Tag: perpetual war

CIA Drone Carried Out First Known Land Strike On Venezuela 

The CIA is reported to have carried out a bombing operation within Venezuelan territory, CNN and The New York Times report in follow-up to President Trump touting that the US had knocked out “a big facility”.

CNN while citing unnamed sources, reports that the CIA conducted a drone strike on a remote dock along Venezuela’s coastline, after the US suspected the site was being used to store and transport illegal drugs, and which were supposedly bound for America.

Reports indicate the location was unoccupied at the time of the strike, which occurred earlier this month. The New York Times published a similar account based on anonymous sources, specifying that the operation took place last Wednesday.

As we detailed, President Trump had on Friday in a radio interview disclosed something which missed the attention of the US and global media. He let slip that a large land site had been knocked out by a strike from US forces in the Caribbean.

Trump may have actually assumed the attack which he disclosed publicly for the first time was already being reported on, but it had not. He was being interviewed by John Catsimatidis, the Republican billionaire who owns the WABC radio station in New York on his The Cats & Cosby Show, and the two were talking about the Venezuela campaign. 

“They have a big plant or a big facility where the ships come from,” Trump said, though he did not explicitly identify the exact location or even country attacked. “Two nights ago we knocked that out.”

Interestingly, the remarks generated almost no headlines for much of that weekend. But by Monday he expanded on those remarks during a press conference, saying the target was located on Venezuela’s coast and that a “major explosion” occurred at a dock where boats were supposedly loaded with drugs.

“There was a major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs,” he told reporters at Mar-a-Lago, his club and residence in Florida.

“They load the boats up with drugs. So we hit all the boats, and now we hit the area. It’s the implementation area, that’s where they implement, and that is no longer around.”

But even after this, neither CIA, nor White House, nor Pentagon would comment. Even more strange was that Venezuelan officials themselves have also remained silent, issuing no public statements regarding the alleged attack. It is perhaps the case they don’t want the population to panic, or else don’t want to give acknowledgement of a successful land strike by Washington.

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Foreign states condemn Ukrainian attack on Putin’s residence

The United Arab Emirates and Nicaragua have strongly condemned the attempted Ukrainian kamikaze drone attack targeting the residence of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Kiev launched 91 long-range strike drones at Putin’s state residence in Novgorod Region on the night of December 28-29, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Monday. Russian officials said all the drones were intercepted, with no casualties or damage reported.

In a statement released on Monday evening, the UAE Foreign Ministry expressed solidarity with President Putin and the people of Russia, reaffirming Abu Dhabi’s “unwavering rejection of all forms of violence.”

“The United Arab Emirates has strongly condemned the attempt to target the residence of His Excellency Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, and denounced this deplorable attack and the threat it poses to security and stability,” the ministry said.

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China’s Military AI and Biotechnology Directed at the United States

Soldiers in a brigade attached to the 83rd Group Army of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army conduct virtual reality exercises. Photo: Screenshot from China Central Television

According to a congressional report, the People’s Liberation Army continues to exploit military-civil fusion to integrate commercial and academic research into military systems. Military-Civil Fusion is China’s national strategy to merge civilian technology, research institutions, and industry with the defense sector in order to build a world-class military.

The strategy aligns commercial innovation with military requirements across fields ranging from artificial intelligence to semiconductors, pooling state and private resources to accelerate military development. Chinese authorities describe military-civil fusion as a core component of comprehensive national power and a central driver of long-term military modernization.

Through state laboratories, funding programs, conferences, and industrial parks, China has ensured sustained private-sector participation in this effort. As a result, it has made significant advances in artificial intelligence and large language models that underpin many emerging PLA technologies. AI reasoning systems support cyber operations, command decision-making, and influence campaigns, while also enabling autonomous and unmanned platforms, drone swarms, and loyal wingman UAVs.

These capabilities increasingly intersect with developments in quantum computing, quantum sensing, and quantum communications, which China has identified as priorities for national security and future warfare.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has described quantum technologies as drivers of industrial transformation, and Beijing is investing in post-quantum cryptography, military applications of quantum sensing, and ground- and space-based infrastructure for a global quantum communications network with both civilian and military uses.

Quantum communications support nuclear command, control, and communications by enabling hardened and interception-resistant links, while quantum sensing has potential applications in anti-submarine warfare by enabling detection methods that do not rely on active sonar.

Semiconductor self-sufficiency remains a parallel strategic objective. In 2024, firms including Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp and Huawei Technologies received substantial local government funding to accelerate chip indigenization. Although China continues to lag the West in the most advanced GPUs, it is pursuing alternative pathways through nontraditional microchip technologies, including photonic components developed by state research institutes.

Domestic chip production underpins military resilience by enabling continued weapons manufacturing under sanctions and securing supply chains for missiles, drones, and radar systems. Alternative chip architectures support AI processing and reduce reliance on advanced Western GPUs, sustaining production capacity during conflict.

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Here Are 5 Wars Trump Started or Expanded in 2025

President Donald Trump came into office presenting himself as a peace president. “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into,” he said in his inaugural address.

By those standards, his presidency has been a failure. Trump launched nearly as many airstrikes in five months as former President Joe Biden did in his entire term, according to Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, a nonprofit that monitors wars around the world. And those airstrikes have hit places where the U.S. military was not fighting during Biden’s term, from the Caribbean to Iran.

Of course, Biden himself was guilty of the same sort of double-talk. He bragged that “the United States is not at war anywhere in the world” less than an hour after U.S. Central Command announced a new air raid on Yemen. Like death and taxes, it seems a certainty of life that American presidents will talk peace while continuing—and expanding—war.

Here are four countries where Trump has done that:

Venezuela

On the campaign trail, Trump signalled that he wanted a full-on war against drug cartels in Latin America. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Steven Miller originally wanted to target Mexican cartels, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio steered Trump toward a regime change campaign in Venezuela, arguing that the Venezuelan government was itself a drug smuggling gang.

The campaign began by bombing alleged drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean. At least 104 people have been killed in these attacks so far. In one instance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the military to bomb survivors clinging to a shipwrecked boat. The White House reportedly hoped that the military buildup and show of force would convince Venezuelan ruler Nicolas Maduro to “cry uncle,” in the words of White House Chief of Staff Susan Wiles.

Meanwhile, Trump and Miller’s stated goals have shifted from a war on drugs to a naked resource grab. They both demanded that Venezuela compensate the U.S. for nationalizing oil businesses several decades ago as Trump declared a “TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE” of oil tankers from the country. The U.S. military has seized at least two oil tankers leaving Venezuela, and Maduro has ordered his navy to escort oil shipments.

The American people are not enthusiastic about this military campaign. Recent polling shows that 53 percent of Americans oppose the boat attacks and 63 percent oppose attacking Venezuelan soil. But the Trump administration is eager to show that it can do things without permission from Congress or the public, and the Caribbean is apparently full of easy targets.

Yemen

In Yemen, Trump turned a frozen conflict back into a hot war. The Houthi movement in Sanaa, one of the two rival Yemeni governments, had been harassing international shipping in the Red Sea as a tactic to pressure Israel to pull out of Gaza. After Trump secured a ceasefire in Gaza in January 2025, the Houthis stopped their attacks.

Without warning, Trump attacked Yemen in March 2025. He presented this as a prelude to attacking Iran, declaring that any “shot fired by the Houthis will be looked upon, from this point forward, as being a shot fired from the weapons and leadership of IRAN.” Then, after two months of inconclusive bombing and the loss of two American fighter jets, Trump ended the campaign.

It was in the Yemen war that former National Security Adviser Mike Waltz accidentally added a journalist to a group chat for planning air raids. (In the process, Hegseth revealed that the military deliberately killed one or more civilian bystanders.)

Only a few months before relaunching this war, Trump had criticized the logic behind it. “It’s crazy. You can solve problems over the telephone. Instead, they start dropping bombs. I see, recently, they’re dropping bombs all over Yemen,” then-candidate Trump said in May 2024. “You don’t have to do that. You can talk in such a way where they respect you and they listen to you.”

Iran

The Islamic Republic is the Middle Eastern grand prize for neoconservatives, who have been pushing for a regime change war there since the early 2000s. Trump edged toward that outcome in his first term, with military buildups, an economic embargo, and the assassination of an Iranian general. Every time, he stopped just short of an attack on Iranian soil.

That changed in his second term. Publicly, Trump was negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program. Those talks were actually a U.S.-Israeli ruse to prepare for war, PBS and The Washington Post reported last week. Israel attacked without warning on June 13, 2025, killing Iranian commanders and disabling Iranian air defenses.

After 12 days of back-and-forth air raids between Iran and Israel, the U.S. launched a stealth bomber raid on Iranian nuclear enrichment sites, then declared victory. Although Trump didn’t go as far as some neoconservatives wanted, experience suggests that if you give war hawks an inch, they’ll take a mile. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is headed to the White House on December 29 to make the case for another attack on Iran.

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Russia ‘Confidently Advancing’ In Ukraine, Over 30 Settlements Captured In December: Putin

Russian President Vladimir Putin has made clear to both his citizens and to the world that the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine will continue on until all goals are achieved, and that his forces are advancing ‘confidently’.

He chaired a televised meeting with the country’s top military officials, focused on a status update regarding Ukraine, and crucially coming the day after Presidents Trump and Zelensky met in Florida in a failed effort to reach breakthrough on the proposed peace deal. Moscow is pressing ahead with its goal of fully capturing and pacifying the four Ukrainian regions it declared part of the Russian Federation in fall of 2022 via a ‘popular referendum’.

“The goal of liberating the Donbas, Zaporizhia and Kherson regions is being carried out in stages, in accordance with the plan of the special military operation,” Putin described before underscoring, “The troops are confidently advancing.“

At the meeting it was also announced that Russian troops have made more gains in the last 24 hours, especially the capture of Dibrova village in Donetsk region.

According to an update of the meeting via RT translation, battlefield gains of the past month are significant:

In December, Russian forces liberated over 700 square kilometers of territory, taking some 32 settlements under control, Gerasimov said at the meeting. This month, the military has shown the highest rate of progress in the entire outgoing year, he noted, adding that troops are advancing “along virtually the entire frontline.”

“The adversary is not undertaking any active offensive actions. They have concentrated their main efforts on strengthening their defenses and are attempting to slow the pace of our advance by conducting counterattacks in isolated areas and using drones en masse,” Gerasimov said.

The Kremlin has at the same time reiterated that it is not interested in a ‘Plan B or Plan C’ in terms of a peace deal, but that it only seeks lasting political settlement. This will of course include international recognition of its territories in the Donbass.

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Did US Land Strikes On Venezuela Begin Last Week & No One Knew It?

President Trump on Friday in a radio interview disclosed something which missed the attention of the US and global media. He let slip that a large land site had been knocked out by a strike from US forces in the Caribbean – however without specifying which country was hit (whether Venezuela or perhaps Colombia).

Trump may have actually assumed the attack which he disclosed publicly for the first time was already being reported on, but it had not. He was being interviewed by John Catsimatidis, the Republican billionaire who owns the WABC radio station in New York on his The Cats & Cosby Show, and the two were talking about the Venezuela campaign. 

The United States had knocked out “a big facility” last week, Trump described somewhat vaguely, in apparent reference to a drug facility on the Latin American coast. 

“They have a big plant or a big facility where the ships come from,” Trump said, though he did not explicitly identify the exact location or even country attacked. “Two nights ago we knocked that out.”

According to the full remarks in context, the president said:

“But every time I knock out a boat, we save 25,000 American lives. It’s very simple. And what’s happening is they’re having a hard time employment-wise, they can’t get anybody.

And we just talked out, I don’t know if you read or you saw, they [Venezuela] have a big plant or a big facility where the ships come from. Two nights ago, we knocked that out. So we hit them very hard. But drugs are down over 97 percent. Can you believe it?”

Some unnamed American officials suggested to the New York Times that the Commander-in-Chief was referring to a drug facility in Venezuela: 

Trump did not name the location of the facility, though American officials told the New York Times that the president was referring to a drug facility in Venezuela that was eliminated. The president’s comment is the only report of such an attack. No other Latin American government, including Venezuela, has disclosed a strike of this sort.

But information or confirmation other than that disclosure remains a mystery, as neither the CIA nor Pentagon have commented, as the NY Times notes:

If Mr. Trump’s suggestion that the United States had struck a site in the region proves accurate, it would be the first known attack on land since he began his military campaign against Venezuela. U.S. officials declined to specify anything about the site the president said was hit, where it was located, how the attack was carried out or what role the facility played in drug trafficking. There has been no public report of an attack from the Venezuelan government or any other authorities in the region.

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Kremlin claims Ukraine ‘attacks Putin’s residence’ – shortly after Trump hailed progress in peace talks

The Kremlin has claimed that Ukraine attempted to attack Vladimir Putin‘s residence in a long-range drone attack hours after Donald Trump hailed progress in peace talks.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov ​said on ​Monday ​that ⁠Kyiv had attempted ​to ‍attack President ​Putin’s remote retreat in ‍the ‍Novgorod region and so ⁠Moscow‘s negotiating position ⁠would change, Interfax reported.

‘Such reckless actions will not ⁠go unanswered,’ Lavrov was quoted as saying, adding that the attack involved 91 long-range drones. 

Zelensky has denied the claims, calling them ‘lies’. 

It was ⁠not immediately clear if Putin was in the residence at the time. ‍

The attempted attack comes as the warring countries edge closer to signing a peace deal after almost four years of conflict. 

Trump on Sunday celebrated the success of his highly anticipated peace talks with Zelensky, revealing they are ‘very close’ to striking an agreement on all but ‘one or two thorny issues’.

The President had earlier welcomed the Ukrainian leader to his Mar-a-Lago estate with open arms when he arrived in Florida to discuss a 20-point plan aimed at ending the war with Russia.

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Zelensky Wants 50-Year(!) Security Guarantee From Trump

There were no substantial breakthroughs in the latest Trump-Zelensky talks on Ukraine peace at Mar-a-Lago resort on Sunday, and fresh reporting on Monday reveals why.

A major point of disagreement remains security guarantees. Ukraine has been pushing maximalist demands for something akin to NATO Article 5 protections. It would be like getting all the benefits of being in NATO but without being a formal member of the Western military alliance.

The Ukrainian side has revealed that President Trump had offered security guarantees for 15 years following a peaceful settlement, but Zelensky considered this much too short to protect from future potential Russian aggression.

But in classic Zelensky fashion, he wants way more than this. Also, maximalist demands are something that European leaders have backed him on all along – and they may have even put him up to. According to The Wall Street Journal:

Kyiv had asked for security guarantees to last up to 50 years after the end of the conflict during weekend discussions. In the documents currently being discussed, the U.S. offered a 15-year guarantee with the possibility of extension, Zelensky said in audio messages to journalists on Monday.

That’s half a century! Would Congress and the American public sign off on this? Congressional hawks like Lindsey Graham surely would, but others might not want to be hitched to the Ukraine wagon for yet decades more to come.

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Iranian President Says His Regime in a ‘Full-Fledged’ War With America and Its Allies

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said Saturday that Iran is engaged in what he described as a “full-fledged war” with the America and its allies.

Speaking in an interview published on a website affiliated with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Pezeshkian said Western powers are attempting to prevent Iran from becoming economically and politically self-sufficient.

“In my opinion, we are in a full-fledged war with America, Israel, and Europe,” Pezeshkian said. “They do not want our country to stand on its feet.”

“This war is worse than Iraq’s war against us,” he said, referring to the conflict between the two nations that ended in 1988.

”If one understands it well, this war is far more complex and difficult than that war,” he added.

The remarks come as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepares to travel to Washington for meetings with Trump focused on Iran.

Trump ordered strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites in June, a move that escalated a nearly two-week armed conflict between Iran and Israel, later referred to as the “12 Day War.”

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Trump at Zelenskyy Presser: ‘If the 2020 Election Weren’t RIGGED and STOLEN, You Wouldn’t Have Had This War’

President Donald Trump hosted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at Mar-a-Lago on Sunday to discuss ongoing peace negotiations aimed at ending the Russia-Ukraine war.

Flanked by American and Ukrainian flags, Trump delivered a no-holds-barred assessment of the conflict, tying its origins directly to the stolen 2020 election.

Trump didn’t mince words, stating, “I’ve said and nobody’s disputed it: If the election weren’t rigged and stolen in 2020, you wouldn’t have had this war. It didn’t happen for four years. Never was even thought to happen.”

The US president emphasized his good relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, despite what he called the “total hoax” of the Russia-Russia investigation, and noted that he had recently spoken with Putin about Ukraine.

“Russia WANTS to see Ukraine succeed! It sounds a little strange! But I was explaining to [Zelensky], Putin was very generous in his feeling toward Ukraine succeeding. Including supplying energy, electricity and other things at very low prices,” Trump said. “A lot of good things came out of that call.”

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