Tag: perpetual war

End Game: Netanyahu Now Plans To Annex Gaza, Bowing To Extremist Members Of Coalition

Having rendered much of Gaza uninhabitable and displacing a huge proportion of its population, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to propose a plan by which Israel will begin claiming parts of Gaza to be Israeli territory, with an eye on eventually seizing all of it. The scheme — which is said to have President Trump’s backing though also certain to trigger international condemnation — is aimed at preventing his extremist ruling coalition from splintering, according to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which first reported on it.  

Under the scheme, Israel will give Gaza political and militant group Hamas a short deadline for accepting a ceasefire. After Hamas refuses to accept Netanyahu’s terms (which will likely be written to guarantee refusal) Israel will start annexing portions of Gaza, starting with the buffer zone it has created along the perimeter of the territory, before proceeding to claim more land in the north. Eventually, all of Gaza will be claimed as Israeli land, fulfilling the wishes of extremist ministers who are vital to Netanyahu’s ruling coalition. 

One of those powerful coalition members is Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the Religious Zionism party, which seeks to move the Israeli state closer to a theocracy. Smotrich is himself a West Bank settler who has long agitated for the annexing of that territory. In May, Smotrich told a settler conference that “Gaza will be totally destroyed,” with all 2.3 million residents “concentrated” in the extreme south, where they will be “totally despairing” with “no hope” and “looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.” 

Smotrich opposed Netanyahu’s decision — in the face of rising malnutrition and starvation in Gaza accompanied by growing global condemnation — to even slightly increase the flow of food and medicine into the besieged strip. So did another minister of note: Itamar Ben Gvir, who leads the National Security Ministry, called Netanyahu’s move “a capitulation to Hamas’s deceitful campaign,” and reiterated his demand that nothing at all be allowed to flow into Gaza, and for the IDF to conquer the territory and encourage the Palestinians to move to other countries. To get a sense of his extremism, consider that Ben Gvir infamously adorned his home with a photo of Baruch Goldstein, who mass-murdered 28 Muslims in the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre. 

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Entering a Golden Age for War Profiteers

When, in his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the dangers of the unwarranted influence wielded by a partnership between the military and a growing cohort of U.S. weapons contractors and came up with the ominous term “military-industrial complex,” he could never have imagined quite how large and powerful that complex would become.  In fact, in recent years, one firm — Lockheed Martin — has normally gotten more Pentagon funding than the entire U.S. State Department. And mind you, that was before the Trump administration moved to sharply slash spending on diplomacy and jack up the Pentagon budget to an astonishing $1 trillion per year.

In a new study issued by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the Costs of War Project at Brown University, Stephen Semler and I lay out just how powerful those arms makers and their allies have become, as Pentagon budgets simply never stop rising. And consider this: in the five years from 2020 to 2024, 54% of the Pentagon’s $4.4 trillion in discretionary spending went to private firms and $791 billion went to just five companies: Lockheed Martin ($313 billion), RTX (formerly Raytheon, $145 billion), Boeing ($115 billion), General Dynamics ($116 billion), and Northrop Grumman ($81 billion). And mind you, that was before Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Budget bill landed on planet Earth, drastically slashing spending on diplomacy and domestic programs to make room for major tax cuts and near-record Pentagon outlays.

In short, the “garrison state” Eisenhower warned of has arrived, with negative consequences for nearly everyone but the executives and shareholders of those giant weapons conglomerates and their competitors in the emerging military tech sector who are now hot on their trail. High-tech militarists like Peter Thiel of Palantir, Elon Musk of SpaceX, and Palmer Luckey of Anduril have promised a new, more affordable, more nimble, and supposedly more effective version of the military-industrial complex, as set out in Anduril’s “Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy,” an ode to the supposed value of those emerging tech firms.

Curiously enough, that Anduril essay is actually a remarkably apt critique of the Big Five contractors and their allies in Congress and the Pentagon, pointing out their unswerving penchant for cost overruns, delays in scheduling, and pork-barrel politics to preserve weapons systems that all too often no longer serve any useful military purpose. That document goes on to say that, while the Lockheed Martins of the world served a useful function in the ancient days of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, today they are incapable of building the next-generation of weaponry.  The reason: their archaic business model and their inability to master the software at the heart of a coming new generation of semi-autonomous, pilotless weapons driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced computing.  For their part, the new titans of tech boldly claim that they can provide exactly such a futuristic generation of weaponry far more effectively and at far less cost, and that their weapons systems will preserve or even extend American global military dominance into the distant future by outpacing China in the development of next generation technologies.

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Lockheed Has Something ‘Magical,’ Costly as Hell, and Totally Secret Up its Sleeve

Defense giant Lockheed Martin just reported a rare — and yuge — quarterly loss of $1.6 billion, but CEO James D. Taiclet sounded unfazed, thanks to a “magical” classified aeronautics program he claims will create a “game-changing capability for our joint U.S. and international customers.”

Is it a bird? A plane? Superman?

Before we get to the speculation — and there is some juicy stuff — a quick look at how the company lost so much money on something that Taiclet said Lockheed “probably won’t be able to talk about what that is for many years to come.”

Lockheed launched Program X with the Pentagon in 2018 during the Trump 45 administration on a fixed-price basis. That strikes me as a bit odd (albeit awesome for taxpayers) because exotic weapons systems that require developing bleeding-edge technologies are usually done on a cost-plus basis. That’s just because you can’t price something when half the parts haven’t even been invented yet.

So Lockheed signed on to a fixed-price contract just a couple of years before Bidenflation knocked 25% off the value of the dollar. “But I can assure you,” Taiclet said of Project X, “that it’s going to be in high demand for a very long time, well beyond the fixed price commitments.”

What might generate so much revenue, not just from the Pentagon, but from our allies around the world? I did a little poking around on Reddit and other forums where nerds like to geek out and found some fascinating possibilities.

Lockheed lost the contest to produce the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) stealth fighter — now known as the F-47 — to rival Boeing. So there’s been some speculation that Project X is a carrier-based version of Lockheed’s NGAD for the Navy. But Lockheed denies this.

There’s also the long-rumored Hypersonic Reconnaissance Aircraft to replace the long-retired SR-71 spy plane. But those are top-secret, highly specialized aircraft that would be unlikely to generate foreign sales, even if Congress decided to allow it. (Congress refused permission to sell the F-22 Raptor stealth fighter overseas to help keep its secrets.) I seriously doubt Project X is an SR-72.

Here’s where the possibilities get weirder — or should I say, “magical?”

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Israel’s aid concessions merely offer Gazans survival on a leash

Over the past few weeks, the images coming out of Gaza have become impossible to ignore, even for Israel’s staunchest allies. Emaciated children, newborns dying from dehydration, and reports of adults collapsing from hunger made headlines around the world. More than 100 prominent humanitarian organizations signed a joint statement urging “decisive action” to end the siege, while the UN’s World Food Programme warned that a third of Gazans are going several days without eating at all. Even celebrities who haven’t said a word about Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza for two years felt compelled to condemn its latest phase.

In turn, several Western governments that are usually reluctant to openly criticize Israel began to issue statements of concern, calling for an unimpeded flow of aid. Britain and France joined the chorus — the latter taking the additional step of announcing it will recognize a Palestinian state — and even U.S. President Donald Trump has now called out what he described as “real starvation” in Gaza, in a public rebuke of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

This past weekend, in the face of growing international pressure, Israel announced several measures ostensibly aimed at allaying the humanitarian crisis it created: a daily 10-hour “tactical pause in military activity” within the 13 percent of Gaza that remains accessible to Palestinians; the opening of “secure routes” to allow more aid trucks to enter the Strip; and the resumption of aid drops from the sky.

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“Step Towards War”: Kremlin Slams Trump Ultimatum, Unleashes More Deadly Missile Attacks On Ukraine

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev issued the Kremlin’s response to President Trump’s Monday announcement from Scotland that he’s reducing a deadline for Russia to agree a peace settlement from 50 days to 10 or 12 days, citing ‘disappointment’ in Putin not ending or at least winding down the war.

Medvedev, who serves as the current deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, wrote on X that the US President was playing “the ultimatum game” with Moscow, which we should note is of course nuclear-armed, and that each new threat like this is a “step towards war”.

Medvedev warned: “Russia isn’t Israel or even Iran” and thus that “Each new ultimatum is a threat and a step towards war. Not between Russia and Ukraine, but with (Trump’s) own country.”

America’s own loudmouth hawk later in the day Monday responded with his own challenge pushing back. Here’s what the senator from South Carolina said on X:

“To those in Russia who believe that President Trump is not serious about ending the bloodbath between Russia and Ukraine: You and your customers will soon be sadly mistaken. You will also soon see that Joe Biden is no longer president,” Lindsey Graham said, adding: “Get to the peace table.”

Medvedev then responded to this on X, telling “gramps” to instead get busy working on America First. “Negotiations will end when all the objectives of our military operation have been achieved. Work on America first, gramps!” he said.

Trump’s new deadline means that he could impose fresh sanctions by somewhere in early August: possibly Aug. 7-9, as opposed to what was initially the 50-day window which would have ended on September 2.

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Russian Intel: US and UK Working to Oust Zelensky and Enthrone Zaluzhny – Ukrainian General Is Portrayed in the Pages of Vogue

The ousting of Kiev regime leader is ongoing – and today, the successor was anointed in the pages of Vogue.

After three and a half years hailed as the heroic defender of democracy and a present-day Churchill, Kiev regime leader Volodymyr Zelensky rapidly fell out of favor with both the exhausted Ukrainian population and with his masters in the West.

We reported today here on TGP how the EU has frozen all aid until the independence of the anti-corruption agencies is restored.

(The problem is that the agencies were investigating people on Zelensky’s and Andriy Yermak’s circles.)

But, according to Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, the US and Britain not only want to replace Zelensky with General Valery Zaluzhny as president of Ukraine, but they are already plotting it, discussing it at a secret meeting in the Alps.

Until February 2024, Zaluzhny held the post of commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Here he became famous as the organizer of meat grinders for Ukrainian troops.

Sputnik reported:

“In March 2024, due to a conflict with Zelensky and unwillingness to give him decision-making on army actions, he was removed from his post and sent as the Ukrainian ambassador to London. He probably carries out Kiev’s main communication with [British Intelligence] MI6.”

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Netherlands Labels Israel ‘Threat To National Security’ In Unprecedented Move

The Netherlands has, for the first time, included Israel on a list of states which pose a threat to its national security, according to a report from the Dutch National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism (NCTV) – the country’s main counterterrorism agency. 

The report bears the title Assessment of Threats from State Actors. It notes that Israel has made efforts to manipulate and influence public opinion and policy in the Netherlands, via disinformation campaigns. 

According to the Dutch report, an Israeli ministry circulated a document to journalists and officials in the Netherlands last year, which included personal details of Dutch citizens. 

This took place after fans of the Israeli football team Maccabi Tel Aviv carried out provocative acts after their team lost a match in Amsterdam in November 2024, triggering tension and clashes with locals. 

The report by the Dutch agency also noted concerns over threats against the International Criminal Court at The Hague, from both Washington and Tel Aviv. It said these threats could negatively affect the court’s work. 

Israel has long posed a threat to the ICC. According to a report by The Guardian from May last year, Tel Aviv has waged a years-long intimidation campaign against the ICC, which included the “stalking” and “threatening” of its officials in a bid to stifle investigations into Israeli war crimes.

Since the court issued arrest warrants against Israel’s premier and former defense minister last year, Washington has imposed sanctions on the ICC. Israel and the US are not signatories of the 1998 Rome Statute nor members of the ICC. 

The American Servicemembers’ Protection Act of 2002, nicknamed the “Hague Invasion Act,” authorizes a US president to use “all means necessary and appropriate” to free any US or allied personnel detained by the ICC. This includes the potential use of military force. The law also restricts US cooperation with and support for the ICC.

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AOC wrong: More civilians die when we send Israel ‘defensive weapons’

On July 18, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) voted against the U.S. defense appropriations bill. She also voted against an amendment to the bill submitted by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) that would have cut $500 million from funds for Israel’s Iron Dome, the air defense system designed to shoot down short-range rockets.

AOC’s vote on both did not affect the outcome – MTG’s amendment failed, having received only 6 votes, while the defense spending bill passed, 221 to 209. Nonetheless, AOC’s opposition to MTG’s amendment provoked significant outcry among progressives, particularly when she defended her rejection of the amendment on X the following day:

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s amendment does nothing to cut off offensive aid to Israel nor end the flow of US munitions being used in Gaza… What it does do is cut off defensive Iron Dome capacities while allowing the actual bombs killing Palestinians to continue. I have long stated that I do not believe that adding to the death count of innocent victims to this war is constructive to its end… I remain focused on cutting the flow of US munitions that are being used to perpetuate the genocide in Gaza.

Many prominent human rights and Palestine advocates denounced her explanation in the replies, pointing out the incongruity between her charge that Israel is committing genocide and her determination to continue funding it. The virulent reaction generated its own round of media coverage, especially after her Bronx office was vandalized, and amplified the progressives’ disappointment with their rising star.

AOC’s post highlighted a flawed logic that many American politicians continue to deploy: the idea that it is both moral and possible to distinguish between defensive and offensive weapons. A similar logic was used by the Biden administration regarding support for Saudi Arabia during its bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen. In February 2021, President Joe Biden declared that he was “ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales.” Instead, Washington would only provide defensive munitions, ostensibly to help protect Saudi cities from Ansar Allah’s missiles.

In both cases, a Democratic politician depicted their actions as reflecting a responsible middle path, neither enabling aggressive behavior nor abandoning a U.S. strategic partner. They may think this helps them to appear reasonable and primarily concerned with the welfare of civilian victims of military conflict.

Yet by boosting Saudi Arabia and Israel’s ability to “defend” themselves, American politicians — from a centrist like Biden to an ostensible progressive like AOC — are enabling the aggressive behavior that they allegedly wish to curtail. Countries like Saudi Arabia and Israel are effectively encouraged to act more aggressively knowing they are protected, thanks to the United States, from costly retaliation.

Especially in the case of Israel, decades of virtually unconditional U.S. support have disincentivized any previous willingness on its part to compromise or seek peace. This is the moral hazard of Washington support whether in the form of a guaranteed supply of U.S. weaponry, or vetoes at the UN Security Council. Knowing that one will not face consequences for bad behavior tends to inspire more of it.

And yet this evident truism has not inspired a change in U.S. policy. For decades until at least the October 7 Hamas attack, successive administrations claimed that the only way to convince Israel to accept a two-state solution was to provide the weapons that would make it feel militarily invincible against any and all of its neighbors, otherwise as known as ensuring its “qualitative military edge,” or QME.

The Iron Dome, which was built with nearly $1.7 billion in U.S. funding and now depends on hundreds of millions of dollars more worth of key U.S.-provided parts to continue operating, offers an example. When it came online in 2011, one of the rationales for U.S. support was that it would actually help protect Palestinian lives as well as Israelis, ostensibly because, if fewer Israelis were killed by Palestinian rockets, Israel’s retaliation would be less severe.

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The Gaza Catastrophe

It was obvious almost from the get-go what Israel was up to in Gaza. I wrote the article below in early December of 2023. Gaza was to be ethnically cleansed of Palestinians, full stop. Whether by bullets, bombs, disease, mass starvation, or expulsion, Palestinians were to be eliminated from the land, replaced by Jewish settlers. A beach blanket bingo fantasy scene would follow.

Chris Hedges writes about this today, honestly and powerfully. Caitlin Johnstone puts it bluntly in her latest, the title of which is “They’re Starving Civilians To Steal A Palestinian Territory, And They’re Lying About It.” It’s all so shameful and disgusting.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote in 2023, when Israel got a blank check from Biden and Blinken. Now that blank check has become a mandate from the Trump administration, complete with fantasies of a “new” Gaza, depopulated of Palestinians, featuring a fantasy Trump tower. Can the U.S. government sink any lower? I suppose it can.

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Abandoning Ukraine

The war with Russia is now going very badly for Ukraine. But Ukrainians must feel like the world, and not just Russia, is treating them badly.

At the beginning of July, the Russian armed forces took full control of the Luhansk region for the first time. And, though it is too early to tell if they will hold it, there are now unconfirmed reports that the Ukrainian front line defending Pokrovsk has collapsed and that the Russian army has broken through, rapidly advancing 6-10 km and cutting Ukraine’s supply lines. There are now even unconfirmed reports that Russian forces have entered Pokrovsk, which, if true, is a severe strategic setback for Ukraine.

But Ukrainians must feel that it is not just Russia that is pummeling them. Ukrainians must feel as though the whole world has abandoned them. 

In the first weeks of the war, before all the loss of life and land, Ukraine was prepared to sign a peace with Russia that would have satisfied its goals. The U.S. and its Western allies—particularly the UK and Poland—encouraged them off the diplomatic path and pushed them into war with Russia with the assurance that they would be provided with everything they need for as long as they need it.

Ukraine needs more, and they need it for longer, but the promise has been broken, and Ukraine is largely on its own. The U.S. will no longer provide Ukraine with military equipment unless European countries buy it for them. But several European countries have opted out of the deal, and even if all of Europe was all in, not enough weapons can be made available on time to save Ukraine.

Ukraine provided the bodies the U.S. asked for in its proxy war with Russia, but the U.S. broke its promise to arm them. Now the Donabas is nearly lost, the Ukrainian armed forces is in real danger of collapsing, and Ukraine looks to be on the verge of losing the war the U.S. pushed them into fighting.

And it is not just the U.S. that has abandoned Ukraine, it is the entire NATO community that pretended to court it. Ukraine was pushed to fight to defend its right to join NATO and NATO’s right to expand where it wanted. As the U.S. State Department explained it, “each and every country has a sovereign right to determine its own foreign policy, has a sovereign right to determine for itself with whom it will choose to associate in terms of its alliances, its partnerships, and what orientation it wishes to direct its gaze.”

Ukraine was seduced with promises of an “irreversible path for Ukraine into NATO.” But at the recently concluded NATO summit, the issue of Ukrainian membership in NATO was not even on the agenda. The Summit Declaration contained not one word about Ukraine joining NATO and not one promise of an irreversible bridge.

Russia was not going to end the war without written guarantees that Ukraine would never join NATO. But Russia did seem prepared to give Ukraine an open road to European Union membership. And Europe had courted Ukraine with promises of fast tracking their accession. But, like the U.S. and NATO, the European Union seems to have abandoned Ukraine.

Richard Sakwa, Emeritus Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent, told me in a recent correspondence that “a growing number of member states are growing uncomfortable with the idea of Ukraine’s membership in the European Union.”

Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, promised in a recent social media post to “do everything” to prevent Ukraine from joining the EU. But Ukraine’s long time EU ambassador, Olha Stefanishyna, recently revealed that there is more than one country–not just Hungary–that have concerns about Ukraine joining the EU. Public support in some other countries, including the Czech Republic, is low. And Poland’s new president, Karol Nawrocki, campaigned against Ukraine accession to the EU. 

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