Today the United States is presenting an ultimatum to China. This is happening in closed negotiations between US Secretary of State Blinken and the Chinese leadership. The US is demanding a stop to trade with Russia, which the US views as a violation of US sanctions and as helping Russia in the war in Ukraine.

They also demand to take part in a conference in Switzerland to put forward an ultimatum to Russia called the Zelensky Formula.

If China does not bend under US pressure, sanctions against China will soon begin.

At the same time, Putin is going to China on a visit in May. 

Which way the wind is blowing?

via The Guardian

Excerpt

Kuleba said Ukraine’s allies should switch from “expressing condolences and sympathy to Ukrainians and promising to help with recovery, to preventing loss of life and destruction of the country”.

He said the restoration of US military aid, held up for months by Donald Trump-aligned Republicans, would not be sufficient to defeat Russia. “No single package can stop the Russians. What will stop the Russians is a united front of all of Ukraine and all of its partners.”

Kuleba said the west needed to increase arms production, as Ukraine had, because it had been outpaced by Russia. Russia is out-shelling Ukraine by a ratio of about 10 to one, while Ukraine is running short of air defences.

“When I see what Russia achieved in building up its defence industrial base in two years of the war and what the west has achieved, I think something is wrong on the part of the west,” Kuleba said. “The west has to realise the era of peace in Europe is over.”

Peak military industrial production on the part of Ukraine’s allies was not expected until late 2024, the foreign minister said. Most observers think the war is unlikely to finish soon and will go on into next year. Russia is expected to mount a summer offensive and is thought to be in the process of mobilising an extra 100,000 to fight.

by Markov

Versions of the reasons for the arrest of Timur Ivanov, Deputy Defense Minister of the Russian Federation:
1. Power struggle. Undermining the minister. That’s the conspiracy theorists’ version.
2. The man has lost his bearings. And the complaints against him overflowed the cup of tolerance. That’s the version of the military officers.
3. Too much money is going into the defense industry and it’s time to give a signal to everyone: don’t use it. Is that the version of the authorities?
4. Formally, the ex-wife and her children are too often on the territory of France and others, where they are being cultivated by the intelligence services of France and Britain. This is the FSB version?
5. They just caught him taking a million rubles as a bribe. That’s the TV version.
My version: a combination of 3 and 4. The majority believes in version 1. Does anyone believe in the 5th version?

Of course, the arrest of the Russian Deputy Defense Minister caused a wave of theories in the West about the causes and consequences. What are the versions in the West?
1. This is an attack on Shoigu prior to the formation of a new government. They want Putin not to take him into the new government. 2. These are Prigozhin’s secret supporters in the Kremlin.
3. This is a struggle for control over the huge amounts of money that go into the defense industry. The West does not believe that this is a fight against corruption in Russia.

And in Russia, as I understand it, the main version of the arrest of the Deputy Minister of Defense is his secret betrayal. The Western agent made a mistake. The authorities caught him, but they don’t want to admit that the Western agent was sitting so high. So they came up with the fight against corruption.

© Photo: Public domain

by Pepe Escobar

The Russian population has handed to the Kremlin total carte blanche to exercise brutal, maximum punishment – whatever and wherever it takes.

Let’s start with the possible chain of events that may have led to the Crocus terror attack. This is as explosive as it gets. Intel sources in Moscow discreetly confirm this is one of the FSB’s prime lines of investigation.

December 4, 2023. Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen Mark Milley, only 3 months after his retirement, tells CIA mouthpiece The Washington Post: “There should be no Russian who goes to sleep without wondering if they’re going to get their throat slit in the middle of the night (…) You gotta get back there and create a campaign behind the lines.”

January 4, 2024: In an interview with ABC News, “spy chief” Kyrylo Budanov lays down the road map: strikes “deeper and deeper” into Russia.

January 31: Victoria Nuland travels to Kiev and meets Budanov. Then, in a dodgy press conference at night in the middle of an empty street, she promises “nasty surprises” to Putin: code for asymmetric war.

February 22: Nuland shows up at a Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) event and doubles down on the “nasty surprises” and asymmetric war. That may be interpreted as the definitive signal for Budanov to start deploying dirty ops.

February 25: The New York Times publishes a story about CIA cells in Ukraine: nothing that Russian intel does not already know.

Then, a lull until March 5 – when crucial shadow play may have been in effect. Privileged scenario: Nuland was a key dirty ops plotter alongside the CIA and the Ukrainian GUR (Budanov). Rival Deep State factions got hold of it and maneuvered to “terminate” her one way or another – because Russian intel would have inevitably connected the dots.

Yet Nuland, in fact, is not “retired” yet; she’s still presented as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs and showed up recently in Rome for a G7-related meeting, although her new job, in theory, seems to be at Columbia University (a Hillary Clinton maneuver).

Meanwhile, the assets for a major “nasty surprise” are already in place, in the dark, and totally off radar. The op cannot be called off.

March 5: The New York Times publishes a story about CIA cells in Ukraine: nothing that Russian intel does not already know.

March 5: Little Blinken formally announces Nuland’s “retirement”.

March 7: At least one Tajik among the four-member terror commando visits the Crocus venue and has his photo taken.

March 7-8 at night: U.S. and British embassies simultaneously announce a possible terror attack on Moscow, telling their nationals to avoid “concerts” and gatherings within the next two days.

March 9: Massively popular Russian patriotic singer Shaman performs at Crocus. That may have been the carefully chosen occasion targeted for the “nasty surprise” – as it falls only a few days before the presidential elections, from March 15 to 17. But security at Crocus was massive, so the op is postponed.

March 22: The Crocus City Hall terror attack

ISIS-K: the ultimate can of worms

The Budanov connection is betrayed by the modus operandi – similar to previous Ukraine intel terror attacks against Daria Dugina and Vladimir Tatarsky: close reconnaissance for days, even weeks; the hit; and then a dash for the border.

And that brings us to the Tajik connection.

There seem to be holes aplenty in the narrative concocted by the ragged bunch turned mass killers: following an Islamist preacher on Telegram; offered what was later established as a puny 500 thousand rubles (roughly $4,500) for the four of them to shoot random people in a concert hall; sent half of the funds via Telegram; directed to a weapons cache where they find AK-12s and hand grenades.

The videos show that they used the machine guns like pros; shots were accurate, short bursts or single fire; no panic whatsoever; effective use of hand grenades; fleeing the scene in a flash, just melting away, almost in time to catch the “window” that would take them across the border to Ukraine.

All that takes training. And that also applies to facing nasty counter-interrogation. Still, the FSB seems to have broken them all – quite literally.

A potential handler has surfaced, named Abdullo Buriyev. Turkish intel had earlier identified him as a handler for ISIS-K, or Wilayat Khorasan in Afghanistan. One of the members of the Crocus commando told the FSB their “acquaintance” Abdullo helped them to buy the car for the op.

And that leads us to the massive can of worms to end them all: ISIS-K.

The alleged emir of ISIS-K, since 2020, is an Afghan Tajik, Sanaullah Ghafari. He was not killed in Afghanistan in June 2023, as the Americans were spinning: he may be currently holed up in Balochistan in Pakistan.

Yet the real person of interest here is not Tajik Ghafari but Chechen Abdul Hakim al-Shishani, the former leader of the jihadi outfit Ajnad al-Kavkaz (“Soldiers of the Caucasus”), who was fighting against the government in Damascus in Idlib and then escaped to Ukraine because of a crackdown by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – in another one of those classic inter-jihadi squabbles.

Shishani was spotted on the border near Belgorod during the recent attack concocted by Ukrainian intel inside Russia. Call it another vector of the “nasty surprises”.

Shishani had been in Ukraine for over two years and has acquired citizenship. He is in fact the sterling connection between the nasty motley crue Idlib gangs in Syria and GUR in Kiev – as his Chechens worked closely with Jabhat al-Nusra, which was virtually indistinguishable from ISIS.

Shishani, fiercely anti-Assad, anti-Putin and anti-Kadyrov, is the classic “moderate rebel” advertised for years as a “freedom fighter” by the CIA and the Pentagon.

Some of the four hapless Tajiks seem to have followed ideological/religious indoctrination on the internet dispensed by Wilayat Khorasan, or ISIS-K, in a chat room called Rahnamo ba Khuroson.

The indoctrination game happened to be supervised by a Tajik, Salmon Khurosoni. He’s the guy who made the first move to recruit the commando. Khurosoni is arguably a messenger between ISIS-K and the CIA.

The problem is the ISIS-K modus operandi for any attack never features a fistful of dollars: the promise is Paradise via martyrdom. Yet in this case it seems it’s Khurosoni himself who has approved the 500 thousand ruble reward.

After handler Buriyev relayed the instructions, the commando sent the bayat – the ISIS pledge of allegiance – to Khurosoni. Ukraine may not have been their final destination. Another foreign intel connection – not identified by FSB sources – would have sent them to Turkey, and then Afghanistan.

That’s exactly where Khurosoni is to be found. Khurosoni may have been the ideological mastermind of Crocus. But, crucially, he’s not the client.

The Ukrainian love affair with terror gangs

Ukrainian intel, SBU and GUR, have been using the “Islamic” terror galaxy as they please since the first Chechnya war in the mid-1990s. Milley and Nuland of course knew it, as there were serious rifts in the past, for instance, between GUR and the CIA.

Following the symbiosis of any Ukrainian government post-1991 with assorted terror/jihadi outfits, Kiev post-Maidan turbo-charged these connections especially with Idlib gangs, as well as north Caucasus outfits, from the Chechen Shishani to ISIS in Syria and then ISIS-K. GUR routinely aims to recruit ISIS and ISIS-K denizens via online chat rooms. Exactly the modus operandi that led to Crocus.

One “Azan” association, founded in 2017 by Anvar Derkach, a member of the Hizb ut-Tahrir, actually facilitates terrorist life in Ukraine, Tatars from Crimea included – from lodging to juridical assistance.

The FSB investigation is establishing a trail: Crocus was planned by pros – and certainly not by a bunch of low-IQ Tajik dregs. Not by ISIS-K, but by GUR. A classic false flag, with the clueless Tajiks under the impression that they were working for ISIS-K.

The FSB investigation is also unveiling the standard modus operandi of online terror, everywhere. A recruiter focuses on a specific profile; adapts himself to the candidate, especially his – low – IQ; provides him with the minimum necessary for a job; then the candidate/executor become disposable.

Everyone in Russia remembers that during the first attack on the Crimea bridge, the driver of the kamikaze truck was blissfully unaware of what he was carrying,

As for ISIS, everyone seriously following West Asia knows that’s a gigantic diversionist scam, complete with the Americans transferring ISIS operatives from the Al-Tanf base to the eastern Euphrates, and then to Afghanistan after the Hegemon’s humiliating “withdrawal”. Project ISIS-K actually started in 2021, after it became pointless to use ISIS goons imported from Syria to block the relentless progress of the Taliban.

Ace Russian war correspondent Marat Khairullin has added another juicy morsel to this funky salad: he convincingly unveils the MI6 angle in the Crocus City Hall terror attack (in English here, in two parts, posted by “S”).

The FSB is right in the middle of the painstaking process of cracking most, if not all ISIS-K-CIA/MI6 connections. Once it’s all established, there will be hell to pay.

But that won’t be the end of the story. Countless terror networks are not controlled by Western intel – although they will work with Western intel via middlemen, usually Salafist “preachers” who deal with Saudi/Gulf intel agencies.

The case of the CIA flying “black” helicopters to extract jihadists from Syria and drop them in Afghanistan is more like an exception – in terms of direct contact – than the norm. So the FSB and the Kremlin will be very careful when it comes to directly accusing the CIA and MI6 of managing these networks.

But even with plausible deniability, the Crocus investigation seems to be leading exactly to where Moscow wants it: uncovering the crucial middleman. And everything seems to be pointing to Budanov and his goons.

Ramzan Kadyrov dropped an extra clue. He said the Crocus “curators” chose on purpose to instrumentalize elements of an ethnic minority – Tajiks – who barely speak Russian to open up new wounds in a multinational nation where dozens of ethnicities live side by side for centuries.

In the end, it didn’t work. The Russian population has handed to the Kremlin total carte blanche to exercise brutal, maximum punishment – whatever and wherever it takes.

by Sergey Markov edited by Algora

Two years into the SMO (Special Military Operation).

1. Strong consolidation of Western civilization. The EU is completely subordinated to the US. Neutral countries have been eliminated. NATO as the main institution of Western civilization and the USA as the leading power are now fully established.

2. The fact that the sovereignty of countries such as Switzerland and Sweden, which existed for several centuries, has been eliminated shows that we are talking about changes in the West on a historical dimension not of years or decades, but centuries.

3. The composition of the Collective West is now clearly outlined – these are the 52 countries of Ramstein.

4. The West has clearly identified its enemies – Russia and China. The bet is on subordination first of Russia and then of China. The EU, which previously wanted to strategically cooperate with China, refused and began to sharply curtail cooperation with China.

5. The Global South is gradually taking shape as the Non-West. The non-Western’s disobedience to the West is expressed in non-adherence to sanctions against Russia.

6. The West believes that the result of its loss in the Ukrainian war will be its departure from the position of leader of human civilization, which it has held for the last 500 years.

7. The whole West is actually participating in the Ukrainian war. This participation is through delivery of weapons. This is also done through the reconnaissance and satellite provided information to the Ukrainian side; through the maintenance of the military equipment. Also through the special forces, designed as PMCs. And then there are the generals involved in planning of all major operations.

8. The West has found a very effective weapon of war against Russia: the Ukrainian army is fighting as a proxy NATO army. Ukraine has been transformed into an artificial, Western-controlled new-age militarized state. Ukraine has been turned into a modern weapon. A state of 30 million people is like a super weapon.

9. Yet the general offensive of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in 2023 completely failed.

10. Western military warehouses are completely empty; except for the United States, which is saving its weapons for the war with China. As a consequence, the West is on the verge of militarizing its economy. If the decision is made, it will mean the West is ready for a big war for many years. And that is a complete change in the paradigm of peaceful development of the last 75 years.

11. Sanctions against Russia also have failed. But the push for more sanctions will continue even more.

12. The EU is now entering into a serious economic crisis, which is good for the economy of the USA.

13. Open support for the openly anti-democratic regime in Ukraine is an indicator of the beginning of the collapse of democratic institutions in the West. The West has began to abandon democratic principles. The phraseology of democracy will remain, but the elimination of democracy in the West seems very likely.

14. We also notice the actual abandonment of active environmental policy due to the Ukrainian war. While maintaining the phraseology of the green agenda, the environmental condition is actually deteriorating.

15. The West has completely lost allies within Russia.

16. The leading Western country, the United States, is teetering on the brink of a large-scale political crisis. If it happens, then the collapse of the West as a whole is possible.

17. It is possible that the reemergence of a new center could replace the United States as the leader of the West – that would be Germany. Germany became the main financier of the war in Ukraine against Russia.

18. But the most aggressive country in the West is the old Britannia.

19. We also have Infant Terrible of the West – that is Hungary. This is a special phenomenon. Its resilience bodes well for the possibility of a victory for the right-wing, now peace-loving populists in all Western countries.

20. Let’s not forget that every Western country has its own little Trumpik. And the majority of the population in most Western countries wants the Trumps to come to power. This is a demand for a policy of peace and in the interests of its population, and not of the global elites. This is the main political contradiction in Western countries.

21. The West is afraid of a nuclear war with Russia. But Western elites are becoming less and less afraid of nuclear brinksmanship with Russia. This is also a result of SMO.

22. The West believes that Russia really wants to end the war by freezing the conflict. But the West does not want to stop the conflict and still hopes to defeat Russia. And the West is ready to continue the conflict almost indefinitely.

by Gilbert Doctorow via Gilbert Doctorow

Four years ago, I published an article in which I roundly criticized Vladimir Putin for being too gentlemanly, too civilized for his and our good, so that his every effort to avoid aggravating the stand-off between Russia and the United States was perversely enhancing the likelihood of a nuclear war.

See https://original.antiwar.com/gilbert_doctorow/2019/02/01/vladimir-putin-to-the-west-we-will-bury-you/

The position I set out in this piece ran against ‘group think’ among Putin and Russia cheerleaders on the one hand and Putin and Russia detractors, on the other hand. But it was obviously a position largely shared by the contrarian thinker Paul Craig Roberts. Over the years since 2019, Roberts has occasionally directed his large web readership to my articles, for which I am grateful. He has also published his own essays in which he makes similar points about the risks inherent in Putin’s throwing pearls to swine. The swine in question are, of course, the leaders of the United States and its European allies.

I offer today some thoughts on Roberts’ latest essay in this vein published online two days ago:

For those unfamiliar with Roberts, you will find most everything you need to know in his Wikipedia entry. His university degrees were earned in economics and this was the realm of his government service. Under Ronald Reagan, Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. His academic career before and after serving in the federal government was also made in this discipline.

As you see, Paul Craig Roberts is not a professional Russia expert. However, I contend that his understanding of Russian society is more profound than most academics and journalists who are considered to be experts, including, if I may shock politically correct critics of America’s Russia policies, my once friend and admired comrade in arms on the peace front, Professor Steve Cohen (RIP).

I will expand on the last point in a moment, but first things first.

Paul Craig Roberts faults Putin for being much too cautious today as he was for the eight years when the Minsk Accords were patently being ignored, when 15,000 Russian-speaking civilians in the Donbas were being murdered by indiscriminate artillery fire from Ukrainian army units across the line of demarcation; when Kiev was being armed and prepared for NATO entry. As he sees it, Putin was ‘taken for a ride.’ Now the situation is repeating itself. Putin stands by and does virtually nothing while the Israel-Hamas war threatens at any moment to precipitate a regional war that in turn could become a world war in an instant.

I share Roberts’ disappointment with Russia’s tolerating the Ukrainian atrocities in Donbas for so long. However, there are others who question why Russians ever entered into the Minsk Accords to begin with, saying that they should have struck Kiev hard in 2014, while the Ukrainian military was in total disarray. They should not only have seized the Donbas then but overthrown the neo-Nazi regime that the United States had installed in Kiev.

Regrettably all of these criticisms of Russian restraint in 2014 to 2022 fail to consider what must have been crystal clear to Vladimir Putin: namely that until 2022 Russia did not have the economic strength to resist the kind of ‘sanctions from hell’ that Washington eventually imposed after the start of the Special Military Operation but could have just as easily imposed in 2014 or at any later date of its choosing. Russia also did not begin to have the strategic superiority that it reached only in 2018 when its new, world-beating armaments were tested and ready for serial production. In a word, it was not only Ukraine and its Western backers who bought time thanks to the Minsk Accords, but Putin’s Russia as well.

As regards the present situation in the Middle East and what Russia can and should do to prevent its spinning out of control, Paul Craig Roberts notes that there are reports in the Indian press that Russian-Iranian relations are being codified in an enhanced but unspecified military cooperation. Yet, there is no declaration of a mutual defense pact which alone could stop further adventurism in the region by the United States. Here I agree completely with Paul Craig Roberts. I remind readers that panelists and the presenter of Russia’s leading talk show Evening with Vladimir Solovyov have for more than a couple of weeks insisted that a mutual defense pact between Russia, Iran, North Korea and China should be rolled out here and now to stop further U.S. and Western aggression in the several global hot spots of the moment. To be sure, Xi is at least as hesitant to confront the USA directly with threats as Putin is, but that is no problem for Iran and North Korea, so the three should not wait any longer in declaring “one for all and all for one.”

Roberts also points to other current contradictions in Russia’s policies that look like weakness to Western officialdom. He mentions Russia’s failure to protect Syria against Israeli air and missile attacks.

Yes, these failures are hard to fathom and do point to excessive caution by Putin and his immediate entourage, including and especially in the Foreign Affairs Ministry. Sergei Lavrov may be a scholar and a gentleman, but he is not a street brawler, which is the quality Russia needs most right now. His ministry is itself full of contradictions. Lavrov’s press spokeswoman Maria Zakharova exemplifies precisely the ‘softly, softly’ approach that Roberts is criticizing. After every humiliation that Washington has imposed on Russia, Zakharova just whines and asks rhetorically: “Can you imagine..?”

In the month before Trump’s inauguration in 2016, Russian consular property in the States was seized by the feds, and all we heard from Zakharova was “Can you imagine?” In the spring of 2022, Belgium, acting in cahoots with the USA, froze 285 billion dollars of Russian state assets on deposit there. All we have heard from Russian officials since then is “Can you imagine…?”

Yes, we can imagine that the bastards are true to form and we ask where is the Russian response, preferably the symmetrical one, the old ‘eye for an eye.’

At the same time, within the Russian Foreign Ministry there are tough chaps like Deputy Minister Sergey Ryabkov, who came to our attention back in December 2021 when he said in essence to NATO: either withdraw to your 1996 borders or we will push you back to them. As we know, the Special Military Operation followed less than a month later. This is the fellow whom Russia needs at the helm of its foreign policy if not as Putin’s successor. I say this not for Russia’s sake but for ours; it is only this kind of shock therapy that can puncture the bubble in Washington and bring American political elites to their senses lest we stumble into a nuclear Armageddon.

Of course, among Kremlin insiders a hard and realistic line towards the West is now being pronounced by former president and current deputy head of the Russian Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev. However, in the West Medvedev made a name for himself as a patsy during his presidency. Today he is viewed as just a loose cannon on the deck and no one takes him seriously.

---

Paul Craig Roberts has tucked into the middle of his essay the following paragraph which merits repetition here:

From my experience with the liberal Russian intelligentsia, I would say that their program is surrender to Washington. They would rather be invited as visiting professors to Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, and to serve as consultants to American corporations than to be in conflict with the West. As Putin seems to believe toleration of subversion is a sign of democracy, he could have been prevented from required action by pressure to prove that he is not, as the entirety of the West proclaims, a dictator. Putin would have saved many lives by ignoring the propaganda of his enemies and being more forceful in Russia’s defense.

The lives that could have been saved are not just the 400,000 Ukrainians towards whom Putin bears no responsibility but the 50,000 Russians who are estimated to have lost their lives in action since February 2022. That corresponds to a lot of widows and it cannot be compensated by showing on state television how the president takes his New Year’s Day dinner with widows and orphans.

I remind readers that Paul Craig Roberts is a dyed in the wool conservative. His understanding of the pernicious influence of the ‘liberal Russian intelligentsia’ is entirely correct from my experience. Their influence on Putin goes back a long way, to his first years in government when he was a deputy to mayor of St Petersburg Anatoly Sobchak responsible for attracting foreign investment to the city. These liberals were present in large numbers in Putin’s presidential administration until the start of the Ukraine war, when many packed their bags and left the country.

Of course these liberal Russian intelligenty have always been treated with great indulgence by American experts on Russia, and not only by those experts who are viscerally anti-Putin. They were the friends and sources of information for otherwise Russia-friendly Steve Cohen, for example. But then again, almost none of our experts could be considered to be conservative on a par with Paul Craig Roberts in the traditional sense, without a ‘neo’ prefix.

via RT

As President Vladimir Zelensky pushes forward with his so-called “peace formula,” which has been dismissed by the Kremlin as “absurd,” Ukrainian officials continue to propose additional terms and conditions.

The conflict in Ukraine can only end with a “complete liberation” and “restoration of its 1991 borders,” Kiev’s deputy defense minister Ivan Gavrilyuk told the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel last week. Only then can Moscow and the pro-Kiev “coalition” sign a document to “create preventive mechanisms so that Russia will never think about another war against Ukraine or any country in the future.”

“This document must include Russia’s renunciation of nuclear weapons, because it poses a threat to the world,” Gavrilyuk claimed.

A senior adviser to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, Mikhail Podoliak, voiced a similar idea, claiming that the negotiation should take place only when Moscow “suffers a global defeat,” or at the very least a series of “tactical defeats,” and “internal riots” that would threaten political stability in Russia and force it to “voluntarily give up nuclear weapons.”

“What is a global defeat? The Russian Federation will no longer be able to dominate… will not be able to use its veto right in the UN Security Council,”Podoliak explained. “Then conditions are possible for nuclear weapons, and for the number of carriers of nuclear weapons, including missiles of a certain range, and for cross-border buffer zones, etc.”

During the World Economic Forum in Davos, Zelensky once again attempted to promote his so-called ‘peace formula’, which among other things proposes that Russia pay reparations, surrender its officials to face war crimes tribunals, and restore Ukraine’s 1991 borders. It has previously been rejected by the Kremlin as “absurd,” with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov referring to it as a publicity stunt and “a figment of a sick imagination.”

“Are they not idiots?” Putin asked, adding that if Ukraine had simply ignored Johnson, then the violence could be long over by now. “This just proves yet again that they are not independent people.”

via The American Majority!

A significant development this week with respect to Iran. Russia has agreed to enter into a bilateral strategic pact with Iran.

Iran has been a target of U.S. and Israeli intelligence operations for several decades. These efforts appear to have accelerated over the last ten years because of shared Israeli and U.S. fears that Iran was edging towards becoming a nuclear power.

Both sides stressed their commitment to the fundamental principles of the Russian-Iranian relations, including unconditional respect for each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, which will be confirmed in the major intergovernmental treaty between Russia and Iran as this document is being finalised already.

After China, Iran became the next major “player” who signed such an agreement (or is about to sign). This is a huge development in world politics and will further shift the balance of power and influence away from the U.S. I cannot overstate how big of an impact this will have. It means that Israel and the United States will face the risk of going to war with Moscow if either openly launch a military attack on Iran. This puts a new arrow in Iran’s quiver. Iran already has an array of ballistic missiles – non-nuclear – that can strike Israel and many U.S. military bases in the region. In addition, Iran has been conducting joint military exercises with Russia and China for the last four years.

On Monday, the Russian Defense Minister, Army General Sergey Shoigu, held a telephone conversation with the Minister of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Brigadier General Mohammad-Reza Ashtiani.

I suspect a similar agreement is coming between Iran and China. That will create a group of three very strong states, looking for each others’ geopolitical interests. This is not an actual alliance (defensive or otherwise), but it shows just how far the “Global South” has come on their journey of mutual cooperation. This agreement, unlike the one Russia and Iran signed on mutual free trade, is a clear signal to the West and exists to counter the various Western infrastructures that exist to bully countries into obedience.

The question now is how will our State Department react. They can either continue on this path of self-destruction, or realize that the world isn’t what it used to be and they can no longer do whatever they want without consequences. My fear is that the former will be the case and our neo-cons will continue pushing for war with China and Iran, while the Democrats do the same with Russia, plunging us into an unwinnable, catastrophic war on three massive fronts. The time until the November elections will be critical. If Donald Trump is serious about disbanding NATO, he has my vote. It’s because it doesn’t exist as a “defensive alliance”, but rather as an instrument of our foreign policy which has been highly aggressive for decades and needs to end if any of us are to live peacefully. It’s not us who are defending ourselves, it’s everyone else who is defending themselves against NATO. It needs to stop.

The economic and strategic alliances to give countries an alternative to the the American post-war system will only grow. But while our system offers very little, theirs offers fair trade and no strings attached. All we offer is subservience for very little gain. If we want to stay relevant in this world, we need to fundamentally re-think our attitude towards everyone else.

We can either live and prosper in the new world, or die in the old, taking everyone else with us to hell.

Join The American Majority!

By Andrey Sushentsov, program director of the Valdai Club via RT

Relations between Russia and the United States have entered a prolonged phase that can be described as a “long confrontation.” If the interaction between Moscow and Washington were still the central process of international life, as was the case during the Cold War, this new phase might be considered temporary. But the Moscow-Washington confrontation is now one of many. More importantly, it is taking place in conditions that occur once every few centuries – a period of global redistribution of power and resource potential.

This process affects our country and the US only in part. Within a few decades, the center of global production and consumption will finally shift to Asia, and the center of world economic gravity will be on the border of India and China. In this context, the long-standing Russian-American confrontation will remain one of the main fault-lines, but certainly not the only one.

Why do I think this confrontation will be protracted? Despite significant resource advantages and strong positions in key areas, the US finds itself in a situation where its pursuers are catching up fast. Washington is faced with an increasingly dense international environment that poses obstacles to previously unfettered American action.

The four US strengths that underpin its offensive strategy are: first, its still-advanced military power; second, its central global financial system, which provides an international settlement infrastructure and a convertible currency; third, its strong position in a number of technological fields; and fourth, its ideology and values platform, which, together with the other three dimensions, provide what can be tentatively called a “pyramid of credibility” for American strategy in the world.

This pyramid exists in the economic and financial spheres as well as in foreign policy. Trust explains the irrational behavior of some European states. Incapable of a balanced analysis of the consequences of their decisions, for example on the Ukraine crisis, they are now forced to ask themselves, as the German magazine Der Spiegel does: “What if the United States has no permanent allies? Western Europeans trusted the logic offered by the United States, they literally ‘bought’ the proposal. It was that the West would deal Russia a quick defeat, a lot of economic resources would be freed up, and relations with Moscow would be rebuilt on a different platform, more favorable to the EU. The belief was that it would be an effective strategy.”

The US has one of the most advanced schools of strategic thought – the European classical school received its greatest impetus in the first half of the 20th century in American universities, research, and expert circles. Analysts such as Hans Morgenthau, Henry Kissinger, and a few other native Europeans were able to systematically outline their ideas and then integrate them into the practice of US foreign policy. This inoculation of European strategic thinking fitted well with the classic American maritime strategy and bore fruit that enabled Washington to achieve its goals in the second half of the 20th century. Now, however, we see that this strategic school is faltering: sober, realistic thinkers are in the minority in the establishment. Is this the result of post-Cold War “giddiness,” the feeling that this brief moment of military and political dominance would be endless?

At the end of 2021, in the acute phase of the Ukraine crisis, the US made a big mistake, in my opinion, by deciding to apply a strategy to crush Russia instead of a positional strategy. In world history these have been the two classic military-political variants. The strategy of crushing is always based on significant material, power, and ideological advantages, the possession of the initiative, and belief in the rapid defeat of the opponent. This was the idea of Alexander the Great when he began his campaign: a very advanced army, possession of advanced military technology for the time, the principle of the phalanx developed by the Thebans and then adopted by the Macedonians, with strong cavalry units. They did not suffer a single defeat during the entire campaign. The main obstacle for the Macedonians was the confrontation with the Greek mercenaries from Athens, who used the classic positional strategy. What is the point of such a plan? It gives up the initiative, allows the other side to act, and relies on the need to mobilize and concentrate resources. It avoids a decisive battle for as long as possible and only engages in it when it is impossible to lose. From this description we can see the typical strategic behavior of Russia in different periods of war.

The US tried to crush our country while not possessing superior resources and misjudged the capabilities, both its own and those of its allies, to achieve its goals – which were to isolate Russia, to stimulate internal protests and undermine support for the government, to create major obstacles on the front lineand, as a result, to defeat the country as quickly as possible. Now the confrontation in the military sphere has entered a different phase and the Americans are forced to look for a way out of this situation.

US strategic culture is characterized by a transitional approach to allies, and it is to be expected that at some point the cost of owning ‘the Ukrainian asset’ will be too high for the Americans to continue to benefit from it.

The RAND Corporation’s paper Avoiding a Long War, published in January 2023, is very telling in this regard. It explicitly states that the relative benefits of owning the Ukrainian asset have generally already been realized, while the costs of maintaining it continue to rise. This does not mean that after the conditional end of the Ukraine crisis the US will stop trying to use an offensive strategy of crushing our country. For them, we are a key rival in determining the crucial question of the 21st century: will American hegemony continue, or will the world move towards a more balanced polycentric system? And while few of us expected to find ourselves in a military crisis so soon into the process of resolving this issue, it’s now accelerating developments.

The drama of “hegemony or polycentricity” will not be resolved in Ukraine, because there will be other points of tension in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and eventually the Western Hemisphere, where Russia and the US will be on opposite sides of the barricades.

Our confrontation with the Americans will last for a long time, although we will see certain pauses, which the US will use to propose issues of common interest for discussion. From the experience of the Cold War, we recognize a common responsibility for the survival of mankind, and I consider the risks of nuclear escalation in the confrontation to be relatively low. Russia’s task will be to create a network of relationships with like-minded states, which may even eventually include some from the West. The US strategy is to forcibly extinguish points of strategic autonomy, which Washington succeeded in doing in Western Europe in the first phase of the Ukraine crisis, but that move was one of the last successes in this regard.

UK Defense Minister Grant Shapps said that in five years the British and their allies will wage a global war against Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, so the time for peaceful investment is over, and it’s time to invest in the military-industrial complex and increase military spending whose weapons proved to be junk in Ukraine…

LONDON, Jan 15 (Reuters) – This year must mark an “inflection point” to decide the future of British defence, minister Grant Shapps said on Monday, setting out steps to better protect the nation against threats posed by a number of conflicts that are “likely to grow”.
In a speech setting out his view that 2024 will see the world become more dangerous and require Britain and its allies to deal with “irrational” powers, Shapps said the government was striving to increase defence spending to 2.5% of gross domestic product – something he urged other democratic nations to follow.

“In five years’ time, we could be looking at multiple theatres including Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. Ask yourself … is it more likely that that number grows or reduces? I suspect we all know the answer. It’s likely to grow,” the defence minister said. “So 2024 must mark an inflection point.”
He said Britain was spending more money in cash terms on defence than it ever had, adding the government was increasing funds for modernising its nuclear deterrent and replenishing stocks and should continue to do so, while studiously refusing to call directly for additional funds.
“We’ve made the critical decision to set out our aspiration to reach 2.5% of GDP on defence and as we stabilise and grow this economy, we’ll continue to strive to reach that as soon as possible,” he said.
“But now is the time for all allied and democratic nations across the world to do the same thing and ensure their defence spending is growing too,” he said in reference to those NATO members, which are not reaching the goal of spending 2% of GDP.
Asked whether the government would go beyond current spending, a spokesman for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said it was a matter for the finance minister but the government was expanding defence spending.
Keen to underline Britain’s engagement in the world, Shapps said Britain was committing 20,000 military personnel to serve across Europe in a major NATO exercise in the first half of this year, as well as warships and fighter jets.

He also said Britain had shown it will “step up to the plate when it is needed” through its strikes, coordinated with the United States, against the Houthis in Yemen to protect international shipping.
“We intended it as a single action and we will now monitor very carefully to see what they do next,” he said, adding such action was harder for other European countries to take.
“The United Kingdom is one of those countries which has always traditionally, and continues to, step up to the plate when it is needed.”

Reporting by Elizabeth Piper and Andy Bruce Editing by Tomasz Janowski