Tag: perpetual war

Could Zelensky Suffer Diem’s Fate?

U.S. and NATO leaders have waged a multi-year propaganda campaign to convince Western publics that Ukraine is a splendid democracy and that President Volodymyr Zelensky is an extremely popular elected leader who epitomizes those values.  Multiple aspects of that carefully crafted image are untrue.  Ukraine is a corrupt, autocratic state that maintains strict censorship and brutally represses political opponents.  When Zelensky’s term ended in 2024, he and his obedient followers in parliament simply postponed elections indefinitely.  Even absent adverse election result, though, there are ample signs that NATO’s much-lauded hero has alienated Ukraine’s public.

The systematic campaign to present Zelensky as a hero is crucial to NATO’s overall portrayal of the ongoing Ukraine-Russia war as nothing less than an existential struggle between freedom and dictatorship – a conflict with truly global implications.  New York Times columnist David French contends that “for the first time in my adult life, the moral and strategic heart of the defense of liberal democracy doesn’t beat in Washington.  It doesn’t beat in London or Paris or Berlin or Ottawa, either.  It’s in Kyiv, where a courageous leader and a courageous people have picked up the torch America has dropped.”

Western leaders have redoubled their propaganda initiatives efforts in recent months to sell the proposition that underdog Ukraine is beginning to win the military contest against Russia.  Despite a few flashy Ukrainian military successes, however, the overall picture of an eventual Russian victory in a war of attrition remains essentially the same.

Domestic developments in Ukraine even more strongly suggest that Zelensky may be closer to the precipice of disaster than to the summit of victory.  Indeed, his position bears an eerie resemblance to that of an earlier U.S. client and political darling, South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem.  U.S. officials gradually soured on Diem, however, and in 1963 they quietly encouraged South Vietnamese military leaders to oust him.  Those generals did so on November 2, killing Diem as well as his brother and chief adviser, Ngo Dinh Nhu.

The Diem episode highlights a broader theme.  U.S. foreign clients who become inconvenient to Washington have not fared well over the decades.  Given the recent adverse domestic developments with respect to Zelensky, he has ample reason to worry about his long-term survival prospects.

Major political fractures have occurred in Ukraine over the past year, and they are intensifying in both frequency and severity.  Zelensky’s actions even alienated some of his most reliable supporters and apologists in the West.  For example, the decision by Zelensky and his parliamentary allies in 2025 to curb the independence of anti-corruption agencies proved to be extremely unpopular.  Several rounds of anti-government demonstrations erupted in Kiev and several other cities.  Zelensky’s reputation throughout the West of being a noble leader dedicated to democracy and honest government was always unwarranted, but this time a good portion of Ukrainian public opinion became disillusioned as well.

Several new incidents indicate mounting political turmoil. General Oleksandr Syrskiy was once considered a national hero. During the early days following Russia’s expanded invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he masterminded the successful defense of Kiev against a much larger Russian force surging toward Ukraine’s capital.  He then planned the counteroffensive that helped his country regain some conquered territory in the east.  Zelensky made him commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces two years later.

By the summer of 2026, though, most Ukrainians no longer viewed Syrskiy as a heroic figure whom they wished to follow.  Moreover, Zelensky himself came under intense political fire and confronted waves of street protests throughout the country after siding with the 60-year-old general to fire the country’s charismatic young defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, in mid-July.  For only the second time since February 2022, thousands of people joined mass anti-government demonstrations. The goal was to pressure Zelensky to change course and reaffirm Fedorov’s vision of technology-driven warfare increasingly relying on drones and robots. (The first large protests, in the summer of 2025, denounced Zelensky’s purge of government anti-corruption agencies.)

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Wait, I Thought We Won the War Already?

The Iran war was originally intended to be short. Due to the fast-paced news cycle, this fact has been forgotten by many. On February 28, 2026, when the U.S. and Israel officially launched their military campaign, the administration was expecting this war to last only weeks, and for the Iranian regime to fall rather quickly. President Trump told The New York Times that he intended for strikes on Iran to continue for “four to five weeks.”

That was on March 1, 2026. It is now July.

The sporadic timeline shifts have not deterred the administration’s attempts to portray the campaign as a massive success. We have heard dozens of times now from Donald Trump that we have won the war, and that it will be wrapping up shortly.

However, the words of Donald Trump don’t comport with the military realities.

All pain, no gain

If we look back at the stated objectives set by the administration for what they sought to achieve from this war, none of them have come to fruition.

The Iranian’s stockpile of missiles and drones have not been meaningfully diminished.

The Iranian’s enriched uranium stockpile has not been destroyed or removed from the country.

The IRGC has not been cut off from their network of proxies across the Middle East. We have seen this in Lebanon, where Hezbollah has managed to deal some significant blows to the IDF in the south of the country. The Iranians are also considering activating the Houthis in Yemen to cut off the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, should U.S. strikes on Iranian infrastructure continue.

Regime change has also not occurred. The rhetoric coming from the White House at the beginning of this conflict described their intent to overthrow the IRGC and make room for “the people” to rise up and implement liberal democracy in its place.

Not only did this not happen, but by all accounts, this war has had the opposite effect. At the funeral of the slain Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the streets of Tehran were flooded with Iranian citizens pledging to defend their nation and avenge the death of their leader. We saw a “rally around the flag” effect, the predictable result of bombing major cities and killing government and religious leaders in foreign lands.

If the goal was to inspire an embrace of Americanism within Iran, this war has done the opposite.

Perhaps launching a war of aggression against a population and killing their religious leader isn’t the most effective way to make them embrace your influence over their society. Just a thought.

The biggest U.S. blunder has been seen in the Strait of Hormuz, where a waterway previously open to international transit has been shut down by the IRGC, putting a massive strain on the global energy market. By using missiles and drones to close the Strait, Iran has gained a major piece of leverage. They have the ability to hold 20% of the world’s energy supply hostage, inflicting tangible financial pain on U.S. consumers at the gas pump. This will also likely cause domestic political pain for Donald Trump and the Republican Party in this year’s midterm elections.

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Inspired by Trump, Israel Advances Plan for Crocodile-Ringed Prison for Palestinians

The Israeli government this week stripped Nile crocodiles of their protected status in order to advance a proposal that National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said was inspired by the Trump administration’s now-shuttered Alligator Alcatraz to build a prison for Palestinians surrounded by a moat full of the ravenous reptiles.

“You read that right,” the liberal US Jewish group J Street said in response to the news. “When cruelty becomes a governing principle instead of an aberration within the Israeli government, something has gone deeply wrong.”

Israeli Environmental Minister Idit Silman signed a directive Wednesday reclassifying Nile crocodiles as “specially managed wild animals,” a novel legal category enabling the government to keep them for security purposes.

Ben-Gvir, who heads the Israel Prison Service (IPS), said he was inspired by the Trump administration’s recently closed Alligator Alcatraz immigrant detention center in Florida. He is seeking to first introduce crocodiles into a moat around Ketziot Prison in southern Israel.

While it is not certain that the plan will come to fruition, Ben-Gvir celebrated Silman’s decree in a social media post showing him petting a crocodile, with the caption: “Cursed terrorist, thinking of trying to escape? Think again.”

Palestinians have occasionally escaped from Israeli lockups, such as in September 2021, when six men used improvised tools, including spoons, to tunnel out of the high-security Gilboa Prison. All six escapees were caught within weeks.

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‘Sip your coffee while watching the sunrise’: How Israel is colonizing the West Bank by selling Palestinian land to Jewish Americans

In mid-May, protesters gathered outside a synagogue in Brooklyn to demonstrate against a real estate expo being held inside. The properties advertised for sale were not located in New York City, but in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, and the target clientele was members of the Jewish American community. 

The “Great Israeli Real Estate Event,” organized by the Israeli company, My Home in Israel, was one of many property fares held across the U.S., Canada, and the UK, targeting prospective Anglophone Jewish buyers. A recently scheduled London event carrying the same name drew widespread condemnation last June from human rights groups and over 100 British lawmakers.

The settlements at the top of the event’s promoted property listings included Ma’ale Adumim, Givat Ze’ev, Karnei Shomron, and Kfar Eldad. Each listed area is undergoing urban expansion and new construction, concurrent with seizure and confiscation orders targeting the Palestinian lands surrounding them  — a systematic process aimed at entrenching settlement dominance.

The promotional advertising for these settlements deploys seductive language to attract investment. An advertisement for a real estate project in Kfar Eldad, located within the Gush Etzion Regional Council southeast of Bethlehem, pitches a rural lifestyle “close to Jerusalem, far from the routine.”  The ad reads: “Time flows a bit differently around here. In the morning you can sip your coffee while watching the sunrise, and just 12 minutes later, before your coffee has even cooled, find yourself in Jerusalem. And in the evening, you’ll return to soothing tranquility. This makes Kfar Eldad the perfect alternative for those seeking reasonably priced housing close to Jerusalem, but away from the noise and traffic of city life.”

Behind the glossy brochures and manicured images of “modern residential communities” lie painful chapters of systematic Palestinian land confiscation — a process that has expanded in recent years to encompass nearly half of the total area that Israeli occupation authorities have declared “state lands” since the Oslo Accords were signed.

The “soothing tranquility” in the hills and open terrain of Bethlehem was, until recently, home to Palestinian and Bedouin communities who practiced seasonal farming and herding. Those original inhabitants were barred from accessing their land, which was confiscated under military orders decades ago, before settlement projects were built on it.

“I owned land in the area of the Gush Etzion bloc’s expansion — land covered in hanging grapevines and almond trees of all kinds,” Ibrahim Ataallah, a resident of Khirbet Beit Skaria, told Mondoweiss. “But I was barred from accessing it after a confiscation order was issued [in 1984]. Even though we in Beit Skaria hold the legal documents proving ownership of the land we live on, they see us as an obstacle to the settlement expansion in Gush Etzion.”

As Atallah described the location of his plot of land, and the grapevines and almond trees it once bore, he looked at the maps and advertisements published by Hebrew real estate websites advertising properties in the Gush Etzion area. An advertisement describing the features of a plot for sale caught his eye. Though he could not pinpoint his own land on the map due to its lack of clarity, the descriptions of the land for sale and the lifestyle being offered to potential settlers hit close to home. 

“I really did drink my coffee at sunrise and waited for my friends from Jerusalem to join me,” he said. “We would talk about the price of grapes at the market, the coffee still warm by the time they arrived.”

“All that separates us from Jerusalem was a few kilometers,” he lamented. Today, that short distance no longer implies access. As a Palestinian ID holder, Atallah is barred from entering Jerusalem without a permit, transforming what was once a routine trip to visit friends into a near-impossible journey.

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Democrats Put Ukraine Ahead Of American Troops 

Democrats seem more determined to keep the war in Ukraine going than to fund America’s war against Iran. The Pentagon says the Iran fight has cost about $37 billion, while nearly $200 billion has been poured into Ukraine.

That tells you everything about Washington’s broken priorities. Iran directly threatens America. Ukraine’s war needs to end. American troops and American security must come first.

Congressman Brandon Gill also exposed the Smithsonian’s eye-popping woke agenda, including racially charged propaganda involving Mickey Mouse.

Americans are paying for museums, not left-wing indoctrination.

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Four Republicans Vote AGAINST Codifying President Trump’s Executive Order Banning Transgender Service in the Military

Four Republicans just teamed up with Democrats to torpedo an amendment that would have locked in President Donald Trump’s critical Executive Order banning transgender individuals from serving in the U.S. military.

The amendment, sponsored by fiery Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), aimed to codify Trump’s policy into law as part of the fiscal year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

President Trump’s Executive Order rightly recognizes that military service demands the highest physical and mental standards, standards that biological reality and decades of data prove are incompatible with gender dysphoria and the radical “transitions” pushed by the left.

“Next to ensure that we have the most lethal fighting force in the world, we will get transgender ideology the hell out of our military. It’s going to be gone,” Trump announced last year.

“In addition, we will stop our service members from being indoctrinated with radical left ideologies such as critical race theory. We’re going to stop it. It’s already been stopped. It’s already been halted, totally halted.”

The amendment failed by a razor-thin 212-217 vote, with 210 Republicans supporting it and four Republicans voting against it, joining every voting Democrat in opposition.

The GOP lawmakers were Reps. Mike Lawler (R-NY), Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), as well as the non-voting Republican delegates from Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands.

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State Department blames one country for communism infecting U.S.

President Donald Trump has commented several times about the possibility of the United States taking action that would involve a takeover of Cuba.

Now the State Department has released a report, “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” that offers a foundation for such action.

It explains it’s because Cuba’s leftist ideologies and impulses have been behind many of the extremism agendas invading America right now.

Forbes said the report makes “inflammatory” claims, accusing Cuba of “fostering an anti-American network of left-wing activism in the U.S.,” including the Democrat party’s latest flame, the Democratic Socialists of America, as well as Black Lives Matter and more.

The report reviews tensions between Cuba and the U.S. from the Cold War on, and looks at the island nation’s “sprawling revolutionary network that shaped a disproportionate share of America’s most famous and influential extremist movements.”

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House Narrowly Passes $1.15 Trillion Defense Bill That Integrates US Military Tech & Supply Chains With Israel

The House passed the Fiscal Year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act on Wednesday by a 216-212 vote, sending the $1.15 trillion measure to the Senate after one of the most partisan House votes in the must-pass bill’s recent history. Only six Democrats supported it, while seven Republicans voted no.

Armed Services Chairman Mike Rogers praised a topline that he said finally “accounts for the true cost of American deterrence.” The authorization is a centerpiece of President Trump’s push to raise total defense spending to $1.5 trillion in fiscal 2027. Democrats opposed the measure over the unauthorized war with Iran – which has flared again since the collapse of a memorandum of understanding intended to open peace talks – as well as the attachment of the SAVE America Act’s mail-voting restrictions and voter-ID requirements. They also objected to a price tag they argue would be financed through cuts to domestic programs.

The amendment votes exposed the chamber’s other fault lines. Rep. Eli Crane’s proposal to halt nearly all military aid to Ukraine was defeated 76-350, while Rep. Lauren Boebert’s attempt to codify the ban on transgender military service failed 212-217. The House nevertheless adopted two amendments from Rep. Nancy Mace restricting gender-related care through the military’s TRICARE health system and barring transgender athletes from girls’ sports at Defense Department-run schools.

Opposition also came from lawmakers objecting to the bill’s US-Israel defense-industrial integration provisions. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was among the Democrats who cited Section 219, while Reps. Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna had announced that they would oppose final passage on the same grounds. The provision remained intact after the Rules Committee declined to permit a floor vote on their amendment to remove it.

The bill now heads to the Senate, where the companion measure, S. 4784, is already stalled. On July 14, the Senate rejected cloture on the motion to proceed, 50-46, after Democrats opposed advancing the bill in protest of the Iran war. With the House scheduled to leave Friday for a recess lasting through the end of August, any eventual conference negotiations are likely to be pushed into the fall.

A separate party-line effort to authorize $60 billion in new war-related spending also remains far short of the $350 billion the Pentagon originally sought.

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Ukraine: America’s Enduring Proxy War on Russia

In his farewell address of January 1961, Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans against the “acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” and the danger that “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” Sixty-five years on, Eisenhower’s warnings have been repeatedly and tragically vindicated. American democracy hangs by a thread, while the military-industrial complex, now including Silicon Valley, runs American foreign policy over the objections of the American people.

The aim is American primacy, meaning the unchallenged wealth, power, and prerogatives of American elites, unchecked by any other nation or group of nations. What this means in practice is that Wall Street, military contractors, Silicon Valley, and Big Oil control American foreign policy to maximize elite wealth and access to global resources, supply chains, and strategic choke points. The rest of the world is to fall in line.

The military-industrial complex deploys a toolkit that we summarize as “regime control,” directed at subordinating the rest of the world’s governments to the United States. The instruments used for regime control include the imposition or removal of trade barriers; the access to or denial of technologies; the introduction or removal of economic sanctions; the ownership and manipulation of foreign media; electoral interference of varying extent; political assassinations, color revolutions, CIA-backed coups; the instigation of overseas bank runs and the supply of emergency loans when states submit; the freezing and unfreezing of foreign assets; the targeting of foreign officials with corruption claims, extradition, or kidnapping; and, when none of these suffice for regime control, outright war. The US wars of choice (really, wars for regime control) are perpetual, and lucrative for the war industries, though the deep state typically prefers that other governments cave in without a fight.

Geopolitical Pivots and American Primacy

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard (1997) laid out the goal of regime control with remarkable candor. Eurasia is the board on which America’s global primacy must be secured. To succeed, America should dominate “geopolitical pivots,” meaning states that are unimportant to America per se but useful for weakening another major power. Brzezinski named key geopolitical pivots, the most important of which was Ukraine. He repeatedly proclaimed that Russia without Ukraine ceases to be a great power. He identified Iran as another pivot. Control over Iran secures America’s hold on the Persian Gulf, Mideast oil, and the Caspian region. It is no surprise that US wars rage in both places.

This is important to understand the decisions of six seemingly different presidents, who all pursued one consistent Ukraine policy. Bill Clinton set out to enlarge NATO to Ukraine and other border states of Russia, counting on Russia being too weak to object. He and subsequent presidents assumed that Russia would ultimately accept its diminished global status, accept the reality of NATO on its borders, and settle into a subordinate role of supplying raw materials to the West within an American-ordered Eurasia.

Clinton launched NATO enlargement in the 1990s, over George Kennan’s warning that it was “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold-War era” and despite the legally binding assurances given by the US to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would move “not one inch eastward.” George W. Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty and, at Bucharest in 2008, committed NATO to membership for Ukraine and Georgia, crossing what William Burns, then ambassador in Moscow and later CIA director, privately called “the brightest of all redlines” for the entire Russian elite. Barack Obama’s administration backed the 2014 Maidan overthrow of Ukraine’s elected, neutral government (we know this through Victoria Nuland’s intercepted call where she discusses choosing the next prime minister), and then supported the new regime’s bid to join NATO. Donald Trump, in his first term, sent Javelin systems to the US-backed regime in Kyiv to fight the breakaway, Russian-speaking Donbas. Joe Biden brushed aside Russia’s December 2021 draft security treaties without negotiating and scuttled the near-agreement between Russia and Ukraine at Istanbul in the spring of 2022, which would have ended the war. And so the war continues to this day.

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Ukraine Drones Strike 13 Russian Vessels In 48 Hours — Black Sea Blitz Knocks Out Power Across Occupied Crimea

The following is reporting from Western and pro-Ukraine sources, and should be viewed with caution. Russian forces continue to take territory in Donbass. Constantinovka is in Russian hands and Slavyansk is in their crosshairs. The deep strikes on Russia are causing pain but yet to stop Russia’s advance on the ground.

Ukraine’s drone war pivoted sharply to the sea this week. The commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, Robert Brovdi, announced Wednesday morning that Ukrainian drones had struck 13 Russian vessels in the Black Sea and Sea of Azov within the past 48 hours — the most concentrated maritime strike operation of the conflict to date, per The Independent’s live war coverage.

The campaign is targeting Russian-flagged vessels operating between the Russian mainland and occupied Crimea — the lifeline that sustains Moscow’s grip on the peninsula. The Kyiv Post reported this week that the operation has now expanded beyond its original focus area to include Russia’s Krasnodar shoreline, marking the first time Ukrainian drone strikes have targeted that stretch of coast. In an earlier phase of the campaign, Ukraine’s drone forces commander told outlets that 183 vessels had been struck in July alone — a figure the BBC said it had seen evidence to support, though it could not independently verify the full tally.

Simultaneously, Ukraine hit Crimea’s power grid. Drones struck electric substations in Masandra and Yalta, according to Telegram monitoring channel Supernova Plus, triggering widespread blackouts across occupied Alushta and surrounding areas, per the Kyiv Independent. The blackouts add to weeks of infrastructure attrition: much of the peninsula is now reported to have limited access to food, running water, and electricity — a grinding siege by drone rather than by armor.

On land, Ukraine renewed strikes deep behind Russian lines Wednesday. The head of Russia’s largest online retailer, Wildberries — Tatyana Kim — confirmed on Wednesday that warehouses in Krasnodar and Nevinnomyssk had been hit. Regional governor Veniamin Kondratiev said 10 people were wounded in the Krasnodar storage complex attack, and social media footage showed a thick column of smoke rising over the city. Drone debris also damaged two residential high-rises in Krasnodar, with no reported casualties from that secondary strike.

The maritime escalation comes as Ukrainian military and political leadership is navigating a command transition. Zelensky overnight confirmed General Mykhailo Drapatyi as the new commander-in-chief, and it will fall to him to either sustain or redirect this naval offensive. Russian milbloggers, meanwhile, have been pushing back on official Kremlin claims that Russian forces have secured the M-14 Rostov-Crimea highway — the primary land route linking mainland Russia to occupied Crimea — against Ukrainian mid-range drone strikes, per the Institute for the Study of War’s July 20 assessment.

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