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Polls show east German state elections will be historic turning point, but the establishment has a plan to block the AfD

By John Cody | Remix News | June 21, 2024

German elections in the eastern states this autumn are likely to send shockwaves through the German political landscape, with the latest poll from Saxony showing the Alternative for Germany (AfD) leading at 32 percent. However, AfD performing well in these elections is mostly already baked in, and now the German political establishment is looking for ways to keep the party out of power, including what will likely be extremely unorthodox alliances.

The real twist in these polls is the introduction of the newly formed leftist BSW party, led by Sahra Wagenknecht. In the poll from Saxony, the party is in third place with 15 percent. Until recently, Wagenknecht’s party did not even exist.

The Christian Democrats (CDU) are in a close second behind the AfD. If the elections were held now, the only possible coalitions would be AfD and BSW, AfD and CDU, and CDU and BSW. In such a scenario, any governing coalition in Saxony would only need 44 percent of the vote to govern, as most parties would not make the cut to enter parliament.

Why are only these three coalition combinations possible? The polling continues to reveal the historic crash of left-liberal parties, with the Greens at 5 percent, the Social Democrats at 5 percent, and the Free Democrats at a measly 2 percent. With a 5 percent threshold, all of these parties are threatened with being voted entirely out of parliament, which would be a catastrophe for the governing coalition parties.

As a result, the CDU will have limited options about whom to work with when all the votes are counted, at least according to current polling.

It is true that the BSW is considered so far to the left that any coalition with it will immediately harm CDU’s credibility. Furthermore, on key issues such as the war in Ukraine, the CDU and BSW parties are diametrically opposed, with BSW promoting an immediate ceasefire. However, the CDU and BSW coalition is the most likely outcome if both parties can secure enough votes, as the CDU will be under enormous pressure to choose this scenario, even if the CDU and AfD are closer ideologically on a range of domestic issues.

For starters, CDU has ruled out any cooperation with the AfD, and in fact, some of its members are actively working to ban the AfD party entirely.

Secondly, the BSW and CDU have not ruled out cooperation at the state level, according to German news outlet MDR. For example, in the eastern state of Thuringia, polling shows a similar situation as in Saxony, with the AfD and the CDU leading, while the BSW has soared higher, reaching 21 percent. There, the BSW regional leader Katja Wolf ruled out a coalition with the AfD but said alliances with other parties are possible.

“It must be possible to talk and reach compromises with all democratic parties,” said Wolf.

BSW is well positioned to serve as a “spoiler” party against the AfD, just as many on the left had hoped for. The CDU, in turn, will work with the far-left party as needed, and the media will likely be in place to support its decision. Importantly, the German political establishment, including the CDU, will not have to compromise on key foreign policy issues, as the BSW will have little influence on the course of the war in Ukraine at the local state level. The war will continue, open borders will remain in place, and the AfD will be contained.

At least, that is the plan.

Of course, even a shift of a few points in either direction could mean a BSW and CDU coalition is no longer possible, leaving AfD a window to enter a potential coalition government. However, there are still many months to go until elections are held. The AfD could lose or gain support in the east, although it appears to have hit a temporary ceiling in the east over the last year.

If the EU elections were any barometer, the media and the government will likely wait until the final two months of the state elections to spring investigations, launch arrests, and wage a massive media campaign against the right. Despite this last media onslaught against the AfD, it appeared to have little effect in the east of Germany, where the AfD rose to be the number one party in the country.

The AfD is hoping to break the firewall. It is up to voters in the east if this will ever happen.

June 21, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Militarism | , | Leave a comment

MI6 Coup in Macedonia Unravels

By Kit Klarenberg | Active Measures | June 21, 2024

On May 12th, this journalist documented the labyrinthine Western-orchestrated machinations via which Macedonia – under the locally-despised name of North Macedonia – was forcibly enrolled in NATO, despite widespread public opposition. Absent from that investigation was reference to the central role played in these connivances by British intelligence. Namely, London’s ambassador to Skopje and lifetime MI6 operative, Charles Garrett. Now troublesome VMRO-DPMNE is returned to office, it is vital his activities in the country are re-examined.

Charles Garrett receives an award from King Charles

As The Grayzone has previously documented, London operates a dedicated program known as “Global Britain” in the West Balkans. Leaked documents related to the effort reveal it is concerned with insidiously influencing the composition of local governments and legal and regulatory environments to advance British interests, while filling regional security, intelligence, and military forces with handpicked assets. As one leaked file makes clear, MI6 does not tolerate regional opposition to its agenda, readily deploying active measures to neutralize any and all local resistance:

“In contexts where elite incentives are not aligned with [Britain’s] objectives/values… an approach that seeks to hold elite politicians to account might be needed… We can build relationships and alliances with those who share our objectives and values for reform… It is critical that the media have the capacity and freedom to hold political actors to account.”

Events in Macedonia over the past decade provide a brutal demonstration of what can befall governments and officials in the Balkans who do not share Britain’s “objectives” and “values”, and how they are “held to account.” So too does a 2020 coup in Kyrgyzstan, where Garrett set up shop after leaving Skopje. With Central Asia now in the crosshairs of London’s endless quest for “reform” overseas, it’s never been more vital to beware Brits bearing gifts.

‘Colorful Revolution’

Following Russia’s March 2014 reunification with Crimea, NATO’s efforts to expand in the Former Yugoslavia became turbocharged. The Grayzone has previously reported how alliance membership was imposed upon Montenegro, despite near-universal public opposition, in 2016. Achieving this feat required sustaining a corrupt, savage pro-Western dictator in power for almost two decades, and an elaborate connivance whereby anti-NATO opposition actors were jailed on bogus charges of colluding with Russian intelligence to overthrow the government, based on bogus CIA and MI6-supplied evidence.

Similar subterfuge played out in Skopje, which signed a “Membership Action Plan” with NATO in 1999. While slightly more supportive of NATO membership than Montenegrins, the local population near-unanimously opposed changing the country’s name, which Greece, the EU and US made a prerequisite for joining. The VMRO government, led by Nikola Gruevski, pledged Macedonia would always be called Macedonia. So a Western-orchestrated coup was put into motion.

In February 2015, opposition party SDSM’s leader Zoran Zaev began regularly dropping what he and the media branded “bombs” – deeply damaging wiretaps of private conversations between prominent Macedonian officials, businesspeople, journalists, and judges. The tapes seemingly implicated Gruevski and his ministers in serious crimes, including murder. Zaev claimed the illegally-captured recordings were passed to him by whistleblowers. The premier countered that the releases were supplied by foreign intelligence services, with the objective of forcing an early election.

Subsequent investigations exposed how SDSM deceptively edited and spliced these leaked recordings to grossly distort their contents, and falsely incriminate government officials. For example, one “bomb” was extensively doctored to make it sound like VMRO leaders conspired to cover up the 2011 murder of a young Macedonian in Skopje by a senior police officer, while shielding them from justice. The unexpurgated tape indicated they were in fact shocked by the killing, and wanted the culprit to be severely punished.

It was not until four years later that the truth was revealed, however. Upon release, Zaev’s “bombs” sparked widespread outcry in Macedonia, prompting hundreds of thousands of citizens to take to the streets, voicing righteous rage at VMRO. Openly called the “colorful revolution” by participating citizens and NGOs, and English language media, the EU and US duly stepped in and brokered the Przino Agreement, under which Gruevski resigned, and new elections were held.

SDSM scraped into office via a fragile coalition, then set about laying the foundations of Macedonia’s name change in explicit service of NATO membership, with tens of millions of dollars in assistance from intelligence cutout USAID. Parliamentarians were blackmailed – frequently using the illegal wiretap intercepts – and bribed into passing unconstitutional and highly controversial reforms, allowing Skopje to be rebranded North Macedonia without public support, or even the President’s signoff. A sham referendum, boycotted by most citizens, was also cynically staged.

At last, North Macedonia was formally inducted into NATO in March 2020. Alliance officials have since repeatedly made clear they consider Bosnia and Herzegovina joining to be inevitable. This is despite 98% of Bosnian Serbs opposing membership, due to NATO’s central role in the criminal destruction of Yugoslavia during the 1990s. There are covert British efforts to promote NATO in Serbia too, despite over 80% of the population opposing joining.

‘Charlie’s Angels’

In August 2013, Charles Garrett was appointed London’s ambassador to Macedonia. His express brief was to help the country “achieve its goals of joining NATO and the EU.” Multiple local sources have informed this journalist that Garrett was instrumental in the “colorful revolution,” distributing cash to NGOs and activists involved in the unrest from his diplomatic pouch, while attempting to get government supporters on board.

Public records strongly suggest Garrett is a lifetime MI6 officer. His lengthy career in London’s diplomatic service includes spells in Cyprus, Hong Kong, Switzerland and Taiwan, all key nuclei of intelligence gathering and cloak-and-dagger action for Britain’s foreign spying agency. He was also posted to the Balkans in the latter half of the 1990s, when the region became a veritable MI6 playground.

Under the Przino Agreement, a Special Prosecutor’s Office (SPO) was created to investigate officials over serious crimes supposedly revealed by the illegal intercepts. A previously unknown prosecutor from a small Macedonian border town, Katica Janeva, was selected to run the Office. While the SPO was supposed to prosecute SDSM activists – including Zaev, for releasing the intercepts – this never materialized. Meanwhile, any and all Western officials visiting Macedonia made sure to visit SPO headquarters and get snapped with Janeva. Garrett was, of course, among them.

Charles Garrett and Katica Janeva

Initially, Western journalists treated Janeva to multiple fawning profiles. The British press was particularly smitten. The Financial Times referred to her as Macedonia’s “Beyonce”. The BBC dubbed the Special Prosecutor and her two primary assistants “Charlie’s Angels”, claiming the trio were “the scourge of Macedonia’s political elite and heroines of the street protests now rocking the tiny Balkan nation.” A lengthy USAID-funded “documentary” featured her staff mocking their targets via phone, between discussing who to jail next over pizza and cigarettes.

That broadcast has been removed from the web, and virtually no trace of its existence can be found online today. This may be because in June 2020, Janeva was jailed for seven years for corruption. Her crime-fighting crusade was from inception an obscene, partisan fraud. Along the way, the Special Prosecutor secretly enriched herself through a variety of unscrupulous, criminal means. The SPO’s true objective was destabilizing the VMRO government, and discrediting its supporters by association.

Janeva’s targets were often indicted on farcical charges. For example, at one stage Prime Minister Gruevski was accused of “abuse of office” for commissioning the construction of two “Chinese highways”. Prosecutors charged he had improperly benefitted from the deal – not financially, but because he would “receive a popularity boost” if the highways were completed on schedule. Elsewhere, a pro-VMRO female journalist was accused of tax fraud for writing off laundry as a business expense, and resultantly subjected to much misogynistic mockery in SDSM-affiliated media.

More gravely, the owner of an independent news site committed suicide after being pressured to turn state witness by the SPO, following early morning police raids targeting him and his family. Cases brought against the owners of government-supporting TV stations Sitel and Nova shifted their editorial line in favor of SDSM, leading to the latter being closed outright. In its place, the rabidly pro-SDSM 1TV was launched by eccentric Macedonian media personality Bojan Jovanovski, also known as Boki 13.

Publicly, Boki 13 used his station to relentlessly promote the SDSM-led government and the SPO’s work, with Janeva a frequent guest on its assorted “factual” and entertainment programs. In private, he extorted wealthy businesspeople indicted by Janeva, or somehow caught up in the illegal intercepts, promising to make their legal troubles go away in return for lavish advertising buys on 1TV, or sizable donations to his “charity”, International Association. None other than Charles Garrett sat on its board.

‘Fifth Column’

By the time these facts became public knowledge, and Janeva and Boki 13 were in prison, Garrett was safely extracted from Skopje, having been appointed British ambassador to Kyrgyzstan. Almost immediately, a revolution erupted in Bishkek. Mass demonstrations, ignited by reports of vote rigging in the October 2020 parliamentary election, culminated with the military storming President Sooronbay Jeenbekov’s compound and removing him – physically – from office.

In February 2022, a Kyrgyzstan government-affiliated newspaper openly accused Garrett of operating a “fifth column” in Bishkek. It alleged that in the leadup to the 2020 vote, he along with US State Department representatives met with local journalists and bloggers, offering them enormous sums to identify electoral violations – such as vote rigging – and document official pressure on media outlets and civil society groups. Garrett purportedly promised them top-of-the-range broadcasting equipment, to increase their audience reach. Not long after publication, he returned to London.

Garrett has kept a low profile ever since and now occupies a cushy role overseeing the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Nonetheless, in September 2023, he submitted written evidence to a British parliamentary committee investigating London’s “engagement in Central Asia”. He advocated a number of means to exploit “disruption caused by Moscow’s renewed invasion of Ukraine” to undermine the region’s historic, economic and political ties with Russia and China, and “shape the future of these countries” according to Britain’s interests.

When British Foreign Secretary David Cameron conducted a much-publicized tour of Central Asia in May 2024, he followed Garrett’s proposals to the letter. The ambassador’s legacy visibly endures in Macedonia today too. In March 2016, colorful revolution protesters attempted to burn down the President’s office, after 56 individuals indicted by the SPO were pardoned. The premises were transformed into the headquarters of UK Aid, a now-defunct British government agency intimately implicated in the neoliberal rape and pillage of Ukraine.

The Skopje headquarters of UK Aid

This included running covert communications campaigns on Kiev’s behalf, promoting the destruction of workers’ rights locally. It is likely the organization was engaged in similar skullduggery in Skopje, after Garrett rode into town. VMRO’s return to government at last offers Macedonians an opportunity to halt the operations of all US and British intelligence fronts and cutouts operating on their soil, and reclaim foreign-conquered territory.

June 21, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Militarism | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Droning Russia’s nuke radars is the dumbest thing Ukraine can do

Attacks on the early warning system actually highlights the fragility of peace between the world’s nuclear powers

BY THEODORE POSTOL | RESPONSIBLE STATECRAFT | JUNE 5, 2024

For a fleeting moment on May 22 the world may have come closer to a catastrophic nuclear accident due to a reckless Ukrainian drone attack on two Russian strategic nuclear early warning radars at Armavir.

Fortunately, a subsequent Ukranian drone attack on a third radar station at Orsk in Russia on May 26 failed.

The incidents underscore a few important things. First, the Ukrainians could have needlessly sparked a crisis in which the Russians, feeling like one of their defenses against a U.S. nuclear attack, were down, struck back hard in retaliation. And second, it highlights the need for Russians to acquire comprehensive space-based nuclear radar of their own.

What happened and what it means

The Ukrainian attack at Armavir was a big deal. It shut down both Russian radars immediately. And it’s likely that within minutes of the attack, an emergency meeting took place with the commander of the Russian strategic rocket forces along with his highest-level officers.

The attacks should not be taken lightly, and President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken should be giving this special attention.

Even after decades of expensive Russian attempts to build a space-based early warning system that could provide global surveillance of U.S. submarine missile launches, Russia has been unable to marshal the extremely specialized high-technologies needed to build such a system.

To in part deal with this serious shortfall in Russia’s nuclear early warning capabilities, Vladimir Putin himself initiated and publicly supported a highly visible national effort to build a dense and capable nuclear strategic early warning radar system that utilizes numerous giant radars (typically about 30 to 35 meters high).

Since these radars basically form the singular foundation of Russia’s strategic nuclear early warning capabilities, any tampering with their functions in any unpredictable global situation is accompanied by very grave risks of misinterpretations of intentions that could lead to a massive launch of Russian nuclear forces.

Figure 1 below shows a satellite photograph of the two radars at Armavir. The radar beam from what is labeled “Radar Fan 1” is pointing in a counterclockwise direction from North of roughly 125°. Radar Fan 2 is pointing in a clockwise direction from North of roughly 125°.

Figure 2 shows the coverage of the two radar fans at Armavir, and the radar at Orsk drawn on a spherical earth. A side view of a radar fan is shown in the upper right corner. The side-on view shows an extremely important consequence of the fact that Earth is curved and the radar beam propagates basically in a straight line. Because of that, the radar cannot actually see objects near the surface.

For example, it is not possible for the radar to observe aircraft flying over Ukraine. Even ATACM missiles launched from the Ukrainian Black Sea coasts, which rise to altitudes of no more than 40km before they start gliding to their targets, cannot be reliably detected by these radars.

Thus, the radars at Armavir pose no surveillance threat to Ukrainian aircraft, cruise missiles, drones or ATACM missiles. The real threat to Ukrainian aircraft and missiles is from Russian airborne radar systems that are tightly queued into Russian ground-based surface-to-air missile systems.

Why these radars are so important
The importance of having a space-based satellite early warning system can be readily understood by re-examining figure 2.

For purposes of illustration, imagine that a Trident ballistic missile is launched at Moscow from the Indian Ocean at about the same latitude as Bombay on the West Coast of India (20° North latitude). The range to Moscow would be roughly 4,500 to 4,600 km.

If the ballistic missile were launched on a “minimum energy trajectory” (at a loft angle of roughly 34°) it would require the smallest missile burnout speed needed to reach Moscow. In this case the time between “breakwater” missile ignition and impact would be roughly 21 to 22 minutes.

However, the Trident missile is designed to launch its warheads to much higher burnout speeds. For example, it could launch its nuclear payload toward Moscow at a slightly higher speed and lower loft angle of 25° (this is often called a slightly “depressed” trajectory) and still easily reach Moscow in 18 to 19 minutes.

If a launch towards Moscow is on a slightly depressed trajectory, the Russians would not know they were under attack for at least six minutes, until the warheads and the rocket upper stages passed into the Armavir radar search fan. If the Armavir radar was not operating it would take eight to nine minutes from breakwater before the Russian radars in Moscow would indicate they were under attack.

The radar in Moscow would have to observe the incoming missile payloads for one or two minutes before it would have enough data to issue an alert — which means maximum decision-making time that might be available to Russian leaders would be about six or seven minutes!

So you can see why the Russians would be incensed over the Ukraine attacks, which would literally cut their already limited time in which to respond to a nuclear attack.

If the Russians had an early warning space-based system, they would know that they were under attack roughly 19 minutes before the attacking warheads would arrive and destroyMoscow. They would also immediately know whether or not ballistic missiles were being launched from other parts of the world.

Although all of these warning times are shockingly short, it is clear that a warning time of 19 minutes versus one of eight to nine minutes could make the difference between forcing Russia to rely on an automated decision that could lead to the accidental destruction of the United States and Western Europe, or instead on a more reasoned assessment by political leaders and highly professional military commanders.

Any appropriately knowledgeable expert who has listened carefully to Putin’s numerous statements about nuclear weapons would know that he has a detailed knowledge of this warning system and its limitations. He has regularly shown up at the inaugurations of early warning radar sites, overtly indicating his concerns about the need for adequate and reliable early warning systems.

The Russians do currently have an extremely limited space-based early warning system. The system only observes the U.S. ICBM fields near its northern borders and cannot be proliferated to provide global coverage against U.S. submarine missiles. It does not even have 24-hour coverage of the U.S. ICBM fields, since nine satellites are needed to provide that coverage and only four are active at this time.

I have sought to warn the U.S. government leadership of this serious problem, which could have been solved 30 years ago by the U.S. “lending” certain technologies to the Russians. My proposals involved providing the Russians with specialized space-qualified infrared arrays and electronics that would allow them to build their own systems.

This technology would not give the Russians any sensitive military secrets. There would be no way for the Russians to “reverse engineer” these implementing components. Just like the most advanced computer chips, only a vast technical enterprise could achieve such an end.

Instead of recognizing that it is in the interest of the entire world for both Russia and the United States to have reliable and capable early warning systems, at that time, the Clinton administration largely ignored this serious problem, which I believe threatens the survival of civilization even today. Other administrations that followed did no better.

The bottom line is that this grave danger to human civilization, and possibly human survival, could have been solved by competent political leadership almost 30 years ago, to the benefit of the entire world. But it wasn’t, which makes the attack on the radars now a potential crisis.

Theodore A. Postol is Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology and National Security Policy at MIT. He also taught at Princeton and Stanford, and was an advisor to the Chief of Naval Operations, where he evaluated U.S. tactical and strategic nuclear war plans, U.S. strategic anti-submarine warfare plans, Russian and U.S. missile defenses, and the Trident I and Trident II Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile Systems.

June 20, 2024 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Outgoing Stoltenberg is still laying mines for the world

Global Times | June 19, 2024

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is about to leave his post, and the upcoming NATO summit to be held in the US next month will be his farewell tour, if nothing else. In the past two days, Stoltenberg went to Washington to warm up for the upcoming summit, at the same time showing off some of his own “achievements” to leave some political legacy for the past nine years in his post as NATO Secretary General. He touted that 23 of the 32-member bloc have met the target of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense, while revealing that NATO is discussing the deployment of more nuclear weapons. Stoltenberg’s remarks, which make the world feel great concerns and threats, are said with easiness and even great excitement. The NATO chief also continued to threaten China, saying that China cannot “have it both ways” between the West and Russia and that if it does not change course, “there should be consequences.”

In his nine years in office, the world saw the prolonged Syrian civil war, and the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, as well as the Israel-Palestine conflict. The role of NATO, a product of the Cold War and the world’s largest military bloc, in the conflicts of such magnitude, is dishonorable. The Ukraine crisis, in particular, caused by the bloc’s eastward expansion, plunged Ukraine into war, further tore Europe apart, and brought NATO back to life. Even within the US and Europe, there has been harsh criticism and warnings about this.

Yet, Stoltenberg is not satisfied, as he continued to call on the West to supply more weapons to Ukraine on Monday in Washington, claiming it is the “path to peace.” Even he cannot justify it, admitting that this “may seem like a paradox.” This is Stoltenberg’s way of covering up his attempts at war and culpability, as well as the way of NATO as a whole: to create conflicts in the name of preventing crises and to exacerbate catastrophes in the name of managing crises. As one Western scholar summarized, invasion has been hailed as “humanitarian intervention,” coup d’état as “democratic revolution,” regime subversion as “democracy promotion,” gunboat diplomacy as “freedom of navigation,” military bloc expansion as “European integration,” and domination as “negotiation from a position of strength.”

Under Stoltenberg’s leadership, NATO has also been attempting to interfere in the Asia-Pacific region, aligning with the strategic direction of the US, and promoting “NATO’s Asia-Pacificization.” Although such attempts have encountered resistance from the majority of countries in the Asia-Pacific region, and thus remain limited to a small circle of US allies, regional countries must not be negligent. The desire of regional countries to maintain the regional peace and development does not mean that NATO has no intention of creating discord. NATO’s own history has proved that it strengthens its functions through crisis creation. Since it now intends to enhance its presence and functions on a global scale, it inevitably has to create larger crises.

On this point, insightful individuals internationally, including those in Western countries, have long provided incisive summaries. Organizations like NATO have interfered in nearly all wars and conflicts since its foundation, consistently exporting war and only bringing more problems. In the cycle of seeking enemies, creating crises, and extending its existence, NATO aims to make China the latest target. In recent years, NATO summit declarations have increasingly mentioned China, and provocative actions against China have become more frequent. Particularly, Stoltenberg himself has repeatedly issued threats this year, demanding that China must choose sides between the West and Russia. In February alone, he created a notable scene during his US visit by making seven provocative statements about China in six days. His speeches are filled with confrontational language and echoes of the Cold War. Given that some political elites in the US and Europe frequently champion moral causes such as “opposing coercion” and “defending peace,” they should feel embarrassed by Stoltenberg’s remarks.

Stoltenberg’s strenuous efforts to perform and use various occasions to promote the “China threat” narrative indirectly indicate that this task is difficult. China consistently participates in international affairs as a responsible major power, pursuing peace and bringing opportunities. Even within NATO, China is one of the main trading partners for the majority of its 32 member countries. This is one of the reasons why NATO labels China as a “systemic challenge.” For a war-dependent entity like NATO, a China that follows a path of peaceful development naturally becomes a “challenge.”

This year also marks NATO’s 75th anniversary. Stoltenberg’s warmongering rhetoric is the best commentary on the role NATO has played over the past 75 years. If Stoltenberg leaves any legacy during his term, it is conflict and war. People should be particularly wary of Stoltenberg’s promotion of the “threat narrative.” History has repeatedly shown that such rhetoric always runs counter to peace, development, and prosperity. The louder NATO’s voice becomes, the more vigilant peace-loving people should remain.

June 19, 2024 Posted by | Economics, Militarism | , | Leave a comment

Ukraine frustrated with US over F-16 pilot training

RT | June 19, 2024

The US is making “excuses” for its failure to prepare sufficient numbers of Ukrainian F-16 fighter pilots to aid the war effort, the head of the arms procurement commission in Kiev’s parliament, Aleksandra Ustinova, has claimed.

Kiev’s sponsors in the so-called ‘F-16 coalition’ – the US, Belgium, Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands – have pledged to deliver up to 60 American-made aircraft by the end of this year. Ukrainian pilots are being trained in the US and Denmark, while a separate training program in Romania is planned, but is yet to begin.

So far only eight Ukrainian pilots have received training at the Morris Air National Guard Base in Tucson, Arizona, Ustinova told British newspaper The Times in an interview published on Monday. An additional 12 are being trained in Denmark, she added.

The delay in preparation means Ukraine is likely to only have 20 fully trained F-16 pilots by the end of this year, the lawmaker said. Ukraine earlier asked the US for at least another ten spots in the training programs, but was refused, Ustinova noted.

Last week, Politico wrote that Kiev’s efforts to get 30 more pilots into Western training facilities have been rebuffed. Ukrainian pilots have already hit language barrier issues, a senior DOD official told the news outlet. The Tucson base can only train 12 at a time, and Washington already has other countries’ pilots booked, the source added.

Ustinova questioned the US justification for the delays, suggesting it was deliberate.

“These are not arguments, they are excuses, and they keep coming up with them time and time again,” she stated. The training delays are likely motivated by Washington’s fear that a large-scale presence of US F-16s in the Ukraine conflict could be viewed by Moscow as the integration of the country into NATO, Ustinova told The Times. “This is totally political.”

F-16s are needed to help mitigate the effect of Russian glide bombs on the battlefield, a weapon that has shown devastating effectiveness in the Ukraine conflict, Ustinova stressed. “These bombs are huge – from 500 kilos to 1,500 kilos,” and for Kiev, the only solution is to “bring them down is jet-to-jet.”

Moscow has repeatedly warned that Western arms deliveries will not change the course of the conflict, and only prolong it, causing more deaths. The Russian Parliament’s Defense Committee chair, Andrey Kartapolov, replied to Kiev’s statements about plans for some F-16s to be stationed outside Ukraine. Should the aircraft take off from foreign bases and be used to strike at Russian forces, both the jets and the facilities they are stationed at will be considered “legitimate targets,” Kartapolov warned.

June 19, 2024 Posted by | Militarism | , | Leave a comment

KC – 46A Pegasus Refueler Failure Continues

By Bill Buppert | The Libertarian Institute | June 19, 2024

One of the components of American strategic projection has been the world’s most prodigious and sophisticated aerial refueling fleet.

There are currently approx 400+ KC-135s capable of refueling two receiver aircraft at the same time in the current USAF fleet. The first operational flight was 1956. The last KC-135 was delivered to the Air Force in 1965. Of the original KC-135As, more than 417 were modified with new CFM-56 engines produced by CFM-International.

The newest KC-135 air-frame is 59 years old.

The retirement of the KC-135 has been anticipated and the replacement has been the disastrous KC-46A Pegasus Tanker Modernization Program which has had significant problems to include video control of the fuel boom difficulties and believe it or not, a refueling system that leaks fuel and the usual circus of missing deadlines so typical of DoD programs.

The Boeing KC-46A Pegasus has performed in the same way one would expect in the 21st century: over-budget, way past promised deadlines and rife with problems that should ground the aircraft.The next near-peer or peer contested fight will decimate the refueling fleet if the aircraft are used in the fight and the KC-46 is not ready for prime-time.

You are watching a unique capability die in real time. No one else on Earth has this. The upside is making imperial war-making even more problematic in the future.

According to the GAO report, the Air Force’s KC-46A Tanker Modernization Program has been further delayed because of issues with delivering wing aerial refueling pods and issues with the boom. The report notes that the program has already been delayed by 76 months (over six years).

The program is also at risk of continuing delays due to “ongoing problems with maturing three critical technologies related to the redesigned RVS—a set of visible and long-wave infrared boom cameras and the primary display.”

According to the DoD, “The KC-46A will be equipped with a modernized KC-10 refueling boom integrated with a fly-by-wire control system and will be capable of delivering a fuel offload rate required for large aircraft. Furthermore, a hose and drogue system will add additional mission capability which will be independently operable from the refueling boom system.”

https://simpleflying.com/us-air-force-kc-46a-tanker-modernization-delayed-wing-aerial-refueling/

June 19, 2024 Posted by | Militarism | | Leave a comment

Russia and North Korea agree on mutual aid against aggression – Putin

RT | June 19, 2024

Moscow and Pyongyang have pledged to assist each other against foreign aggression, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on Wednesday during a visit to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Putin and his North Korean counterpart, Kim Jong-un, signed a strategic partnership which will serve as a roadmap for future cooperation in all spheres, from cultural and tourist ties, to trade, economic relations and security, the Russian leader has said, calling it “truly a breakthrough.”

“The document on comprehensive partnership that we have signed today provides, among other things, for mutual aid in case of aggression against one of the participants,” the president added.

Moscow supports Pyongyang’s intention to protect its security and sovereignty from possible Western aggression, which is its right, Putin said. The country considers the US and its allies responsible for the increasing tensions in the region, he added.

“Overused Western propaganda tropes can no longer hide their aggressive geopolitical intentions, including in Northwestern Asia,” Putin said.

Putin noted that Western nations were supplying advanced weapons to Ukraine and have given Kiev the green light to strike Russia. Under these circumstances, “Russia does not rule out the development of military cooperation with the DPRK under the document signed today.”

The visiting head of state denounced the “indefinite restrictions regime” imposed on North Korea by the UN Security Council, which includes an arms embargo, as “orchestrated by the US” and urged for it to be revised.

The Russian president had previously warned the West over Kiev’s desire to use donated weapons to conduct attacks deep inside Russia. Should that happen, Moscow could send similar types of weapons to enemies of the West, which could use them to strike the military assets of the US and its allies, he said earlier this month.

Pyongyang has an “objective and balanced” stance on the Ukraine conflict and sees its core causes, which proves North Korea’s independence and sovereignty, Putin said. The two nations are also on the same page in supporting “a more just and democratic multipolar world” that should replace the previous Western-centric system.

”We will continue to oppose the imposition of strangling sanctions, which the West has turned into a tool of maintaining its hegemony in politics, the economy and other areas,” the president vowed.

Recalling the lengthy record of Russian cooperation with North Korea, Putin noted the role that the Soviet Union played in the fight against Imperial Japan during the Second World War and the reconstruction efforts following the Korean civil war, which split the Korean Peninsula between two rivals. Moscow was the party with which Pyongyang signed its first international agreement 75 years ago, he added.

June 19, 2024 Posted by | Militarism | , | Leave a comment

Glenn Diesen about the benefits of a multipolar, Eurasian world order

Reinvent Money | June 16, 2024

Paul Buitink talks to Glenn Diesen, a Norwegian academic and political scientist. He is a professor at the School of Business of the University of South-Eastern Norway. Glenn explains why the current international liberal unipolar world order is in decline. And why a new multipolar Eurasian order is inevitable and how that would benefit the world. He describes Europe’s role and challenge in this new world order. Also Glenn dives into the Russia and Ukraine conflict and why the incremental approach of the West could lead to a boiling frog situation. At the end he also shares his experiences of being a controversial scientist in Norway.

Find more about Glenn Diesen here, including his latest book The Ukraine War & The Eurasian World Order: https://x.com/Glenn_Diesen https://www.amazon.com/Ukraine-War-Eu…

Follow Paul on X here:   / paulbuitink  

June 19, 2024 Posted by | Book Review, Militarism, Russophobia, Video | , , , , | Leave a comment

We Spent a Billion Dollars Fighting the Houthis… and Lost

By Ron Paul | June 17, 2024

Why does it seem the Pentagon is far better at spending money than actually putting together a successful operation? The failed “Operation Prosperity Guardian” and the disastrous floating Gaza pier are but two recent examples of enormously expensive initiatives that, though they no-doubt enriched military contractors, were incapable of meeting their stated goals.

To great fanfare, last December the Pentagon announced the launch of Operation Prosperity Guardian, a joint US/UK military operation to halt the Yemeni Houthi disruption of Israel-linked commercial shipping through the Red Sea. The Houthis announced their policy in response to civilian deaths in Israel’s war on Gaza, but when the US and UK military became involved they announced they would target US and UK shipping as well.

The operation was supposed to be quick and easy. After all, the rag-tag Houthi militia was no match for the mighty US and UK navies. But it didn’t work out that way at all. Over the weekend the Wall Street Journal published a devastating article revealing that after spending more than one billion dollars on munitions alone, the operation had failed to deter the Houthis and failed to re-open commercial shipping in the Red Sea.

The Journal reported that Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, recently told Congress that “the U.S.-led effort has been insufficient to deter the militant group’s targeting of ships and that the threat will ‘remain active for some time.’”

Meanwhile, the article informed us that a continued US effort to fight the Houthis over Red Sea shipping was “not sustainable.” Perhaps the most revealing part of the article comes from a Washington military expert, Emily Harding of CSIS: “Their supply of weapons from Iran is cheap and highly sustainable, but ours is expensive, our supply chains are crunched, and our logistics tails are long.”

It is reminiscent of a recollection by Col. Harry G. Summers of a discussion he had with North Vietnamese Col. Tu: “You know, you never defeated us on the battlefield,” said Summers. Tu paused for a moment, then replied, “That may be so. But it is also irrelevant.”

Similarly, the US military spent a quarter of a billion dollars building a temporary floating pier to deliver aid to the starving Palestinians even though a land route already existed and would have been far cheaper to use. The project was doomed from the beginning, as days after opening stormy weather broke up the pier and washed part of it up on Israel’s shore. The US military managed to gather the pieces together again, but in total only a few aid trucks managed to use it before, over the weekend, the pier was again disassembled for fear of another weather-related break-up.

The only thing the pier was good for, it seems, was assisting the Israeli military in a Gaza raid on June 8th that killed 270 Palestinian civilians.

As neocons inside the Beltway continue to plot war with China over Taiwan, it seems someone should notice the trouble we have had dealing with Houthis and floating piers. For now, the growth in military spending seems unlimited, but increasing spending bringing diminishing results raises the question of just how much bang are we getting for our bucks?

We have the most expensive military on earth, they say. That may be true, but it is also irrelevant.

June 17, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Sham-ocracy, Scam-ocracy

By Laurie Calhoun | The Libertarian Institute | June 17, 2024

The word “democracy” is bandied about rhetorically by politicians on a regular basis to rationalize whatever it is that they want to do. This tendency has increased markedly in recent times as so-called wars of democracy and campaigns to save or preserve democracy are cast as the most pressing priorities of the day.

In the U.S. presidential election campaign currently underway, both members of the War Party duopoly claim to be the champions of democracy, while depicting their adversaries as loose cannon authoritarians. President Joe “Our Patience is Wearing Thin” Biden attempted in 2021 to force free people to submit to an experimental pharmaceutical treatment which many of them did not need. The Biden administration also oversaw what was one of the most assiduous assaults on free speech in the history of Western civilization. Social media platforms were infiltrated by agents of the federal government with the aim of squelching criticism of regime narratives, even, remarkably, facts recast by censors as malinformation for their potential to sow skepticism about the new mRNA shots never before tested on human beings.

Biden & Co. nonetheless insist that voters must reelect him, because his rival is a dictator in waiting à la Hitler or Mussolini. This despite the fact that Donald Trump already served as president for four years, and never imposed martial law, not even at the height of the highly chaotic and destructive George Floyd and Black Lives Matters protests. Ignoring such conflicting evidence, Joe Biden and his supporters relentlessly proclaim that a Trump victory in November 2024 would usher in the likely end of democracy.

After the conviction of Trump on felony charges crafted through novel procedures and using legalistic epicycles in entirely unprecedented ways, obviously tailored to convict one and only one person, with the aim specifically of preventing his election as the president of the United States, Democratic party operatives and Deep State bureaucrats alike have voiced concern that, if Trump is elected in November, he will go after those responsible for what fully half the country views as his persecution. Given the manifold conflicts of interest involved in the case, in which he was found guilty of all thirty-four charges, it seems likely that, as in the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling to remove Trump’s name from the ballot in that state, the creative felony convictions of Trump will not stand on appeal. One thing is clear: the crime of “miscategorizing hush money payments” has arguably been committed by every member of Congress for whom taxpayer money was used to dispense “undisclosed” payments in suppressing allegations of sexual harassment and other forms of malfeasance. (Thanks to Representative Thomas Massie for sharing on Twitter/X that $17 million dollars were paid to settle 268 such lawsuits from 1997 to 2017.)

Meanwhile, the Russiagate narrative which dominated the mainstream media for the entirety of Trump’s presidency, and continues to this day to color people’s views of the Russian government—thus buoying support for the war in Ukraine—has already been thoroughly debunked for the Hillary Clinton campaign product that it was. The Clinton campaign and the DNC (Democratic National Committee) were fined by the Federal Election Commission for their use of campaign funds miscategorized as legal fees to conduct opposition research which found its way into the Steele dossier on which angry denunciations of Trump’s supposedly treasonous behavior were based. To this day, none of the individuals involved have been indicted for what endures in many minds as the fanciful idea that “Trump is inside Putin’s pocket!” as a man I met in rural New Zealand in 2017 so vividly put it. (I assume he watches CNN.)

Since Trump’s recent conviction for the erroneous classification on his tax form of a hush money payment as a legal fee, he has been busy making lemonade out of lemons, using his new, improved tough-guy “gangster” image to wheel in voters and financial supporters who relate more than ever to his plight, having themselves either been or known victims of the not-so-evenhanded U.S. justice system. To Trump and his supporters, of course, going after those who went after him would be tit-for-tat retribution, just the sort of sweet revenge which persons wronged may crave. But to the many Trump haters (and there is no other way to describe them at this point in history), any attempt to retaliate by using the legal system to press charges against individuals who used the legal system for diaphanously political aims would constitute a grave injustice and threat to democracy.

The situation differs in degree, not in kind, in Europe, where the results of the recent elections have inspired heartfelt exclamations by the usual suspects (European Union Commission president Ursula von der Leyden, et al.) that “democracy” is endangered by the right-wing political groups now in ascendance. Pointing out that those groups were voted in by the people (demo-) to rule (-cracy) does nothing to quell the hysterics, who are somehow oblivious of the fact that when new parties are voted into power, this is precisely because of the electorate’s dissatisfaction with their current government officials. Voting is the only way people have of ousting the villains currently holding elected positions, along with the bureaucrats appointed by them.

In Europe, many working people are disturbed by not only the immigration situation and the specter of totalitarian “wokeism” but also the insistence of their current leaders on provoking and prolonging a war with Russia. It does not seem to be a matter of sheer coincidence, for example, that French president Emmanuel Macron suffered a resounding electoral blow after having expressed the intention to escalate the war between Ukraine and Russia, thus directly endangering the people of France. Macron was also assiduous in excluding swaths of his population, who protested in the streets for months on end, from participation in civil society for what he decreed to be their crime of declining to submit to the experimental mRNA treatment during the height of the Coronapocalypse.

Protests tend not to have any effect on the reigning elites, primarily because the mainstream media no longer covers them to any significant degree, but when politicians are removed from office by the electorate, and replaced by persons who share the concerns of the populace, then change does become possible, at least in principle. Unfortunately, most viable candidates today are card-carrying members of the War Party, whatever divergent opinions they may hold about domestic issues such as whether persons in possession of Y-chromosomes should be considered biological males or whether non-citizens should be permitted to vote.

It would be nice to be able to believe, as some of Trump’s libertarian-leaning supporters apparently do, that his populist appeal reflects a genuine interest in preserving freedom and democracy. This notion is however impugned by the fact that it was under Trump’s administration that the active pursuit of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange commenced, when he was wrenched from the Ecuadorian embassy in London and thrown into Belmarsh prison, where he continues to languish today. It was also under Trump that Assange’s internet access was taken away, which already represented an assault on free speech. But by allowing then-CIA director Mike Pompeo to “mastermind” the eternal silencing of Assange, for the supposed crime of exposing U.S. war crimes (recast as serial violations of the Espionage Act of 1917), Trump betrayed his own commitment to the now octopoid MIC (military-industrial-congressional-media-academic-pharmaceutical-logistics-banking complex), notwithstanding his occasional moments of seeming lucidity with regard to reining in the endless wars. Among other examples, there is not much daylight between the platforms of Biden and Trump regarding Israel. President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken occasionally pay lip service to the innocent Palestinians being traumatized, wounded, and killed, but they nonetheless have furnished Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the means to do just that.

In reality, highly seductive, albeit fraudulent, claims to be defending democracy have been the primary basis for waging, funding, and prolonging wars which have resulted in the deaths of millions of human beings in this century alone. For two decades, the war in Afghanistan was rationalized by appeal to the need to democratize that land, which is currently ruled by the manifestly authoritarian Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (formerly known as the Taliban), just as it was in 2001. Indeed, every country targeted by the U.S. military behemoth is claimed to be the beneficiary of what are the twenty-first-century equivalent of the missions civilisatrices of centuries past. Today, brutal bombing campaigns, invasions and occupations are invariably sustained through the rhetoric of democracy. Since every U.S.-instigated or funded war is said to support “democracy” (by definition!), this rhetorical strategy succeeds in garnering the support of politicians who know that their constituents know, if nothing else, that murder is evil, and democracy is good.

That wars imposed on people against their will—and in which they themselves are annihilated—serve democracy is a preposterous conceit, and yet it becomes ever more frequent as leaders continue to point to World War II as proof that sometimes people must die if freedom and liberty—and, of course, democracy—are to survive. Whoever is running Joe Biden’s Twitter/X account posted a suite of recycled versions of this fallacious notion not long after Memorial Day:

“American democracy asks the hardest of things: To believe we’re part of something bigger than ourselves. Democracy begins with each of us. It begins when one person decides their country matters more than they do.”

“Democracy is never guaranteed. Every generation must preserve it, defend it, and fight for it.”

“History tells us that freedom is not free. If you want to know the price of freedom, come here to Normandy, or other cemeteries where our fallen heroes rest. The price of unchecked tyranny is the blood of the young and the brave.”

Any sober examination of the historical record reveals that vacuous claims to be supporting “democracy” in wars abroad—the literal weaponization of that term—have as their primary result that the people being slaughtered lose not only their political voice, but also their very life, usually against their own will. War represents, in this way, the very antithesis of democracy.

The conflation of defense and offense codified in 2002 by the George W. Bush administration in its notorious National Security Strategy of the United States of America was made public in a pithy phrase: “Our best defense is a good offense.” This perverse rebranding of state aggression as somehow honorable has given rise to a global military system in which wars are funded by the U.S. government under the assumption that they are everywhere and always a matter of protecting post-World War II democracies. But if people are killed in these wars against their will, often because they are forbidden from leaving their country, and therefore subjected to a greatly increased risk of death through bombing, as was the case in Iraq and Afghanistan (and elsewhere throughout the Global War on Terror), and is currently the case in both Ukraine and Israel, then there is no sense in which the military missions which culminate in the deaths of those people constitute defenses of democracy. Instead, the prolongation of such wars ensures only that there will be fewer people voting than before.

Such flagrant assaults on democracy (rule by the people) in the name of democracy do not, however, end with the depletion of the civilians sacrificed by leaders for the lofty aims of securing the freedom of future, as-of-yet unborn persons. Notably, the idea that already existent young persons should be coerced to fight and die in such wars is often supported by the warmongers as well. The current British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, recently proposed that mandatory national service be reinstated, a clear sign of only one thing: that the British public has grown weary and wary of the endless regime-change wars waged and/or funded by the U.S. government and unerringly supported by its number one poodle ally, the United Kingdom. As a result of the willingness of the British government to deploy its military to serve the dubious purposes of the U.S. hegemon, the number of voluntary enlistees is naturally in decline.

Conscription, the use of coercive means to increase the number of persons to fight in wars, directly contradicts the very foundations of democracy. If democracy is rule by the people, then in order for a war to have any democratic legitimacy whatsoever (ignoring, as if it were somehow irrelevant, the “collateral damage” on the other side), it would have to be fought not only for but also by persons who support it. If it is not to be a contradiction in terms, a democratic war would involve only persons who freely agreed to sacrifice their own lives for a cause which they themselves deemed worth dying for. The fact that coercive threats of imprisonment or even death are used to enlist new soldiers shows that at least those persons, a clearly demarcated segment of the society, do not agree with what they are being ordered to do. A war does not become democratic because a majority of the persons too old to fight in it support sending their young compatriots to commit homicide and die in their stead.

This is the sense in which antiwar activists who exhort chicken hawks such as Senator Lindsey Graham and former Vice President Dick Cheney to go fight their own bloody wars are right. For in any conflict purported to be a “war of democracy,” only persons who freely choose to fight, kill and possibly die in it would be donning uniforms. By this criterion, neither World War I nor World War II were wars of democracy. All of the draft dodgers imprisoned or executed for evading military service were horribly wronged wherever and whenever this occurred.

Conscription is always floating about as a topic of debate in so-called democratic nations because of the list of wars capriciously waged with abstract and dubious aims, and incompetently executed, such as the series of state-inflicted mass homicides constitutive of the Global War on Terror. The prospect of active conscription is always looming in the background wherever more and more leaders, under the corrupting influence of military industry lobbyists, and seduced by “just war” rhetoric, exhibit a willingness to embroil their nations in war. Young persons understandably exhibit an increasing reluctance to serve in what since 1945 have proven to be their self-proclaimed democratic leaders’ nugatory and unnecessary wars.

Mandatory national service is a condition for citizenship in some countries, such as Israel, where at least some persons (the Israelis) can freely choose to leave or to substitute a form of civil service rather than agreeing to kill other human beings at the behest of their sanguinary leaders. In wars in progress, such as that in Ukraine, conscription is used in more of an ad hoc way, as it becomes clear that the forces are dwindling and must be replenished, if the war is to carry on. But the very fact that conscription has come to seem necessary to the leaders prosecuting a war itself belies their claims that what is at stake is democracy itself.

This antidemocratic dynamic is currently on display in Ukraine, where President Volodomyr Zelensky recently remained in power, effectively appointing himself monarch, after canceling the elections which would have given the people the opportunity to oust him, specifically on the grounds that they oppose his meatgrinder war with no end in sight—barring either negotiation or nuclear holocaust. In a true democracy, the people themselves would be able to debate and reject the government’s wars, but in a nation such as Ukraine, the president decides, based on “guidance” provided to him by the leaders of powerful and wealthier nations, above all, the United States and its sidekick, the United Kingdom, to carry out a war for so long as he is furnished with the matériel needed to keep the war machine up and running.

The problem for Zelensky is that no matter how many bombs, missiles, and planes are furnished to the government of Ukraine to bolster the purported defense of democracy, there will always be the need for personnel on the ground to deploy those means. When the voluntary members of the army are injured, exhausted, or dead, then the government, rather than taking a seat at the negotiation table, opts to create an artificial pool of soldiers by coercing able-bodied persons who are ill-inclined to participate, having already had the opportunity to volunteer to serve but declined to do so.

The primary support of both the war in Ukraine and the Israeli government’s assault on Gaza is based on a curtailed, amnesiac view of history, conjoined with the fiction that the states currently in existence are somehow eternal and sacred plots of land the borders of which may never be changed. In reality, states are artifacts, the perimeters of which were established by small committees of (usually) men who negotiated among themselves at some point to permit distinct states to exist. In order for a border war to be in any sense democratic, it would have to take into account the interests of all of the persons likely to be affected, not only the young people enlisted to fight, but also the hapless civilians forbidden from relocating, as in Gaza, and then summarily slaughtered by the government as it pursues its own agenda. The frequently recited refrain that it is necessary to continue to fund the commission of mass homicide in Ukraine and Israel in order to preserve democracy is self-contradictory and delusional, both a sham and a scam.

Laurie Calhoun is a Senior Fellow for The Libertarian Institute. She is the author of Questioning the COVID Company Line: Critical Thinking in Hysterical Times,We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, War and Delusion: A Critical Examination, Theodicy: A Metaphilosophical Investigation, You Can Leave, Laminated Souls, and Philosophy Unmasked: A Skeptic’s Critique.

June 17, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Repeated Western narratives of China’s nuclear ‘threat’ are what lead to a dangerous world

Global Times | June 17, 2024

In an interview with The Telegraph published on Sunday, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg claimed that the bloc is in talks of taking missiles out of storage and placing them on standby in the face of a growing threat from Russia and China. While giving a stark warning about the threat from China, he said a world where countries like China have nuclear weapons, and NATO does not, is “a more dangerous world.”

What truly constitutes a dangerous world is the world’s largest war machine hyping a nuclear war that could bring devastating consequences to mankind. Stoltenberg is telling the world that NATO would go beyond being just a conventional combat force, and become a nuclear alliance. He is trying to create an opinion condition favorable for NATO and the US to strengthen their nuclear-sharing capability. At a pre-ministerial press conference of NATO on June 12, Stoltenberg stated that the US is modernizing its nuclear weapons in Europe.

It is worth noting that the warnings of Stoltenberg came against the backdrop of the ongoing Ukraine crisis. The just concluded two-day peace summit in Switzerland did not achieve much to solve the crisis. The US-led West has no will to end the conflict as soon as possible. Instead, it sent out a nuclear deterrence against Russia, which is nothing but adding oil to the fire, according to Zhang Junshe, a Chinese military expert.

Zhang believes that the fundamental reason that the NATO chief made the irresponsible remarks is to coordinate US strategies to suppress its adversaries.

“The Cold War bloc aims to expand its role to the world, including the Asia-Pacific. It acts as a pawn of Washington to contain Russia in Europe and contain China in Asia,” said Zhang.

On June 7, Pranay Vaddi, a senior White House aide, said that the US may have to deploy more strategic nuclear weapons in coming years to deter growing threats from Russia, China and other adversaries.

Coincidentally or not, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) on Sunday launched its annual assessment of the state of armaments, disarmament and international security, in which it said that China is amid a “significant” expansion of its nuclear capabilities and may have as many intercontinental ballistic missiles as the US or Russia by 2030. The Stockholm-based watchdog also claimed that China is believed to have some warheads on high operational alert for the first time.

Reading through SIPRI’s report, one can feel a strong intention of thwarting China’s development of nuclear weapons, despite the fact that the US has 10 times as many nuclear warheads as China. The report has quickly raised the eyebrows of major Western media outlets which rush to report on China’s “fast-growing” nuclear stockpile.

The fact that nuclear arsenals are being strengthened around the world is the result of global conflicts such as the ones in Ukraine and Gaza and the suppression of Western countries against non-Western countries. “The SIPRI’s report and Western media’s narrative of China’s ‘fast-growing’ nuclear stockpile are deliberate suppression of China and a kind of nuclear blackmail,” Cui Heng, a research fellow from the Center for Russian Studies of East China Normal University, told the Global Times.

Now, the US has ripped off its veil of decency when dealing with China. The competition between China and the US will feature bilateral relations in the long run. Both sides strive to build “guardrails” to prevent relations from going off the track. However, China needs to show its strength. Strength can be best reflected by the nuclear weapons China owns. Nuclear power is the foundation of national security when China faces an increasingly hostile US with 10 times of nuclear warheads that China has.

Zhang, the military expert, noted that China’s expansion of its nuclear arsenal is imperative. It will help not only to effectively get by the West’s nuclear blackmail and threat, but also safeguard the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and break through the shackles and obstacles created by the West during the process of China’s development.

China is a nuclear power that formally maintains a no-first-use policy. Its nuclear policy is fundamentally different from that of the US and NATO. If the US and NATO do not want to live in a dangerous world, they should start by changing their own perception of China.

June 17, 2024 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , | Leave a comment

NATO to Control Ukraine Aid to ‘Trump-Proof’ Arms Shipments

By Kyle Anzalone | The Libertarian Institute | June 17, 2024

The US took a significant step towards preventing a future American president from curtailing weapon transfers to Ukraine by allowing NATO to coordinate the arms shipments. Washington and some of its allies are concerned that former President Donald Trump will end military aid and seek a diplomatic settlement to the war should he return to office.

The bloc adopted the new policy during a meeting of NATO defense ministers on Friday. “With a command in Wiesbaden, Germany, NATO will coordinate training and equipment donations, with nearly 700 personnel from Allied and partner nations involved in this effort,” a press release from the alliance said. “NATO will also facilitate equipment logistics and provide support to the long-term development of Ukraine’s Armed Forces.”

Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren explained that the bloc took the step as the war may grind on for some time, adding that coordination of arms shipments through Brussels will help prevent any country from altering its policy. “It’s to make it proof to any situation,” she said, observing that Russia’s war “might go on for years – so you want to have something in place that does not depend on specific persons, ministers or whoever.”

One official told AFP that the move was meant to prevent Trump from changing US policy. “it is about Trump-proofing, and that is what Stoltenberg says, protecting it from winds of political change,” the official stated. “Any US president can pull the plug on it tomorrow.”

On the campaign trail, Trump pledged to end the war within “24 hours” of returning to office, but has failed to explain how he plans to achieve that promise. Additionally, the former president gave his political support to the $95 billion foreign military aid bill signed in April – which included over $60 billion for Ukraine – helping to break the deadlock in Congress.

Still, Trump’s statements about ending the war have caused concern among NATO members and Ukraine. President Volodymyr Zelenskly recently asserted Trump would become a “loser president” if he ended the conflict and would make America “very weak.”

In addition to agreeing to funnel all arms to Ukraine through NATO, the defense ministers agreed to step up intelligence-sharing with Ukraine, and “discussed the ongoing adaptation of NATO’s nuclear capabilities.” Stoltenberg said, “We are a nuclear Alliance – committed to being responsible and transparent. But clear in our resolve to preserve peace, prevent coercion, and deter aggression.”

While the NATO chief did not provide details about what adaptations the bloc is making, in recent months, Sweden and Poland have expressed interest in hosting NATO nuclear weapons.

June 17, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

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