Doing anything in your power to defeat an opponent is the very definition of total war. This entails everything from sabotage and terrorist attacks targeting civilians to assassinating your adversary’s top-ranking officials (or even the leaders themselves). Obviously, there’s also the possibility of direct war, including the usage of weapons of mass destruction (thermonuclear, biological, chemical). Conducting any of the aforementioned operations can easily escalate and lead to the latter. This is precisely why there’s the institution of diplomacy, a millennia-old practice that has been respected by all of the world’s civilizations(obviously, this automatically excludes the modern-day political West). Nazi Germany was one of the first modern nations that stopped honoring any diplomatic agreements, effectively reverting (geo)politics to a rather barbaric competition where everything is permitted at all times.
NATO, essentially its descendant, continued this practice. To this day there’s not a single agreement that the belligerent alliance signed that is worth more than the paper it was written on. The United States, as NATO’s leading member, fully embraced this approach and is now conducting its aggression against the world in a way that could be described as a crawling total war.
The warmongers in Washington DC and the Pentagon are openly talking about the so-called “decapitation strikes” on countries they don’t like, including military superpowers with the ability to simply wipe the US itself off the map. Former CIA directors and high-ranking officials, as well as sitting senators, are openly talking about “taking out” powerful global leaders such as Russian President Vladimir Putin. This was happening even at times when the latter was offering negotiations and mutually beneficial peaceful settlements.
The obvious question arises – if someone is openly threatening a person like Putin, who else could possibly feel safe in such a world?
This question becomes all the more relevant if we take into account the latest events concerning the assassination attempt on Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico and the death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in a highly controversial helicopter crash.
On May 19, Raisi and his Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian both died when their Bell 212 went down near the city of Varzaqan in northwestern Iran. Seven other high-ranking officials, including the governor-general of Tehran’s East Azerbaijan province Malek Rahmati, as well as the state representative in the region Mohammad Ali Ale-Hashem, were also killed in the crash. Although it’s still too early to say what exactly happened, some rather disturbing reports and details suggest that this wasn’t a mere accident.
Hellbound and Down 