Two interesting thinktank policy papers were released over the past two weeks, which somewhat flew under the radar. I wanted to examine them in light of not only Ukraine’s now-announced major battlefield reorientation, but the general pivotal inflection point on which the conflict stands at the cusp of 2024, to see what projections for the future can be gleaned.
I read both of the papers so you don’t have to, so I’ll highlight the most important points and see how they can tie together into some semblance of a Western/NATO ‘strategic’ redirection.
The first of the two is from the Estonian Ministry of Defense, which has been active in various prognostications and reports from their supposed confidential ‘sources’ within the Russian MOD:
The gist of this paper revolves around hatching ideas for how Ukraine can use its reorientation period to rebuild into a force that can defeat Russia.
It begins with the same tired gloat of how much larger NATO/EU’s combined economies and military spending are over Russia. It’s a bit of a sophomoric take, as they expect this to innately convert into victory, as if it’s just a ‘given’ that “bigger is better.”
This is an excellent analysis, well-worth reading in full. The first part is a discussion of an unremarkable Estonian Defense Ministry report (still worth reading). The second part contains the meat—a well-deserved takedown of American neocons and their destructive fantasies based on their report, The High Price of Losing Ukraine.
Taken together both of these reports reveal the total failure of American neocon policies and the tragedy of allowing a rogue group of committed anti-Russian neocons to take over governance of USA. If these powers had been stopped thirty years ago and USA & NATO had formed a healthy alliance with Russia, all members of that alliance would have benefitted enormously. Instead, the West now faces disaster wherever you look. ABN
Italy has formally withdrawn from China’s vast Belt and Road infrastructure initiative, more than four years after becoming the only G7 nation to sign up, a government source said Wednesday.
The long-expected decision was communicated to Beijing three days ago, according to Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, without any official statement from either side.
An Italian government source confirmed to AFP that Rome had pulled out, without giving details beyond saying it was done in such a way as to “keep channels of political dialogue open.”
Before coming to power last year, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said the decision by a previous government to join in 2019 was a “serious mistake.”
Critics have denounced the trillion-dollar investment scheme as a predatory “Trojan horse” aimed at buying political influence.
BRUSSELS — As the investigation into damage to Baltic Sea critical infrastructure continues, Finland’s Minister of European Affairs Anders Adlercreutz said it’s hard to believe sabotage to the undersea gas pipeline was accidental — or that it happened without Beijing’s knowledge.
“I’m not the sea captain. But I would think that you would notice that you’re dragging an anchor behind you for hundreds of kilometers,” Adlercreutz said in an interview Thursday in Brussels. “I think everything indicates that it was intentional. But of course, so far, nobody has admitted to it.”
Finland and Estonia have been investigating the rupture of the Balticconnector, a 77-kilometer-long gas pipeline that connects the two NATO members beneath the Baltic Sea. The pipeline was damaged around October 7-8, along with two telecoms cables connecting Estonia to Finland and Sweden.
Over 14,000 Gazans have died from the relentless Israeli bombardment of the last few weeks, two-thirds of them women and children and almost none of them members of Hamas. That total represents the official figures of identified bodies, and with most of the local medical system destroyed and so many thousands more missing, buried under the rubble of the tens of thousands of demolished buildings, the true death toll probably already exceeds 20,000.
We are certainly witnessing the greatest televised slaughter of helpless civilians in the history of the world, with nothing even remotely comparable coming to mind. Over the last two years of the bitter war in Ukraine, a Russian missile fired at a military target occasionally caused twenty or forty civilian deaths as accidental collateral damage, and the resulting story spent days dominating the global headlines, then sometimes suddenly vanished once evidence appeared that an errant Ukrainian missile had actually been responsible.
By contrast, what we are now seeing is the deliberate massacre of civilians, aimed at driving out the Palestinians living in Gaza and rendering their enclave uninhabitable. Most of Gaza’s hospitals and medical facilities have been eliminated, and when the Jordanians established field hospitals in South Gaza, those too were bombarded. Schools, bakeries, and other facilities necessary for continued human existence have also been deliberately destroyed, along with the bulk of the housing stock, while the Israelis have blocked the inhabitants from any access to food, water, and fuel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly identified his Palestinian adversaries as the tribe of Amalek, whom the Hebrew God had commanded be exterminated down to the last newborn baby, and many of his country’s other political leaders have used equally genocidal language, with one Cabinet minister suggesting that Israel utilize its illegal nuclear arsenal to eradicate Gaza and its population. Polls show that more than 80% of Israeli Jews support their government’s extremely harsh military measures, hoping to see all the Palestinians killed or expelled.
More and more evidence has steadily accumulated that a majority, perhaps even a large majority of the Israeli civilians killed in the Hamas attack died at the hands of their own country’s trigger-happy military, the victims of tank shells and Hellfire missiles. So the actual number of unarmed Israeli civilians killed by Hamas fighters might have been as low as just 100 to 200, suggesting that the body-count of Palestinian civilians is at least 100 times larger.
…On the same day as the Dutch national elections, the EU Parliament approved a plan put forward by a committee led by Belgian mental and dental patient Guy Verhofstadt, which will abolish national sovereignty in the EU member states. The plan will give the unelected EU commissars full authority in most key realms of government and administration. These include climate, public health, foreign affairs, internal security, defense, education, environment, and migration (meaning, of course, the massive immigration of Africans and Muslims). Most importantly, the plan calls for the abolition of veto rights for individual member states.
In view of the adoption of the Verhofstadt plan, the surprising decision of about one third of Dutch members of parliament not to run for reelection suddenly becomes understandable. All along it was clear that national sovereignty was heading for the exit and that national parliaments would become totally insignificant, if not abolished altogether.
In other words, even if Wilders might succeed in putting together a coalition government, it will fundamentally have no more authority than, say, a municipal government. By the time it takes office, the caretaker Rutte cabinet may have agreed to the Verhofstadt plan.
Short of a collapse of NATO and the EU, which is likely (and hopefully) to follow in the wake of the Russian victory in the Ukraine, the band of sinister criminals running the EU will be in full charge. Under their leadership, Europe will turn into a full-blown hell-hole of the kind precisely Wilders has been trying to prevent at all costs.
If it cannot be stopped, the EU steamroller will proceed and flatten everything in its path.
There is video evidence from 2014 that the US military is in possession of technology that most would describe as Alien. Objects that fly with some sort of gravity propulsion with unbelievable speed and maneuverability, shielded by a vacuum layer that can potentially penetrate anything.
…The implications are enormous. If this technology is real it renders the nuclear deterrence of non-US nations meaningless. These objects can travel faster than any missile and create portals that can make any plane, missile, submarine or satellite disappear.
The Global South was expecting the Dawn of a New Arabian Reality.
After all, the Arab street – even while repressed in their home nations – has pulsed with protests expressing ferocious rage against Israel’s wholesale massacre of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Arab leaders were forced to take some sort of action beyond suspending a few ambassadorships with Israel, and called for a special Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) summit to discuss the ongoing Israeli War Against Palestinian Children.
Representatives of 57 Muslim states convened in Riyadh on 11 November to deliver a serious, practical blow against genocidal practitioners and enablers. But in the end, nothing was offered, not even solace.
The OIC’s final statement will always be enshrined in the Gilded Palace of Cowardice. Highlights of the tawdry rhetorical show: we oppose Israel’s “self-defense;” we condemn the attack on Gaza; we ask (who?) not to sell weapons to Israel; we request the kangaroo ICC to “investigate” war crimes; we request a UN resolution condemning Israel.
UPDATE: KOBK players have no choice but to strike when the time is right if they believe they are the strongest player. Western neocons, which includes Israel, appear to believe they are the strongest. All of their actions over several decades conspicuously indicate they are going for world domination. If you are going for world domination and you believe you are the strongest player and/or it’s now or never, you will make the battle as complex as possible. Complexity aids the strongest player. This is what Western neocons are doing now. Where it will lead is to more war, more conflicts, more stealth strategies and ruses. The goal is world domination at any price, Kill-Or-Be-Killed, KOBK. ABN
UPDATE 2: One of the next big things to happen will be terrorist attacks in Western countries. Whether they are done by Islamic fighters or are false flags, does not matter. They will be blamed on Islamic fighters. The result will be an inflamed and frightened Wester world with people everywhere panicking and calling for revenge. Westerners will clamor for facial-recognition, digital currency, internal passports, lockdowns, anything to keep them safe. The neocons will use this public fervor and support to increase their aggression where it will do the most harm to their enemies—anyone with power who opposes them. ABN
Is this punishment on Gaza’scivilian population, prompted by desire for vengeance? Or is it an outpouring of eschatological rageand determination?
The point about the Gaza crisis is that should everyone agree to stick their head in the sand and ignore the ‘elephant in the room’, it’s easy enough so to do. The meaning to a severe crisis is only properly understood when someone notices ‘the elephant’, and says look out; there’s an elephant stamping here. That’s where we are today. Slowly, the West is beginning to take notice. The rest of world however, is transfixed by it, and is being transformed by it.
What is the ‘elephant’ (or elephants) in the room? Blinken’s recent regional diplomacy was ‘a bust’. None of the regional leaders that Blinken met would talk further about Gaza beyond demanding stridently, ‘no Palestinian population displacement into Egypt’ a ‘stop to this madness’ – the carpet bombing of Gazans – and the demand for an immediate ceasefire.
And Biden’s calls for a ‘pause’ – softly, at first, and the more strident now – is being bluntly ignored by the Israeli government. The spectre of President Carter’s impotence during the Iran hostage crisis hangs ever more soberly in the backdrop.
The truth is that the White House cannot force Israel to do its will – the Israeli lobby holds more clout in Congress than any White House team. Thus, ‘no exit’ from the Israeli crisis is readily to be seen. Biden ‘made his bed’ with the Netanyahu cabinet and must live with consequences.
Impotence then, as the Democratic Party fractures beyond the simplistic division between centrists versus progressives. The polarisation emanating from the ‘no ceasefire stance’ is having stark destabilising effects on politics, both in the U.S. and Europe.
Impotence then, as the shape of the Middle East crystallises into sharp antagonism towards the West’s perceived accommodation of the mass slaughter of Palestinian women, children and civilians. The die may be too far ‘cast’ to brake the ongoing tectonic reset already underway. Western double standards are just too inescapably obvious now to the Global Majority.
UPDATE: With all respect for Crooke’s position, I do not see any of this situation as being a surprise. The ‘eschatological rage’ he describes is in reality an eschatological plan and a very methodical one at that. ‘Greater Israel’ = planet earth. The Israelis, joined at the hip with American neocons, are going for world domination. One could state that differently to avoid overemphasizing the Jewish component: American neocons, joined at the hip with Israeli and Western neocons, are going for world domination.
The plan was obvious in Ukraine, which was simply the most recent aggression against Russia. It’s obvious in mass migration into Western countries coupled with a slew of other anti-national policies which I see no need to list here. The plan for world domination has been obvious for decades. Today it is glaringly obvious.
Why Crooke and so many others pretend not to see it is either: 1) they fear the wrath of the neocons; 2) know that others fear the wrath of the neocons and thus go along; 3) they are trapped in a conceptual mind-control cage developed by the neocon global aggressors.
The plan is a long range one. Historically it is as old as the Old Testament. In the modern era it is well over one-hundred years old, with an acute stage beginning after WW2. This acute stage has become frenzied, inflamed, even enraged, since 2001.
Western neocons are going for world domination. They have already staked everything on it. If their plan is delayed, which I doubt, the delay will be only temporary. Western neocons are locked into a win-or-lose situation, a kill-or-be-killed situation. They will not and cannot back down. ABN
The Gaza war is bringing us an awesome display of Jewish power over the US media and political culture. It’s a display that could effectively wake Americans up to how deeply entrenched Jews are in the American power structure. Even the mainstream media is featuring images of Gazan suffering, bloodied children, and the over 10000 Gazan deaths, mostly women and children. Even clueless White liberals must be starting to wake up about Israel, but of course they will turn a blind eye to the Jewish power in America as enabling all of this, such as that they’re basically funding the Democratic party and its woke agenda the party that preaches a utopian vision of ethnic harmony as a moral imperative supporting yet another round of the decades-long destruction and ethnic violence against the Palestinians.
The Biden administration seems to be realizing that their blind support for Israeli violence can’t be sold to their voters and are pleading with the Israelis for humanitarian pauses. To no avail. As always, “America’s greatest ally” thumbs its nose at America when it wishes. And why not? Just one example: America has been vainly pleading with Israel to stop the West Bank settlements for over 50 years. To no effect. And right now the settlers are violently attacking the West Bank Palestinians. The money and diplomatic support just keep coming. Today’s New York Times:
There is a long history of U.S. presidents realizing they don’t have as much leverage over Israel as they thought,” said Representative Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat and former Marine who served four tours in Iraq. And he said the same applies to Ukraine, “where this is first and foremost their fight, even if we have huge stakes in the outcome.
The atmosphere in Jewish circles right now can best be described as “Blood lust. Kill all the Palestinians, or at least the Gazans. There is no context in the messages emanating from the high ground of American culture—little or no mention of the decades-long occupation, the ethnic cleansing and apartheid, or the open-air prison status of Gaza and the 17-year blockade. And it’s obvious that Jewish media influence is critical for this.
However, as always, the ultimate cause of Jewish power is simply money — most obviously funding a powerful infrastructure of influence, organizations like the ADL. AIPAC, JINSA, left-leaning and war mongering lobbying groups like WINEP — the sorts of organizations that ambitious (and sociopathic) politicians necessarily pay attention to. Jewish financial clout is thus on full display, e.g., punishing the universities and pro-Hamas protesters for allowing anti-Israel speech. Pro-Hamas students and protesters at Ivy League universities have been doxxed and blacklisted from jobs they had been offered at prestigious law firms.
No matter your views on anything, it is important to fully understand MacDonald’s point of view on this topic which underlies so much of American, Western, and world politics. ABN
American Buddhist Net 