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Britain’s military facilities being enhanced to host new US nukes: Report

Press TV – April 13, 2022

British underground military facilities are being upgraded for use in storing US nuclear weapons as part of an extensive nuclear arms modernization program pursued by Washington, US military budget documents show.

In the Biden administration’s 2023 military budget request, the UK was added to the list of countries where infrastructure investment is under way at “special weapons” storage sites, alongside Turkey, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands – all countries where the US stores an estimated 100 B61 atomic bombs, the UK-based The Guardian daily reported Tuesday.

The report cites Hans Kristensen, the director of the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), as saying that the British site being upgraded to host the nukes is the US airbase at RAF Lakenheath, located 100 kilometers northeast of London.

As part of the US nuclear arms modernization bid, the report says, “The B61 has been given a new lease of life with a guidance system, the B61-12 variant, due to go into full production in May.”

Washington’s 2023 budget request states that NATO “is wrapping up a 13-year, $384m infrastructure investment program at storage sites in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the UK, and Turkey to upgrade security measures, communication systems, and facilities.”

This is while Britain has become anxious to assume a more assertive role when it comes to its own nuclear deterrent, according to the report, which noted that London announced last year that it would boost its own stockpile of Trident nuclear warheads by 40 percent to 260 – the first such increase since the end of the cold war.

It further cited British government sources as saying that the UK has “a clearer appreciation” of its role as a nuclear weapons state in a renewed era of state competition with Russia and China.

According to the daily, the British Defense Ministry did not comment on the upgrade mentioned in the US budget, though one official said, “We won’t provide anything on this as it relates to the storage of nuclear weapons.”

It then underlined that the development comes “just four months after the arrival in Lakenheath of the first of a new generation of nuclear-capable US combat aircraft, the F-35A Lightning II, the first such deployment in Europe.”

The report further cited Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, as saying that the upgrade of the British storage facilities is “an early sign that the US and NATO are preparing to engage in a protracted and maybe heightened standoff with Putin’s Russia.”

“The administration should provide some clarity about the military necessity and goals of possibly bringing nuclear weapons back to the UK,” Kimball emphasized.

The developments in Europe are part of a broader retreat from arms control, the daily also noted, adding that the Biden administration’s nuclear posture review – which has been sent to Congress but not yet declassified – reportedly do not include the changes the US president pledged during his campaign.

In 2020, Biden claimed he would formally declare the sole purpose of nuclear weapons to be deterrence of a nuclear attack against the US or its allies. But the review leaves open the option of using nuclear arms to respond to non-nuclear threats as well.

However, the nuclear disarmament group CND said the “quiet announcement” by the US amounted to more militarization at a time of growing risk and would add to the risks faced by the British public. CND’s General Secretary Kate Hudson said she feared it could lead to US warheads being redeployed in Britain, insisting, “Nuclear weapons don’t make us safe – they make us a target.”

The US withdrew its B61 munitions from Lakenheath in 2008, marking the end of more than half a century of maintaining a US nuclear stockpile in Britain. At the time of the withdrawal, the gravity bombs were widely considered as militarily obsolete and hopes were higher for further disarmament by major holders of nuclear weapons.

In the 1990s, RAF Lakenheath had 33 underground storage vaults, where 110 B61 bombs were stored, according to the FAS. Since their withdrawal, the vaults have been dormant. Kristensen said he believed the vaults are now being upgraded so the new B61-12 bombs can be stored there.

According to Kristensen, when the new B61-12 bombs are delivered – expected next year – they will replace older models already there, noting that the Lakenheath upgrade is intended to provide more flexibility to move the nuclear weapons around Europe.

“One of the things they have talked about is protecting the deterrent against Russia’s improved cruise missiles capabilities,” Kristensen asserted. “So they could be trying to beef up the readiness of more sites without them necessarily receiving nukes, so that they have the options to move things around in a contingency if they need to.”

April 13, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Testing Mania: Illogical and Harmful

BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | APRIL 12, 2022

This adapted excerpt is from Dr. Scott W. Atlas’ bestselling book, A Plague Upon Our House, published by Bombardier. 

By the time I arrived at the end of July 2020, the administration had already developed a massive testing capacity from scratch. Nearly a million tests per day were being conducted. The effort was led by Admiral Giroir, who was assigned the thankless task of overseeing that project.

I understood why the VP was so excited when he had displayed that simplistic chart on my first visit. And over the next weeks the administration continued to successfully facilitate and distribute tens of millions of point-of-care PCR tests and, later, rapid antigen tests. This was a significant accomplishment, but it was clear from the beginning that the White House did not understand how or when to use testing. To my thinking, it was a response to political pressure more than anything else.

From my very first meeting in the Oval Office back in July and again over subsequent meetings, President Trump expressed great frustration about testing. It was easy to see why. You could not turn on the news, even the most superficial talk show, without the lead story admonishing the administration for “the lack of testing.” For months, the country had been inundated with that message—not just from public health types who had now become household names, but from every pundit, talk show host, and news anchor. It became pure groupthink. Celebrities who had no understanding or expertise at all were now stridently opining about the unquestionable urgency of massive, widespread, on-demand testing.

Reminiscent of stock market frenzies, esoteric technical terms that had formerly been unknown to the public like “contact tracing” now became common parlance. Testing for this virus had turned into a national, indeed, international obsession. And to me, that obsession was not just misguided, it was harmful, creating more fear, more frenzy, more irrational policies. Yes, testing was an essential tool in the pandemic. And yes, months before I was involved in any way in Washington, there had been a failure to develop and deliver enough tests when they were needed the most. But by the time I came to DC at the end of July, a massive capacity to test had been quickly developed. The problem now was that it was not being leveraged to save lives. Schools and businesses were closed; people were cowering in their homes. Meanwhile, older people kept dying by the thousands.

Criticizing the administration about testing was more than a natural extension of that obsessive mindset. It was low-hanging fruit for the president’s political opponents. There had been almost no preexisting testing capacity from the outset, so naturally it would take some time to meet the challenge. The obsessive demand for testing rapidly escalated into a hyperpartisan issue. I remembered Pelosi’s mantra—“test, test, test; trace, trace, trace!”—as if she, or any politician for that matter, had any understanding of the appropriate testing policy. She was not alone, though. That mantra was echoed on every news network, regardless of political leaning. No dissenting opinion was even visible to most Americans.

That political heat provoked the expected reaction in the White House. Long before my arrival, testing became Priority Number One. Beyond an important public health policy question, it was an election season, and a contentious one at that. This environment elevated testing into the priority of the president’s closest counselors, his political advisors at the highest levels, and operationally, therefore, the vice president’s Task Force. Presumably, like all politicians, the president was politically motivated, too.

The conflict, the misjudgment about issues like testing and other advice coming out of the Task Force, occurred when the president was swayed too much by his political advisors instead of believing in his own common sense. That advice matched the message of the Task Force, especially that coming from Redfield and Birx, whose decision-making background was tied almost exclusively to testing. That was one of the many problems stemming from the HIV backgrounds of Birx and Redfield. SARS2 had already spread to millions, and it spread by breathing in close proximity; the role and practical application of testing in a virus like HIV couldn’t have been more different. In the end, it was easy to see how the advice to the president was to focus on testing.

Understandable for everyone, that is, except the president. He never agreed, because to him it made no sense. He couldn’t understand why we would test people who were not sick. It was as simple as that. President Trump talked to me privately in the Oval Office about many different things, but almost always, our discussions came back to the subject of testing. The president spoke very bluntly and resorted to common sense rather than any data. He knew nothing specific about the medical rationale for testing. He went with his gut feeling and placed no filter on stating his opinions.

“Why are we testing healthy, younger people? Why don’t we just test sick people?” he would ask.

“And if we test more, we find more cases. But those people aren’t sick!” he would point out, exasperated, echoing what he said many times to the press.

And that seemed rather straightforward, on its face. His point was simple logic—test and you shall discover “cases,” especially with COVID, since a large number, maybe half or more, of infections were asymptomatic. He was also correct that in clinical medicine, the definition of a “case”—a patient—is not generally based on a test seeking out something in a healthy, asymptomatic person.

That is not how medicine is practiced, a point I tried to explain time and again to the Task Force troika of doctors. I had that perspective, because I am a doctor who has been an expert for decades on the significance of diagnostic tests showing abnormalities without symptoms. And wasn’t it also important to consider that the overwhelming majority of people did not have a serious illness, even when symptomatic? As for mildly ill patients with COVID, “standard of care” for them was strict isolation, with or without testing. 

Testing, though, was the way—the only way—to find infected people who had no symptoms. In high-risk settings, contagious people with asymptomatic infections would be critical to find, no doubt. But the goal, the rationale for testing, became a key point of confusion and disagreement. We needed to protect high-risk people, absolutely. The question was how. We knew who was at risk, so there were two alternatives: 1) indirectly protecting the “vulnerable” by confining and locking down everyone else, or 2) doing everything to protect high-risk people directly.

By the time I set foot in the White House, the nation, with few exceptions, had already been using the Birx-Fauci lockdown restrictions—the indirect strategy—for months. Why was there no admission that the lockdown strategy did not work? It undeniably failed to protect the elderly. Nursing home deaths were piling up, comprising up to 80 percent of total deaths in some states—and in the meantime the lockdown policy was destroying everyone and everything else. Einstein may or may not have said it, but everyone knew it: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

Yet the strategy was to continue doubling down on the failed lockdowns that were devastating to so many, especially those outside the “elite.” Reality was being denied, and that remains the case today. Regardless, the answer to the failure, the available tool for those all-in on stopping all cases, was more testing!

Unbeknownst to the White House, several top epidemiologists and infectious disease experts had opined that massive testing of healthy people in settings that were not high-risk was not appropriate at this stage of a pandemic. That was apparent to me from months of lengthy discussions with leading epidemiologists at Stanford and elsewhere. There were already tens of millions of Americans who had been infected; even the CDC estimated a tenfold larger number compared to the confirmed number, as verified by early studies on SARS2 antibodies.

Contact tracing was also “futile” at this point, as Dr. Bhattacharya later wrote in a paper I distributed at a Task Force meeting. Contact tracing was a tool for newly emerging pandemics, new outbreaks perhaps. Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta, a world-renowned epidemiologist, repeatedly stressed the lack of logic in mass testing at this stage and the irrationality of focusing on cases by positive tests. Moreover, PCR tests were detecting virus fragments or dead virus in people who were not even contagious. Yet no one in the Task Force would even entertain this discussion.

The question about the role of testing was fundamental. It wasn’t simply surveillance for the purpose of knowledge—testing was the key to a strategic policy. It was not enough to consider testing through the limited prism of an epidemiologist, the way Birx and Fauci did (even though they, like me, are not epidemiologists). In medical practice, if you referred a patient with low back pain to a neurosurgeon, the most likely outcome was surgery. That’s exactly why I always referred patients to neurologists first—they had more perspective. Some might think of the adage “to someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Testing was the main tool in the epidemiology toolbox, their only tool, really. That was very limiting in defining its role in overall policymaking.

At this juncture, the testing was not being done to yield statistically valid surveillance information—a legitimate use of testing in the midst of a pandemic. This was diagnostic testing, with broad-reaching policy aims. In this pandemic, a positive test was a major driver of the policy of quarantining and isolating healthy people with low-risk profiles—shuttering businesses, closing schools— in short, a key to locking down the country. That’s why health policy experts like myself with a broader scope of expertise than that of epidemiologists and basic scientists are needed. Because no one with a medical science background who also considered the impacts of the policies was advising the White House. That lack of perspective was the main source of the tunnel-vision focus on preventing the spread of infections to the exclusion of all other considerations.

It was baffling to me, an incomprehensible error of whoever assembled the Task Force, that there were zero public health policy experts and no experts with medical knowledge who also analyzed economic, social, and other broad public health impacts other than the infection itself. Shockingly, the broad public health perspective was never part of the discussion among the Task Force health advisors other than when I brought it up. Even more bizarre was that no one seemed to notice.

The president clearly understood that testing healthy people for a disease that did not make them sick made little sense and would only lead to confining them. I agreed with that common sense view, although with important exceptions, and sitting in the Oval Office I explained the absurd extension of the logic of “test, test, test.” What was the “necessary” number, anyway? One million per day? Not even close. One hundred million per day? Nope. How about everyone in the country—330 million per day, every day.

Even if you could accomplish that goal, the tests themselves were only a snapshot in time. Seconds later, any given person could become infected. So 330 million per day, every fifteen minutes—maybe that would satisfy the testing mania! No matter how many tests were performed, there would never be enough.

The need for increased testing, but in a smarter, more targeted way, still needed to be explained to the president. And I did just that, repeatedly, whenever I had a chance—in concise, short doses. As always, he listened intently. But he had no time or patience for a detailed presentation. That is one reason why we got along well. I was capable of speaking succinctly, articulating the bottom line. More importantly, he knew I spoke directly, no BS.

From day one, I always reminded myself—if, and whenever, the president of the United States asks for my opinion, I am going to give it.

No holds barred—otherwise, what was I there for? Even on my very first visit to the Oval Office, when he complained about wide-spread testing, I bluntly told him, “You are a hamster on a wheel,” knowing that others in the room would probably recoil at hearing that. But President Trump knew it, even repeating the phrase later himself.

There was, I explained, a more nuanced approach to the policy of testing. There were serious reasons to test, important reasons to actually increase testing, but in a strategic way. The question was how to leverage that testing capability to have the most impact—to save the most lives and to facilitate reopening the country, which was the right goal from both a health perspective and the president’s stated policy.

I thought my approach was obvious. This was simple logic, and it reiterated exactly what I had written months before: let’s focus testing on where it really mattered, and increase it. High-risk environments, where high-risk people lived and worked. Nursing homes, a tinderbox of risk for its elderly, frail residents, were an obvious target. Knowing that cases were brought in by the staff, they needed to be tested, and tested far more frequently, perhaps every day. I also pushed for more point-of-care tests in places independent-living seniors frequented, like senior centers; visiting nurses taking care of seniors at home; and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), where high-risk faculty members were more concentrated.

While the president understood and fully supported this, he remained frustrated, as did I, because his most trusted advisors didn’t fully sign on to a strategic approach to testing. At one point he offhandedly remarked, “You’ll have to convince my son-in-law of that.” Naturally, Kushner and everyone else had been deferring to Fauci and Birx on all things medical. To make matters worse, the Fauci-Birx testing strategy was not merely unfocused; their strategy bizarrely prioritized more testing in the lowest-risk people and the lowest-risk environments—students and schools—while letting the deaths continue in nursing homes and assisted living facilities, where a once-per-week schedule was assumed to be effective.

Politics seemed to be the main driver of those in the inner circle advising the president—that was their job. But the politics were irrelevant to me. The frenzy about testing everyone, everywhere, at all times, including low-risk people in low-risk settings, was incorrect, illogical, and harmful.

The funny thing was that while almost everyone assumed the president was only making excuses, somehow covering up for an “inadequate” testing capacity, there were valid reasons to use testing very differently in order to maximize its benefits. Despite the clamor of the “experts” in the public sphere, and almost the entire media narrative pushing the opposite view, the president happened to be correct. Instead of massively testing everyone on demand, testing should be leveraged to do what everything should have been geared toward in the first place—protecting the high-risk, saving lives, and opening society up as soon as possible.

What was most remarkable to me from the inside was that even though the president expressed his points about testing very clearly, and many top epidemiology experts agreed, the COVID Huddles and other strategic operations were run in a different world. The messaging, the public events, the operational strategy, and the communications team pushed ahead with a focus on producing and delivering more testing to low-risk environments, schools, and communities. Reminiscent of Catch-22, when 150 million antigen tests became available weeks later, I was asked by several people in the COVID Huddle, “Well, now that we have these tests, what do we do with them?”

Scott W. Atlas, M.D., is the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in health care policy at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University and a fellow at Hillsdale College’s Academy for Science and Freedom.

April 13, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Biden mobilizes US military industry to arm Ukraine

Samizdat | April 13, 2022

US President Joe Biden is looking to mobilize the military industry and send another $750 million worth of the Pentagon’s own weapons stockpile to Ukraine, according to new reports citing anonymous officials in Washington. This is on top of the $1.7 billion worth of goods sent to Kiev courtesy of American taxpayers since the conflict escalated on February 24.

So far the US “lethal” aid has consisted mainly of Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger portable anti-air systems.

Now Biden is preparing to escalate the aid to include heavy artillery and other systems, worth three-quarters of a billion or so, Reuters reported on Tuesday citing two US officials. The official announcement could come within a day or two, the agency added.

Biden wouldn’t need congressional authorization for this, either, as it would be done under a Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA), which authorizes transfer from current US military stocks in response to an emergency.

This would put the amount of US military aid to Kiev at over $2.4 billion since Russia sent troops into Ukraine on February 24, when added to the White House’s own figures made public last week.

The US has sent more than 1,400 Stingers and 5,000 Javelins to Ukraine already, Financial Times (FT) reported on Tuesday citing the Pentagon. This amounts to a third of the US stock of Javelins and a quarter of its Stingers, estimated the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think-tank. At current production rates, it will take 3-4 years to restock on Javelins and at least five for the Stingers.

Production levels will be one of the topics at the meeting between the Pentagon officials and top eight US weapons manufacturers, which both Reuters and FT said is scheduled for Wednesday. Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and L3 Harris Technologies are expected in attendance.

Kiev has reached out to US allies far and wide – from its NATO neighbors all the way to South Korea – asking for airplanes, tanks and artillery in particular. On Saturday, German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht said that Berlin could not afford to send any more weapons without depleting its own stocks too much. By Monday, however, the Rheinmetall conglomerate said it could refurbish some obsolete Leopard 1 tanks and send them east.

Last week, Slovakia announced it would send its only battery of S-300 air defense systems to Ukraine, and get US-made “Patriots” to replace them. On Monday, the Russian Defense Ministry claimed that the battery had been obliterated in a cruise missile strike against a hangar in Dnepropetrovsk, a city Ukrainians call Dnipro, the day before.

April 12, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Lawmakers reject amendment to prevent monitoring of unvaccinated

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | April 12, 2022

All Democrats in the House Judiciary Committee voted against an amendment that could have protected the unvaccinated from being tracked.

The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2021 gives federal agencies like the FBI, DOJ, and DHS the authority to “analyze and monitor” activities of domestic terrorism and “take steps to prevent domestic terrorism.”

The current administration’s program for tackling domestic terrorism includes monitoring the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories online.

In February, the DHS released a memo that pays attention to those who claim election fraud in 2020’s presidential race and those who spread “misinformation” about COVID-19.

“There is widespread online proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19,” the DHS memo read.

“Grievances associated with these themes inspired violent extremist attacks during 2021.”

“COVID-19 mitigation measures – particularly COVID-19 vaccine and mask mandates – have been used by domestic violent extremists to justify violence since 2020 and could continue to inspire these extremists to target government, healthcare, and academic institutions that they associate with those measures.”

Following the release of the memo, Republican Rep. Andy Biggs proposed an amendment to the act to protect unvaccinated Americans from being tracked.

“None of the funds authorized to be appropriated in this Act shall be used to monitor, analyze, investigate or prosecute any individual solely because that individual declined the administration of a vaccine to COVID-19 or expressed opposition to such administration,” Biggs’ proposed amendment read.

According to a tweet by Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, every Democrat in the House Judiciary Committee voted against the proposed amendment.

“Due to a troubling DHS bulletin, @RepAndyBiggsAZ offered an amendment to prevent the targeting of Americans due to their views on COVID vax,” Massie wrote.

“Every Dem. voted against his amdt!”

April 12, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Searching for War Criminals

They are nearer than you think

BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • APRIL 12, 2022

The United States is now insisting that Russian President Vladimir Putin should be put on trial for “war crimes” committed in Ukraine. As Putin is still insisting that he will attend the upcoming G20 summit in November on the island of Bali, Indonesia, it will be a great opportunity to have US Marshalls snatch him from the stage and whisk him off to a federal courthouse in Virginia for justice to be served. Or a form of justice anyway, since the United States has no actual jurisdiction over where Putin’s alleged crimes might have taken place and it will be impossible to prove that he actually ordered anyone to carry out so-called “crimes against humanity.” We’ll see how it all works out.

Indeed, there is no other phrase that has been more misunderstood and generally abused of late than “war crimes” or “war criminals.” It belongs with several other labels, including “weapons of mass destruction” and “crimes against humanity” that are used to indicate an adversary has crossed a red line and is so deplorable that anything that is done to him either during actual fighting or in the aftermath is completely acceptable. Going back to Greek and Roman times it has always been understood that even in wartime there are certain activities that are unacceptable, but the attempted definition and codification of “war crimes” as a concept is largely a twentieth century creation used to inflict additional punishment on the losers after the fighting is over. The Treaty of Versailles that ended the First World War punished Germany far beyond what most would consider reasonable, largely because the victorious powers were able to do so without any consequences until the next war began. Likewise, the linked concepts of war crimes and crimes against humanity came largely out of the post-Second World War Nuremberg Trials, which shaped the legal arguments around alleged German behavior, not that of the allies.

The Second World War certainly included atrocities of various kinds on both sides, but the Anglo-American deliberate bombing of German cities has to stand out as particularly disproportionate. Forty-two thousand mostly civilians died in Hamburg in the 1943 firebombing and the bombing of Dresden in 1945, at a point when Germany was on the verge of defeat, was remarkable in that the city was not a military target and was full of refugees from the east. At least 200,000 civilians died. Judge Andrew Napolitano has suggested that the greatest war crime in history, if one makes a case based on unnecessary human suffering, was President Harry Truman’s nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which almost certainly killed more than 200,000 mostly civilians, when Japan was preparing to surrender. As Truman was on the side that won the war and controlled the prosecution process, there were no legal consequences or punishment relating to his decision, though critics since 1945 have sometimes decried the first use of nuclear weapons.

If killing civilians unnecessarily is the standard definition of a war crime, then America’s most recent five presidents have been war criminals. In other words, historically speaking, accusations of war crimes, which have no real meaning in law and are both infinitely elastic and subject to interpretation, have often depended on which side of the fence one is standing on when the war ends. And it gets more complicated than that, given the politics of what is sometimes referred to as the rules based international order, which in theory arose from the ashes of World War Two. The new world order was US-centric from the start, with the United Nations (UN) situated in New York City, the World Bank in Washington, and the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. At the UN, American primacy was reinforced through the creation of a Security Council, which alone has the power to authorize military action against a rogue state. The Security Council had five permanent members, each of whom was armed with a veto, meaning that no effective action against them could ever take place no matter what they had done. And so it has played out, with the US plus China, Russia, Britain and France being effectively immune from censure authorizing military action by the United Nations.

It is of particular interest to observe that the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague was set up to deal with “war crimes and crimes against humanity” that were otherwise ignored. Neither the US, nor the Russians nor the Israelis recognize the authority of the court and the US has stated that no ICC investigator will be allowed entry into the United States. Given that, it becomes possible to witness how the whole farce of war crimes and other violations of the new world order have played out in practice.

Currently the US and its allies are waging economic warfare on Russia without an actual declaration of war, to include an avalanche of sanctions plus completely illegal confiscations of the property of Russian citizens. It is also blocking Moscow from the use of the international monetary conventions and systems that it has had access to. The clearly stated intention is to destroy the Russian economy due to Russia having been charged by the US government with the commission of what it is calling war crimes in its invasion of Ukraine. Vladimir Putin argues in turn that Ukraine’s apparent intention to join NATO, which is a hostile military alliance directed against Russia, is a direct threat to his country and is already manifesting itself in military action undertaken against breakaway parts of Ukraine which are largely inhabited by Russian speakers and ethnics.

There are other issues, but those are the most important. It should also be noted that the issues themselves were at least somewhat negotiable prior to the outbreak of fighting, which Putin sought to do but Joe Biden and NATO were not interested. So ultimately the war, from a third-party point of view, is pitting a Russian vital interest against what really amounts to no genuine interest at all for NATO and the US, apart from goading the Russian bear and removing its government as a way to prevent against any change in the international order.

Since objective reality has no place in United States foreign policy, it is interesting to look at how the US sees itself and how it regards other countries that are doing what Russia is doing or worse. When it comes to its own self-perception, America’s so-called leaders believe that their global leadership role is one by right and they can do no wrong by virtue of a quality referred to as “American exceptionalism.” That is of course a mythical attribute created to permit the United States to get away with mass murder and regime change without any consequences.

A principal beneficiary of American financial and political largesse is, of course, Israel, which consists not only of people “chosen” by Yahweh but also by the media, the United States Senate, House of Representatives and the White House. A comparison of what Russia is doing that is being condemned by Washington versus what both what the US and Israel have been able to get away with might be considered to be in order.

Russia has invaded Ukraine after months of warnings that the status quo was untenable in national security terms, largely due to intentionally fruitless negotiations with stonewalling United States representatives and NATO. Israel, widely acknowledged to be an apartheid state, is currently bombing Syria on an almost daily basis, unnoticed by the US media and the Biden Administration. It in the past has attacked all its neighbors, including the renowned Seven Days War in June 1967 which was a surprise attack staged against Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Subsequent to that war, Israel occupied nearly all of what had been Palestine. It also seized the Golan Heights belonging to Syria and has recently received consent from Washington to illegally annex Arab East Jerusalem as a part of Israel, making the whole of the city Israel’s capital. The Golan Heights have also recently been annexed with Washington’s approval and there are 700,000 heavily armed and violent Jewish settlers now sitting in 261 settlements on stolen Palestinian land on the West Bank.

And what has the United States and its allies done to dissuade Israel? Well, nothing. One rule for Israel and the US and another quite different Washington dictated “rules based” system for everyone else, most particularly if one is Russian. In fact, the more belligerently Israel behaves, the more it gets in terms of US taxpayer money and made-in-USA weapons. Israel has also been the favored destination for traveling congress-critters of late because it is an election year and Jewish donors are being hotly pursued. Recently, a large group of Democrats was departing just before former Vice President Mike Pence arrived in Tel Aviv on Miriam Adelson’s private jet so he could kiss Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s ring and also spend some quality time with Benjamin Netanyahu.

Ironically, while Joe Biden was turning the screws on Russia, the Congress was showering gifts on Israel above and beyond the billions of dollars in “aid” that the wealthy Jewish state already receives. Alison Weir of IfAmericansKnew has examined the recently signed pork laden 2022 federal government spending bill and has identified numerous line-item instances of money going directly to Israel or in support of causes that benefit Israel in some fashion. She estimates that Israel’s economy, which is able to support both free medical care and higher education, now benefits to the tune of $22 million per day from the United States taxpayer, for a total of $8 billion per year, and the number might actually be much higher. And there are other sources of income indirectly funded by the US Treasury, most notably the ability of Israel-focused charities to contribute tax exempt money to Israeli foundations and groups. Many of the “charities” are essentially fraudulent, funding the illegal settlements, domestic terrorism and other anti-Palestinian activities. Every artifice is used by some Jewish groups and billionaire donors to keep the US dollars flowing to Israel while no one of any significance in the federal government complains about the double standard when one compares Israel to Russia. And the Zionist controlled media are completely silent.

The hypocrisy that pervades United States foreign policy is difficult to ignore, but Washington has successfully manipulated its financial instruments to keep its remaining friends and allies in line. Whether that will survive the inevitable pushback coming from Russia, China and a number of non-aligned nations remains to be seen. At a minimum, the Cold War alignment that was broken in 1991 and which seems to again be taking shape around the Ukraine issue appears to have exceeded its expiry date. Ukraine might indeed wind up doing severe damage to the Russian economy, but it seems plausible that it will also bring with it the long overdue demise of American hegemonistic fantasies and NATO.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

April 12, 2022 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Pentagon warns India of China threat

Samizdat | April 12, 2022

US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin hosted his Indian counterpart, Rajnath Singh, on Monday, calling for closer military ties between the countries and warning of security threats posed by China and Russia.

“We’re meeting at a critical moment in the US-India defense partnership,” Austin told Singh as Monday’s talks began. He added that Washington and New Delhi both believe in a “free and open Indo-Pacific” underpinned by respect for national sovereignty and the rule of law, but “we’re facing urgent and mounting challenges to this shared vision.”

Beijing is undermining security in the region by building “dual-use infrastructure” along its border with India and making unlawful territorial claims in the South China Sea, Austin said. “The United States stands with India in defending their sovereign interests,” he pledged.

Austin argued that like China, Russia is trying to “change the status quo by force,” adding, “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the humanitarian devastation that it has created are blatant attempts to undermine the international order that is grounded in the rules and the principles that we share.”

The US defense chief said that as the world’s largest democracy, India is “central to this rules-based order,” and he called for collaboration with “like-minded partners.” Those ties may include co-development of weapons.

Austin and Singh followed their talks by holding a so-called 2+2 meeting with US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Indian Minister of External Affairs Subrahmanyam Jaishankar. “This is a momentous moment in global affairs, and I think as a result, this partnership is even more consequential and more vital,” Blinken said.

However, the partnership has been strained in recent weeks amid efforts by the US and its Western allies to punish and isolate Russia over the Ukraine conflict. Late last month, a top US national security official warned India that there will be “consequences” for countries that try to “circumvent” Washington’s sanctions campaign against Moscow.

“We are keen for all countries, especially our allies and partners, not to create mechanisms that prop up the ruble and that attempt to undermine the dollar-based financial system,” deputy national security advisor Daleep Singh told reporters during his visit to New Delhi on March 31.

President Joe Biden’s top economic advisor, Brian Deese, reiterated those concerns last week, saying Washington had warned India that it would face significant and long-term costs if it aligned strategically with Russia. “There are certainly areas where we have been disappointed by both China and India’s decisions, in the context of the invasion,” he said.

India has declined to impose sanctions against Russia and has ramped up purchases of Russian oil. Indian and Russian officials also have discussed a ruble-rupee payment mechanism for trade between the countries, bypassing the dollar and the euro.

Another source of tension between Washington and New Delhi is India’s historic reliance on Russian-made weapons. India has ordered five S-400 anti-aircraft systems from Russia – in defiance of a warning from the US against the $5.5 billion deal – and it reportedly has an option to purchase more of the surface-to-air missiles.

Austin told US lawmakers last week that it’s not in India’s best interests to continue buying Russian weaponry, and the Pentagon is working with New Delhi to reduce its reliance on Moscow.

April 12, 2022 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | Leave a comment

NATO Sanctions and the Coming Global Diesel Fuel Disaster

By F. William Engdahl – New Eastern Outlook – 11.04.2022 

Amid the ongoing global inflation crisis, NATO heads of state and mainstream media repeat a mantra that high energy prices are a direct result of Putin’s actions in Ukraine since end of February.  The reality is that it is the western sanctions that are responsible. Those sanctions including cutting SWIFT interbank access for key Russian banks and some of the most severe sanctions ever imposed, are hardly having an impact on the military actions in Ukraine. What many overlook is the fact that they are increasingly impacting the economies of the West, especially the EU and USA. A closer look at the state of the global supply of diesel fuel is alarming. But Western sanctions planners at the US Treasury and the EU know fully well what they are doing. And it bodes ill for the world economy.

While most of us rarely think about diesel fuel as anything other than a pollutant, in fact it is essential to the entire world economy in a way few energy sources are. The director general of Fuels Europe, part of the European Petroleum Refiners Association, stated recently, “… there is a clear link between diesel and GDP, because almost everything that goes into and out of a factory goes using diesel.”

At the end of the first week of Russia’s military action in Ukraine, with no sanctions yet specific to Russia’s diesel fuel exports, the European diesel price was already at a thirty-year high. It had nothing to do with war. It had to do with the draconian global covid lockdowns since March 2020 and the simultaneous dis-investment by Wall Street and global financial firms in oil and gas companies, so-called Green Agenda or ESG. Almost on day one of Russian troop actions in Ukraine, two of the world’s  largest oil companies, BP and Shell, both British, stopped deliveries of diesel fuel to Germany claiming fear of supply shortages. Russia supplied some 60 to 70% of all EU diesel before the Ukraine war.

In 2020 Russia was the world’s second largest exporter of diesel fuel behind USA, shipping more than 1 million barrels daily. Most of it, some 70%, went to the EU and Turkey. France was the largest importer, followed by Germany and UK. In France some 76% of all road vehicles—cars, trucks—use diesel. The EU diesel demand is far higher than in the US as most cars also use the more economical and efficient diesel fuel. In the first week of April the EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proudly announced new sanctions against Russian energy that would begin with a ban on coal. The EU is the largest importer of Russian coal. Oil and gas she said would follow at a later date. That foolish move will merely boost costs of energy, already at record highs, for most of the EU, as it will force oil and gas prices far higher.

At the beginning of the Ukraine crisis global stocks of diesel fuel were already the lowest since 2008 as the covid lockdowns had done major damage to the demand-supply situation of oil and gas production. Now the stage is set for an unprecedented crisis in diesel. The consequences will be staggering for the world economy.

Diesel Moves World Trade

Diesel engines have the highest engine efficiency of conventional motors. They are based on the principle of compression developed in 1897 by Rudolf Diesel. Because of their greater efficiency and greater mileage per gallon, diesel fuels almost all freight truck motors. It fuels most all farm equipment from tractors to harvesting machines. It is widely used in the EU, almost 50% for auto fuel as it is far more fuel efficient than gasoline engines. It is used in most all heavy mining machines such as Caterpillar earth movers. It is used in construction equipment. Diesel engines have replaced steam engines on all non-electrified railroads in the world, especially freight trains. Diesel is used in some electric power generation and in most all heavy military vehicles.

A global shortage in diesel fuel, temporary or longer-term, is therefore a catastrophic event. Goods cannot be moved from container ports to inland destinations. Without diesel fuel trucks cannot deliver food to the supermarket, or anything else for that matter. The entire supply chain is frozen. And there is no possibility to substitute gasoline in a diesel engine without ruining the engine.

Until the ill-conceived global covid lockdowns of industry and transportation that began in March 2020, the demand and supply of diesel fuel was well balanced. The sudden lockdowns however collapsed diesel demand for truck transport, autos, construction, even farming. Unprofitable refineries were closed. Capacity declined. Now as world production returns to a semblance of pre-covid normal, diesel reserve stocks worldwide are dangerously low, especially in the EU which is the world’s largest diesel consumer, but also the USA.

Rationing?

At the start of this year world diesel stocks were already dangerously low and that drove prices sky-high. As of February, 2022 before impact of the Ukraine war, diesel and related stocks in the US were 21% below the pre-covid seasonal average. In the EU stocks were 8% or 35 million barrels below the pre-covid average level. In Singapore, the Asian hub stocks were 32% below normal. Combined all three regions’ diesel stocks were alarmingly low, some 110 million barrels below the same point last year.

Between January 2021 and January 2022 EU diesel fuel prices had almost doubled, and that, before the Ukraine sanctions. There were several reasons, but primary was the soaring price of crude oil and supply disruptions owing to global covid lockdowns and the subsequent resumption of world trade flows. To add to the problem, in early March the Chinese central government imposed a ban on its exports of diesel fuel, to “ensure energy security” amid Western sanctions on Russia. Add to that the recent Biden administration ban on imports of all Russian oil and gas, which in 2021 included an estimated 20% of all Russian heavy oil exports. At the same time the EU in its ever-ideological wisdom, is finalizing a ban on imports of Russian coal with bans on Russian crude oil, diesel fuel and gas reportedly  to follow.

On April 4 average price per liter of diesel in Germany was €2.10. On December 27, 2021 it was €1.50, a rise of 40% in weeks. Following the unprecedented USA and EU sanctions against Russia following the Ukraine military campaign after February 24, more and more Western oil companies and oil traders are refusing to handle Russian crude oil or diesel fuel for fear of reprisals. This is certain to escalate so long as fighting in Ukraine continues.

The CEO of the Rotterdam-based Vitol, the world’s largest independent energy trading company, warned on March 27 that rationing of diesel fuel in the coming months globally was increasingly likely. He noted, “Europe imports about half of its diesel from Russia and about half of its diesel from the Middle East. That systemic shortfall of diesel is there.”

On April 7, David McWilliams, a leading Irish economist formerly with the Irish national bank, sounded an alarming note. “Not only is oil going up, diesel is going up and there’s a real threat diesel will run out in Western Europe over the course of the next two or three weeks, or maybe before that… We import a significant amount of our diesel, it comes from two refineries in the UK where it’s first processed. Those refineries do not have any crude at the moment. So we are basically running the economy on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour basis.” He added: ‘We have not just an oil crisis, we have an energy crisis the likes of which we haven’t seen in 50 years.” According to him the reason diesel stocks are so low is that the EU countries found it far cheaper to outsource oil and diesel to Russia with its huge supply.

The situation in the USA is not better. For political reasons the true state of the diesel fuel crisis is reportedly being downplayed by the Biden administration and the EU. Inflation is already at 40 year highs in the US. What the unfolding global diesel fuel crisis will mean, barring a major turnaround, is a dramatic impact on all forms of truck and auto transportation, farming, mining and the like. It will spell catastrophe for an already failing world economy. Yet governments like the German “Ampel” (traffic light) coalition, with their insane Zero Carbon agenda, and their plans to phase out oil, coal and gas, or the Biden cabal, privately see the exploding energy prices as further argument to abandon hydrocarbons like oil for unreliable, costly wind and solar. The real industrial interconnected global economy is not like a game of lego toys. It is highly complex and finely tuned.That fine tuning is being systematically destroyed, and all evidence is that it is deliberate. Welcome to the Davos Great Reset eugenics agenda.

April 11, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , , , | Leave a comment

Twitter is questioned over Hunter Biden laptop story censorship

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | April 11, 2022

In October 2020, just before the election, the New York Post published a story about Hunter Biden’s potentially corrupt dealings when his father, Joe Biden, was vice president. The story was based on damning emails obtained from a laptop Hunter left at a repair shop in Delaware.

Twitter censored the story over the “origins of the material” and suspended the New York Post’s account for two weeks. The online platforms also prevented users from sharing the story.

A few weeks ago, The New York Times confirmed the authenticity of what the New York Post called the “laptop from hell.”

Now, Republican members of the House Election Integrity Caucus, led by Rep. Claudia Tenney, in a letter addressed to Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, are asking for answers about the censorship of the story.

“Big Tech oligarchs have grown far too powerful, censoring free speech that challenges their preferred narrative and their handpicked politicians,” Tenney told FOX Business. “In 2020, this reached a new low.”

“Twitter’s actions to silence the New York Post and others undoubtedly swayed the outcome of the presidential election. The free flow of information is key to a healthy democracy and to free and fair elections. Congress must be unequivocal in its response and hold Big Tech accountable.”

The Republicans want Twitter to “provide answers to the American people.” They also want Congress to “break up big tech, take an axe to Section 230, and ensure Silicon Valley elites can no longer interfere in our elections.”

They argue that the laptop contained damning emails that could have worked in President Trump’s favor.

“The laptop reportedly contained damning emails from Hunter Biden, showing how he exploited his connections to his then-vice president father to further his own career interests, leveraged his connections for massive paychecks from foreign entities, and much more,” the lawmakers wrote.

“Twitter then suspended the New York Post’s account for more than two weeks and blocked users from sharing the article because of what it called concerns about the ‘origins of the material.”

They added that the suspension prevented people from “reading a news article that could have had serious consequences for the presidential election.”

The New York Times confirming the authenticity of the laptop has “renewed concern over Twitter’s interference in a presidential election,” according to the lawmakers.

In the letter, the legislators demand answers to several questions from Agrawal, including who “made the decision to censor the New York Post’s story on Hunter Biden’s ‘laptop from hell.’” They also want to know if Twitter collaborated “with any individuals directly or indirectly involved with the Biden campaign” when it censored the story.

April 11, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

CIA Admits Feeding Americans False Info About Ukraine

By Ron Paul | April 11, 2022

Late last year, a Gallup poll showed that Americans’ trust in the mainstream media has fallen to its second lowest level on record. Only seven percent of Americans responded that they have a “great deal” of trust in the media.

That loss of trust has been well-earned by the mainstream media, and it explains the massive growth of independent media and alternative voices on social media. The response to the rise of independent media voices has been a rush to “cancel” any voice outside the accepted mainstream narrative.

Citizens of the Soviet Union would read manipulated media like Pravda not because the regime reported facts, but because truth was hidden between the lines of what was reported and what was not reported. That seems to be where we are in the US today.

Last week an extraordinary article appeared in, of all places, NBC News, reporting that the US intelligence community is knowingly feeding information it does not believe accurate to the US mainstream media for the American audience to consume.

In other words, the article reports that the US “deep state” admits to being actively engaged in lying to the American people in the hopes that it can manipulate public opinion.

According to the NBC News article, “multiple US officials acknowledged that the US has used information as a weapon even when confidence in the accuracy of the information wasn’t high. Sometimes it has used low-confidence intelligence for deterrent effect…”

Readers will recall the shocking headlines that Russia was prepared to use chemical weapons in Ukraine, that China would be providing military equipment to Russia, that Russian President Putin was being fed misinformation by his advisors, and more.

All of these were churned out by the CIA to be repeated in the American media even though they were known to be false. It was all about, as one intelligence officer said in the article, “trying to get inside Putin’s head.”

That may have been the goal, but what the CIA actually did was get inside America’s head with false information meant to shape public perception of the conflict. They lied to propagandize us in favor of the Biden Administration’s narrative.

Those pushing the “Russiagate” hoax through the Trump years claimed that the goal of “Russian disinformation” was to undermine Americans’ trust in our government, media, and other institutions. Isn’t it ironic that the CIA itself has done more than the Russians to undermine Americans’ faith in the media by feeding false stories to establish a particular narrative among the American people?

After the Bay of Pigs disaster, President Kennedy has been quoted as wanting “to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” That didn’t work out too well for him. As Senate Majority Chuck Schumer famously told Rachel Maddow in 2020, responding to the-President Trump’s criticism of the CIA, “let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

As more information about the activities of the US Intelligence Community in trying to bring down Trump come out, it appears that, for once, Schumer was right.

It’s time to revisit President Kennedy’s post-Bay of Pigs wish. The CIA using lies to propagandize the American people toward war with Russia is just one of thousands of reasons to scatter a million pieces of that agency to the wind.

Copyright © 2022 by RonPaul Institute.

April 11, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

SAS and Delta Force part of “secret war”: French intelligence source

Samizdat | April 11, 2022

Elite special forces from the UK and the US have been present in Ukraine since the beginning of hostilities with Russia in late February, a source in the French intelligence community reportedly told a Le Figaro reporter, last week.

The claim was reported by the newspaper’s senior international correspondent Georges Malbrunot on Saturday, the day when British Prime Minister Boris Johnson made his surprise visit to Kiev. The British leader was reportedly surrounded by guards from the elite SAS force, though this claim was not officially confirmed.

SAS units “have been present in Ukraine since the beginning of the war, as did [sic] the American Deltas,” Malbrunot tweeted citing a French intelligence source. He added that according to the source Russia was well aware of the “secret war” waged against its troops by foreign commandos. Le Figaro included his report in their updates on Ukraine.

The UK and the US have been among the most active military supporters of Kiev. Johnson reportedly personally urged his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky to keep on fighting against Russia and not settle for peace until better terms are offered.

Western pro-fighting consensus was apparently confirmed last week by EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, who said on Saturday that the “war will be won on the battlefield” as he too was visiting Kiev.

British media earlier reported that dozens of “retired” SAS soldiers had gone or planned to go to Ukraine to contribute their expertise in reconnaissance and anti-tank warfare to Kiev’s cause. Their services were allegedly paid for by “a country in Europe, still to be named, via a private military company” rather than by the British government, according to the UK tabloid the Daily Mirror.

The Russian military reported action against what it described as “mercenaries” fighting for Ukraine on several occasions. One of the recent instances was on Saturday, just as Johnson and Borell were in Kiev.

The Russian defense ministry said Kiev attempted to use a civilian ship in its latest failed attempt to evacuate high-value personnel from the port city of Mariupol, which saw some of the most intensive fighting during the conflict. The individuals intended for evacuation were identified as leaders of the ultranationalist Azov battalion and foreign mercenaries. There are unconfirmed reports that hundreds of foreign nationals could be blocked in Mariupol along with several thousand Azov troops.

The US and the UK have publicly stated they had no plans to involve their troops in the fighting in Ukraine. Both are major suppliers of arms to Kiev and were training soldiers in Ukraine before the Russian offensive. The experts were reported pulled out of the country in the run-up to the hostilities.

Britain’s Defence Ministry banned active service members from traveling to Ukraine in early March, saying that violating the rule could result in prosecution. Kiev called on volunteers abroad to join the ranks of its newly-created “foreign legion” after the Russian attack.

April 11, 2022 Posted by | Deception | , , | Leave a comment

Asian fault lines of Biden’s war on Russia

BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | APRIL 11, 2022 

The tremors of the United States’ tensions with Russia playing out in Europe are being felt in different ways already in Asia. The hypothesis of Ukraine being in Europe and the conflict being all about European security is delusional.

From Kazakhstan to Myanmar, from Solomon Islands to the Kuril Islands, from North Korea to Cambodia, from China to India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, the fault lines are appearing.

To be sure, extra-regional powers had a hand in the failed colour revolution recently to overthrow the established government in Kazakhstan, a hotly contested geopolitical landmass two-thirds the size of India, bordering both China and Russia, Washington’s sworn adversaries. Thanks to swift Russian intervention, supported by China, a regime change was averted. 

Equally, the Anglo-American project to embroil Myanmar, bordering China, in an armed insurgency has floundered for want of a sanctuary in India’s northeastern region and due to the perceived congruence of interests among the surrounding countries in Myanmar’s stability. 

In comparison, the North Korean fault line has aggravated. North Korea moves on its own timetable and has probably decided that the Ukraine crisis offers useful cover while it ramps up its testing program. Pyongyang explicitly supports Russia’s special operation in Ukraine, commenting that “the basic cause of the Ukraine incident lies in the high-handedness and arbitrariness of the United States, which has ignored Russia’s legitimate calls for security guarantees and only sought a global hegemony and military dominance while clinging to its sanctions campaigns.” 

North Korea’s objective is to enhance its security and leverage by increasing the quality and quantity of its deterrent capabilities and strengthening its bargaining position.  

On another plane, the Ukraine crisis injected a new urgency into the US efforts to cultivate new Asian partners. But Washington has run into headwinds and had to indefinitely postpone a special summit with the ten member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) that was initially scheduled for end-March. No new date has been proposed, although the US had hyped up the summit as “a top priority.” 

Showing some ire, Washington has since sanctioned Cambodia, currently the ASEAN Chair. Clearly, the southeast Asian countries are chary of taking sides between the US and China or of voicing criticism against Russia.

Perhaps, the most direct fallout of the Ukraine crisis in Asia so far is the sharp deterioration in Japan’s ties with Russia. It is an unwarranted development insofar as Tokyo simply did a cut and paste job, copying all the US sanctions against Russia (including against President Putin). Prime Minister Kishida wantonly destroyed what his predecessor Shinzo Abe had carefully cultivated as a cordial, friendly relationship. 

Japan now openly refers to Russian “occupation” of the Kuril Islands — something it hasn’t been doing in the past. Moscow retaliated by designating Japan as an “unfriendly” country. Yet, analysts were estimating until recently that Russia and Japan had congruent interests in blocking China’s Arctic ambitions and were, therefore, moving toward solving their dispute over the Kurils.

Suffice to say, Kishida’s motivations in an abrupt turnaround to make Kurils a potential flashpoint in relations with Russia are, to say the least, to be traced to the broader US strategy to isolate Russia.

Meanwhile, a contrarian development has also appeared in China’s challenge to the US’ Island Chain strategy in the Western Pacific by negotiating a new security deal with Solomon Islands. This game-changing development may have extensive consequences and is dangerously interwoven with the Taiwan issue. Biden is reportedly dispatching a top White House official to Solomon Islands to scuttle the deal with China. 

The Biden administration is now doubling down on India to roll back its ties with Russia as well. That becomes a fault line in the US-Indian strategic partnership. What must be particularly galling for Washington is the likelihood of India pursuing its trade and economic cooperation with Russia in local currencies. Indeed, China and India have taken a somewhat similar stance on the Ukraine crisis.  

Given the size of the Chinese economy and the high potential of growth for the Indian economy, their inclination to bypass the dollar would be a trend-setter for other countries. Russia, hit by Western sanctions, has called on the BRICS group of emerging economies to extend the use of national currencies and integrate payment systems.

Suffice to say, the “weaponised dollar” and the West’s abrasive move to freeze Russia’s reserves sends a chill down the spine of most developing countries. Nepal caved in to ratify the Millennium Challenge Corporation agreement following threat by a middle ranking US official! 

There is no conceivable reason why the NATO should become the provider of security for the Asian region. That is why Afghanistan’s future is of crucial importance. Without doubt, the regime change in Pakistan is partly at least related to Afghanistan. The Russian Foreign Ministry has disclosed certain details of the US interference in Pakistan’s internal affairs and its pressure on former Prime Minister Imran Khan. 

But time will show how realistic are Washington’s  expectations of inducting Pakistan into the US orbit and making it a surrogate to leverage the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Russia and China are making sure that the door remains closed to NATO’s return to Afghanistan. They have undercut Washington’s recent efforts to co-opt the Taliban leadership in Kabul. (See my blog US pips regional states at race for Kabul.) 

The message out of the recent Foreign Ministers’ Meeting on the Afghan Issue Among the Neighbouring Countries of Afghanistan in Tunxi, China, is that in that country’s transition from chaos to order, the regional states hope to undertake a lead role. Thus, the regional states have incrementally marked their distance from the West’s exceptionalism and are instead adopting a persuasive track through constructive engagement. The joint statement issued at Tunxi reflects this new thinking. 

The developments over Afghanistan provide a signpost that any attempt at imposing Western dominance over Asia will be resisted by the regional states. Most Asian countries have had bitter experiences with colonialism in their history. (See my blog India’s dilemma over West vs. Russia) 

Although the American analysts underplay it, the fact remains that the conflict in Ukraine is bound to impact the “Asian Century” very significantly. The US is determined to transform NATO as the global security organisation that will act beyond the purview of the United Nations to enforce the West’s “rules-based order.” 

The West’s desperate push to weaken Russia and tilt the global strategic balance in the US’ favour aims to clear the pathway leading to a unipolar world order in the 21st century. In a recent interview, Hal Brands, Henry Kissinger distinguished professor of global affairs at Johns Hopkins, put across the US strategy behind the war in Ukraine as very logical: 

“Well, there’s long been a debate in the United States over whether we should prioritise competing with Russia or China or treat them as co-equals. And that debate has flared up again in the context of this war. I think what the war indicates, though, is that the best way of putting pressure on China, which is the more dangerous and the more powerful of the two rivals, is actually to ensure that Russia is defeated, that it does not achieve its objectives in this war, because that will result in a weaker Russia, one that is less capable of putting pressure on the United States and its allies in Europe and thus less useful as a strategic partner for Beijing.

“The United States simply can’t avoid the reality that it has to contain both Russia and China simultaneously.” 

April 11, 2022 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

How Biden’s Huge Strategic Oil Release Could Backfire

By Irina Slav | Oilprice.com | April 3, 2022

This week, the Biden administration revealed that it will release as much as 180 million barrels of crude oil in a bid to calm oil prices, which have remained above $100 per barrel for an extended period of time. The International Energy Agency, meanwhile, is coordinating a smaller but international reserve release of some 60 million barrels and has called an emergency meeting to discuss how exactly to go about it.

It remains unclear whether part of the 180 SPR release in the United States will be a completely separate endeavor or if some of these barrels will be part of the IEA release. Earlier this year, the U.S. had agreed to release 30 million barrels as part of the IEA push. What is clear is that the success of these releases in calming down oil prices is quite unlikely.

The United States last year announced the release of 50 million barrels in an effort to bring down prices t the pump, which were eroding Americans’ purchasing power and weighing on the President’s approval ratings.

This pressured prices for a few days before they rebounded, driven by continued discipline among U.S. producers, equal discipline in OPEC+, and a relentless increase in demand for the commodity.

Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and the U.S. banned imports of Russian crude and fuels. It also sanctioned the country’s financial system heavily, making paying for Russian crude and fuels too much of a headache for the dollar-based international industry. Prices soared again before retreating some, but remain firmly in three-digit territory.

As of mid-March, the Department of Energy said, some 30 million barrels of crude from the strategic petroleum reserve had been sold or leased. That’s more than half of the 50 million barrels announced in November, and it appears to have had zero effect on price movements.

But the new reserve release is a lot bigger, so it should make a difference, shouldn’t it? It amounts to some 1 million bpd over several months, per reports about White House plans in this respect. Unfortunately, but importantly, oil’s fundamentals have not changed much since November.

U.S. shale oil producers, the companies that a few years ago prompted talk among analysts that OPEC was becoming increasingly irrelevant, have rearranged their priorities. They no longer strive for growth at all costs. Now they strive for happy shareholders.

This has given more opportunities to smaller independent drillers with no shareholders to keep happy. Yet these have also run into challenges, mainly in the form of insufficient funding because the energy transition has had banks worrying about their reputations and their own shareholders.

Pandemic-related supply disruptions have also affected the U.S. oil industry’s ability to expand output. Frac sand, cement, and equipment are among the things that have been reported to be in short supply in the shale patch. Now, there’s a shortage of steel tubing, too.

Meanwhile, OPEC is doing business as usual, sticking to its commitment to add some 400,000 bpd to oil markets every month until its combined output recovers to pre-pandemic levels. Just this week, the cartel approved another monthly addition of 432,000 bpd to its combined output despite increasingly desperate calls from the U.S. and the IEA for more barrels.

OPEC has been demonstrating increasingly bluntly that its interests and the interests of some of its biggest clients may not be in alignment right now. It has refused to openly condemn Russia for its actions in Ukraine and has not joined the Western sanction push.

On the contrary, OPEC is gladly doing business with Russia. And Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the two OPEC members that actually have the capacity to boost production beyond their quotas, have deemed it unwise to undermine their partnership with Russia by acquiescing to the West’s request for more oil.

In this environment, releasing whatever number of barrels from strategic reserves could only provide a very short relief at the pump. Then, it may make matters even worse. As one oil market commentator on Twitter said about the SPR release news, the White House will be selling these barrels at $100 and then may have to buy them at $150.

Indeed, one thing that tends to get overlooked during turbulent times is that the strategic petroleum reserve of any country needs to be replenished. It’s not called strategic for laughs. And a 180-million-barrel reserve release will be quite a draw on the U.S. SPR, which currently stands at over 580 million barrels. If oil’s fundamentals remain the same, prices will not be lower when the time to replenish the SPR comes.

This seems the most likely development. The EU, the UK, and the United States have stated sanctions against Russia will not be lifted even if Moscow strikes a peace deal with the Ukraine government. This means Russian oil will continue to be hard to come by for those dealing in dollars or euros.

According to the IEA, the shortfall could be 3 million barrels daily, to be felt this quarter. OPEC+ is not straying from its course. In some good news, at least, U.S. oil production rose last week for the first time in more than two months, by a modest 100,000 bpd.

April 11, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , , | Leave a comment

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