Tag: perpetual war

Trump Says He Is Trying to Get Bagram Air Base Back from the Taliban

President Donald Trump said he was working to reestablish America’s largest military base in Afghanistan. While Trump negotiated an agreement with the Taliban to end the Afghan War, he has argued that President Joe Biden made a mistake by withdrawing from the Bagram Air Base. 

While discussing Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, Trump explained that the US made a mistake by withdrawing from the Bagram Air Base, and he had planned to keep the facility. However, Trump signed an agreement with the Taliban to end the Afghan War and withdraw from the country. 

Trump says he is now working to establish the military facility. “We gave it to them for nothing. We’re trying to get it back, by the way. That could be a little breaking news, we’re trying to get it back because they need things from us,” The President said Thursday.

While Trump did not elaborate on what he may offer the Taliban, the US maintains crippling economic sanctions on Afghanistan, and the country faces intense poverty. 

The President went on to say that the base will give the US a military position near China’s nuclear weapons facility. “We want that base back but one of the reasons we want the base is, as you know, it’s an hour away from where China makes its nuclear weapons,” he added.

It’s unclear how the Taliban will respond to Trump’s proposal to reoccupy part of Afghanistan. Last week, Washington made a prisoner exchange deal with the Taliban that is part of a larger effort to normalize US-Afghan relations. 

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Ukraine’s Embrace of Suicidal Nationalism

The recent assassination of the Ukrainian neo-fascist politician Andriy Parubiy are a grim reminder of the far-right origins of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution — a revolution which eventually gave way to the full-scale Russian invasion of February 2022 and a war that has decimated the Ukrainian state.

At two key moments over the past 20 years, during 2004’s Orange Revolution and, a decade later, during the Maidan uprising, Ukraine’s nationalist political elites, at the urging of the American foreign policy establishment, sought to marginalize, stigmatize and eventually disenfranchise the substantial bloc of ethnic Russian citizens living in the country’s east and south.

That such an eventuality was possible (if not likely) was foreseen some 35 years ago by the last decent foreign policy president we’ve had, George H.W. Bush, who crafted a post Cold War policy based on (1) a refusal to rub Russia’s diminished fortunes in its face and (2) a wariness of re-awakening the poisonous sectarianism that so marked the politics of Eastern and Central Europe at mid-century.

Bush’s emphasis was on avoiding creating unnecessary crises within the post-Soviet space rather than provoking new ones (as subsequent Republican and Democratic administrations have chosen to do). As Bush’s secretary of state James A. Baker later wrote: “Time and again, President Bush demanded that we not dance on the ruins of the Berlin Wall. He simply wouldn’t hear of it.”

The nature of the Cold War had changed with Mikhail Gorbachev’s UN Speech of December 7, 1988. Gorbachev announced that the USSR was abandoning the class struggle that for decades served as the basis for Soviet foreign policy. In place of that, Gorbachev declared that Eastern European states were now free to choose their own paths, declaring that “the compelling necessity of the principle of freedom of choice” was “a universal principle to which there should be no exceptions.”

Gorbachev continued:

…The next U.S. administration, headed by President-elect George Bush, will find in us a partner who is ready – without long pauses or backtracking – to continue the dialogue in a spirit of realism, openness and good will, with a willingness to achieve concrete results working on the agenda which covers the main issues of Soviet-U.S. relations and world politics.”

Initially, Bush and his team were skeptical of Gorbachev. In his memoirs, Bush’s National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft dismissed Gorbachev’s overture, writing that the speech “had established, with a largely rhetorical flourish, a heady atmosphere of optimism.” Scowcroft, echoing the analysis offered to him by the CIA, worried that Gorbachev would then be able to “exploit an early meeting with a new president as evidence to declare the Cold War over without providing substantive actions from a ‘new’ Soviet Union.”

The caution with which Bush and his team treated Gorbachev likewise was extended to the newly or soon-to-be independent states in Eastern Europe.

There was to be no dancing on the ruins of the Berlin Wall.

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Top Russian officer reports advances on all Ukrainian fronts

A senior Russian officer toured positions held by his troops in Ukraine on Wednesday and said Moscow’s forces were advancing on all fronts, the Russian Defence Ministry said, with the heaviest fighting taking place around the logistics centre of Pokrovsk.

General Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s chief of staff of the armed forces in what Moscow calls its “special military operation”, said Moscow’s troops were making progress in the eastern Donetsk region, the conflict’s focal point, and further west in the Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions.

“Our troops in the zone of the special military operation are advancing in practically all directions,” the Defence Ministry quoted Gerasimov as saying.

“And the heaviest fighting is occurring in the Krasnoarmeisk direction,” he added, using the Soviet-era name for the city of Pokrovsk, “where the enemy, by any means and taking no account of losses, is trying unsuccessfully to stop our advances and seize back the initiative.”

The Ukrainian military, he was quoted as saying, “has deployed the best-trained and most capable fighting units, taking them from other areas. And that facilitates the advance of our troops in other sectors.”

In their slow advance through eastern Ukraine, Russian forces have maintained heavy attacks on the area around Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region for months.

Gerasimov said Russian forces were also making progress in taking Kupiansk, a largely destroyed city in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region, and Yampil, further east.

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Polish missile caused ‘Russian drone attack’ damage – media

The only confirmed damage from what Poland claims was a Russian drone incursion into its airspace was actually caused by a Polish missile fired from a NATO F-16 which struck a residential building, the Rzeczpospolita outlet has reported, citing sources.

Polish officials last week reported at least 19 violations of the country’s airspace by drones, saying up to four UAVs had been downed. Warsaw accused Moscow of being behind the incident. Russia has rejected the accusation and insisted its drones only strike Ukrainian military-related facilities.

Western leaders, according to Moscow, “accuse Russia of provocations on a daily basis, most often declining to offer any arguments.” 

Rzeczpospolita reported on Tuesday that most of the drones involved in the incident were not carrying explosives and caused no damage. However, one exception was in the village of Wyryki Wola near the border with Belarus, where what was described by Poland as an “unidentified flying object” crashed into a private home, damaging the roof but without causing casualties.

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EU to propose new plan to leverage €170bn of frozen Russian money

Brussels is pressing ahead with a plan to use €170 billion of Russia’s frozen sovereign assets to back “reparation loans” for Ukraine, the Financial Times has reported. The EU faces growing pressure to find additional funding for Kiev as US cuts back its support.

Moscow has condemned the asset freeze and warned that any seizure of its money would amount to “theft.” 

Western nations froze an estimated $300 billion in Russian funds after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022 – some €200 billion of which is held by Brussels-based clearinghouse Euroclear. The funds have accrued billions in interest, and the West has explored ways to use this revenue to finance Ukraine. While refraining from outright seizure, the G7 last year backed a plan to provide Kiev with $50 billion in loans to be repaid using the profits generated by the funds. The EU pledged $21 billion.

European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen has proposed going further by creating a ‘reparation loans’ mechanism, which she described as urgently needed to finance Kiev.

People familiar with discussions said the plan involves channeling cash balances from Russia’s immobilized assets into EU-issued bonds, with the proceeds transferred to Ukraine in tranches. Brussels argues the system would provide Kiev with immediate support while sidestepping a formal seizure.

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Ukraine expects $3.5 billion fund for US weapons to sustain fight against Russia, Zelenskyy says

Ukraine expects there will be around $3.5 billion by next month in a fund to buy weapons from the United States and help sustain its more than three-year fight against Russia’s all-out invasion, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Wednesday.

The financial arrangement known as the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List, or PURL, pools contributions from NATO members, except the United States, to purchase American weapons, munitions and equipment.

“We received more than $2 billion from our partners specifically for the PURL program,” Zelenskyy said at a joint news conference in Kyiv with visiting European Parliament President Roberta Metsola. “We will receive additional money in October. I think we will have somewhere around $3.5-3.6 billion.”

Zelenskyy declined to provide details of what weapons the first shipments would include, but said that they would definitely contain missiles for Patriot air defense missile systems and munitions for the High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS.

An end to the war appears no closer, despite months of U.S.-led peace efforts.

The Patriot systems are vital to defend against Russian missile attacks. The HIMARS systems have significantly bolstered the Ukrainian military’s precision-strike capability.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov reaffirmed Russia’s readiness for peace talks, telling reporters on Wednesday that “we remain open for negotiations and prefer to settle the Ukrainian crisis by political and diplomatic means.”

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Founder of NYC Pro-Democracy Group Pleads Guilty to Spying for China

A Chinese man living in New York City has pleaded guilty to spying on his fellow activists on behalf of the Chinese regime’s intelligence agency, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced on Sept. 16.

Tang Yuanjun, 68, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was a prominent figure in New York City’s Chinese dissident community, having participated in protests outside the Chinese Consulate in the New York City borough of Manhattan and founded a pro-democracy group, the Chinese Democracy Party Eastern U.S. Headquarters Inc., based in the Flushing neighborhood of the borough of Queens.

Despite his public advocacy against Beijing, Tang was secretly working under the direction of the Chinese intelligence service to collect information on his fellow Chinese American dissidents, according to a guilty plea entered on Sept. 16.

As part of the plea, Tang admitted to one count of conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government without notifying the attorney general, which is punishable by up to five years in prison.

“For years, Yuanjun Tang abused the trust he had gained among pro-democracy activists in New York City and around the United States by secretly accepting tasks from Chinese intelligence officers and reporting on persons of interest to the [People’s Republic of China] and events conducted in support of democracy,” U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said in a statement.

“Tang’s covert operations violated our nation’s sovereignty and threatened the security of New Yorkers exercising their fundamental rights to free speech and free association. Tang’s plea … illustrates our profound commitment to protecting American ideals from malign foreign influence.”

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The End Game for Gaza

I’ve taught military history “from Plato to NATO,” as we used to joke, but my expertise focused on technology and warfare. Along with “revolutions” and “transformations” in weaponry, I probably spent too much time focusing on “decisive battles” and “great captains” in history. When you look at the course of military history, most deaths from war didn’t come in battle. They came from hunger and disease, from famine and pestilence. Sometimes, mass starvation and pandemics were unintentional byproducts of chaos and societal disruption caused by war, and sometimes starvation and disease were intentional weapons and products of war.

You might call this apocalyptic war, from the Bible and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which included famine and pestilence among the death riders.

An apocalyptic fate seemingly awaits Palestinians in Gaza. I’ve written about Gaza as a genocide, the mass bombing by Israel, the mass killing, with the apparent goal of forcing Palestinians out of Gaza, but I haven’t given enough thought to the use of mass starvation and diseases as weapons in this genocide.

A reader, Dan White, brought this lesson home to me, and I’d like to quote his message to me at length:

I can’t think of a better word than the etiology of starvation. It hasn’t been adequately addressed by the snoozemedia. Starvation death rates have a funny shaped curve. During the first stages of starvation – can’t give any figures on a time period for this or any other part of the process/curve, due to there being varying levels of food deprivation – there are few deaths, generally (but not always) those persons with compromised health/preexisting health problems that make them more susceptible to death than others in the population. After some (varying length) period of starvation, people start to die in larger numbers, and then all of a sudden, everyone is dying, and then everyone is dead. This period of death is fairly short compared to the period of starvation. Again, due to varying levels of starvation and varying levels of preexisting health and varying levels of surplus consumable body tissue in the starved group, this period has no fixed length, but it happens all of a sudden, and it doesn’t take long for everyone to die once it starts – couple of weeks seems common.

The starving residents of Gaza haven’t reached the mass-death stage of starvation, but it could well start happening tomorrow. I can’t say because I don’t know the food reserves preexisting, the food delivery figures since the ‘war’ started, and nobody in the news biz has bothered to look for them, either. There really should have been some government or multi-state agency who has looked for them and published them, but nobody has.

When the mass-death stage hits, people in Gaza will be dying by the tens of thousands a week. Stopping the mass-death by all of a sudden providing food isn’t going to work very well, on account of logistical delivery problems and the medical problems of alleviating starvation at this advanced stage – folks’ digestive tracts may well not work well enough even if they get food. That will be the real genocide, and I’d bet money it happens, and bet more money that this is the real objective of Israel’s ‘war’ in Gaza. The notion of Israel’s war objective is displacement of Gazans is an absurdity – you want someone to leave, well they have to be able to walk, right? And they have to have a place to go. Israel is counting on the rest of the world to all of a sudden do a mass-evacuation of Gazans combined with a mass feeding and mass medical intervention all at the same time in order to prevent this mass death of Gazans from occurring? NFW – Israel’s leaders have accepted mass killing as an official state policy, and have commenced doing it, and do it as we speak. And Israeli hasbara [propaganda] will blame us for it, and a whole lot of whored-out American and European politicians, as well as Israel-worshiping American Jews, will go along with it.

What Dan White posits here is horrifying – and increasingly likely. Of course, as people are weakened through starvation, they become more susceptible to various diseases associated with famine and unsanitary conditions.

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‘Eastern Sentry’: The New NATO Initiative To Protect The Eastern Flank

Some eight NATO allies have prepared operation ‘Eastern Sentry’ following last week’s alleged Russian drone breach of Poland. It is a new joint military mission to bolster defense of Europe’s eastern flank, also after Romania had more recently reported a Russian drone incursion, resulting in the scrambling of fighter jets to track it.

“Following the Russian drone incursions into Poland, I have decided to deploy three Rafale fighter jets to contribute to the protection of Polish airspace and of NATO’s Eastern Flank together with our Allies,” President Emmanuel Macron announced on X this week. Along with France, the effort includes the UK, Italy, Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Spain, and The Netherlands. More nations are expected to join.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has confirmed that his country will deploy Royal Air Force jets to Poland, while Italy will contribute two Eurofighter jets, and Germany has readied four Eurofighters. Denmark will also sent jets, and Czech Mi-171S helicopters have also arrived in Poland. Over 150 NATO troops have also initially arrived along with the equipment.

Meanwhile, eastern European and Baltic countries are already calling for more, including:

Anti-drone defense systems in NATO countries still need to be developed, Latvia’s President Edgars Rinkevics told a press conference on Tuesday.

NATO on Friday launched “Eastern Sentry,” a new military mission to bolster defense of Europe’s eastern flank in response to Russian drone incursions into Polish airspace last week.

The Washington Post wrote on Monday, “The incident raised serious questions about the alliance’s readiness to counter the relatively cheap, highly maneuverable but devastatingly destructive unmanned aerial vehicles that have redefined modern warfare since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.”

Additionally, in a Monday interview, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski called on NATO countries to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine.

“We as NATO and the EU could be capable of doing this, but it is not a decision that Poland can make alone; it can only be made with its allies,” he said.

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Shooting Down Russian Drones Over Poland: Who Is Trying To Start World War 3?

The world is now closer to a full-scale war between NATO and Russia than at any time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.  In the early morning hours of September 10, 2025, Western air defenses spotted a fleet of Russian drones that had entered Poland’s airspace.  Shortly thereafter, NATO fighter planes intercepted the intruders, shooting down 16 of them. NATO’s military forces also elevated their alert status.

Questions immediately arose about whether this episode was a deliberate provocation on Russia’s part, or simply a case in which Moscow’s contingent of unmanned drones heading for targets in Ukraine flew off course.  Not surprisingly, high-level officials in both Warsaw and Kyiv, including Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, insisted that the airspace violation was intentional, despite the lack of definitive evidence.  The Washington Post’s editorial board embraced a somewhat different argument, concluding that it really didn’t matter if the incursion was deliberate or not; in either case, the members believed that the situation amounted to a test of NATO’s air defenses and, more important, the Alliance’s “resolve.”

Hawks in many NATO countries also exploited the incident to argue that the Alliance needed to accelerate the pace of its ongoing military buildup and to boost its security solidarity with Ukraine.  In other words, such advocates seek to escalate NATO’s existing proxy war that uses Kyiv as a tool to weaken Russia.  The contemplated escalation would take the form of increasing the Alliance’s direct military involvement – even though that step would risk the outbreak of combat between Russian and NATO units.  NATO leaders have now used the drone incident to adopt a new confrontational mission, dubbed Eastern Sentry.

Such a move would intensify NATO’s already alarming confrontation with Moscow.  Ironically, a reasonably dispassionate assessment of the circumstances surrounding the drone episode would suggest that it was more likely an inadvertent intrusion than a hostile probe.  At the same time that Alliance defenders were knocking the Russian drones out of Poland’s skies, Russian ally Belarus announced that it was taking similar action against such drones that had penetrated its airspace.

The nature of Minsk’s response indicated that a Russian drone fleet launched against Ukraine had been disrupted by Ukrainian or NATO electronic warfare measures, causing it to deviate onto a new course over Poland.  It would be ironic if the Western powers had brought this problem on themselves through their own electronic warfare actions, but the overall circumstances suggest that that it is the most likely explanation.

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