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Democracy as Mob Rule

Trump, The Ultimate Hustler and Shyster

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by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with

At the beginning of this month, Bild, the German media sensationalist, claimed to have discovered “incredible developments between [Presidents] Trump and Putin. And they affect Germany! Bild research reveals secret talks between the US and Russia in Switzerland. It’s about an explosive gas deal for Germany! At the centre of the affair: once again the Baltic Sea pipeline Nord Stream 2.”

The Bild story alleged that Trump’s envoy for special missions, Richard Grenell, made several visits for negotiations at the headquarters of Nord Stream 2 AG — the Baltic seabed pipeline’s operator, wholly owned by Russia’s sanctioned Gazprom — in Steinhausen, in the Swiss canton of Zug. Grenell has denied the story.

The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, added there was no point in his commenting on Bild’s claims because Grenell “has already denied it. And so the Americans have denied it. Also, there is a lot of information [in the Bild publication] that is not true.”

The Bild report followed just hours after a report appeared in London by the Financial Times maintaining that “a former spy and close friend of Vladimir Putin has been engineering a restart of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Europe with the backing of US investors, a once unthinkable move that shows the breadth of Donald Trump’s rapprochement with Moscow. The efforts on a deal, according to several people aware of the discussions, were the brainchild of Matthias Warnig, an ex-Stasi officer in East Germany who until 2023 ran Nord Stream 2’s parent company for the Kremlin-controlled gas giant Gazprom.”

The anonymous sources told the newspaper “Warnig’s plan involved outreach to the Trump team through US businessmen as part of back-channel efforts to broker an end to the war in Ukraine while deepening economic ties between the US and Russia. Some prominent Trump administration figures are aware of the initiative to bring in US investors, according to officials in Washington, and they see it as part of the push to rebuild relations with Moscow.”

Warnig told the FT he was “not involved in any discussions with any American politicians or business representatives.”

Stephen Lynch, a well-known arbitrageur between Russian and US asset buyers and sellers following the Yukos oil company’s nationalization between 2004 and 2007, was reportedly behind some of the fresh media leaks, according to which “one US-led consortium of investors has drawn up the outlines of a post-sanctions deal with Gazprom, according to one person with direct knowledge of talks who declined to disclose the identity of the prospective investors.” For Lynch’s record, including his attempt at a hostile takeover of gas assets of Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash in 2016, click to read the archive.

While Lynch has been promoting a Nord Stream takeover for his own commercial reasons, the planting of the story in Bild and the FT may have been an attempt by European officials to kill it.

“Senior EU officials,” according to the London newspaper, “became aware of the Nord Stream 2 discussion in recent weeks. Leaders of several European countries are concerned and have discussed the matter, according to several officials with knowledge of the discussions…The latest plan would in theory give the US unparalleled sway over energy supplies to Europe, the people said, after EU countries moved to end their dependence on Russian gas in the aftermath of the invasion.”

Russian analysis of these purported dealmakers and their targets has been compiled in this new piece, published on March 18 by the Moscow business weekly, Expert. In its assessment of the German and British claims, Expert concludes that American speculators are being attracted to the potential profit in schemes for buying low-priced Russian assets currently under sanctions; lobbying the Trump Administration to lift the sanctions as part of an end-of-war settlement in the Ukraine; and then reselling the assets if and when business with Russia revives and the Russian asset prices return to pre-war market levels. Lobbying the Trump Administration is the polite term for this.

According to Expert, a scheme to dismantle the current sanctions and refill the single, undamaged pipe of Nord Stream 2 with Gazprom gas for Germany is between improbable and impossible. However, an alternative with better chances for speculators is a buyout of Rosneft’s German oil refinery at Schwedt.

Cultural/Ideological Divide, Democracy as Mob Rule

How to Build An Omnipotent Thought-Control Machine…

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Ed. Note. Interesting and long article which explains some of the intricacies of the last 20 years of power politics within the US and its projection of power around the world. It explains to the uninformed the political technology of consensus making and the manipulation of public opinion, basically in all spheres of social life, Unfortunately, the article is also heavily biased in a Israeli direction, applauding the carnage in Gaza and Israel’s successful anti-American manipulative policy.

by David Samuels via TabletMag.com

Excepts

[ . . . ] a brilliant young political theorist named Walter Lippmann once identified, in his 1922 book, as “public opinion.”

Lippmann was a progressive Harvard-educated technocrat who believed in engineering society from the top down, and who understood the role of elites in engineering social change to be both positive and inevitable. It was Lippman, not Noam Chomsky, who coined the phrase “manufacturing consent,” and in doing so created the framework in which the American governing class would understand both its larger social role and the particular tools at its disposal. “We are told about the world before we see it,” Lippmann wrote. “We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.” Or as he put it even more succinctly: “The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do.”

The collapse of the 20th-century media pyramid on which Lippmann’s assumptions rested, and its rapid replacement by monopoly social media platforms, made it possible for the Obama White House to sell policy—and reconfigure social attitudes and prejudices—in new ways. In fact, as Obama’s chief speechwriter and national security aide Ben Rhodes, a fiction writer by vocation, argued to me more than once in our conversations, the collapse of the world of print left Obama with little choice but to forge a new reality online.

[ . . . ]

What mattered here was no longer Lippmann’s version of “public opinion,” rooted in the mass audiences of radio and later television, which was assumed to correlate to the current or future preferences of large numbers of voters—thereby assuring, on a metaphoric level at least, the continuation of 19th-century ideas of American democracy, with its deliberate balance of popular and representational elements in turn mirroring the thrust of the Founders’ design. Rather, the newly minted digital variant of “public opinion” was rooted in the algorithms that determine how fads spread on social media, in which mass multiplied by speed equals momentum—speed being the key variable. The result was a fast-moving mirror world that necessarily privileges the opinions and beliefs of the self-appointed vanguard who control the machinery, and could therefore generate the velocity required to change the appearance of “what people believe” overnight.

[ . . . ]

The methodology on which our current universe of political persuasion is based was born before the internet or iPhones existed, in an attempt to do good and win elections while overcoming America’s historical legacy of slavery and racism. Its originator, David Axelrod, was born to be a great American advertising man—his father was a psychologist, and his mother was a top executive at the legendary Mad Men-era New York City ad agency of Young & Rubicam. Instead, following his father’s suicide, Axelrod left New York City for Chicago, where he attended the University of Chicago, and then became a political reporter for the Chicago Tribune. He then became a political consultant who specialized in electing Black mayoral candidates in white-majority cities. In 2008, Axelrod ran the successful insurgent campaigns that first got Barack Obama the Democratic Party nomination over Hillary Clinton, and then elevated him to the White House.

Axelrod first tested his unique understanding of the theory and practice of public opinion, which he called “permission structures,” in his successful 1989 campaign to elect a young Black state senator named Mike White as the mayor of Cleveland. Where Black mayoral candidates like Coleman Young in Detroit and Marion Barry in Washington had typically achieved power in the 1970s and 1980s by using racially charged symbols and language to turn out large numbers of Black voters in opposition to existing power structures, which they portrayed as inherently racist, White’s history-making campaign attempted to do the opposite: To win by convincing a mix of educated, higher-income white voters to vote for the Black candidate. In fact, White won 81% of the vote in the city’s predominantly white wards while capturing only 30% of the vote in the city’s Black majority wards, which favored his opponent and former mentor on the city council, George C. Forbes, a Black candidate who ran a more traditional “Black power” campaign.

Permission structures, a term taken from advertising, was Axelrod’s secret sauce, the organizing concept by which he strategized campaigns for his clients. Where most consultants built their campaigns around sets of positive and negative ads that promoted the positive qualities of their clients and highlighted unfavorable aspects of their opponents’ characters and records, Axelrod’s unique area of specialization required a more specific set of tools. To succeed, Axelrod needed to convince white voters to overcome their existing prejudices and vote for candidates whom they might define as “soft on crime” or “lacking competence.” As an excellent 2008 New Republic profile of Axelrod—surprisingly, the only good profile of Axelrod that appears to exist anywhere—put it: “‘David felt there almost had to be a permission structure set up for certain white voters to consider a black candidate,’ explains Ken Snyder, a Democratic consultant and Axelrod protégé. In Cleveland, that was the city’s daily newspaper, The Plain Dealer. Largely on the basis of The Plain Dealer’s endorsement and his personal story, White went on to defeat Forbes with 81 percent of the vote in the city’s white wards.”

In other words, while most political consultants worked to make their guy look good or the other guy look bad by appealing to voters’ existing values, Axelrod’s strategy required convincing voters to act against their own prior beliefs. In fact, it required replacing those beliefs, by appealing to “the type of person” that voters wanted to be in the eyes of others. While the academic social science and psychology literature on permission structures is surprisingly thin, given the real-world significance of Axelrod’s success and everything that has followed, it is most commonly defined as a means of providing “scaffolding for someone to embrace change they might otherwise reject.” This “scaffolding” is said to consist of providing “social proof” (“most people in your situation are now deciding to”) “new information,” “changed circumstances,” “compromise.” As one author put it, “with many applications to politics, one could argue that effective Permission Structures will shift the Overton Window, introducing new conversations into the mainstream that might previously have been considered marginal or fringe.”

By itself, the idea of uniting new theories of mass psychology with new technology in efforts of political persuasion was nothing new. Walter Lippmann based Public Opinion in part on the insights of the Vienna-born advertising genius Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew and the inventor of modern PR. The arrival of television brought political advertising and Madison Avenue even closer together, a fact noted by Norman Mailer in his classic essay “Superman in the Supermarket,” which channeled the insights of Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders. In 1968, the writer Joe McGinniss shocked at least some readers with The Selling of the President, his account of the making of Richard Nixon’s television commercials which showed Madison Avenue admen successfully selling the product of Nixon like dish soap. The title of “political consultant” was itself a creation and a consequence of the television age, signaling the triumph of the ad man over the old-fashioned backroom title of “campaign manager”—a function introduced to national politics by Martin Van Buren, the “Little Magician” from Kinderhook, New York, who built the Democratic Party and elected Andrew Jackson to the Presidency.

It is not surprising then, that following Axelrod’s 1993 success in electing Harold Washington as the first Black mayor of Chicago, Barack Obama—already imagining himself as a future president of the United States—would seek out the Chicago-based consulting wizard to run his campaigns. But Axelrod wasn’t interested. In fact, Obama would spend more than a decade chasing Axelrod—who was far better connected in Chicago than Obama was—in the hopes that he would provide the necessary magic for his political rise. The other Chicago kingmaker that Obama courted was Jesse Jackson Sr., whose Operation PUSH was the city’s most powerful Black political machine, and who liked Obama even less than Axelrod did. The reality was that Obama did best with rich whites, like the board members of the Joyce Foundation and the Pritzker family.

When Axelrod finally agreed to come onboard, he found that Obama was the perfect candidate to validate his theories of political salesmanship on a national scale. First, he engineered Obama’s successful 2004 Senate campaign—a victory made possible by the old-school maneuver of unsealing Republican candidate Jack Ryan’s divorce papers, on the request of Axelrod’s former colleagues at the Chicago Tribune—and then, very soon afterward, Obama’s campaigns for the presidency, which formally commenced in 2007.

It worked. Once in office, though, Axelrod and Obama found that the institutions of public opinion—namely the press, on which Axelrod’s permission structure framework depended—were decaying quickly in the face of the internet. Newspapers like the Cleveland Plain Dealer, as well as national television networks like CBS, which Axelrod relied on as validators, were now barely able to pay their bills, having lost their monopoly on viewers and advertisers to the internet and to newly emerging social media platforms.

With Obama’s reelection campaign on the horizon in 2012, the White House’s attention turned to selling Obamacare, which would become the signature initiative of the president’s first term in office. Without a healthy, well-functioning press corps that could command the attention and allegiance of voters, the White House would have to manufacture its own world of validators to sell the president’s plan on social media—which it successfully did. The White House sales effort successfully disguised the fact that the new health care program was in fact a new social welfare program that would lower rather than raise the standard of care for most Americans with preexisting health insurance, while providing tens of billions of dollars in guaranteed payments to large pharmaceutical companies and pushing those costs onto employers. Americans would continue to pay more for health care than citizens of any other first world country, while receiving less.

As a meeting of Axelrod’s theories with the mechanics of social media, though, the selling of Obamacare—which continued seamlessly into Obama’s reelection campaign against Mitt Romney—was a match made in heaven. So much so, that by 2013 it had become the Obama White House’s reigning theory of governance. A Reuters article from 2013 helpfully explained how the system worked: “In Obama’s jargon, getting to yes requires a permission structure.” Asked about the phrase, White House spokesman Jay Carney explained that it was “common usage” around the White House, dating back to Obama’s 2008 campaign. The occasion for the article was Obama’s use of the phrase permission structure at a press conference in order to explain how he hoped to break an impasse with congressional Republicans, for which he had been roundly mocked as an out-of-touch egghead by D.C. columnists including Maureen Dowd and Dana Milbank, and by staffers for Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell.

[ . . . ]

In field after field, from sex and gender, to church attitudes toward homosexuality, to formerly apolitical sources of public information, to voting practices, to the internal politics of religious groups, to race politics, to what films Americans would watch and how they would henceforth be entertained, the oligarchs would do their part, by helping buy up once independent social spaces and torque them to function as parts of the party’s permission structure machine. The FBI would then do its part, by adopting political categories like “white supremacy” as chief domestic targets, and puppet groups in the vertical, like the ADL and the ACLU, would pretend to be objective watchdogs who just happened to come to the same conclusion.

Obamacare was followed by the Iran deal, which was followed by Russiagate, which was followed by COVID. Messaging around the pandemic was the fourth and most far-reaching permission structure game that was run by small clusters of operatives on the American public, resulting in the revocation of the most basic social rights—like the right to go outside your own home, or visit a dying parent or child in the hospital. COVID also proved to be an excuse for the largest wealth transfer in American history, comprising hundreds of billions of dollars, from the middle and working classes to the top 1%. Most ominously, COVID proved to be a means for remaking the American electoral system, as well as providing a platform for a series of would-be social revolutions in whose favor restrictions on public gatherings and laws against looting and public violence were suspended, due to manifestations of “public opinion” on social media.

As COVID provided cover for increasingly extreme and rapid manifestations of rapid political enlightenment, numbers of formerly quiescent citizens began to rebel against the new order. Unable to locate where the instructions were coming from, they blamed elites, medical authorities, the deep state, Klaus Schwab, the leadership of Black Lives Matter, Bill Gates, and dozens of other more or less nefarious players, but without being able to identity the process that kept generating new thought-contagions and giving them the seeming force of law. The game was in fact new enough that Donald Trump didn’t get it before it was too late for his reelection chances, championing lockdowns and COVID vaccines while failing to pay attention to the Democratic lawyers who were changing election laws in key states. Once Joe Biden was safely installed in the White House, Obama’s Democratic Party could look forward to smooth sailing—protected by new election laws, the party’s control over major information platforms, the FBI, and the White House, and a government-led campaign of lawfare against Trump. It was hard to see how the party could lose for at least another generation, if ever again.

[ . . . ]

The effect of the permission structure machine is to instill and maintain obedience to voices coming from outside yourself, regardless of the obvious gaps in logic and functioning that they create. The clinical term for this state is schizophrenia, which is a term that had a deep hold over the 20th-century modern literary and social imagination, from popular works like I Never Promised You a Rose Garden and Sybil to theorizing by R.D. Laing (The Divided Self) and Gilles Deleuze (Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia). Among the superior works of literature in this genre are Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Sylvia Nasar’s A Beautiful Mind, the singular House of Leaves, Greg Bottoms’ memoir Angelhead and many dozens of other books. The expected reaction within the genre to hearing such voices is horror.

Key Figures and the Collapse of Obama’s System

The article further identifies three figures—Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Benjamin Netanyahu—as instrumental in dismantling Obama’s system [and using it instead for the benefit of Trump-Musk-Netanyahu[+Orban] triumvirate):

1. Elon Musk: Musk’s purchase of Twitter in 2022 disrupted the Democratic Party’s censorship apparatus. By opening the platform to diverse viewpoints, Musk undermined the party’s control over social media narratives. His unique understanding of the permission structure machine allowed him to outmaneuver its operators.

2. Donald Trump: Trump’s resilience

3. Benjamin Netanyahu: Netanyahu’s decision to invade Rafah and confront Iranian-backed forces reversed Obama’s Middle East strategy. His actions were aimed at dismantling the regional power structure centered on Iran.

Democracy as Mob Rule

The Oval Office Shouting Match – Wrap-Up

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via MoA

The first 40 or so minutes of yesterday’s oval office press talk (vid) went quite normal. Questions were asked and replies were given in general form, addressing the public. There was some mild banter. But then a breakdown (vid) occurred:

It was all destroyed when JD Vance, the US vice-president entered the conversation to declare: “The path to peace and the path to prosperity is maybe engaging in diplomacy.

“We tried the pathway of Joe Biden of thumping our chest and pretending the Potus’s words counted more than Potus’s actions,” he declared.
To anyone who has spent time in or around the Ukraine war, such airy talk of “diplomacy” – as if it means anything without hard force to back it up – is exasperatingly naive.
Mr Zelensky should probably have let it slide. But he was not taking it.
“Can I ask you?” he asked, leaning towards Mr Vance.
“Sure,” replied Mr Vance.
…
“What kind of diplomacy, JD, are you speaking about? What do you mean?”
It was a mistake.
There followed a barrage of invective about Ukrainian ungratefulness – in front of the world’s media.

For anyone who remembers how the whole Ukraine conflict was initiated by the U.S., the hypocrisy played out here is overwhelming.

How can one, as Trump and Vance do, lament that the war has destroyed Ukraine and led to countless people dying for no good cause and, at the same time, demand that Ukraine be thankful for all the ‘advice’, weapons and money the U.S. has given in first place to drag Ukraine into a war and to wage it.

But Zelenski wasn’t upset about U.S. hypocrisy. He was upset that he was told to make peace.

The bad mood he was in had already festered for some time. In late 2023 Simon Shuster had portrait Zelenski for Time:

On my first day in Kyiv, I asked one member of his circle how the President was feeling. The response came without a second’s hesitation: “Angry.”
…
[M]ost of all, Zelensky feels betrayed by his Western allies. They have left him without the means to win the war, only the means to survive it.

But his convictions haven’t changed. Despite the recent setbacks on the battlefield, he does not intend to give up fighting or to sue for any kind of peace. On the contrary, his belief in Ukraine’s ultimate victory over Russia has hardened into a form that worries some of his advisers. It is immovable, verging on the messianic. “He deludes himself,” one of his closest aides tells me in frustration. “We’re out of options. We’re not winning. But try telling him that.”

Trump and Vance tried to tell him – Zelenski exploded. Some say this was trap or set up. I and others disagree. It was Trump who wanted the ‘mineral deal’ to be signed. Why would he sabotage that? 

It would have been easy for Zelenski to not react to Vance’s interdiction but he instead started a fight. He even might have dreamed of a knock out.

The incident, in full view of the U.S. public, will allow Trump to drop Ukraine as the bad asset that it now is. As I commented yesterday:

What will Trump do now?

Best guess:

  • He will walk away from Ukraine. (No rare earth deal or anything else.)
  • Europeans will be ignored (Macron had urged him to meet Zelenski —> bad!)
  • He will make a deal with Russia. Rare earth, lifting sanctions and much more.

There seems to be no regret by Zelenski who has failed to apologize.

Meanwhile USAID has stopped repairs of Ukraine’s energy grid. Other U.S. support is highly endangered:

Trump administration press secretary Caroline Leavitt stated that the U.S. will no longer provide military assistance to Ukraine because their priority is peace negotiations. This decision came after the controversy during Zelensky’s visit.

“We are no longer going to just write blank checks for a war in a very distant country without a real, lasting peace,” Leavitt said.

Zelenski hopes that Europe will back him. But while some European bots claim to stand by Ukraine they have neither the men, money nor weapons to do so. There is no European unityon it:

Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are ‘very unhappy’ they were betrayed by being excluded from tomorrow’s Ukraine summit in London. They ‘have a plan… but they weren’t invited’ – Sky News

Zelenski will have to go – one way or the other. His former advisor, the slimy Oleksy Arestovych, is already offering himself as replacement:

Arestovych @arestovych – 14:03 UTC · Mar 1, 2025
– Zelensky is not just proposing war – he’s proposing war without weapons.
He weakened the army (failed 55% of the defense procurement plan), lost U.S. support, and divided the country.
Without him, Ukraine would fight better and make peace faster and more effectively.
I stand for peace.
There is a way out – Zelensky, step down.

The Russians are the big winner in this. Ukraine is in a scuffle with its main sponsor. The western alliance has splintered. The enemies’ frontline is falling apart.

Russia is opposed to Trump’s main demand of a cease-fire along the current frontline. But Zelenski is blamed for sabotaging it.

I do not see how Zelenski can escape from this.

Democracy as Mob Rule

How Washington and Ankara Changed the Regime in Damascus

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by Thierry Meyssan via Voltairenet

With surprising aplomb, the international press assures us that we are not witnessing a military change of regime in Syria, but a revolution overthrowing the Syrian Arab Republic. The presence of the Turkish army and US special forces is hidden from us. We are bombarded with propaganda that has been denied several times about the crimes attributed to “Bashar”. Cannibal throat-cutters are transformed into respectable revolutionaries. Once again, the international press is consciously lying to us.

In 11 days, the Syrian Arab Republic, which had valiantly resisted attacks by jihadists supported by the largest coalition in history since 2011, was overthrown. So what happened?

First of all, since October 15, 2017, the United States has organized a siege of Syria, prohibiting all trade with it and prohibiting the United Nations from participating in its reconstruction [1]. This strategy was extended, in 2020, to Lebanon with the Caesar Act [2].

We, members of the European Union, have all participated in this crime. The majority of Syrians were malnourished. The pound had collapsed: what was worth 1 pound before the war, in 2011, was worth 50,000 when Damascus fell (the pound was revalued three days later thanks to an injection of Qatari money). The same causes always have the same effects, Syria was defeated like Iraq before it, when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright congratulated herself on having caused the death of half a million Iraqi children from disease and malnutrition.

On the other hand, if it was the jihadists of Hayat Tahrir al-Cham (HTC) who took Damascus, they were not the ones who won militarily. On November 27, HTC, armed by Qatar and supervised by the Turkish army disguised as the “Syrian National Army” (SNA), took control of the M4 highway which served as a ceasefire line. In addition, HTC and Türkiye had very high-performance drones operated by Ukrainian advisers. Finally, HTC took with it the Uighur colony of the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP) which had been entrenched in al-Zanbaki for 8 years [3]. The Israeli, Russian and Chinese theaters of operation have therefore merged.

Then, these forces attacked Aleppo, until then defended by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. The latter withdrew without a word, leaving a small garrison of the Syrian Arab Army to defend the city. Faced with the disproportion of forces, the Syrian government ordered its troops to withdraw to Hama, which they did on November 29, after a brief battle.

On November 30, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad went to Russia. Not to attend the exam that his son Hafez was taking at Moscow University where he is continuing his studies, but to call for help. The Russian forces in Syria could only bomb the jihadists’ convoys because they are only airborne. They therefore tried to block the road to HTC and Turkey. They could not intervene on the ground against them. Aleppo was well and truly lost. Moreover, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, following his country’s tradition [4], has never acknowledged the loss of the Ottoman territories of Greece (Thessaloniki), the island of Cyprus, Syria (Aleppo) and Iraq (Mosul).

With dormant jihadist cells having been reactivated by Türkiye, the already exhausted Syrian Arab Army had to fight on all fronts at once. This is what General Maher el-Assad (the president’s brother) tried to do, in vain.

Ali Larijani, special envoy of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, went to Damascus to explain the withdrawal of the Revolutionary Guards from Aleppo and to set conditions for military aid from the Islamic Republic of Iran; astonishing cultural conditions for a secular state. In a telephone conversation with his Iranian counterpart, Masoud Pezeshkian, President Bashar al-Assad said that the “terrorist escalation” was aimed at “trying to fragment the region, to crumble its states and to redraw the regional map in accordance with the interests and objectives of America and the West.” However, the official statement does not reflect the mood of the conversation. The Syrian president wanted to know who had ordered the Revolutionary Guards to abandon Aleppo. He did not get an answer. He then warned President Pezeshkian about the consequences for Iran of a fall of Syria. Nothing worked. Tehran continued to demand that it be given the keys to Syria to defend it.

On December 2, General Jasper Jeffers III, commander in chief of the United States Special Forces (UsSoCom), arrives in Beirut. Officially, he comes to monitor the implementation of the oral Israeli-Lebanese ceasefire. Given his functions, it is obvious that this will only be part of his mission. He will supervise the capture of Damascus by the Turks behind HTC.

On December 5, the United States relaunches at the United Nations Security Council their accusations against President Bashar al-Assad of using chemical weapons to repress his own people. They ignore the very many objections, testimonies and investigations that have shown that they are nothing more than war propaganda. Chemical weapons are the first argument of the gigantic Anglo-Saxon persuasion machine. They are what allowed the number 2 of the United Nations, Jeffrey Feltman, to prohibit the reconstruction of Syria. They were the ones who convinced Western public opinion that “Bashar is the executioner of Damascus” and blamed him for all the deaths in the war launched against his country.

Simultaneously, the Pentagon told HTC and the Turkish army that they could continue their advance, take Damascus and overthrow the Syrian Arab Republic.

On December 6 and 7, the Doha Forum was held in Qatar. Many Middle Eastern figures participated alongside Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. On the sidelines of the Forum, a guarantee was given to Russia, which represented President al-Assad, that the soldiers of the Syrian Arab Army would not be pursued and that the military bases of the Russian Federation would not be attacked. Another guarantee was given to Iran that the Shiite shrines would not be destroyed, but it seems that Tehran was already convinced of this.

According to Hakan Fidan, the Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Benjamin Netanyahu and Joe Biden considered that the operation should end there. It was the Pentagon that decided, with the United Kingdom, to continue until the overthrow of the Syrian Arab Republic [5].

In New York, the Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2761 [6]. It authorizes disregarding sanctions against jihadists during “humanitarian operations”. The United Nations, which has never authorized relief for populations crushed under the yoke of Daesh, has suddenly authorized trade with HTC. This turnaround by the Security Council corresponds to the instructions of the United Nations advisor, Noah Bonsey, as he had already put forward in February 2021 when he worked for George Soros [7].

Abou Mohammed al-Jolani, the leader of HTC, gives an interview to Jomana Karadsheh for CNN. She highlights it while the State Department’s Rewards for Justice website still offers $10 million for any information leading to the arrest of the jihadist leader [8]

On December 7, HTC and Türkiye take Saidnaya prison. This is a major issue for war propaganda that has nicknamed it “the human slaughterhouse.” It is claimed that thousands of people were tortured and executed there and that their bodies were burned in a crematorium. For three days, the White Helmets, an NGO that has both saved lives and participated in massacres, search the prison and its surroundings in search of secret underground passages, torture rooms and a crematorium. Alas! They find no evidence of the crimes denounced. Ultimately, journalist Clarissa Ward stages for CNN the release of a prisoner who has not seen the light of day for three months, but is clean, well-dressed and has well-groomed nails [9].

The accusations of torture and summary executions are all the more difficult to bear since Bashar al-Assad gave instructions in 2011 prohibiting all forms of torture and created a Ministry of National Reconciliation responsible for reintegrating Syrians who had joined the jihadists, and finally implemented general amnesties about forty times.

On December 8, President Bashar al-Assad ordered his men to lay down their arms. Damascus fell without a fight. The jihadists immediately unfurled pre-printed banners and affixed the symbol of the new regime to their uniforms. Former Al-Qaeda fighter and then Daesh number 2, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, real name Ahmad el-Chara, seizes power. Surrounded by British communications advisers, he gives a speech at the Great Umayyad Mosque, modeled on that of the Daesh caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, at the Great Al-Nouri Mosque in Mosul in 2019.

HTC now treats Christians as mustamin (Islamic classification for non-Muslim foreigners who reside on a limited basis in Muslim territory), sparing them the dhimmi pact (a series of rights and duties reserved for non-Muslims) and the payment of the jiziya tax. In September 2022, for the first time in a decade, a ceremony in honor of Saint Anne was held in the Armenian church of al-Yacoubiyah, in the countryside of Jisr al-Shugur, west of Idlib.

3,000 soldiers of the Syrian Arab Army go into exile in Iraq. They are disarmed and housed in tents at the Al-Qaim border crossing, then transferred to a military base in Rutba. Baghdad announces that it is trying to obtain guarantees so that they can return home [10].

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) launch an operation to destroy the equipment and fortifications of the Syrian Arab Army. In four days, 480 bombings sink the fleet and set fire to armories and warehouses. Simultaneously, ground teams assassinate the country’s leading scientists.

After showing journalists around the empty Syrian fortifications along the coast, Benny Kata, a local military commander, tells his guests: “It is clear that we will stay here for a while. We are prepared for it.”

The IDF is already invading Syria a little more, beyond the Golan ceasefire line that it occupies. It announces that it will create a new buffer zone on Syrian territory, to protect the current buffer zone, in short to annex it. In addition, they annexed Mount Hermon so that they could monitor the entire region.

On December 9, General Michael Kurilla, commander-in-chief of the US forces in the broader Middle East (CentCom), traveled to Amman to meet with General Yousef Al-H’naity, chairman of the Jordanian Joint Chiefs of Staff. He reaffirmed the US commitment to support Jordan if threats emanated from Syria during the current transition period.

On December 10, General Michael Kurilla visited his troops and those of the Syrian Democratic Forces (Kurdish mercenaries) in several bases in Syria. He developed a plan to ensure that Daesh would not leave the area assigned to it by the Pentagon and would not interfere in the regime change in Damascus. Immediately, intense bombardments prevented Daesh from approaching.

HTC appoints Mohammed al-Bashir, former jihadist “governor” of Idlib, as Prime Minister of the new regime. He is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, sponsored by the British MI6. France, which had negotiated with its special envoy, Jean-Yves Le Drian, the appointment of Riad Hijab (former secretary of the Council of Ministers in 2012), realizes that it has been cheated.

That same evening, there is no longer any question of making Jean-Yves Le Drian Prime Minister in France. On the contrary, the Élysée invites the anti-terrorism prosecutor of Paris to the France2 news. He puts an end to the acclamations of the new power in Damascus and deplores that HTC is involved in the assassination of the French professor Samuel Patty (2020) and in the massacre in Nice (86 dead, in 2016). The French press then changed its tune and began to question the new power that the international press continued to present as respectable.

On December 11, the main Palestinian factions present in Syria (Palestine Liberation Front, Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Islamic Jihad Movement, Palestinian Popular Struggle Front, General Command) met in Yarmouk (Damascus) in the presence of delegates from HTC (Military Operations Department). Fatah and Hamas did not participate in the meeting. They were asked to make peace with their Israeli ally. It was decided that no faction would have a privileged status and that all would be treated identically. Each group agreed to lay down their arms.

General Michael Kurilla traveled successively to Lebanon and Israel for three days. In Beirut, he met with General Joseph Aoun, commander of the Lebanese armed forces, and especially his colleague, US General Jasper Jeffers III. In Tel Aviv, he met with the entire Israeli Joint Chiefs of Staff and Defense Minister Israel Katz. On this occasion, he said: “My visit to Israel, as well as to Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon over the past six days, has underscored the importance of seeing today’s challenges and opportunities through the eyes of our partners, our commanders on the ground and our service members. We must maintain strong partnerships to confront current and future threats to the region.”

On December 12, Ibrahim Kalin, director of the Turkish National Intelligence Organization (Millî İstihbarat Teşkilatı – MIT), is the first foreign high-ranking official to visit the new government in Damascus. On the same day, the Kurdish mercenaries, who administer northeastern Syria for the US occupation army, raise the country’s new green, white and black three-star flag, that of the French mandate. Kalin will be followed on December 15 by a Qatari delegation.

To validate the accusations of torture attributed to the former regime, Clarissa Ward, who is definitely in great shape, stages for CNN corpses found in the morgue of a hospital in Damascus, as the same CNN had staged those in a morgue in Timișoara, during the overthrow of the Ceaușescu, in 1989 [11].

Meanwhile, according to the United Nations, more than a million Syrians are trying to flee their country. They do not believe that the HTC jihadists have suddenly become civilized.


The author of this article, Thierry Meyssan, was an advisor to the Libyan and then Syrian authorities for nine years. From this experience, he produced a fundamental work on Western policy in the Middle East: Before Our Very Eyes, Fake Wars and Big Lies: From 9/11 to Donald Trump.

Translation
Roger Lagassé

[1] “Parameters and Principles of UN assistance in Syria”, by Jeffrey D. Feltman, Voltaire Network, 15 October 2017.

[2] “Hassan Nasrallah says US wants to cause famine in Lebanon”, Voltaire Network, 17 June 2020.

[3] “The 18,000 al-Qaeda Uyghurs in Syria”, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 21 August 2018. «Uyghur fighters in Syria vow to come for China next», Sophia Yan, The Telegraph, Decembrer 13, 2024.

[4] « Serment national turc », Réseau Voltaire, 28 janvier 1920.

[5] «Fidan: Nous avons négocié avec la Russie et l’Iran pour qu’en Syrie, ça se passe sans effusion de sang», Anadolu Agency, 13 décembre 2024. «“Israël ne voulait pas qu’Assad tombe”, affirme le chef de la diplomatie turque», I24 News, 16 décembre 2024.

[6] « Résolution portant exemption des sanctions contre les jihadistes », Réseau Voltaire, 6 décembre 2024.

[7] «In Syria’s Idlib, Washington’s Chance to Reimagine Counter-terrorism», New Crisis Group, Noah Bonsey & Dareen Khalifa, February 2021.

[8] «Muhammad al-Jawlani», Rewards for Justice, site consulté le 14 décembre 2024.

[9] «‘Are you serious?’: He spent months in a Syrian prison. CNN’s camera caught the moment he’s freed, Clarissa Ward, CNN, December 11, 2024.

[10] «خاص»
محمد عماد, 11 ديسمبر

[11] «Battered corpses show the horrors of life and death under Syria’s Assad», CNN December 12, 2024.

Democracy as Mob Rule

Mob Warfare Is Only On the Rise

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by Claudiu Secara

If it comes to a full-blown economic war between the BRICS countries and the West, chances are that BRICS coalition‘s odds of success are quite bleak.

For one, only Russia can actually remain unaffected for long by such an eventuality, and China only partially. A US-led embargo on China would be automatically followed by at least half the world controlled by the US. That in itself would cause a massive industrial collapse in China, and millions of people would take to the streets. Any repression by the Chinese government would be used as grounds for more sanctions in defense of the so-called human rights.

Faced with a flood of media attacks on China, the rest of the BRICS countries, Brazil, India, etc., would have to buckle and follow suit, of course to the detriment of their own economies.

In parallel there is now real potential to stir up the Muslims in Russia. The success of the takeover of Syria is monumental. The former head-choppers have changed their keffiyeh scarves for the Western attire and a Western professional military look. They present themselves as a very attractive option for the disoriented youths of Russia. Rejected by the growing Russian nationalism in Russia itself, these youths have few opportunities left in their provincial regions.

Russia is proud of its advanced military technology, and rightly so. Their achievements are truly impressive and unmatched by the West. Nevertheless, as we have just witnessed over and over again, the real confrontation is not between specific weapons on traditional battlefields but on the streets via color revolutions. Not even at the ballot box, but at the level of mobs-for-hire. The mobs are now the battering rams in the arsenal of military technologists.

The West’s narrative of “everything goes” is irresistible to the masses of uneducated and dispirited useless eaters. While the West is keeping a tighter and tighter noose around the necks of their own masses, their Woke narrative gives the alluring impression that unrestrained freedom and liberty are actually real.

The streets respond with gusto to this invitation to anarchy, while any rational presentation by rational people gets ridiculed and dismissed out of hand as unacceptable authoritarianism.

The mob is in the billions while the reasonable are few.

Democracy as Mob Rule, Uncategorized

The Fall of Syria

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by Germán Gorraiz López- Analyst

The unstoppable jihadist offensive is reported to have occupied Aleppo and Hama and to be encircling Homs, the gateway to Damascus, while rumors are already circulating of a coup d’état against Assad led by Hussam Luka, a Syrian intelligence officer, which will force Assad to go into exile in Russia.

US constructive chaos

The Carter Doctrine inspired by Brzezinski (1980), aimed at implementing in the Near and Middle East the so-called “constructive chaos”, a concept based on the maxim attributed to the Roman emperor Julius Caesar “divide et impera”, to achieve the establishment of a field of instability and violence in the area (balkanization) and create a chaos that would spread from Lebanon, Palestine and Syria to Iraq and from Iran and Afghanistan to Pakistan and Anatolia (Asia Minor).

Thus, the former president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, (overthrown for rejecting the installation of US bases on Egyptian soil), revealed in an interview to the Egyptian daily El-Fagr the existence of an alleged plan to divide the entire Middle East region, consisting in the establishment of the aforementioned “constructive chaos” through the successive destruction of the autocratic regimes of Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria and Iran and reserving for Jordan the role of “new homeland of the Palestinian people”.

Surprise attack coordinated by Turkey, Israel and the U.S.

Taking advantage of Al Assad’s official visit to Moscow and the fact that Friday is a holiday in Syria, jihadist groups teleguided by the US, Turkey and Israel unleashed a lightning offensive, entering Aleppo, the second largest city in the country, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).

Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) is the most prominent group involved in the current offensive against the Assad government.The group is led by Abu Mohammed al Julani and controls most of Idlib province, and is reportedly remote-controlled by Israel, which is interested in the formation of an Islamic Caliphate with its capital in Aleppo. Likewise, the surprise attack could involve forces of the National Liberation Front, a group backed by an Erdogan obsessed with gobbling up the Kurdish-Syrian state of Rojava.

Although the United States has disassociated itself from this new battle by asserting that it has “nothing to do with this offensive, led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham”, the Pentagon’s initial objective would appear to be to open a new front against Russia which would force it to distract air forces from Ukraine and thus slow down its counteroffensive in Kursk and the Donbas.

A coup against Assad?

The unstoppable jihadist offensive reportedly occupied Aleppo and Hama and is encircling Homs, the gateway to Damascus, while rumors are already circulating of a coup d’état against Assad led by Hussam Luka, a Syrian intelligence officer, which will force Assad to go into exile in Russia.

After that, we will see the design of the new map resulting from the partition of Syria into four parts. Thus we will have Syria with its capital in Damascus, a Russian protectorate which will include the naval base in the Syrian port of Tartus; the Turkish-Syrian strip of the NLF under the control of Erdogan; Syrian Kurdistan or Rojava, under the control of the USA; and the new Caliphate of Aleppo of the HDS, under the control of Israel.

For his part, Trump will sacrifice Zelenski who will be accused of corruption and forced into exile, while a peace agreement is to be signed with Russia, which will make Assad and Zelenski the first collateral victims of the Cold War 2.0.

Democracy as Mob Rule

Who is Steve Witkoff?

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image0.jpeg

❓ Who is Steve Witkoff, Trump’s pick for Middle East special envoy?
 
President-elect Donald Trump nominated real estate executive Steven Witkoff as his special envoy to the Middle East. 
Who is Witkoff and is he the right man for the job?
 
The founder of the Witkoff Group appears to have zero expertise in diplomacy or the Middle East. But Trump insists his appointee will be “an unrelenting voice for peace” in the troublesome region. 
Witkoff is Jewish and staunchly pro-Israel, and rallied support for Trump in the Jewish-American business community, Axios reports. A source close to the president-elect told the website Witkoff has a direct line to Trump which could improve his chances of being accepted by Middle Eastern regional players. 
The businessman praised Trump’s Middle East policies during his first term, including his controversial recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over Eastern Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, major cuts to US aid to Palestinians and “maximum pressure sanctions” against Iran. “With President Trump, the Middle East experienced historic levels of peace and stability. Strength prevents wars. Iran’s money was cut off which prevented their funding of global terror,” Witkoff told reporters in July. 
Witkoff’s tasks will include brokering a peace deal in Gaza and normalizing Israel-Saudi relations, Axios writes. The two goals are deeply intertwined. In October, the Times of Israel quoted sources saying that Trump told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to end the Gaza war by the time he returns to office. But late last month Netanyahu signaled that Israel is not ready to wind down the conflict. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia seems reluctant to open diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman condemned Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and attacks against Iran earlier this week.
 @SputnikInt
Democracy as Mob Rule

Trump Stacks Incoming US Cabinet with ‘Israel-First’ Hawks

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The President-elect’s choices for multiple key positions indicate support for Israel is the priority of the incoming administration

via News Desk The Cradle

(Photo credit: AP Photo/Oded Balilty, File)

US President-elect Donald Trump has announced a slew of aggressively pro-Israel figures to fill the cabinet of his upcoming administration, reinforcing fears that he will prioritize Israeli over US interests, continue to enable Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, and give the green light for Israel to achieve its most desired goal – the ethnic cleansing and annexation of the West Bank.

AP reported on 13 November that Trump’s pick for ambassador to Israel, former Arkansas governor and Baptist preacher Mike Huckabee, has long rejected a Palestinian state, repeatedly signals his unwavering support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, frequently visits Israel, and firmly believes the West Bank belongs to Israel because “the title deed was given by God to Abraham and to his heirs.”

In an interview with Israeli Army Radio, Huckabee said that “of course” annexation of the West Bank is a possibility, but noted that he is not the one who sets policy.

Bloomberg reported that during his run for president in 2015, Huckabee held a fundraiser in the illegal Jewish settlement Shilo, located deep in the heart of the occupied West Bank between the Palestinian cities of Ramallah and Nablus.

Huckabee’s Shilo event was sponsored by Simon Falic, an US-Jewish supporter of both Republican candidates and right-wing Israeli politicians.

Trump’s appointment of Huckabee and other hawkishly pro-Israel figures comes after Israeli-US billionaire Miriam Adelson donated $100 million to his presidential campaign in October, allegedly in exchange for a pledge to allow Israel to annex the West Bank.

On 13 November, Trump named Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host, author, and military veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as his pick for defense secretary.

After a visit to Israel to see biblical sites in 2016, Hegseth told the Jewish Press “It’s the story of God’s chosen people. That story didn’t end in 1776 or in 1948 or with the founding of the UN. All of these things still resonate and matter today.”

“I have come to really appreciate the Jewish heritage and the Jewish state. I understand how geopolitically we are linked and how critical it is that we stand by such a strong ally,” he added.

Sources speaking with the New York Times reported Monday that Trump is expected to nominate Florida Senator Marco Rubio, a persistent Israel supporter, to serve as secretary of state.

The Jewish Forward reported that “If picked, Rubio’s selection would likely reassure both Israel and traditional Republicans that Trump intends to maintain his strong support for Israel in a second term, amid concerns about an inner circle pushing an isolationist approach.”

The president-elect announced Tuesday that he has chosen John Ratcliffe, who was director of national intelligence (DNI) during Trump’s first term, to serve as his CIA director.

Earlier this year, Ratcliffe criticized President Joe Biden’s hollow threat to withhold weapons shipments to Israel amid its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, saying the it had put a key ally at risk. He also argued that the administration had not been harsh enough on Iran.

Trump also declared his choice this week of Republican Congressman Michael Waltz of Florida, a former Green Beret, as national security advisor.

Waltz has also worked with prominent neoconservatives who helped launch the 2003 Iraq war on Israel’s behalf. Waltz served as an advisor to defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and advised then-vice president Dick Cheney on counterterrorism.

The Jewish Insider described Waltz as an “Israel and Iran hawk” and “stalwart supporter of Israel” who has advocated that Israel strike Iran’s oil and nuclear infrastructure.

President-elect Trump has picked Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik of New York to be his next ambassador to the UN.

Politico noted that Stefanik has “made herself a household name among Republicans as a staunch defender of Israel.”

Stefanik has repeatedly accused the UN of anti-Semitism for its criticism of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and its continued opposition to the expansion of illegal Jewish settlements and oppression of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

She has also supported blocking US support for the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), the main provider of humanitarian aid to Palestinians, amid Israel’s effort to starve the remaining Palestinian population in northern Gaza.

On 12 November, Trump announced the delegation of South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem for the position of secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

As governor, Noem prioritized fighting the so-called rise in anti-Semitism, passing a bill that would criminalize criticism of Israel based on the definition of anti-Semitism proposed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).

Democracy as Mob Rule

Is Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency Doomed to Fail?

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Here’s what investor Peter Schiff wrote on X:

“I hate to rain on this parade, but the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is not a real department. It exists outside of government and has no authority to do anything. Like any one of a number of independent think tanks that already exist, it’s free to make any recommendations it wants, and the government is free to ignore them all. Even if the Trump administration actually proposes some of the DOGE recommendations, they mean nothing unless Congress votes to pass them, which it won’t.

Since no Democrats will vote in favor of eliminating any government department or agency—except perhaps the Space Force—the House will need over 98% of Republican votes. This is nearly impossible to achieve with so many RINOs still in the House and so many representing swing districts. In the Senate, even if all Republicans vote in favor of the cuts, they still don’t have 60 votes.

Also, regarding firing government workers, the civil service unions make that nearly impossible. The best Trump can do is allow the workforce to shrink naturally through attrition. That will help, but the savings over the course of his term will be minimal.

Of course, the nearly impossible task will become completely impossible after the Republicans lose the House in the midterms. That is normal for the party in power. In two years, Trump and the Republicans will own the economy. With stagflation firmly entrenched by then, disappointed voters will again vote for change. But as usual, there will be no real change until an actual dollar and sovereign debt crisis finally forces our leaders to act.”

Democracy as Mob Rule

Trumpquake

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by Pele Escobar via Strategic-Culture

Excerpt

Now we come to the clincher. Trump personally destroyed the JCPOA – the Iran nuclear deal – brokered by the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany). Moscow – and Beijing – know perfectly well how this led to further destabilization of the whole of West Asia, in conjunction to the Trump-ordered assassination of Gen Soleimani, which started what I termed the Raging Twenties.

Last but not least, Trump brokered the bombastically-named “Deal of the Century”: the Abraham Accords, which if implemented will forever bury any possibility of an Israel/Palestine two-state solution.

The deal – which may be considered as nefarious as the 1917 Balfour declaration – may be in a coma. But MbS’s Whatsapp pal Jared Kushner is back, and will certainly renew the pressure. MbS still has not made up his mind when it comes to BRICS. Trump will go bonkers if MbS increasingly starts to navigate the petroyuan way.

All that brings us to a supremely nefarious character, Tony Soprano wannabe Mike Pompeo, who is a serious candidate to become head of the Pentagon. That would spell major trouble ahead. Pompeo was CIA director and Secretary of State under Trump 1.0. He is an uber-hawk on Russia, China and especially Iran.

Arguably the pressing question from now on is whether Trump – whose life was spared by God, in his own interpretation – does what is expected of him by his uber-wealthy donors, appoints Pompeo and similar gangsters for key posts, and invests on Israel’s war against Iran and the Axis of Resistance.

If that’s the case, he won’t have to worry about another failed sniper. But if he really tries to run his own independent game, there’s no question he will be a dead man walking.
So the whole Global Majority waits with bated breath. How will Trumpquake translate in the geopolitical MAGA sphere? Sure bets focus on extensive use of private military companies (PMCs) for foreign policy “missions” and selected, targeted military “interventions”. Targets could include any Global South player from Mexico (to “secure the border”) to Venezuela (the Monroe doctrine “securing the oil”), Yemen (to “secure the Red Sea”) and of course Iran (a massive bombing campaign to “secure Israel”).

In a nutshell: no new wars (as Trump promised), just a few targeted incursions. Plus Hybrid War on maximum overdrive. Brazil, watch out: Trumpquake will not tolerate a truly sovereign BRICS member increasing its Global South influence in the “Western Hemisphere”.

Fasten your seatbelts: whatever happens, Trumpquake is bound to be a bumpy ride.