Tag: perpetual war

US Threatens the UK: Increase Defense Spending, or Lose Support for Sovereignty Over the Falkland Islands

European territories in the Western Hemisphere are not safe anymore.

Today, The Telegraph has issued a bombshell report (picked up by several other outlets by now) that reveals that the US is threatening to oppose Britain’s sovereignty over the Falkland Islands unless Andy Burnham increases the UK defense spending.

The proposal is reportedly among measures being prepared at the Pentagon to force NATO nations to fulfill their 5 percent of the GDP defense spending pledge.

The Telegraph reported:

“A senior US official told The Telegraph that Britain was likely to receive ‘special attention’ in Washington’s review of its allies’ commitment to Nato, which will examine whether member nations have credible paths toward the target.

Officials in Washington believe that while Britain has the potential to be a leading defense partner, the defense investment plan, announced by Sir Keir Starmer in June, was not enough of a ‘step in the right direction’.

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Trump Stuns By Outright Dismissing Notion Putin Preparing To Attack A NATO State

President Trump has added fuel to the fire of controversy and speculation over the question of why CIA Director John Ratcliffe made a surprise and highly rare trip to Moscow on Tuesday.

Media accounts which seek to explain the nature of his meeting with top Kremlin intelligence officials, while apparently being snubbed by Putin in terms of a direct interaction, have shifted in days since the visit. The early ‘consensus’ was that he delivered a stern warning for Russia not to attack any NATO state. But President Trump has poured cold water on this explanation, appearing to dismiss it outright in his latest comments. 

“I’ve had good talks with him. He’s not going to be attacking a NATO territory,” Trump said of Putin on Thursday while talking to reporters in the Oval Office.

Trump didn’t answer specifically when pressed on if the president directed Ratcliffe to deliver a warning to Putin to not attack NATO. “I don’t want to comment on that but they’re not going to attack,” Trump said.

While many times over the course of the Ukraine war, European heads of state have claimed that Russia is expansionist and seeks to attack countries in Europe beyond Ukraine, this has not ever been a public allegation of Trump, who has tended to downplay it as a possibility. 

Trump did deny the reports centered on Ratcliffe in an interview with Axios Thursday, saying “Ratcliffe sees his Russian counterpart once every six months or once every year. They have a very good relationship. There was no message and there was nothing unusual.”

And when asked over whether he’s concerned that Putin might attack NATO or deeper inside Europe, Trump replied, “I am not concerned … at all. There is no problem.” According to more:

The president called Ratcliffe’s trip “standard business” and expressed puzzlement over the media accounts of it.

But the reality is that no CIA director has made such a trip in well over four years. The prior time was November 2021, when then-CIA Director William Burns traveled to Moscow to meet with senior Russian officials and issued a stark warning against invading Ukraine.

It was also highly unexpected in terms of timing, given the stalemated nature of the Ukraine conflict, and the fact that zero peace negotiations are happening. There has not even so much as been any efforts at achieving a short-term ceasefire, akin to last year’s Christmas truce.

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US Military Shoots Down 3 Mexican Cartel Drones With Laser

A laser system was used to shoot down three drug cartel drones in southern Texas, close to the Mexican border, the U.S. military said on Aug. 27.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command, in a joint statement, said an Army Multipurpose High Energy Laser (AMP-HEL) was used overnight on Aug. 25-26 in the Rio Grande Valley.

The Joint Task Force-Southern Border (JTF-SB) deemed the three drones to be hostile and posing a physical threat to U.S. military personnel and their partners in U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

Maj. Gen. Curtis Taylor, commander of JTF-SB, said the successful operation against the drones was a testament to the readiness, vigilance, and technological edge of his force.

US Will ‘Not Tolerate Hostile Surveillance’

“Cartel networks are increasingly employing unmanned aircraft systems to facilitate illicit human-smuggling and actively spy on our personnel and law enforcement partners,” Taylor said. “By integrating layered countermeasures alongside advanced directed-energy capabilities like this laser system, we have made it clear that we will not tolerate hostile surveillance.”

Ammon Blair, a former U.S.Border Patrol agent and senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Secure & Sovereign Texas Initiative, told The Epoch Times in March 2025 that he recalled hearing cartel-operated drones overhead while working along the Texas border.

“You’d be running, and you’d have a drone right above your head and tracking every move you made,” Blair said at the time.

In February, the airspace around El Paso International Airport was closed for 7 hours for “special security reasons.”

The White House told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement at the time that Mexican cartel-operated drones had breached U.S. airspace and that the Department of War took action to disable them.

In other parts of Mexico, cartels have used drones to drop explosives in deadly attacks, but there is no suggestion the drones in the Texas incident were armed.

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A Trillion Dollar Budget But Military Can’t ‘Afford’ To Attack Mold On Bases?

A new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report finds that the maintenance backlog for military installations has ballooned to more than $285 billion – leaving many facilities in disrepair, while risking readiness and service members’ quality of life.

This figure is a jump up from 2022, when the maintenance backlog was about $137 billion. But the backlog continues to grow, because the services only request about 80% of the funds they need for installation repairs and maintenance.

“By requesting less funding for installation maintenance and improvement projects than its models and experts recommend, DOD has chosen to accept some degree of risk that mission or quality of life will be negatively affected,” the report, released Friday, found.

Indeed, service members face a range of issues at the facilities where they work and live. Barracks at Naval Station Norfolk, for example, have had suspected mold since 2023. But the installation office declined requests to test the growth observed there “due to the cost of testing and potential remediation.”

Another highly used facility at that Naval station had evidence of asbestos and significant water damage, GAO found. While all the station’s piers require renovation, the Navy was “actively improving” only one – leaving the rest to operate in a “degraded condition.”

At one Naval Base Guam facility, GAO observed, rust build-up and algae on an emergency door’s lock could “affect the door’s functionality during an emergency.” The base’s facilities have also been prone to HVAC failures and roof leaks, GAO found, leading to suspected mold.

Beyond physical hazards and operational risks, other issues undercut service members’ overall quality of life.

About 3,000 soldiers live at Fort Wainwright, for example, yet the army installation’s dining facility was only built to serve 800.

“The dining facility is not able to serve soldiers in a timely manner, so many opt to eat less-healthy food in their living spaces at their own expense, especially in the winter when it is too cold to wait in line outside,” GAO found. Officials have repeatedly advocated for expanding the dining facility, but the installation has not yet received the funding needed to do so.

The maintenance backlog continues to swell despite the Pentagon’s rapidly expanding budget. The White House requested a record $1.5 trillion defense budget for FY 2027.

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The UN and Red Cross Are Calling for Restrictions on AI Drones and Killer Robots

The United Nations and the Red Cross are warning that rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic weapons are bringing the world dangerously close to crossing a moral red line that has inspired dystopian science fiction for decades: the autonomous targeting of humans by deadly machines.

In an appeal to world leaders on August 25, the International Committee of the Red Cross and UN Secretary-General António Guterres renewed their call for a global treaty establishing restrictions on autonomous weapons systems. They warned that the technology behind AI targeting software and unpiloted drones has developed at record speed since the UN and Red Cross first called for such negotiations three years ago.

“At the same time, scientists and engineers developing these systems have themselves raised the alarm,” Guterres and the Red Cross said in a joint statement on August 25. “When the architects of this technology are calling for limits, States cannot afford to remain passive. This year must mark a turning point.”

In other words, the world must act now to rein in what are commonly known as “killer robots” or “slaughterbots” — unpiloted drones, robotic dogs, robot sentries armed with guns, AI targeting systems, and other digitally driven death machines that can identify, strike, and eliminate human beings on their own.

“You don’t even need drone operators; you can just type in a coordinate and not see the implications of what you are doing,” said Rory Fanning, an author, activist, and veteran of the U.S. war on Afghanistan, in an interview.

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Trump Has Made Up to $15M in Oil and Gas Stock Rise Spurred in Part by Iran War

President Donald Trump’s deeply unpopular war on Iran has helped inject millions of dollars into his personal wealth while saddling everyday Americans with a $72 billion bill, a new report reveals.

Amid the war, oil and gas companies’ stocks have skyrocketed in value as companies report staggering earnings; ExxonMobil recently reported its profits doubling year-over-year, while Chevron’s net income has increased nearly 400 percent as a result of the disruptions to the global oil market. In all, oil and gas companies reported $125 billion in profits in the first half of 2026, with a corresponding jump in stock value across the fossil fuel industry.

As a result of that rise, Trump may have profited as much as $15.5 million, and netted at least $4.6 million, from his oil and gas holdings this year, Democrats on Congress’s Joint Economic Committee (JEC) found in a report this week. In all, his oil and gas holdings went from a maximum value of $45.5 million to as much as $61 million.

The analysis was based on stocks that Trump held at the end of 2025, including Exxon, Chevron, and seven other oil and gas companies. His profits may be even higher than the report suggests, as Trump bought additional oil and gas stocks in the first three months of 2026 worth up to $3.6 million. These were bought in a period when the U.S. seized control of Venezuela’s oil profits and launched a war on Iran that has sent oil prices sky-high.

Meanwhile, the rise in energy prices has cost Americans an additional $71.5 billion in gas prices at the pump, the Democrats found, or an average of over $600 a household. That’s before taking into account the hike in prices for things like groceries and other associated costs like increased mortgage rates caused by the war.

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Trump Must Not Let Washington’s Korea Hawks Intimidate Him Again

One of the great foreign policy disappointments of Donald Trump’s first term was the failure to advance his initial promising initiative to begin normalizing relations with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).  Trump had abandoned the threats and bluster toward Pyongyang that marked his early months in office.  Instead, he moved to open a personal dialogue with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and facilitate productive negotiations on several important issues.  That approach led to an unprecedented U.S.-DPRK summit meeting in Singapore on June 12, 2018 and, later on, to a famous sight: the U.S. president crossing the Demilitarized Zone from South Korea into the communist North on June 29, 2019, to hold a brief chat with Kim.

Unfortunately, Trump failed to prevent hawks from both parties in Congress and in the overall national security establishment from sabotaging such conciliatory efforts.  Indeed, the president made a fatal blunder of his own by appointing the rabidly hawkish John Bolton as his National Security Advisor.  Congressional opponents of any meaningful relationship between the United States and the DPRK also excoriated Trump for moving to reduce Washington’s confrontational stance toward Pyongyang.

Indeed, hardliners in Congress and the broader policy community denounced the president for his willingness even to interact with Kim. The United States gave the odious dictator a huge boost in prestige, critics contended, merely by affording him a face-to-face meeting with the president and treating him as an equal. “In his haste to reach an agreement, President Trump elevated North Korea to the level of the United States while preserving the regime’s status quo,” intoned House minority leader Nancy Pelosi.

Despite that bruising political experience during his first term, Trump has indicated that he would be receptive to a new dialogue with the North Korean leader before the end of 2026.  “I get along with him well,” Trump stated.  “And you know what? The fact that I get along with him, that’s a very good thing, not a bad thing.”

On the delicate and difficult issue of relations with North Korea, Trump’s instincts are correct.  A new summit meeting would be a useful first step toward ending the dangerous policy rigidity that, except for Trump’s all-too-brief interlude, has plagued the U.S. stance toward North Korea for decades.

To achieve a constructive breakthrough, however, the president must go on the offensive against a host of vitriolic, often partisan, detractors.  Even his mild new outreach to Pyongyang is already drawing fire akin to the ideological and partisan attacks that doomed his efforts in 2018 and 2019.  The rhetoric of Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) was typical. “Kim Jong Un is not, I think, terribly impressed with Donald Trump.  And withdrawing forces from Korea, canceling exercises, plays into his game.”  Trump in a Truth Social post the previous Sunday stated that he told Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to “substantially reduce” planned joint military exercises alongside South Korean forces.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board echoed Reed’s opposition to Trump’s conciliatory gestures to Pyongyang. “President Trump is nothing if not impulsive, and his latest brainstorm is to rekindle his courtship of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.”  The Journal’s editors were especially annoyed that Trump had cited his “very good relationship” with Kim and had contended that U.S. military exercises with South Korea “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful.”

The editors expressed alarm at the president’s approach.  “This will reinforce the growing belief in Asia and Europe that the U.S. is becoming an unreliable ally,” they fumed.  “It may also increase the calls in the South for Seoul to develop its own nuclear deterrent.”

Despite the shrill criticism, Trump’s latest initiative actually is a cautious, overdue effort to jump-start meaningful diplomacy with Pyongyang.  The real danger is that such a modest, conciliatory effort will be too little, too late.

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VoterGA: Declassified Intelligence Reveals Massive China Election Interference Cover-up

President Donald Trump delivered a primetime address from the White House on July 16, 2026, on the subject of US election security.

During the speech, Trump announced the declassification of intelligence documents and made a series of allegations involving China, the 2020 election, and a subsequent effort by intelligence officials to withhold information from him and from Congress.

As reported earlier by Patriot Perspective, one CIA report outlined China’s broader objective as leveraging domestic and foreign groups opposed to Trump to reduce his support, pressure him to resign, or stop him from winning another term.

Another report alleged that information collected from millions of TikTok users could be used to place authentic names, addresses, and identification numbers on the fraudulent licenses, making them more difficult to detect.

The release by the US government in July, via an earlier TGP report by Patriot Perspective, revealed China’s massive, multi-year US election interference campaigns.

The documents depict a foreign adversary determined to exploit America’s political divisions.

The most alarming material concerns the collection of Americans’ personal information.

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Zelensky Appoints Key Azov Commanders to Lead Defense of Last Strongholds in Donetsk – MSM Tries To Whitewash Their Nazi Ideology

The board is set, the pieces are moving for the battle for the last fortified bastions of Ukrainian control in Donetsk Oblast.

We have been reporting here on TGP on the impending major battle that will decide the fate of the Donbas, the cradle of the Ukraine war.

While the Luhansk region has already been fully conquered by Russia, there are still a cluster of fortified towns in northern Donetsk that have been holding since 2014.

But now, the advancing Russian forces are just a few miles from the Slavyansk-Kramatorsk ‘agglomeration’, and the fight for the ‘fortress belt’ is about to begin.

RT reported on Telegram:

“Four kilometers [2,4 miles] are left to the eastern outskirts of Slavyansk — [Russian] Chief of General Staff [Valery] Gerasimov.

Russian advance groups of assault units are fighting on the territory three kilometers from the outskirts of Kramatorsk.

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Moscow Warns It Could Target British Military Facilities In Unprecedented Statement

From the very start of the Ukraine war, the United Kingdom has consistently been among Kiev’s most open and ardent military supporters, time and again transferring heavy weaponry, including cutting edge long-range missiles like the Storm Shadow.

At the start of this week, Britain announced it plans to provide Ukraine with classified technology to allow for the country’s own manufacturing of the British/French-designed SCALP air-launched cruise missile (which in the UK is known as the Storm Shadow). The allies expect to set up a production line in Ukraine as soon as year’s end.

Already, Ukraine has used its domestic-made and designed Neptune cruise missile to strike oil refineries and military sites deep inside Russian territory. A domestic-made SCALP would present the likelihood of Ukraine then using this Western-designed missile to directly attack Russia, which only increases the chances of an eventual Moscow-NATO clash. Ukrainian forces already appeared to have used the missile on Donetsk and other locations closer to front lines in the Donbass.

On Thursday the Kremlin has issued one of its strongest warnings and threats aimed at London to date, accusing the UK of “fully taking part in the war on Kiev’s side” – and thus thwarting any chance of peace talks while adding fuel to the fire.

Moscow is now saying that the UK’s own military facilities could become fair game for direct attacks.

Kremlin spokesperson Maria Zakharova said in a Thursday press briefing, “We have repeatedly warned that the response to Ukrainian strikes using British weapons against Russian territory could be directed against any British military facilities and equipment in Ukraine and beyond.”

Zakharova urged “all residents of the United Kingdom to think about the inevitable, catastrophic consequences of the hostile steps taken by their own authorities.” She also laid out:

“We propose that the British leadership once again carefully analyze the situation and immediately, in the most resolute and unequivocal manner, abandon the hostile, aggressive line, which can only… create the risk of the conflict escalating to an entirely new level.”

Ironically this comes just on the heels of a rare visit of the CIA Director to Moscow. US officials claim the Tuesday meeting between John Ratcliffe and top Kremlin intelligence officials was to convey a warning to President Putin to not attack any NATO member. However, many analysts are skeptical that this was the official reason.

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