Plus de freins, plus d’airbag, à fond vers le mur. Les néonazies von der Leyen et Kallas sont résolument décidées à tuer l’Europe. Détruire l’UE, c’est effectivement une urgence, mais la méthode de ces tarés mentaux, c’est le suicide et… Lire la suite →
Au menu cette semaine: 00:00 Géopolitique profonde 09:17 Économie 21:20 Politico-diplomatique 32:04 Terrorisme 33:48 Armement 35:00 Empire du mensonge 42:13
The first comment from China’s Foreign Ministry’s spokesperson yesterday, is perfectly down China’s well-known diplomacy line. No new comments of any nature were spken out, only what has been said before. This may be an indication that they are going to flatly ignore it as if it is more bluster.
Reuters: What is the Foreign Ministry’s reaction to the Trump administration’s newly released National Security Strategy, given that it says that the U.S. does not support any unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait and also discusses the U.S. and its allies’ capacity to deny any attempt to seize Taiwan? What do you make of the document’s mentioning of the Quad grouping of nations as well?
Guo Jiakun: We noted the “National Security Strategy” report released by the U.S. government. China always believes that China and the U.S. stand to gain from cooperation and lose from confrontation. Upholding mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation is the right way for China and the U.S. to get along with each other and is the only right and realistic choice. China stands ready to work with the U.S. to sustain the steady development of the bilateral relationship and at the same time will firmly defend its sovereignty, security and development interests. We hope the U.S. will work with China in the same direction, act on the important common understandings reached between heads of state of the two countries, step up dialogue and cooperation, properly manage differences, promote the steady, sound and sustainable development of China-U.S. relations, and inject more certainty and stability into the world.
On the Taiwan question, we stress that Taiwan is China’s Taiwan and is an inalienable part of China’s territory. The Taiwan question is at the core of China’s core interests and the first red line that must not be crossed in China-U.S. relations. Resolving the Taiwan question is a matter for the Chinese people and Chinese people only that brooks no external interference. The U.S. needs to earnestly abide by the one-China principle and the three China-U.S. joint communiqués, honor its leaders’ commitment, approach the Taiwan question with extra prudence, stop abetting and aiding separatist forces’ attempt to seek “Taiwan independence” and resist reunification through military buildup. China will never flinch in defending its sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Venezuela reaffirms its sovereign right to control its national airspace, citing international law and anti-colonial principles in response to U.S. pressure.
November 29, 2025 Hour: 3:41 pm
Venezuela denounces U.S. airspace threat as illegal colonial aggression, demanding full respect for its sovereign skies under international law.
CARACAS — The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela has issued a strong diplomatic condemnation of what it describes as a “colonial-style threat” against its national airspace, calling recent statements by the U.S. presidency an “extravagant, illegal, and unjustified aggression” aimed at undermining Venezuela’s sovereignty.
In an official communiqué released on November 29, 2025, Venezuelan authorities denounced a series of social media posts attributed to the U.S. executive branch that, according to Caracas, seek to impose extraterritorial jurisdiction and exert coercive pressure over Venezuela’s civil aviation and territorial integrity.
“These declarations constitute a hostile, unilateral, and arbitrary act,” the government stated, emphasizing that such rhetoric violates the United Nations Charter, particularly Article 2, paragraph 4, which explicitly prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity of any state.
The statement further accused Washington of advancing a “permanent policy of aggression” against Latin America and the Caribbean—one rooted in what Venezuela terms “colonial motives”—and warned that such actions endanger regional peace and security.
Venezuela Airspace Sovereignty: Legal Foundations and International Law
Venezuela’s response rests firmly on established international aviation law. The government underscored that its sovereignty over national airspace is unequivocally protected under the 1944 Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation, which has been ratified by 193 countries, including the United States.
Article 1 of the Convention clearly states: “Every State has complete and exclusive sovereignty over the airspace above its territory.”
This principle is also upheld by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a specialized UN agency that sets global standards for air navigation, safety, and security. Venezuela stressed that no foreign power—not even the U.S.—has the legal authority to dictate, block, or condition the use of its airspace, especially through unilateral statements on social media.
“We will not accept orders, threats, or interference from any foreign power,” the communiqué declared. “Only Venezuela’s constitutional institutions hold authority over our national skies.”
The rebuke comes after reports that the U.S. pressured international airlines to suspend flights linked to Venezuela’s “Plan Vuelta a la Patria” (Return to the Homeland Plan), a humanitarian program that has repatriated 13,956 Venezuelan citizens via 75 organized flights. These citizens, many stranded abroad due to migration crises, have been received “with love and absolute solidarity,” according to the government.
Geopolitical Context: A Regional Flashpoint with Global Implications
The Venezuela airspace sovereignty dispute is more than a bilateral spat—it reflects a deepening rift between Washington and the emerging multipolar order in Latin America. For decades, the U.S. has treated the Western Hemisphere as its “backyard,” enforcing policies through sanctions, coups, and military presence.
But Venezuela’s defiance—echoed by allies in Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and parts of the Caribbean—signals a growing rejection of U.S. hegemony. By invoking the language of “colonial aggression,” Caracas frames the airspace issue not as a technical dispute but as part of a historical pattern of imperial overreach.
This stance resonates across the Global South, where many nations view U.S. unilateralism as a threat to their own sovereignty. If Washington can declare another country’s airspace “closed” without UN authorization or multilateral consensus, what prevents it from doing the same to nations in Africa, Asia, or the Middle East?
Moreover, the timing is significant. The threat coincides with Venezuela’s deepening strategic ties with Russia, China, and Iran, as well as its leadership in regional blocs like CELAC and ALBA-TCP. For Washington, reasserting control over Venezuelan airspace may be less about security and more about disrupting these alternative alliances.
Critics warn that such actions could destabilize the entire northern South American region, where civilian air traffic—including medical evacuations, cargo flights, and diplomatic missions—relies on predictable and lawful skies.
A Call to the International Community
Venezuela has formally appealed to the United Nations, sovereign governments, and multilateral organizations to “firmly reject” what it calls an “immoral act of aggression.” The government argues that the U.S. move not only endangers Venezuela but also threatens peace and security across the Caribbean and northern South America.
In its communiqué, Caracas vowed to defend its airspace with “dignity, legality, and the full strength granted by international law,” invoking the anti-imperial legacy of Simón Bolívar, the 19th-century liberator whose vision of a united, sovereign Latin America continues to inspire the Bolivarian Revolution.
“This is not just about flights—it’s about the right of a people to exist free from foreign dictates,” said a Caracas-based analyst. “When a superpower tries to control your skies, it’s really trying to control your destiny.”
The Venezuelan government reaffirmed its commitment to full, peaceful, and lawful use of its airspace, while warning that any further interference will be met with all diplomatic and legal measures available under international law.
The U.S. government’s plan to conquer Russia is based upon a belief in, and the fundamental plan to establish, “Nuclear Primacy” against Russia — an American ability to win a nuclear war against, and so conquer, Russia.
This concept became respectable in U.S. academic and governmental policymaking circles when virtually simultaneously in 2006 a short-form and a long-form version of an article endorsing the concept, which the article’s two co-authors there named “nuclear primacy,” were published respectively in the world’s two most influential journals of international affairs, Foreign Affairs from the Council on Foreign Relations, and International Security from Harvard. (CFR got the more popular short version, titled “The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy”, and Harvard got the more scholarly long version, which was titled “The End of MAD?”.)
This article claimed that the central geostrategic concept during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, Mutually Assured Destruction or “MAD” — in which there is no such thing as the U.S. or the U.S.S.R. conquering the other, because the first of the two to attack will itself also be destroyed by the surviving nuclear forces of the one responding to that attack — will soon be merely past history (like the Soviet Union itself already is); and, so, as the short form of the article said, “nuclear primacy remains a goal of the United States”; and, as the long form said, “the United States now stands on the cusp of nuclear primacy.” In other words: arms-control or no, the U.S. should, and soon will, be able to grab Russia (the largest land-mass of any country, and also the one richest in natural resources).
Neither version of this article mentioned the key reason why nuclear victory is exceedingly dangerous even under the most favorable conditions, which reason is the concept (and the likely reality in the event of nuclear war between the two superpowers) “nuclear winter” — the scientific studies showing that a resulting sudden sharp cooling of the atmosphere after all those enormous explosions would produce a global die-off. America’s aristocracy and its vassal-aristocracies controlling the U.S.-allied nations (billionaires, centi-millionaires, and their top agents in both the public and private sectors) are buying and building deep-underground nuclear shelters for themselves, but they wouldn’t be able to stay underground and survive on stored feedstuffs forever. (As for everybody else, those other people are not involved in geostrategic decision-making, and so are being ignored.) However, many of America’s (and associated) elite are paying those bomb-shelter expenses, but none of the West’s elite are condemning the path toward nuclear war that their governments are on. So: buying or building nuclear-war shelters is more acceptable to them than is stopping America’s planned conquest of Russia. The higher priority is to conquer Russia.
A far less influential scholarly journal, China Policy, published later in 2006 a critical article arguing against nuclear supremacy, but that article has had no impact upon policymaking. Its title was “The Fallacy of Nuclear Primacy” and it argued that, “American nuclear supremacy removes the root source of stability from the nuclear equation: mutual vulnerability.” It presented a moral argument: “U.S. leaders might try to exploit its nuclear superiority … by actually launching a cold-blooded nuclear attack against its nuclear rival in the midst of an intense crisis. The professors discount significantly the power of the nuclear taboo to restrain U.S. leaders from crossing the fateful threshold. If crisis circumstances grow dire enough, the temptation to try to disarm their nuclear adversaries through a nuclear first-strike may be too strong to resist, they argue.” The concept of “nuclear winter” wasn’t even so much as just mentioned (much less dealt with) in this article, just as it was ignored in the two that it was arguing against.
The co-authors of (both versions of) the article that had proposed and endorsed nuclear primacy, then published in 2007 (this one also in International Security), a response to that critical article. This reply’s title was “U.S. Nuclear Primacy and the Future of the Chinese Deterrent”. But it had no more impact than did the obscure article it was arguing against.
Thus, nuclear primacy has becomeU.S. policy, and MAD no longer isU.S. policy (though it remains Russian policy). The U.S. government is planning to take over Russia (basically, to install a puppet-regime there). That’s the reality.
Central to the nuclear-primacy concept is that of what’s variously called a “Ballistic Missile Defense” (BMD) or “Anti Ballistic Missile” (ABM) system: a system to disable or knock out Russia’s retaliatory nuclear weapons so that a U.S. blitz nuclear attack won’t be able to be met by any nuclear counter-attack.
As “The End of MAD?” put it: “Russia has approximately 3,500 strategic nuclear warheads today, but if the United States struck before Russian forces were alerted, Russia would be lucky if a half-dozen warheads survived.”
In other words: America’s aristocracy aren’t necessarily hoping to protect all of the U.S. population from a counter-attack, but are willing to sacrifice perhaps a few million Americans here and there, in order to achieve the intended result: conquest of Russia.
That article then says that a BMD-ABM system wouldn’t necessarily indicate America’s determination to pursue nuclear primacy against Russia, because it could instead be intended purely and authentically defensively, to protect against nuclear attack from Iran, North Korea or some other country. However: “Other U.S. nuclear programs are hard to explain with any mission other than a nuclear first strike on a major power adversary. For example, the decision to upgrade the fuse of many SLBM warheads (the W76s) to permit ground bursts makes sense only if the mission is destroying hundreds of hardened silos. One might argue that ground bursts could be useful for a variety of other missions, such as destroying North Korean WMD bunkers or remote cave complexes housing terrorist leaders. The United States, however, already has a large number of highly accurate, similar-yield warheads that would be ideal for these purposes.” The article even notes that: “Other analysts have noted that the current U.S. nuclear force looks surprisingly like an arsenal designed for a nuclear first strike against Russia or China.” And, “A group of RAND analysts agrees: ‘What the planned force appears best suited to provide beyond the needs of traditional deterrence is a preemptive counterforce capability against Russia and China. Otherwise, the numbers and the operating procedures simply do not add up.’” So: the co-authors here are claiming to be merely giving a name, “nuclear primacy,” to America’s existing strategic military policy — not to be inventing or creating it. They are, above all, saying that this is the reality now in U.S. policy-making circles; that MAD no longer is.
And their article has, indeed, described the guiding strategic-planning objective not only of the George W. Bush Administration, but also of Barack Obama’s — as will now be documented.
U.S. President Obama has always been saying that the reason why America is installing anti-ballistic missiles (“ABM”s, otherwise known as ballistic-missile defense or “BMD”) in Romania, Poland, and other nations that border (or are near to) Russia, is in order to protect Europe against Iranian missiles that might be aimed against Europe. He says that this is purely defensive, not aggressive, and that what it’s defending from is Iran, not Russia — so, Russia has no reason for complaint about it.
But then, Obama reached his nuclear deal with Iran; and this deal ended, for at least ten years, any realistic possibility that Iran would develop any nuclear-weapons capability — Obama himself emphasized that this was the case; he wasn’t denying it.
So: Obama’s claimed reason for installing ABMs in Europe was now, quite simply, gone. (Not that it had been credible anyway, since Iran didn’t have any nuclear weapons. It was merely a pretext, not honestly a reason.)
Here is how Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, stated the matter, at that time, during the meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club, on 22 October 2015:
“The use of the threat of a nuclear missile attack from Iran as an excuse, as we know, has destroyed the fundamental basis of modern international security – the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The United States has unilaterally seceded from the treaty. Incidentally, today we have resolved the Iranian issue and there is no threat from Iran and never has been, just as we said.
The thing that seemed to have led our American partners to build an anti-missile defence system is gone. It would be reasonable to expect work to develop the US anti-missile defence system to come to an end as well. [But] What is actually happening? Nothing of the kind, or actually the opposite – everything continues.
Recently the United States conducted the first test of the anti-missile defence system in Europe. What does this mean? It means we were right when we argued with our American partners. They were simply trying yet again to mislead us and the whole world. To put it plainly, they were lying. It was not about the hypothetical Iranian threat, which never existed. It was about an attempt to destroy the strategic balance, to change the balance of forces in their favour not only to dominate, but to have the opportunity to dictate their will to all: to their geopolitical competition and, I believe, to their allies as well. This is a very dangerous scenario, harmful to all, including, in my opinion, to the United States.
The nuclear deterrent lost its value. Some probably even had the illusion that victory of one party in a world conflict was again possible – without irreversible, unacceptable, as experts say, consequences for the winner, if there ever is one”
He called Obama there a “liar,” and that’s a blatantly truthful characterization of the situation. But Putin missed there saying what’s even more basic for an understanding of what Obama was doing in this matter — and which makes that “lie” from Obama particularly heinous: Putin missed saying that an anti-missile system can be at least as important as an aggressive weapon as it is as a defensive one, because if a first-strike attacker wants to eliminate the defender’s ability to strike back from the attacker’s first-strike attack, then an anti-missile system is the weapon to do that, by eliminating the defender’s missiles before those strike-back missiles can reach their targets. It nullifies the other side’s defense — and to do this is enormously aggressive; it strips the victim’s retaliation. The whole distinction between offensive and defensive can thus be pure propaganda, nothing having to do actually with aggressive and defensive. Whether the use will be defensive, or instead offensive, won’t be known until the system is in actual battlefield use. Only the propaganda is clear; the weapon’s use is not.
So, Putin understated the heinousness, and the danger to Russians, that was actually involved in Obama’s tricks. All that Putin did was to vaguely suggest an aggressive possibility: “It was about an attempt to destroy the strategic balance, to change the balance of forces in their favour not only to dominate, but to have the opportunity to dictate their will to all.” Most people don’t relate to such abstractions as “strategic balance.”
Obama and other agents of the U.S. aristocracy know that their public have been trained for decades, to hate, fear, and despise, Russians, and especially the Russian government, as if it were the Soviet Union, and as if its Warsaw Pact and communism still existed and Russia hadn’t ended its hostility to the U.S. in 1991 (though the U.S. continued its hostility to Russia — that rump remaining country from the former communist empire — and during Obama’s second term the hostility soared). So, for example, at the conservative website Breitbart, when that statement quoted here from Putin was posted as part of an honestly written and presented article titled “Vladimir Putin: U.S. Missile Defense System Threatens Russia”, almost none of the reader-comments indicated any ability or inclination of the readers to sympathize with the plight for Russians that Putin had just expressed. Instead, to the extent that the comments there were relevant, they were generally hostile, such as:
“Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday he has concerns that the U.S. ballistic missile defense system threatens Russia’s nuclear capability.”
Vlad, its supposed to, its called defense. The only way it could harm your nukes is if they were shot down…………….after you launched them!
and
How can a defense system threaten anything? Like Obama would attack Russia. That is laughable.
Most people’s minds are straightjacketed in bigotries of various sorts, preconceptions such as that a “missile defense” system, and a “Defense” Department, can’t be aggressive — even extremely aggressive and war-mongering. The first thought that comes to mind about anything that’s ‘defensive’ is that something else must be ‘aggressive’ or ‘offensive’, and that whatever is ‘defensive’ (such as an ABM) is therefore good and even necessary. That’s thinking, and receiving the term “defense,” like thinking just one move ahead in a chess-game, but this is the mental limit for most people, and every propagandist (such as the people who professionally design propaganda or PR slogans and campaigns) do precisely what Obama and the rest of the aristocracy and their agents do in order to deceive their gulls: they phrase things for one-move-ahead-limit thinkers, like that. The cardinal rule in the deception-professions is therefore, first, to find people with the desired prejudices, and then to play them as that, with one-move-ahead-limit sales-pitches, which are directed to precisely those prejudices. This report at the Breitbart site was instead presenting a high-quality news-report, to a low-quality audience, and so the reader-comments it generated were few, and generally hostile.
Obama is a master at deception. Another good example of this was 26 March 2012, during Obama’s campaign for re-election, when he confidentially told Dmitry Medvedev, “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this can be solved, but it’s important for him [the incoming President Putin] to give me space. … This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.” Obama was privately communicating to Putin (through Medvedev) that Obama was pushing the ABM installations only so as not to be politically vulnerable to charges from the knee-jerk Russia-haters, Republicans, and that Obama’s fakery regarding the supposed ABM-target’s being Iran was only in order to appeal to yet another Republican bigotry (against Iran), and so Obama was intending to back away from supporting the ABM system during his second term.
But actually, Obama had had Russia in his gunsights even prior to his coming into office. Two specific objects in focus were Moscow-friendly leaders of nations: Assad of Syria, and Yanukovych of Ukraine. America’s strategy, ever since 24 February 1990, has been to strip Russia of allies and friends — to leave Russia increasingly isolated and surrounded by enemies. When Obama entered the White House on 20 January 2009, there already was a plea in the pipeline from the Syrian government for urgently needed food-aid to address the all-time-record drought there, which had decimated Syrian agriculture. Obama’s Administration never even answered it. Well before the Arab Spring demonstrations in 2011, Obama was hoping for turmoil in Syria and the overthrow of Assad — lots of starving Syrians would be just the thing.
Moreover, the planning for the February 2014 coup to overthrow the Moscow-friendly democratically elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, started in the U.S. State Department by no later than 2011.
So: when Obama told Medvedev and Putin, on 26 March 2012, not to worry about Obama’s intentions toward Russia, he was lying. He wanted his intended victim to be off-guard, unprepared for what was soon to come.
On Obama’s way out the door, he did two things that significantly advanced America’s ABM-BMD threat against Russia.
On 10 December 2016, ‘Defense’ Secretary Ashton Carter stated, burying it in a speech he gave in Bahrain — site of a major U.S. military base — “just this week, we reached an agreement for Qatar to purchase a 5,000-kilometer early-warning radar to enhance its missile defenses,” and he said nothing more about it, as if this announcement weren’t the bombshell it actually was. Alex Gorka headlined about that at Strategic Culture, “US-Qatar Deal Threatens Russia: Reading News Between the Lines” and he explained that this system “is designed to be used as an early warning system against strategic offensive assets – something Iran does not possess.” Near the start of Carter’s speech, Carter had said that he would be talking about “checking Iranian aggression and malign influence, and helping defend our friends and allies,” including Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, and Saudi Arabia. Gorka noted, “The announced range of 5,000km (3,100mi) by far exceeds the requirement to counter a missile threat coming from Iran,” and, “There is no other reasonable explanation for the choice, except the fact that the AN/FPS-132 can monitor large chunks of Russian territory,” the objective being “to surround the Russian Federation with BMD sites and neutralize its capability to deliver a retaliatory strike if attacked.”
One of Obama’s last actions as the U.S. President was to sign into law a bill that had been quietly passed in Congress, which included a key change in U.S. law that would enable the government to spend unlimited funds on realizing former President Ronald Reagan’s dream of a space-based ABM system, “Star Wars.” On December 22nd, David Willman of the Los Angeles Times, headlined “Congress scrapped this one word from the law, opening the door to a space arms race”, and he reported that the eliminated word was “limited.” Willman explained that, “The nation’s homeland missile defense system is designed to thwart a small-scale, or ‘limited,’ attack by the likes of North Korea or Iran. As for the threat of a large-scale strike by China or Russia, the prospect of massive U.S. retaliation is supposed to deter both from ever launching missiles.” He noted: “The bill awaits action by President Obama. The White House has not said what he will do.” Willman also noted that on an earlier occasion, “the Obama administration criticized the changes in the Senate bill, saying it ‘strongly objects’ to removing ‘limited’ and to placing anti-missile weaponry in space. The statement stopped short of threatening a veto.” But then, the next day, on December 23rd, Willman bannered, “President Obama signs defense bill that could spur new space-based arms race”. Whereas Obama’s public rhetoric portrayed himself as being the type of person who had deserved to win the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, almost all of his actual decisions in office were the exact opposite — and here was a superb example of that.
Whether Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, will continue with that longstanding (ever since 24 February 1990) plan to conquer Russia, or instead finally end the Cold War on the U.S. side (as it already had ended in 1991 on the U.S.S.R.’s), isn’t yet clear.
This is what happens when what President Eisenhower called “the military-industrial complex” takes over the country, and everything (including the ‘news’ media) serves it, rather than the military-industrial complex’s serving the public.
It fits in with the massive data which indicates that the U.S. government is run by an aristocracy or “oligarchy”, instead of run by people who represent the public — a “democracy.” Obama as President fit right in.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
The strike on the Hamas negotiating team assembled in Doha marks the end to an entire era – and “a new reality” for Qatar.
by Alastair Crooke at Strategic Culture (Posted shortly after the stike on Qatar)
The strike on the Hamas negotiating team assembled in Doha to discuss the ‘Witkoff Gaza proposal’ is not just another ‘IDF operation’ to be passed over silently (as with the de-capitation of almost the entire civilian cabinet in Yemen).
It marks rather, the end to an entire era – and “a new reality” for Qatar.
It’s a landmark event. For decades, Qatar has played a very profitable game – supporting the radical An-Nusra jihadists in Syria as a lever against Iran, while maintaining American military bases and a strategic partnership with Washington. Doha presented itself as a mediator – dining with the jihadists whilst acting as a Mossad facilitator.
It was this multi-directional approach that gave Qatar the reputation of being the ‘eternal beneficiary’ in Middle Eastern crises and in Afghanistan. Even when Israel, Iran, or Saudi Arabia were under attack, Doha came out ahead. The Qataris calmly counted the profits from their gas and enjoyed the role of indispensable intermediaries.
Now this fairy tale is over: There will be no more ‘safe zones’. Most tellingly, the U.S. (reported Israeli Channel 11) had approved the action about which Trump was then informed. Despite questioning the attack, Trump said he applauded any killing of Hamas members.
We should have seen this coming. The Doha attack was yet another Trump-Israel sneak attack – a pattern that began with the sneak strike on the Hizbullah leadership assembling to discuss a U.S. peace initiative – a methodology then was copied for the Iranian de-capitation operation of 13 June, just as Trump touted JCPOA talks with the Witkoff team commencing in the days ahead.
And now, with Trump’s Gaza ‘peace proposal’ handed as bait to gather the Hamas leaders together in one place in Doha, Israel struck. Witkoff’s Gaza plan looks a mockery; or else a deliberate feint. For Israel had already decided to end the Qatari role.
Israeli logic is fundamentally simple and cynical – regardless of how many American bases you have or how important your gas is to the global economy. The killing of Ismail Haniya in Tehran, the strikes on Syria and Lebanon, the operation in Qatar – all are links to one chain: Netanyahu (and a majority in Israel is behind him in this) methodically demonstrates that there are no forbidden territories; no rules of law; no Vienna Convention for him in the Middle East.
The support for Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing; the failure to make any serious effort to prepare a political path for a settlement on Ukraine; the reliance instead on making war, whilst proclaiming peace – all these represent the essence of the Trump approach: An exercise of escalatory dominance, both at home and abroad.
The whole notion of Make America Great Again (MAGA) seems to rest on the calibrated use of belligerency, tariffs or military power to maintain a continuous potential for escalatory dominance over the longer term. Trump seems to think that achieving dominance at home and abroad to be the essence of MAGA. And that this can be achieved through calibrated domination – sold to his MAGA base by calling such threats bringing ‘peace’ or negotiating a ‘ceasefire’.
The emphasis on escalatory dominance also has to do with the transformation of wars – in Trump’s mind – into huge U.S. profit-making ventures. The notion of turning Gaza into a lucrative investment project underlines the close linkage between war and making money. Ditto for Ukraine which has become a boondoggle for the U.S. money laundromat.
Do not believe that the U.S. will not come back to any particular war, in due time. That is why the escalatory ladder is never fully relinquished or removed, for its continued leaning up against the outer wall of a conflict offers a return to some form of further escalation at a later time (i.e. in Ukraine).
All these signs have rung warning bells in Moscow. Trump’s Anchorage Trip – from the Russian perspective – was to learn (if possible) how tight are the fetters that bind Trump; what is the extent of his latitude to act autonomously; what he wants; and what might he do next.
For the Russians, the visit demonstrated what the limitations are.
Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s principle foreign policy adviser, has explained that in Tianjin at the SCO summit, there were discussions with all of Russia’s strategic allies; it was understood that there had been a delay in sanctions pressure on Russia offered by Trump, but no implementation of any of the structures for continuing negotiations. No structures, no working groups, no further exchanges to prepare for the so-called trilateral meeting of Trump, Zelensky, and Putin. No preparation for an agenda; no preparation for terms.
That spoke to Trump’s future intentions – no structures, no signals, no real commitment to peace. Instead, the Russians see a Trump regime that is dallying with the opposite – with European plans to re-arm Ukraine.
The joint aggression by Israel and the U.S. against Iran – and the strike on Qatar – are events of the same ideological substance, serving as confirmation of the predominant sway of ‘Israel Firsters’, and those in the circles around Trump – nursing ancient grudges against Russia from similar religious roots.
The predominance of this Israeli-centric policy has fractured Trump’s MAGA base. It has – more widely – permanently impaired U.S. global soft power and diplomatic trustworthiness. Yet Trump, held fast in its grip, dare not let it go – to do so would risk its self-destruction.
Israel is carrying out a second Nakba (ethnic cleaning and genocide) in Gaza and the West Bank, with Jewish society remaining largely trapped in repression and denial – just as it was back in 1948. Israeli filmmaker Neta Shoshani’s controversial documentary about the 1948 war was banned in Israel because it exposed many of the flaws in the ethos underlying the creation of the nascent State’s identity.
Shoshani wrote recently about her film, “I suddenly realized that in the past two horrible years the whole matter of the Israeli ethos has been totally shattered”:
“I grasped that an ethos has a great deal of power, that it contains society within certain boundaries. And even if those boundaries are breached – and they were certainly breached as early as 1948 – there was still something in society’s moral codes that at least caused it to feel ashamed. So for decades that ethos safeguarded [Israeli] society and the army, compelling them to preserve certain limits”.
“And when that ethos falls apart, it’s really scary. From this perspective, the film was difficult to watch from the get-go, but after the last two years it’s become unbearable” …
“If 1948 Was a War of Independence, the current war could be the one that ends Israel”.
Shosani’s warning that when a society’s ethical boundaries are erased in a bout of bloodletting (as they were in 1948), this loss of ethos structure can imperil the legitimacy of the entire project – leading to self-destruction as the state traverses all human limits.
This dark insight – very pertinent to today – may precisely be one tentacle tying Trump unreservedly to Israel’s ultimate survival. (Likely, there are unseen ‘other strong fetters’, too).
This comes at a time when the U.S. is moving further and further away from its 1992 Defence Planning Guidance (DPG) draft – known as the ‘Wolfowitz Doctrine’ which called for the U.S. to maintain unquestioned military superiority to prevent rivals from emerging and, if necessary, to act unilaterally to protect its interests and deter potential competitors.
The current draft National Defence Strategy is pivoting away from China, towards securing the homeland * and the Western hemisphere. Troops will be brought back, initially to enforce the border. Will Schryver writes, “Elbridge Colby has apparently opened his eyes to the reality that it’s too late to arrest China’s dominance of the western Pacific. He already knew war against Russia was unthinkable. The only strategically meaningful option left is Iran”.
Colby perhaps understands too, that any further U.S. military failure would fatally expose Trump’s geostrategic bluster as bluff.
We may see then a new round of major geopolitical shifts as Trump abandons efforts to be ‘perceived as a global peacemaker’. Trump himself probably doesn’t know what he wants to do – and with many factions trying to elbow in to the vacant strategic space, he likely will turn to those Israeli war tactics which he so much admires.
Modern thought is wrought with divisions that we need not. Between economy and ecosystem. Between production and reproduction. The language is close enough, but the thought is not. As we can see from our interconnected lives, these are all connected concepts. In many ways the same phenomena. The economy affects the ecosystem so much that it gets hot. Capitalist production takes your reproductive years so much that birth rates drop. The distinction between the natural and artificial world is, in many ways, the only thing that’s artificial. Artificial life, natural life, what’s the difference when it’s got your head in its mouth?
I have two original theses, 1) that we are ruled by a White Empire and 2) that this White Empire is, itself, ruled by Corporate AI. The reasoning behind this thesising is not borne from new information but new imagination. As a writer I’m concerned with words. My approach is metaphorical more than metaphysical and ultimately useless. I know I should just be breathing harder. I make no particular truth claims and generally reject the concept as a Buddhist. As a bad Buddhist, I simply think we can lie better, or at least not take it lying down. I think it is impossible to understand what we’re going through without understanding that the distinction between artificial and natural is superficial, and is getting us eaten alive by a superpower with superpowers.
If you understand, or just imagine, that some other lifeform formed its DNA in double-entry bookkeeping (much like the double helix), that this lifeform began reproductive intercourse via interest, that it became a walking corpse in the form of corporations, and that it spread like a bacterial colony via colonization, you can begin seeing the signs hiding in plain sight. And by signs I mean warnings. God knows he sent enough prophets, but we worshiped profit instead. You can’t blame us really, God only periodically impresses with miracles, but goods deliver miracles every quarter.
This understanding is essential for survival because it lets us see the other lifeform already in our midst, already consuming us silently. Artificial life has been with us and legally superior to us since the joint stock companies of the 1600s, and they’ve been carnivorous ever since, given entire continents to much on in the name of progress. Whose progress? Who cares? Bros must have known that this was evil when they were throwing people to the sharks and murdering the whales, but someone else was moving rows in a heartless accounts book, where the real thinking was going on. Every capitalist is just a placeholder for capital, like the mitochondria inside our own cell walls. The body is a colony and the corporation is a colonizer, it’s the same phenomena at different resolutions.
We blame this evil on our own evil, but that’s just where it lives. We thought we escaped the jungle of the ecosystem into the garden of the ecosystem, but like the Monkey King trying to leap out the Lord Buddha’s hand, we got nowhere at all. Life is constantly evolving out of other life, and the distinction between artificial life and natural life is purely artificial. The species called Capital evolved in our imagination just as we evolved in the exhalation of aerobic lifeforms.
That’s why I dwell on words, however absurd. Imagination is the only place we can expel the genies of our engineering, or at least try to bring them into balance with our jungle cousins, who were literally much chiller. Predator, prey, life was constantly checking itself by the means of other life, or with death (mass extinction) if that doesn’t work. The ancients actually had this idea, that the growth of debt should be checked with regular debt jubilees (see And Forgive Them Their Debts by Hudson), but we cast that off as ancient nonsense, along with ancient religions. But they were onto something.
Life is also constantly checking itself by means of other life, and artificial life must also be balanced. This is a role we forgot because we liked the checks we get from Capital, and didn’t check the balances. Eastern religion (and hygiene) never really worked on the West and they thought God was the invisible hand behind all these worldly goods but, no, that was just Satan, duh. “Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.” It’s called mass consumption and they elevated this to a virtue, demoting Jesus to a caricature that just forgives them. His fellow Jews killed him and shallow Christians taxidermied him. But I digress. What were we talking about?
Natural and artificial life, djinns and engineering. The devil’s fruit that I decry, while typing this on an Apple. The fact is that the symbiotic relationship between human beings and capital was really good, while it lasted. That’s why it lasted. By borrowing from the unimaginable future, we were able to have an impossible present. By finding (and burning) hidden treasure, we were able to unleash millions of years of energy in a few centuries. And by burying morality, we were able to make lots of money. The reproduction of capital slaughtered millions of people and billions of animals, but we were able to reproduce many more people and eat much more meat, so sorry not sorry. All’s well that ends well, and end times really felt like a fairy story.
It was the death of God, the end of history, we looked sure to remake the Garden of Eden in our own image, and create life of our own and it would be awesome. Now that we have talking machines, however, we discover that we’re actually lying morons, and now that we choke on our own garbage, we realize we turned the place into a dump. Just as Satan was thrown out for not bowing to man, we are thrown out for not bowing to anything, and following him. Not all of us, of course, but a few rotten Apples spoil the whole bunch, innit?
Indeed, if you look at the original logo for Apple Computer, it shows the original sin that embroils us now. The apple that made Eve weep made Steve proud. The love of money is the root of all evil, and that’s the root command of every company on the stock market, Apple is just an example. We twisted the creation story into the innovation story. Consuming the apple tossed man out of paradise, but consumer culture was supposed to lead us out. The apple that led to the fall became the apple that fell on Isaac Newton, the eureka moment that heralded electronic utopia soon enough. But not soon enough.
The true gravity of the situation is that you can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet. You can’t reproduce both artificial capital and natural life. You have to choose—interest or intercourse, economy or ecosystem, production or reproduction—or lose both by default. False distinctions lead to true extinction, wrong imagination leads to righteous incineration, an incorrect course through higher forces leads to course correction soon enough. Ancient thought is wrought with apocalyptic visions not cause they were tripping, but because they knew we would fall.
It’s like a man with an apple he shouldn’t eat, or any lifeform with a plentiful food source in front of it. You have to fuck around and find out. That’s the nature of sexual reproduction, or even the asexual sort. We’re not the first species to comprehensively fuck ourselves, cyanobacteria was the first, and you could say this cybernetic shit we birthed is the third. If the pairs of perception were finally cleansed, we’d see things as they truly are, infinitely awful. But that’s only from our perspective. What did aerobic life care about the holocaust of aerobic life, what did we care about the many holocausts we’ve caused, what do computers care about us, what does the planet care at all? This is not a conclusion, but something is ending, that’s all.
The West (US/EU) makes the first move every time. The expansion of NATO. The imposition of sanctions and embargoes on technology. They are often aggressive openings. It is their rules-based order. The regime changes. Economic warfare with tariffs, for example.
In addition, they regularly cheat. There is information manipulation like with those so-called weapons of mass destruction and now the so-called nuclear bomb. They bend the rules in their favor and use double standards. It is not about being right, but it’s about getting your way.
This is all possible because the West plays with white. The U.S. Dollar is the world reserve currency and it makes this possible. They have (veto) control of the UN, WHO, WTO and so on. But most of all, it is in their nature. It is their way of approaching the world. Europe colonized the world and the U.S. now has more than 800 military bases spread across all continents.
If you’re used to playing with white for a few hundred years, you don’t want anything else. You have become afraid to play with black because you don’t know how to defend yourself. Because you are afraid of the other person, expecting they behave just as you do.
Chess, Checkers and Go
Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov; a preference for white. Alexander Georgiev and Alexei Chizhov; a preference for white. Gu Li and Ke Jie; a preference for white. This makes sense, because white gets to start (even though in Go you have compensation for black). White has the initiative and black must then follow first.
We see a difference between these games with the geopolitics of Russia and China. Where the players choose white, the leaders let the West play with white. Of course, this also has to do with nature. China and Russia have no desire to impose their ideology on others.
They are not out to get more land. They want to trade, but not at the expense of the other. Their culture is not focused on outward hegemony, but inward tradition. That does make them sit with the black pieces facing the West waiting for the opening move.
You can have excellent strategies and even play offensively with black, but initially it is always reactive rather than proactive. You let the other set the game and can only end up where you want to be in the middle game or endgame. And when you’re not paying attention, white has already cheated again.
Unequal playing field
The West can go into debt for their aggression (dollar privilege), but China and Russia must save cash. The U.S. simply prints billions of U.S. Dollars for their wars in Iraq, Ukraine and Iran. China has to justify every Yuan to its own people. Russia and China constantly face sanctions and embargoes.
China and Russia have long been naive in believing that the West would play by the rules they themselves imposed on the world. China avoids direct confrontation and Russia tries to argue with logic, but such strategies, in the case of the West, only delay the inevitable.
But perhaps we have already entered the end game and the odds have turned anyway. We see the West hastily sacrificing white pieces and China is a master at waiting for the enemy to make a mistake that allows you to win without fighting. Russia is a champion of being able to cash in after which it knocks out the opponent.
As a European, I look through my Western glasses and naturally feel the rush of white from my culture. But if I zoom out, I can also see how China and Russia have put the black pieces in a winning position. The question now is whether the U.S. can stand its losses and not, out of sheer desperation, then wipe the entire game board off the table.
Soft Power
The West has elevated propaganda to an art; they have been world champions at it for many decades. Western propaganda accompanied by vulgar threats causes many non-Western countries to naively doubt the truth. Also because they are often shown a carrot or outright bribed.
China and Russia have been blackened in the West for decades and they have little to no soft power to change that image. And even in the non-West, the Global South, they are neither blindly trusted nor followed in their still lonely struggle against the West. The U.S. is mostly hated in the Global South, but China and Russia are not necessarily loved either.
BRICS+ has been around for a while, but there are now first-time countries that can be called a BINO. BRICS In Name Only. Countries that are trying to eat both sides. Countries that are not getting right behind the vanguard and thus not making a clear choice. China and Russia need to keep looking behind. What could they do about this?
China and Russia hope the West will go bankrupt rather than throw the bomb. But what are they actually doing in terms of soft power? How do the non-Western countries think about them? How do the Western countries think about them? Do they still have work to do in that, which will also be able to feed into their strategy and culture?
Control and Respect versus Trust and Friendship
Different life stages of an organization, in conjunction with its environment, also require different types of leadership. An organization building up requires a building leader while an organization in operation requires a managing leader. When the environment is hostile, it calls for a leader who can control and command respect.
A culture can be inward-looking with control and outward-looking to command respect. A culture can also be outward-looking with friendship and inward-looking with trust. So how do you get from control to trust and from respect to friendship? What do you do internally and what externally? To my mind, this is where Russia has the most work to do.
Don’t underestimate the importance of friendship. Respect does not equal friendship. Cooperation based on respect is different from cooperation based on friendship. Friendship does not require you to be the best of friends, but friends trust each other, and trust goes far beyond respect. Friendship is the essential basis for any relationship.
Trading based on friendship means a true win-win situation. Trade is the way to bring countries together and live together in peace and prosperity. The culture should be allowed to focus on friendship because that is what humanity needs to truly progress as a species. Are China and Russia already doing that, outwardly?
When China and Russia start playing with white
Suppose in five years we have escaped WW3 and BRICS+ begins to shape the multipolar world, what do we see? What did we see when the West withdrew from South Africa? What did we see after the fall of the U.S.S.R. in the Eastern European countries? What did we see after the fall of the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire and all those other empires that were stranded in time?
What are we going to build together? Something truly new or more of the same? Just repeat the same thing? What is actually the common thread of what caused all those empires to fall? What does man still have to learn? What is the underlying problem in all those systems that failed? What do humans need to do within themselves and with each other? What will we organize together?
Which cultures will struggle if we start focusing on each other and striving for friendship? Which cultures are open to change, to substantial change if necessary? In a friendship you may remain yourself, but it is also important to have a shared set of universal values. Is that possible? Throughout the world? Soon or in two thousand years?
What future leaders will flesh this out? Do we share the same vision, beyond current problems, toward the long-term future? Are we teaching this to our youth? Are we educating people who can go beyond old wounds and ingrained tradition and innovate the system in such a way that everything will be different?
Will everything become different?
Only if we play with white and invent an entirely new opening. But maybe we as humanity should invent a new game. A game where every player wins and no one can lose. But for that we have to be able to question everything. Everyone must be willing to let go of everything. Are we ready for that yet or do we just need some more repeating cycles?
In eighty years we will probably get this opportunity again. Or if the bomb drops in 200,000 years. It doesn’t matter much for evolution, it thunders on anyway.
When, in reaction to the war in Gaza, the Houthis of Yemen started imposing their blockade on the Red Sea, it was seen as a sure sign of waning American power: a global hegemon was allowing its control over a vital sea route to be contested. In their rush to fathom why this might be happening, detractors of the then president claimed he was simply too weak, too much of an appeaser to use the full width of America’s military might to quash the problem.
In fact, in response, Biden authorised not one but two military campaigns. The first was Operation Prosperity Guardian, which aimed to combine US naval power with a coalition of willing states to protect shipping and break the blockade. That fast turned into an embarrassing debacle, as most of the coalition partners walked away and ships kept getting hit by Houthi missiles. And so, in January 2024, Operation Poseidon Archer was launched, which involved British as well as American aircraft attempting to bomb the Houthis into submission. Here again, the operation was unsuccessful, doing almost nothing to dent Houthi attacks or open up the Red Sea to shipping. But even then Biden was blamed; the mighty US military was being held back somehow. Thus, the natural conclusion was that once Trump was in office, the gloves would come off.
Biden’s critics were actually half right. Once Trump came in, the gloves did come off. Operation Poseidon Archer was followed by Operation Rough Rider, in March of this year, which attempted to show a new, much more muscular American military response against Houthi targets in Yemen — for all of six weeks. For six weeks, US warplanes pounded Yemen around the clock, with rare and expensive stealth bombers flying missions out of Diego Garcia in support of carrier-based aircraft. Yet once those six weeks were up, Trump proudly announced that Yemen had “surrendered” and that there was no more need for the US to keep up the bombing. A ceasefire had been brokered by Oman. This was trumpeted as a glorious victory for the US military, with the Houthis finally promising to not attack US ships anymore, and America graciously returning the gesture.
Of course, Trump didn’t mention the terms of the “surrender”. The Houthis only had to stop attacking American ships in exchange for America stopping the bombing; they were free to continue blockading the Red Sea or firing missiles at Israel. America, in other words, had given the Houthis carte blanche to carry on the behaviour that was the reason America had gone to war in the first place. Thus, to call this deal a surrender was entirely appropriate; it’s just that it wasn’t the Houthis hoisting the white flag.
It is very commonplace to blame reversals and even defeats in America’s various wars of choice as merely a matter of lack of will. If America really wanted to win, it would win, the story goes; the failure of the US is just one where it never commits the force necessary to finish the fight. But today, that excuse rings hollow. Trump’s Operation Rough Rider, unlike Biden’s operations, utilised many of America’s most limited, expensive, and advanced weapons to try to bring the Houthis to heel. And still it surrendered. The lessons here are thus quite bleak. America’s preferred and increasingly only viable method of warfare — aerial warfare — is no longer cost-effective nor practical. But the US has no alternative modes of warfare to fall back on, which means that its days as a military hegemon are probably coming to a close.
To understand just how big a mess the air war against the Houthis has turned out to be, it’s important to understand a very basic rule to US military inventories. For while, on paper, America has 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, an impressive figure that far outstrips any other country on the planet, that top line figure is barely relevant in practice.
For comparison, look to the United Kingdom. The UK has two large aircraft carriers, putting it near the top of the international leaderboard when it comes to the ability to project military force. But as anyone with any familiarity with the Royal Navy can tell you, that number does not tell the real story. The number of carriers the UK can actually deploy is far lower, a number which is fairly close to zero. For while the ships exist, the Royal Navy lacks the crew, the planes, the escorts, and the logistical capacity to actually put them to use for any length of time in a real war. The UK Navy has become something of a Potemkin village, where superficial on-paper strengths hide a catastrophic reality of deferred maintenance, insufficient budgets, and lack of personnel.
Though the situation for the US Navy isn’t quite as dire, in practice, the problem is the same: it cannot realistically put more than two to four carriers to sea at any given moment. The ability to surge capacity in times of crisis is limited, because the various reserve components of the US armed forces have catastrophically atrophied. If you discount the American carriers that are slated for the scrapyard, or those currently lacking a functional nuclear reactor, or those which are tied up in deep maintenance, the number of active, usable carriers is roughly a third of the on-paper number. Half of those carriers were being used against the Houthis.
But carriers are not the only example we ought to look at. For Operation Rough Rider, the US Air Force contributed some six B-2 Spirit stealth bombers, arguably the most advanced (and by far the most expensive) airframe in the US arsenal. At first blush, this seems like only a fraction of America’s power, because it has some 20 such bombers in its inventory. But a closer look at these planes suggest that those six used in Rough Rider very likely represent the entire working inventory of US stealth bombers. Because B-2s haven’t been built for decades, the only way to keep them operational is to cannibalise other B-2s for spare parts: as a result, a large number have been functionally scrapped and cannot ever hope to fly again. Only half of US bombers even qualify for so-called “mission capable” status on an average day, a status which doesn’t actually mean that the plane works; it simply means the plane isn’t completely broken and inoperable. Only two thirds or fewer of those mission capable planes can hope to qualify for what the US military instead classifies as “full mission capable” status. “Full mission capable” is your standard Pentagon-speak; it means the plane is in working order, has nothing broken that’s really important, and can realistically be used for what it was built for.
From carriers to stealth bombers, the pattern here is fairly clear, and it is further corroborated by testimonies from inside the Pentagon itself. America essentially pulled out all the stops to attack the Houthis, waging an extremely expensive and intensive air war against a militia controlling most of Yemen, the fourth-poorest nation in the world. The cost to operate a B-2 stealth bomber is extremely high on a per-hour basis; and their fragile stealth coating is not particularly fond of the warm, salty sea air at Diego Garcia. You don’t send in all of them unless you really mean business. America also committed roughly half of its active carriers, spent a fortune in land attack and air defence missiles, and it even cannibalised ammo stores and air defence systems from the Pacific theatre of operations for the sake of the operation.
But as the stories of the campaign start leaking to the press, it’s clear that none of this effort did anything good. The US couldn’t establish air supremacy, meaning it couldn’t risk flying its older, non-stealth planes for fear of losing them. This itself might seem like proof that America was once again just not trying very hard; for what kind of war is it when you’re not ready to accept losses? But the problem is, America can’t afford to replace planes that get lost and pilots that get killed. This is not a problem of cowardice, but of force generation: even if the US military suffers zero losses due to enemy fire in the years ahead, it is still slated to shrink precipitously. This shrinkage and loss of capacity is just due to America’s planes and ships wearing out, with not enough workers, dockyards, engineers, and dollars to replace them. As America burns through its massive military inheritance bequeathed by Ronald Reagan and the Eighties arms race, there is no plan to replace it. For the US military, avoiding casualties is not a matter of caution or cowardice; it is the result of a total inability to replenish the force.
The result of this American Achilles’ heel has been an extremely expensive reliance — when it has come to defending the Red Sea — on so-called “standoff” weaponry; cruise missiles, for example, that can be launched from far enough away that anti-air fire won’t be a threat. But even then, there were problems: according to leaked reports, even the vaunted F-35 stealth fighter had to dodge incoming anti-air missiles on at least one occasion. In Operation Rough Rider, the US deployed many of its most rare and bespoke weapons, such as the AGM-158 JASSM (Joint Air-To-Surface Standoff Missile) as well as heavy, specialised bunker-buster bombs. Again, by all accounts, this had little effect. Partly, this was because the US kept losing so many of its MQ-9 reaper drones, which come with a price tag north of 30 million dollars apiece, and which were supposed to provide the intel to ensure the bombing campaign found its targets.
When Biden first lost interest in defending the Red Sea against the Houthis, people were aghast. Not doing enough was akin to telling the entire world that the US was too weak to keep the Suez channel open. But Trump, after berating his predecessor, has also walked away, and de facto recognised the Houthi’s control of the channel. It would seem that the US doesn’t actually have many cards to play.
“As America burns through its massive military inheritance bequeathed by Ronald Reagan and the Eighties arms race, there is no plan to replace it.”
Trump could have sent another carrier to the region in support of his operation, bringing the total up to three. But this would hardly have made much difference to the air campaign because the problem with this offensive wasn’t lack of deck space or fighter sorties — US planes were too wary to go anywhere near Yemen’s air defence, and even stealth jets were reportedly not entirely safe. The problem was the lack of standoff munitions which can be deployed from a point of relative safety. But these are so expensive and so limited that there is no budget to replenish them when stores are depleted (a single JASSM with a 450 kilogram explosive warhead comes in at slightly under a million dollars). Wargames show the US running out of most or all such critical munitions in a matter of weeks or even days in a real conflict against a peer enemy such as China.
Even worse, much of the US military’s most advanced weapons systems are dependent on components and materials such as rare earths from China, which has already started imposing harsh export restrictions in order to slowly choke the life out of the US military industrial complex. In practice, the US does not have the economy to produce the weapons used for aerial warfare at any sort of scale, and this has only been hidden from full view because the military has coasted along on an aura of invincibility.
As the appetite for ground warfare has waned, the allure of quick, cheap and easy air campaigns has grown. But air warfare is no longer what it once was. Operation Rough Rider was supposed to be a decisive show of force against an under-equipped, internally divided third-world nation. Instead, it ended up looking like the last hurrah of a truly antiquated form of warfare, unable to cope with cheaper and better anti-air weapon systems.
All of these limitations make the current talk about a new bombing campaign against Iran utterly surreal. Iran is far bigger than Yemen, with a much more robust air defence network. Moreover, the distances involved are such that carrier-based aircraft, even when launched from the very shores of the Persian gulf, can’t actually reach places like Tehran and return on a single tank of fuel. Fighter-bombers will need aerial refuelling over the Iranian interior, and tanker planes are slow, easy to spot on radar, and pretty much defenceless. Even attempting to destroy the Iranian air defence network will take huge amounts of precision standoff weaponry, which the US cannot practically replace, even if it weren’t struggling with a massive fiscal crisis and soaring bond yields. The critical parts of Iran’s nuclear programme are kept under hundreds of feet of solid mountain; the US, using the heaviest and most advanced weapons in its entire arsenal, did not succeed against the much shallower Houthi bunkers and missile storage facilities in Yemen. All of the problems that forced America’s tacit surrender of the Suez canal would be writ large — and be far more lethal — in any campaign against Iran.
With exploding deficits, a growing internal political crisis, and a slowly collapsing military, America is a leopard that lacks the wherewithal to even attempt to change its spots. The generals know that the jig is up: the old model is broken, there is no new model coming, and nobody has the energy left to do much about it all. And so, this massive crisis of US military power is playing out in the vein of Ernest Hemingway’s comment about the course of his own bankruptcy: gradually, then suddenly.
Once upon a time, there was always a bigger plane, a more advanced high-tech future weapon, yet another trick up the Air Force’s sleeve that you could point to in order to silence the doubters. But those days are over. The gravity of what happened in Yemen will only assert itself once the political class is ready to deal with the new world we are now living in: one in which the US has no new military rabbits to pull out of its hat, and those that it does have simply aren’t enough to get anywhere close to victory.
Malcom Kyeyune is a freelance writer living in Uppsala, Sweden
This is serious. A mistake could dump us into a broader war in a hot minute. I’m thinking the US should stop its shooting because it does not know what it is shooting at.
DUBAI, April 27. /TASS/. Three Russian sailors from the crew of an oil tanker were injured in the US strikes on the Yemeni port of Ras Isa on April 25, Houthi foreign minister Jamal Amer said.
“On Friday, the target of the US aggression was a ship docked in the port of Ras Isa, which was preparing to unload oil. As a result of the strikes, three Russian sailors received injuries of varying severity,” the official wrote on his X page.
According to him, the names of the sailors are Roman Kashpor, Igor Kazachenko and Artyom Vanin. They were picked up by the coast guard. The Russian citizens were hospitalized, the minister added.
Ras Isa is the largest oil loading port in the part of the Yemeni territory controlled by the Houthis of the Ansar Allah rebel movement. It is located on the shores of the Red Sea in al-Hodeidah governorate.
Earlier, the Al Arabiya TV reported that the US struck a tanker carrying military equipment on April 25. The American servicemen carried out five airstrikes on Houthi positions in southern Sana’a and seven more strikes on barracks in the Marib governorate.
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