Tag: perpetual war

UNREPORTED: Ukraine’s parliament fails to extend Volodymyr Zelensky’s presidential term

Ukrainian Parliament failed to pass the vote recognizing Zelensky as president until the inauguration of a new Head of state.

This is a signal: Leave.

Through this vote, the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament) made clear to Zelensky there will be no indefinite mandate.

Europe expected “stability” and “support” for him, but saw a parliament setting a countdown timer for Zelensky.

EU leaders arrived in Kiev today to stand in solidarity with Zelensky.

The vote was held to disprove of Trump’s 4% statement but that didn’t happen, an agreement could not be reached on the legitimacy of Zelensky as president.

This is a slap in the face by Parliament to Zelensky, essentially telling him your days are numbered.

The U.S. will have to negotiate with those who will come to power. Ukraine needs not temporary figures but leaders who act firmly and pragmatically—without hysteria, illusions, or artificial power retention scenarios.

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France Eyeing Deployment Of Nuclear-Armed Rafale Fighters To Germany: Report

France is apparently looking at the possibility of deploying air-launched nuclear weapons to Germany, a consideration that’s being made amid growing concerns that the United States will no longer guarantee European security under NATO. Broader discussions about nuclear deterrence among European leaders point very clearly to the deepening crisis in the transatlantic alliance under U.S. President Donald Trump, emphasized by calls from German leader-in-waiting Friedrich Merz for talks with his British and French colleagues about European “nuclear sharing or at least nuclear security.”

According to a report in the British newspaper The Telegraph, which cites an unnamed French official, “Posting a few French nuclear jet fighters in Germany should not be difficult and would send a strong message” to Russia, which would aim to bolster Europe’s nuclear deterrent.

While it’s unclear how seriously the proposal is being discussed at the highest levels in France, there is a logic behind raising the idea at this point in public.

In France, there is now an increasing focus on building up Europe’s capacity to provide a defensive bulwark against Russia, as Trump shifts to embrace Moscow. The result has been a growing rift between the United States and its European NATO allies, with differing positions on the continued provision of support for Ukraine looming large.

Evidence of this fractious relationship was provided in a meeting between Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron in Washington yesterday, in which Ukraine was again atop the agenda. Trump refused to provide security guarantees to Ukraine once a potential peace deal is signed.

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The Moralistic Risk for Trump’s Foreign Policy

As the new Trump Administration turns a critical eye to the priorities of government spending, one target of its investigations seems to be delivering an endless supply of questionable practices for scrutiny. USAID, long theorized to be part of a global soft regime change network by many opposed to the status quo of foreign policy, has been proven to be exactly that. This ranges from manufacturing opposition to the Cuban government, to using progressive identitarian groups to affect elections in Bangladesh, and even to create a feedback loop where American media cites supposedly independent activists abroad (who are funded by USAID)  in order to justify distorting the narrative at home.

None of this is particularly surprising to those of us who have been skeptical of the softer side of endless interventionism. Two and a half years ago I published Woke Imperium: The Coming Confluence of Social Justice and Neoconservatism, which made the case that the increasingly messianic nature of progressivism served the cause of moral justification for a foreign policy of endless interventionism abroad; it provides a built-in excuse to be involved in as many foreign countries as possible. Through everything from non-governmental organizations supporting ethnic minorities in geopolitical fault lines to the funding of media that pushes a North American–style cultural vanguardism onto very different societies, a changing domestic audience could be brought into the quest for global domination through a self-flattering moralism.

That process is hardly unique to the liberal faction of politics, however. The George W. Bush administration was obsessed with democracy promotion and nation-building as a part of its plan to combat terrorism. It also had a reputation for conflating its own conservative Christian fixation on culture war with foreign policy, such as when its plans to combat AIDS in Africa were tied to abstinence-only education and a ban on condoms, reflecting the administration’s domestic obsession with similar policies at home. It was under such conditions that foreign governments could reasonably claim that American missionaries were tied at the hip to intelligence operations.

The present Trump administration’s willingness to question old talking points about foreign policy being a moral project are laudable but inconsistent. In the transactional worldview that Trump emphasized on campaign, there can be little room for such sentiments, yet already there are signs that he is willing to lean into domestic culture war in order to justify unnecessary interventions abroad. Any plan to remake war-shattered Gaza by acquiring it in a real estate deal facilitated by the United States reflects a long line of interventionist thought about the United States playing some kind of providential role in transforming the Middle East. Indeed, USAID itself once cooked up a potential plan for the relocation of Palestinians into new settlements in Egypt.

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Status Panic on the Campus

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is “fighting back against efforts to intimidate professors into silence,” which—for many of us whose memories of college lecture halls are not uniformly pleasant—is yet another ACLU cause we might not support. The issues here, however, are of more momentous social and political consequence than our initial reaction might suggest.

The ACLU’s efforts—they’re raising funds to support them—are a response to lawsuits brought against students and faculty at Columbia University and elsewhere for their opposition to the war in Gaza. 

The issues are complicated, but the ACLU says it is fighting against attempts to “weaponize our legal system to punish and silence constitutionally protected speech.” Such lawsuits “have become a common tool for intimidating and silencing criticism—including from whistleblowers, journalists and political protestors… not necessarily to win in court, but to entangle people in expensive litigation, using the prospect of mounting legal fees and a potentially ruinous financial penalty to chill speech. In other words, to bully people into silence.” 

The plaintiffs in the Columbia case say statements by faculty supporting student protestors “somehow injured them by causing Columbia University to move classes online, restrict campus access, and cancel commencement.” Three defendants in the case are Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Jamaal Bowman—members of the notorious Capitol Hill “Squad”—which might be about all most conservatives will want to know before making up their minds.

Personally, I have no dog in this fight. Both sides—all sides—seem intent on dragging their opponents into court, a strategy that seems unlikely to improve matters. This conclusion that the atmosphere on campuses will only get more poisonous, tentative as it is, was reinforced the other day in a casual conversation with a college professor friend at a public university more than 300 miles from Columbia. 

This professor and I have a mutual friend who was hoping to land a job at the university, and I asked what he might do to help make that happen. 

“I have no influence here,” the professor said. “I’m just a content provider.”

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We Can, and Should, Negotiate with Putin

One thing at least is now indisputable. We live in a multipolar world. Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted as much during his wide-ranging interview in January with Megyn Kelly. The recognition that multipolarity is now the kind of world we live in came about, in the first instance, because Russia has not been defeated in Ukraine. Rather the reverse. 

To be sure, acceptance of the fact of multipolarity does not dictate the nature of our response to it. Secretary Rubio’s preferred response, as he made clear during his interview, is to embrace—one is tempted to say relearn how to do—the “hard work of diplomacy.”   

Other responses are certainly possible. A team writing for Foreign Affairs last fall suggested reinstating a far-going policy of containment of Russia, such as existed during the first Cold War. Former British defense secretary Ben Wallace, for his part, went considerably further: he suggested, in an article published in January, placing Russia “in a prison” and “building the walls high.” 

Which path is the right one? Rubio’s strikes me as the best approach, especially if supplemented by what is sometimes termed civilizational realism, a school that does not—as the pure realists are sometimes prone to do—exclude moral considerations from the practice of foreign affairs. Civilizational realists accept the necessity of virtue, but they also have the sophistication to recognize that liberal democracies are not the only states capable of practicing it. As for the idealists, their problem is a tendency to get divorced from reality, and they have an annoying habit of imposing their own version of morality on everyone everywhere—or at least, trying to. 

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China To Develop Robot Dog Drones With Thermobaric Weapons For ‘Comprehensive Destruction’

New technologies such as drones have remade the battlefield as has been show in the Ukrainian conflict with deadly effect.

However, a new terrifying dawn is coming to warfare – the robots.

Recent People’s Liberation Army (PLA) urban warfare drills suggest that unmanned platforms armed solely with light weapons may struggle to root out enemies shielded in buildings or underground bunkers, wrote the South China Morning Post.

To achieve “comprehensive annihilation”, Chinese military scientists now propose equipping ground robots with thermobaric warheads – weapons of mass destruction second only to nuclear arms in lethality.

This marks China’s first official disclosure of plans to deploy the controversial munitions on unmanned systems.

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President Trump Wants To Cut the Pentagon Budget in Half. How?

It is Presidents’ Day, and President Donald Trump has made a bold statement regarding military spending – one that no other president in modern history has made. He claims he could cut the Pentagon budget by about 50%.

President Trump has suggested a major cut in defense spending, proposing that the United States, Russia, and China each reduce their military budgets by 50%. He has also expressed a desire to begin denuclearization and arms control discussions with both Russia and China to accomplish this objective.

Military contractors poured $4,440,605 into Kamala Harris’s campaign – more than double what they contributed to Donald Trump. Yet, even with the support of establishment figures like Dick Cheney, their favored candidate fell short. The defeat of the military contractor’s candidate may have consequences for the industry.

Now, with President Trump in office and a bold initiative to cut Pentagon spending by 50%, the defense industry faces a challenge unlike any before.

The financial markets are already responding: Major U.S. defense firms are experiencing notable stock declines, while European defense companies surge in anticipation of increased regional military spending. Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman have all seen stocks fall, while companies such as Rheinmetall, BAE Systems, and Saab are benefiting from investors expecting a shift in global defense priorities.

Last week, we examined the staggering costs of U.S. military spending in ‘The Cost of Freedom: Confronting Military Waste.’ This week, we take the conversation further by analyzing President Trump’s claim that he could cut Pentagon spending in half – what that actually looks like, and which interests may be affected.

As President Trump pursues negotiations to bring peace to Ukraine, European governments appear to be moving in the opposite direction, increasing military budgets and deepening their involvement in the conflict. European defense firms are thriving as they anticipate further arms sales to governments committed to escalating military engagement rather than seeking diplomatic solutions.

This contrast underscores the significance of Trump’s initiative – challenging the entrenched military-industrial complex, wherever it is located, and seeking to end perpetual warfare.

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The US Needed Russia to Invade Ukraine


The U.S. got its war in Ukraine.

Without it, Washington could not attempt to destroy Russia’s economy, orchestrate worldwide condemnation and lead a proxy war to bleed Russia, all as part of an attempt to bring down its government.

Joe Biden has now left no doubt that it’s true.   

The president of the United States confirmed what Consortium News and others have been reporting since the beginnings of Russsiagate in 2016, that the ultimate U.S. aim is to overthrow the government of Vladimir Putin.

“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden said on Saturday [March 26, 2022] at the Royal Castle in Warsaw. The White House and the State Dept. have been scrambling to explain away Biden’s remark. 

But it is too late.

“The President’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region,” a White House official said. “He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.”

On Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “As you know, and as you have heard us say repeatedly, we do not have a strategy of regime change in Russia, or anywhere else, for that matter,” the last words inserted for comic relief. 

Biden first gave the game away at his Feb. 24 [2022] White House press conference — the first day of the invasion. He was asked why he thought new sanctions would work when the earlier sanctions had not stopped Russia. Biden said the sanctions were never designed to prevent Russia’s intervention but to punish it afterward.

The U.S. therefore needed Russia to invade in order to punish it in the hope of undermining its economy and Putin’s rule. 

“No one expected the sanctions to prevent anything from happening,” Biden said.  “That has to sh- — this is going to take time.  And we have to show resolve so he knows what’s coming and so the people of Russia know what he’s brought on them. That’s what this is all about.” 

It is all about the Russian people turning on Putin to overthrow him, which would explain Russia’s crackdown on anti-war protestors and the media.

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The liberal establishment is finally criticizing ethnic cleansing in Gaza now that they can blame Trump

A week after the long-awaited ceasefire between Hamas and Israel brought a rare moment of quiet skies for Palestinians, President Donald Trump announced his plan to “clean out” Gaza, proposing to relocate its remaining population to neighboring countries like Jordan and Egypt. He has since reiterated this stance, claiming that the U.S. aims to “take over” Gaza, in order to rebuild and develop the area into a “riviera of the Middle East”. Is it, one may ask, truly a Trump presidency without the permanent furrowing of one’s brow?

Palestinians were quick to react to Trump: while some do have fears about the uncertainty of their safety and future in the shadow of 15 months of non-stop bombardment that left the strip decimated of both human life and infrastructure, many others expressed their steadfast resolve to remain.

“We will remain here – staying above the rubble, stones and iron. We will remain in our homeland, in Gaza”, said Manar Hamo of the Bureij camp.

But some of the most fervent pushback to Trump’s plan to takeover Gaza has come from the very same people, institutions, and newsrooms that spent fifteen months either remaining quiet on the extermination of Palestinians or supporting and building the case for it to continue. What we find is that there is a manufacturing of a moral hysteria around Trump’s proposal that seeks to – either intentionally or by way of liberal anti-Trump muscle memory – erase the direct culpability of the Biden-Harris administration and the Democrats in the genocide of Palestinians.

And so we have been ambushed by their discovery of the words “war crime”, “ethnic cleansing”, “dastardly deed” and “morally indefensible”. Even The New York Times’ made the very novel discovery of what international law may have to say about forced displacement. What we are seeing, again and again, is the introduction of language that not only offers the criminality of a Trump administration policy that has yet to be put in place but also explicitly moralizes about violence against Palestinians, a moralizing that was markedly absent as U.S-funded and made bombs were ripping apart Palestinian families for fifteen months straight.

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Israel Pushes Trump Administration To Deal With Egypt In Sinai

Israel’s political leadership is deeply concerned about Egypt’s violations of the peace agreement in the Sinai Peninsula and intends to address the issue with the Trump administration. Senior security officials warn that despite the peace treaty, Egypt has a vested interest in weakening Israel militarily and politically. They argue that it is time to abandon the misconceptions that led to the intelligence failure on October 7, 2023.

The violations of the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt are causing significant alarm within both political and security circles.

According to security sources, Egypt has expanded military airfields in Sinai, specifically in the Refidim and El-Arish areas, constructed new bunkers and anti-tank obstacles, and established new ammunition and fuel depots.

Additionally, seven tunnels have been built under the Suez Canal—four in the Ismailia area and three in Port Said.

Reports also indicate that Egypt has widened major transportation routes in Sinai into highways, despite the region’s sparse population, writes Israeli journalist Amir Tsarfati.

While some of these violations were permitted by Israel to assist the Egyptian military’s fight against ISIS affiliates in Sinai, security officials emphasize that such approvals were always granted retroactively to avoid diplomatic confrontations with Egypt.

Nevertheless, according to their assessments, Egypt currently maintains four times the military forces in Sinai than permitted under the peace treaty.

Since assuming power in 2014, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has been modernizing Egypt’s military forces—on land, at sea, and in the air—investing heavily with the assistance of the U.S. military aid package, which amounts to $1.5 billion annually.

Furthermore, the Egyptian military continues to conduct exercises simulating combat scenarios against Israel.

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