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The Cuban regime’s days are numbered. I know it, you know it, and the leadership in Havana know it. The USA wants to clean up its hemisphere as it prepares to contain (and possibly attempt to strangle) China. The Donroe Doctrine clearly defines the Western Hemisphere as the USA’s zone of interest. To underline this point, the Americans raided Venezuela, kidnapped its President and his hausfrau, and have bent the government to its will, forcing it to do its bidding.

The “regime change with a light touch” in Caracas effectively removed a potential Chinese and/or Russian base of military/intel operations from the chessboard. Whether one likes it or not, the move made sense. The ease with which it was accomplished boosted the Trump Regime’s self-confidence, so much so that voices within it and in its periphery immediately demanded that Denmark hand Greenland over to it for safe keeping. It also coloured expectations on how its planned war against Iran would unfold. The desired regime change in Iran has not gone according to plan, to put it lightly, but we will save that discussion for another day. Instead, let’s turn to some much lower hanging fruit: Cuba.

Cuba is anachronism in that the government’s roots lie in being a Soviet client regime, yet it continues to exist in a post-Soviet era. Unlike its fellow communist regime in North Korea, Cuba was utterly reliant on the USSR during the Cold War and lacked the ability to play it off against the Chinese due to historical, and especially geographical, reasons. The North Koreans managed to somehow weather the collapse of the Soviet bloc and go on to develop their own nuclear arsenal. The best that can be said for Cuba is that it has managed to sputter on despite the US sanctions regime under which it lives, entirely thanks to foreign tourist dollars and a police state that has taken a heavy-handed approach to any domestic dissent.

The Sword of Damocles has been an eternal presence hanging above the heads of the Cuban Regime…maybe not eternally, but at least since the Fidel Castro decided to permit his island-state to serve for the USSR what Ukraine has sought to do for NATO: as a forward operating base to be used against its rival. The first few years of Castro’s rule saw the CIA try to remove him from power, whether through the half-hearted Bay of Pigs fiasco, through to the Looney Tunes-like plots against his life. None of these conspiracies succeeded, instead serving only to cement the regime in place.

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I am not as harsh on Vladimir1 Zelensky as many others have been over the years. I do not view him as holding a significant amount of responsibility for the war in Ukraine when compared to others, as I am of the opinion that he is a hired gun, one who was cornered and forced to play-act the role of a “Ukrainian Churchill” by the country’s western backers. This has been my opinion since the Russians (re)crossed the border in February 2022, and I have no reason to change it.

Why do I say this?

It’s quite simple: In October of 2021, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) released a published report accusing Zelensky of benefiting from a network of offshore companies first established in 2012 and spanning the countries and territories of the British Virgin Islands, Belize and Cyprus:

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his partners in comedy production owned a network of offshore companies related to their business based in the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus, and Belize.

• Zelensky’s current chief aide, Serhiy Shefir, as well as the head of the country’s Security Service, were part of the offshore network.

• Offshore companies were used by Shefir and another business partner to buy pricey London real estate.

• Around the time of his 2019 election, Zelensky handed his shares in a key offshore company over to Shefir, but the two appear to have made an arrangement for Zelensky’s family to continue receiving money from the offshore.

The London properties bought via offshore shells linked to his associates: roughly £1.58M + £2.2M + £1.5M (totaling around $8 million USD at the time). That may not seem like much, but then there’s also the charge stemming from an unproven 2019 campaign allegation by a political opponent (Volodymyr Ariev), who claimed the offshore network received $41 million from Kolomoisky’s PrivatBank. The Pandora Papers partially corroborate the structure of the companies (10 matched the chart) but do not confirm the $41 million transfers or prove any wrongdoing.

Zelensky campaigned on a peace and and anti-corruption platform, but at the same time he was the protégé of the notorious Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoisky from Dnipro (aka Dnepropetrovsk). In the ever-shifting alliances of the Ukrainian Oligarchy, one that would not be out of place in Game of Thrones, Kolomoisky was the ultimate maverick as he refused to side with either Russia or the USA, preferring to extract as much as he could while the getting was good. In 2019, OCCRP accused him of stealing $5.5 Billion USD from Ukraine’s PrivatBank:

The former chairwoman of Ukraine’s central bank dubbed it one of the biggest financial scandals of the 21st century.

Valeria Hontareva was describing the alleged theft of US$5.5 billion from PrivatBank, once the country’s largest commercial lender. The suspected masterminds are the bank’s two oligarch owners: Ihor Kolomoisky and Hennadiy Boholiubov, who stand accused of absconding with an amount roughly equal to 5 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. According to court records, both men are said to have recently been living in Switzerland, though Kolomoisky appears to be spending time in Israel.

“Large-scale coordinated fraudulent actions of the bank shareholders and management caused a loss to the state of at least $5.5 billion,” Hontareva said in March 2018. “This is 33 percent of the population’s deposits … [and] 40 percent of our country’s monetary base.”

Now, for the first time, OCCRP has traced the mechanism that appears to have allowed Kolomoisky and Boholiubov to funnel such vast wealth out of Ukraine: The money was moved through a PrivatBank subsidiary in Cyprus.

The arrangement helped hide the fact that cash was disappearing because the National Bank of Ukraine treated the Cyprus branch of PrivatBank the same as it would domestic branches. This designation meant officials never detected that cash transferred to Cyprus was leaving Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Cypriot regulators either failed to detect that the various bank transfers totalling $5.5 billion were backed by bogus contracts, or didn’t take the necessary action to stop them.

The system allowed billions of dollars to be pumped through the PrivatBank accounts, which were held in Cyprus by offshore companies.

This account is based on a forensic audit by Kroll, the U.S.-based corporate investigation and risk consulting firm. The report, which is based on PrivatBank’s own records and was obtained exclusively by OCCRP, also reveals that there was little distinction between Kolomoisky and Boholiubov’s corporate and personal accounts.

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(Image is of Niccolo holding up all the assumptions baked into the ceasefire)

This is the second part of a 2-part series. You can find the first entry here.

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Everything that you are about to read in this entry could be rendered null and void by the time you receive this in your email inbox. This is a testament to just how fragile this ceasefire is. As I type this up, Iran has already launched strikes at Israel, the IDF continues to pound Hezbollah in Lebanon, and now it is being reported that the UAE is striking Iranian oil industry assets in the Persian Gulf. Be prepared to toss this entire analysis into the bin.

However, I still feel the need to provide one. As I wrote in a recent essay, this war is an excellent opportunity for the USA to lock down the entire Middle East, a condition that is necessary for it to move onto its main objective: containing and strangling China. Per contemporary internet parlance, this is an actual happening, and happenings have global repercussions. It deserves our full attention.

All of this could blow up in an instant. Keep this in mind the entire time that you are reading this. We are taking a conflict that is happening in real time, freezing it in amber, and trying to figure out what it all means by assuming that this ceasefire actually holds and progresses to serious negotiations beyond this set two-week time frame. We have to assume some linearity, and therein lies the rub.

How We Got To This Point

The 1979 Iranian Revolution that saw the Shah of Iran deposed and replaced by a Shi’ite Theocracy was a seminal event in the 20th century. For centuries, the Islamic world was in retreat almost everywhere, and was being pressed by The West as it surged ahead on every conceivable front, especially in terms of technology, economics, and warfare. For the first time in generations, Islam experienced a political surge that not only managed to capture one of the most important countries in the Muslim world, but it had the added effect of thoroughly embarrassing the West. Honour was restored.

Despite the sectarianism that plagues the Ummah, Sunnis took inspiration from the changes in Iran, ushering in a resurgence of political Islamism, radicalism, and extremism from Morocco all the way to Indonesia. In the Middle East, Arab secularism (especially Ba’athism) now had a new challenger to face off against, one without the baggage of military defeats that plagued Egypt, Syria, and others in the region.

This earth-shaking change did not please others as well, particularly Israel and especially Saudi Arabia. For the Saudis, not only did the new regime in Tehran present a sectarian opponent for it to face down, Iran also now eroded much of the legitimacy that was bestowed on the Saudis for being the “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques” (their control over Islam’s two holiest cities: Mecca and Medina). Making matters even worse for them was that many Sunni radicals within the Kingdom took inspiration from the Iranian Revolution and quickly moved to copy it at home by toppling the royals. This resulted in the failed Grand Mosque Seizure in the late Autumn of 1979. Saudi Arabia now had an existentialist threat in its neighbourhood.

Israel did not take too kindly to this scene change, either. Overnight, Iran became “The Great Hope” for many Palestinians, and many more Muslims worldwide, in their conflict with the Israeli state. Iran’s approach was incendiary, reflecting its revolutionary character. Israel now had a new existentialist threat in its wider neighbourhood to contend with.

However, no one was more upset than the United States of America. Not only did the Mullahs remove a loyal client in Tehran, they also threatened their key ally in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, their new protege, Israel, and most importantly, the free flow of oil through the Persian Gulf. Postwar USA was built on the solid foundation of US-Saudi relations that provided a steady, cheap, and reliable supply of Saudi oil to the US market that powered its economic dynamism. This situation could not be permitted to go unchallenged.

Fortunately for the USA, it had a junkyard dog on retainer on Iran’s western border: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Hussein, a one-time CIA asset, was happy to go to war with Iran, and a brutal conflict that lasted almost a decade broke out between the two. Neither side had much to show for it other than a tremendous loss of life, but the Iranian regime managed to survive, thwarting American ambitions. Still worse, Hussein had “gone rogue” and turned against his one time patrons, forcing the USA to enact a policy of “dual containment” that spanned both countries. This policy would last until Hussein was toppled over a decade later.

The end of Iraq’s Ba’athist regime introduced a new problem for US policy planners: in the ensuing power vacuum, pro-Iranian Shi’a militias took control of the south and much of the centre of the country. Without firing a single shot, Iran came out a winner in the War on Iraq. Thanks to those very same militias, a “Shi’ite Crescent” came into existence, one that created a land and air bridge between Iran and its client state in Damascus, and its proxy force in South Lebanon, Hezbollah. Iran was now able to easily supply these forces, with Hezbollah acting as a destabilizing agent on Israel’s northern border. This situation was intolerable for both Jerusalem and Washington.

Over this period of time, the spectre of a nuclear-armed Iran began to fill newspaper columns in Israel and the West. Despite Israel reportedly possessing its own nuclear arsenal, an Iranian nuke was beyond the pale. The efforts to dislodge the regime in Tehran continued unabated, with the 2009 Green Revolution being a notable failure in those efforts. Iran proved itself yet again to be nut too tough to crack. It was time to go back to the drawing board.

Obama’s administration engaged in a policy of quasi-detente with Iran, seeking to try to change its behaviour through engagement that would bolster reformists in that country. This led to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that worked to limit the country’s nuclear program in return for sanctions relief. This agreement upset Iran Hawks in the USA, and horrified the Israelis. Thankfully for them, Donald Trump was all to happy to rip up this agreement and place new sanctions on Iran.

A stalemate ensued until Hamas launched its disastrous attack on Israel in 2023. So disastrous was this gambit that it resulted in the decapitation and humbling of Hezbolllah, and more importantly, the long-desired overthrow of the Ba’athist Assad government in Syria. Almost overnight, 40 years of Iranian geo-strategy went up in smoke. The Shi’ite Crescent crumbled, Assad was gone, Hezbollah was humbled, and Iran’s feeble retaliation against Israel made it appear to be a paper tiger. Worse still was the fact that no one, neither Russia nor China, came to its aid. It was left to fend for itself, totally isolated. Why not finish them off once and for all?

This was the line of reasoning used by Bibi Netanyahu when he pitched a war with Iran in front of Trump and his inner circle on February 11th of this year:

In the Situation Room on Feb. 11, Mr. Netanyahu made a hard sell, suggesting that Iran was ripe for regime change and expressing the belief that a joint U.S.-Israeli mission could finally bring an end to the Islamic Republic.

At one point, the Israelis played for Mr. Trump a brief video that included a montage of potential new leaders who could take over the country if the hard-line government fell. Among those featured was Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last shah, now a Washington-based dissident who had tried to position himself as a secular leader who could shepherd Iran toward a post-theocratic government.

Mr. Netanyahu and his team outlined conditions they portrayed as pointing to near-certain victory: Iran’s ballistic missile program could be destroyed in a few weeks. The regime would be so weakened that it could not choke off the Strait of Hormuz, and the likelihood that Iran would land blows against U.S. interests in neighboring countries was assessed as minimal.

…and most importantly:

Besides, Mossad’s intelligence indicated that street protests inside Iran would begin again and — with the impetus of the Israeli spy agency helping to foment riots and rebellion — an intense bombing campaign could foster the conditions for the Iranian opposition to overthrow the regime. The Israelis also raised the prospect of Iranian Kurdish fighters crossing the border from Iraq to open a ground front in the northwest, further stretching the regime’s forces and accelerating its collapse.

Don’t let others fool you: this war has always been about regime change.

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If it were not for Hungary’s obstinance, European countries would have been forced to accept refugees on a quota basis almost a decade ago. It was this persistent stubbornness to permit Brussels to manage the demographics of its member states that won Viktor Orban and Fidesz a lot of international support. It also earned them a tremendous amount of enmity on both sides of the pond. Hungary under Fidesz has been a thorn in the side of the transatlantic elites for almost two decades now.

That may be coming to an end as Magyars head to the polls this Sunday to vote for a new parliament. Fidesz has been in power since 2010, and have won every single election in that time quite handily, even winning supermajorities that permitted it to change the country’s constitution. Yet this time around they are trailing in the polls, and the opposition leader is not a bumbling fool like previous ones were. Fidesz is in danger of going into the opposition.

Contrary to hyperventilating liberals, Fidesz is not an extremist party. It is a party in the tradition of post-war European Christian Democracy. It is a classically conservative party, far, far away from any sort of right wing radicalism. At the same time, this lack of radicalism is what makes Fidesz’s time in government little more than a rearguard action against ever-entrenching liberal democracy. As Orban himself has repeatedly stated, Hungary is too small a country to be able to single-handedly turn Europe towards a new direction. It always needed assistance from either a larger partner member state, or to be part of a bloc of states. The Visegrad 4 could have been that bloc, but the war in Ukraine got in the way, and Poland and Hungary took two opposite routes since then.

Hungary could have weathered the storm of opposition that it drew due to its stance on migration, but its refusal to play ball with Brussels and Washington over the war in Ukraine might be its undoing. The Americans want to park that war onto the EU’s plate, and Hungary has long been a spoiler in these efforts. Despite JD Vance arriving in Budapest only a few short hours ago to try and boost Fidesz’s chances this weekend, Hungary’s independent approach to the war is a nuisance to American foreign policy planners. I personally believe that many in the Trump Administration would not be upset to see Orban leave the scene, despite public appearances to the contrary.

Many Hungarian voters want to punish Fidesz for an economic downturn resulting from the war in Ukraine and exacerbated by the EU withholding funds earmarked for the country. Where Orban could previously campaign on economic successes, this time around Fidesz cannot rely on that argument. Compounding matters is the perception that the party is corrupt. There is a lot of truth to this, and corruption (in most cases) needs to be punished.

I will now say something that might be construed as controversial: a lot of that corruption has been used to create a counter-elite that is patriotic, weakening the entrenched elite that has been held over since the communist era. Russia’s Putin was able to tame most of the rapacious oligarchy by threatening them with prison (or worse) if they refused to play ball. Viktor Orban could not do something similar because it would have violated every rule on human rights in the book. This meant that Fidesz would have to be creative in creating a counter-elite. The above is a very tough pill to swallow, especially because a lot of the corruption is purely selfish. This perception is now so widespread in Hungary that the government no longer has the benefit of the doubt.

Magyars are also experiencing fatigue with Fidesz in that the media war footing that their country has been on for a very long time now could only maintain high levels of support if the economy kept growing and benefits kept being felt by the public. Regime fatigue is a constant in politics across the globe, and Fidesz should have addressed this by bringing in more new and younger faces. Instead, an perceived ossification has set in, and like all people, Hungary’s voting public is fickle.

Can Fidesz pull off a miracle and win one more time? It’s not looking good for them right now as all the stars have aligned to force them out of power after almost an entire generation in power.

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Part 1 of 2 - (Second Part out tomorrow)

I have a somewhat large social media following, and I tend to do my out loud thinking there instead of here for reasons that are entirely about one thing only: quality. On social media, I ask questions out loud and float thoughts, not only to gauge reaction (as relying on basic A/B testing would be unethical), but more to see how the words that I choose to arrange in a sentence to form the idea look to me. In a way, it’s like looking in a mirror while getting ready to step out.

On social media, I get bombarded with questions, and often the deluge is simply too much to bear. That is a price of having a large following. Sometimes, the questions are good or even very good. Sometimes they are horrible, or are based on misreadings of what I have written. The worst are those that are based on second or third-hand misunderstandings of my views. I mainly ignore those. The best ones are ones that make me think and that force me to revisit my priors.

Roughly one week into this new war, I made a comment that suggested that the next three or four days would tell us where this war was going. I had several people remind me of this when that time frame elapsed, hoping that I would provide them an answer. I did give them one…I replied: “I don’t know.”

This was the only honest answer that I could provide at the time. Thankfully, most of those who responded were appreciative of my sincerity, knowing full well that it was also unsatisfactory in terms of obtaining knowledge. I strive at all times not be a bullshit merchant, even if that line of work is much, much more lucrative than this one has been. If you ask me today where I think that this war is headed, my answer will be much the same, albeit with more of the gaps filled in since I was first asked that question.

Why is that?

There are several reasons, but the overarching one is that information on this war has been incredibly shoddy and very, very unreliable. Ever war sees the proverbial “Fog of War” descend on it, but this time it’s as thick as pea soup. Reporters on the ground in Iran are scant, while reporting from Israel and the countries that form the GCC are severely censored, if permitted to report at all. Factor into this the lack of US print media foreign-based reporting, forcing them to rely on updates from the US State Department, White House or DoD (Department of Defense).. Even the Brits and Europeans have gone AWOL when they should be covering this war.

What about the internet, the so-called “democratization of media”? I am very sorry to report that its performance has been even worse than mainstream media in terms of war coverage. During previous conflicts, news aggregator sites like Twitter were excellent resources to track wars to their most minute level. A lot of the heavy lifting is traditionally performed by OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) accounts who rely on a wide range of sources, spanning everything from satellite imagery through to local media outlets, and HUMINT (Human Intelligence). The beauty of OSINT is that trustworthiness is very easy to set ablaze as claims can be verified rather quickly…..or so it seemed (more on this in a bit).

Unfortunately, social media is now a new battleground between opposing sides, and between spectators who have chosen to pick sides. This might provide comedic relief, and it does entertain, but only to the detriment of trying to find out what is actually going on in this war. To borrow an overused term, social media has become “weaponized”. This state of affairs muddies the water, as belligerents choose to flood the zone with disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation in order to not just engage in psychological warfare against their enemy, but to also build support for their cause at home and abroad. Compounding matters is the monetization of social media that incentivizes bad actors to pump out sensationalist imagery and “takes” in order to cash in, which makes them guilty of war profiteering in a way. The rapid rise of AI-produced media makes this dishonesty all the more cheaper to create. I have had to turn back to mainstream media to try and divine the truth regarding this conflict.

If Vietnam was the “First Televised War”, and if the First Gulf War was the “First 24 Hour News War”, then this showdown can be argued to be the “First Fake News on Social Media War” (admittedly, a cumbersome title that certainly won’t stick). A lack of on-the-ground reporting from credible sources, a social media world that is both monetized to lie for clicks and drowning in partisan alt.media takes that have only a fleeting relationship with reality, and a US regime that is practicing a strategy of communications ambiguity is a perfect recipe for creating frustration. That has been a theme of these past four weeks.

Strategic Communication Ambiguity

Traditionally, countries entering into a war will provide their citizenry with a clear understanding as to why it is being undertaken. War is a matter of life and death…literally. It is also the most important decision that any leader or government will make during his/her/its time in office. Every war that is launched is a big risk, and clearly communicating the goals of such a risk is required to try to beef up support for such a tricky venture.

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If you strip away the moral aspect, remove the domestic political considerations, and look at it objectively, this was probably the best time to conclusively hit Iran. Rocked by destabilizing anti-government protests only a year or so after seeing 40 years of its regional strategy blow up in their faces in the span of two weeks, Tehran has been increasingly isolated. Add to this the recent round of joint US-Israeli strikes targeting its nuclear power infrastructure combined with its somewhat feeble retaliatory efforts, and one could satisfactorily argue that the regime has suffered a mortal wound. Why not finish it off once for all?

This is Iran, after all. This is the country whose government chants “Death to America!” like the British once used to exclaim “God Save the King!”. This is a country that took US officials hostage, thoroughly embarrassing the Americans for well over a year, helping destroy Jimmy Carter’s Presidency. This is a country that is technically not just Islamist, but also a revolutionary regime, one whose creation inspired Muslims across the Sunni-Shi’a divide to turn back to Islam and embrace radical, revolutionary politics to upend and replace secular governments that they viewed as being weak in the face of foreign powers.

Think about it: isolated and left to twist in the wind by a Russia too preoccupied with a long and bloody existential war on its footstep, effectively abandoned by a China that is playing its own long game, Iran is ripe for the plucking. Remove yourself from all biases that you carry, and all the politics that you support, and hitting Iran now makes perfect sense. Hitler is claimed to have boasted that “We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.” in reference to the USSR. It wasn’t true with respect to the Soviet Union, but can it be true about Iran?

Bashar Assad is playing video games in exile in Moscow. Saddam Hussein is long dead. The USA finished the process of the Middle East’s de-Ba’athification when Damascus surrendered to al-Qaida (under a new brand) just before Christmas of 2024. Two ex-Soviet client regimes, Iraq (opportunistic) and Syria (traditional), inherited by Russia have been removed from the chessboard of the Middle East in the span of one single generation. Gone from the equation is secular Arab nationalism that is both anti-American and anti-Israeli. Two challengers to US hegemonic ambitions in that region are no more, rendering Iran, the final prize, almost completely isolated. This is an isolation made only even more stark by the loss of an Iranian ally in Damascus, and the humbling of its Lebanese client, Hezbollah. Iran remains the only state challenger to US designs on the Middle East. If the regime can be replaced, or if the present one can be altered enough to a certain degree, the American victory in the region will be final, as the Middle East would be pacified in the larger sense.

Only Iran stands in the way of the USA being able to finally subdue the whole of the Middle East. For almost half a century now, several American governments have been bogged down in a region that holds outsized importance to the global economy, even if that importance has diminished somewhat over the past decade and a half. The story contains three key elements:

1. maintain critical supplies of oil to the USA and most of the rest of the world in order to aid in economic growth

2. gain control of oil and gas supplies in order to use as leverage against state actors not aligned with US strategic goals, yet reliant on said energy supplies

3. support the defense (and sometimes, expansion) of Israel from its regional opponents in order to satiate various pro-Israeli domestic constituents that are politically powerful

Dwight Eisenhower sent 15,000 marines and soldiers to Lebanon in 1958 to stabilize a pro-western regime in Beirut as part of Operation Blue Bat. Ronald Reagan sent the Marines to the same country in the early 1980s, but with disastrous results. It was only with Operation Desert Shield/Operation Desert Storm that the USA entrenched its forces in the Middle East, a presence that has been continuous to this day, one that has been coloured by an immense amount of resources being allocated to it, and triggering a significant amount of criticism in response.

There have been quite a lot of side quests during the era of permanent US military presence in the Middle East, but each one of them, ranging from “fighting terrorism” to “halting Iran’s nuclear ambitions”, fall within the above three elements. For example, the official narrative regarding the 9/11 attacks on the USA states that al-Qaida was responsible for it. The leader of al-Qaida at the time, Osama bin Laden, turned to terror for many reasons, but the straw the broke the camel’s back was the permanent stationing of US forces on Saudi Arabian soil. To him and his type of Sunni Muslim, this represented a severe violation of Islam, in that a non-Muslim power was occupying the “Land of the Two Holy Mosques” (Mecca and Medina). Yet the large US presence in Saudi Arabia only came about due to its confrontation with Saddam Hussein in the lead up to the First Gulf War. Saudi Arabia, the world’s only ‘swing producer’ of oil, was so critical to the increasingly-globalized world economy (led by the USA), that Washington felt it had no option but to place troops in that very conservative Islamic country in order to protect the regime from threats, both external and internal.1 This is a classic example of how one of the three key elements stated above resulted in side quests that have become themes of the history of US forces in the Middle East.

If the Iranian regime can be toppled, and if an American client can be put in its place, the USA will have accomplished the pacification of the Middle East and its successful incorporation into the US Empire. This is just how enormous the stakes are when Donald Trump threw the dice this past weekend. Sure, minor irritants would flare up from time to time, but present ones like Hezbollah and the Houthis would lose their patrons, resulting in a significant loss of their own ability to project power. Most importantly, this desired pacification would permit the USA to finalize two stated policy objectives.

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“Nothing Ever Happens” had a tremendous run, but like all good things it too had to come to an end at some point.

This specific point was reached around a month ago when Team Trump decided to kick its foreign policy ambitions into overdrive (some might say “Turbo”) by kidnapping Venezuela Jefe Nicolas Maduro and his wife, then immediately laying claim to ownership of the whole of Greenland, threatening to regime change Cuba and Colombia, and now threatening to strike Iran yet again. Things are indeed ‘happening’.

It was only a few short years ago when the mood in the USA was one of serious concern as to whether it could keep itself together as the media-driven psy-op that flooded the country (and which many of us foreigners followed closely) painted a picture of an America on the verge of civil strife, one that was in danger of falling behind China. “American decline” was the theme that was repeatedly forced down our throats.

Long-time readers of this Substack are aware that I took a contrarian view, insisting that not only was the USA not in decline on the global stage, but that it was setting itself up for a coming period where it would reassert itself in order to fend off perceived challenges from the world’s two main revisionist powers: China and Russia. Part of my thesis was that the USA would become increasingly extractive with respect to its own allies in order to maintain its dominant global position. I called this theory “Turbo America”, and I developed it over the course of roughly four essays that you can read on this site. Here is the original for those who have never read it:

Suffice it to say that my contrarian take has now been totally vindicated. My take was dismissed at the time, and was often mocked too. I will not get credit for making the best call out of anyone who writes in this sphere, nor have I ever expected that I would get any. Those are the brakes. What I was certain of was that this is how events would play out.

Description is not prescription, a concept that many people seem to have trouble grasping. Since I wrote Turbo America, I have been repeatedly accused of being pro-US Empire. Nothing could be further from the truth. At the same time, other detractors have lumped me in with types who promote BRICS or Russia’s Dugin and his “Eurasianism” worldview, and so on. Again, these types are also off-base. My core concern is my country, and by extension due to its small size, Europe.

The Liberal-Democratic Order

I do not believe that there is a “West” today. The West as a concept cannot exist with a Europe that is totally dominated by an outside force. We can speak of a desire to liberate the West, but for all intents and purposes the West is dead (unless you argue that it has moved across the Atlantic Ocean and now resides in the USA). Despite having all the trappings of national sovereignty, Europe is little more than a collection of national and regional branches of USA Inc. It is less a continent of states and more a collection of vassals. There can be no course correction without accepting this as being the actual truth.

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In lieu of a proper introduction, I will instead offer up some historical quotes about US foreign policy, for reasons that you will instinctively understand.

Egyptian President Gamel Nassar had some choice lines to describe US foreign policy too:

“The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make the rest of us wonder at the possibility that we might be missing something.”

“With the Soviet Union, you know where you stand today and where you will stand tomorrow. With the United States, you never know where you will stand tomorrow—and sometimes not even today.”

“America is like a beautiful woman who changes her mind every night. You can love her, you can fear her, but you can never be sure what she will do in the morning.”

And then there is this recent classic from Russia’s chief diplomat, Sergey Lavrov:

“The USA is agreement non-capable.”

The point of sharing these quotes is to highlight the obvious fact that US foreign policy has long been unpredictable. This wouldn’t be too much of an issue if it were a middling power. When a superpower routinely upends the table, it makes life very, very difficult for those countries that have become “states of interest” for the Americans. Creating and pursuing foreign policy strategies require a lot of time and effort, meaning that they are very rarely predicated on short-term trends. When the predictability of foreign actors is removed from the strategic equation, the foundation of any plan becomes very weak.

Earlier this month, the White House issued its 2025 National Security Strategy vision in a 33 page .pdf document available for all to see and read here. This is an action that the US Executive Branch is mandated to do, ever since the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986. The point of this exercise is to articulate the vision of the President of the United States of America regarding foreign policy, so as to effectively communicate said vision to Congress and the American people. It does not mean that it is an official foreign policy strategy, since this area of governance is the responsibility of both the executive and legislative branches of the US Government.

Because this is the Trump Administration, and because of the fever pitch that has coloured both of his terms in office, a lot of attention is being given to this iteration of this mandatory document. This document is intentionally high-level (meaning that it purposely doesn’t drill down into specifics), keeping within the tradition of previous administrations. However, attention is warranted this time, because the vision outlined by President Trump per this document indicates a significant break in both the USA’s approach to and philosophical arguments regarding how and why it conducts its foreign policy. Despite the obvious Trumpist (think: transactional) touches interspersed throughout this document, what it does represent is a stated desire to break with certain idealist practices of recent administrations in favour of a more realist approach and worldview, one that stresses respect (if we accept the document at face value) for national sovereignty, and an admission that US global hegemony is simply not possible.

So what we are left with is a document that outlines a new vision for US foreign policy, one that has determined that taking on both Russia and China simultaneously is the wrong approach to securing American national interests. This makes it very worthy of closer inspection and analysis (something that I have been thinking about deeply since it was first made available to the public a fortnight ago). Before we begin to dive into it, I am asking you all to temporarily suspend your cynicism and take the strategy outline at face value for the sake of this analysis. I will once again repeat that this is not official policy, and there is a very strong chance that it will never be adopted as that.

Two and a half years ago, I published an essay entitled Turbo America to describe how I interpreted US foreign policy. This was the culmination of several years of essays, and was received quite well. Unfortunately, a lot of people misconstrued what I said in that essay, either deliberately or through failure to grasp the concepts that I had outlined in it (while others didn’t even read it and decided to make up new definitions for a concept that I created), leading me to post a simplified version of my argument. In this simplified version, I reduced my Turbo America thesis down to four points:

Here is what Turbo-America means in concrete terms:

1. continued direct and indirect conflict with Russia, whether military (no appetite for direct here, so it’s done by proxy), economic, or diplomatic

2. boxing China in through the use of targeted economic policies/sanctions, and the beefing up of The Quad, alongside efforts to cobble together an “Asian NATO” that would do to Beijing what NATO has been doing to Moscow

3. Disciplining, streamlining, and homogenizing its own allies to align these countries with the USA politically, economically, culturally, and socially more than they already are i.e. creating unofficial new states of the United States of America via micro-management, targeted sanctioning, espionage, etc.

4. Imperial management via overseeing/managing conflicts in the US Zone of Influence, with the conflicts in Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon being the best example at present

The reason why I bring up Turbo America is that this new document can be seen as a partial repudiation of it, for reasons that we will discuss shortly. The significance in this is that, if taken at face value (once again), this strategic vision is a repudiation of the liberal interventionist approach that has dominated US foreign policy for over a generation now. This repudiation is made abundantly clear in the document:

After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country. Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.

………

They overestimated America’s ability to fund, simultaneously, a massive welfare-regulatory-administrative state alongside a massive military, diplomatic, intelligence, and foreign aid complex. They placed hugely misguided and destructive bets on globalism and so-called “free trade” that hollowed out the very middle class and industrial base on which American economic and military preeminence depend.

This does constitute a rejection of the approach up to the end of the Biden Administration. When taken in tandem with Trump tearing up international trade covenants and institutions in favour of bilateral deals, it does signal an end to globalism, both economic and political. In short: if made real, it would serve to end what is commonly referred to as the ‘rules-based order’. The Trump Administration has effectively concluded that the present economic and security architectures no longer serve the American people as well as they once did, and that a new approach is warranted to pursue US global interests and maintain American power on the world stage.

The document makes clear the administration’s hostility to globalism:

And they lashed American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty.

Distrust of international institutions such as the United Nations has always been present in Republican circles, but this time around it is much more pronounced. Yes, the Dubya Regime did pursue a unilateralist approach that did its best to eschew the multilateralism of the Clinton era, but it still did present its case regarding Iraq at the UN over and over again.

More importantly, this strategy places great emphasis on respecting the state sovereignty of other states, something that was entirely absent from earlier GOP governments. This creates significant problems for the hyper-interventionist set in DC, as they tie the right to state sovereignty to certain individual rights, often the result of recent social trends in the USA. If transgressed, these states can lose their right to sovereignty if the Eye of Sauron glares down at them. The repeated emphasis on national sovereignty concedes the point that not every country should turn into the USA, whether culturally, politically, or socially. USAID has become a notable casualty of this desired policy shift.

‘Core, vital national interests’

Since this vision is high-level, it creates wide avenues of approach for critics of this proposed set of policies. One common refrain will be that this administration seeks to ‘have its cake and eat it too’. Allow me to highlight one example where this is a fair critique:

We want to prevent an adversarial power from dominating the Middle East, its oil and gas supplies, and the chokepoints through which they pass while avoiding the “forever wars” that bogged us down in that region at great cost.

Ever since the Obama Administration, US foreign policy planners have sought to reduce the American footprint in the Middle East in order to pursue its “Pivot to East Asia”. The problem with this stated desire is that events get in the way, and nowhere more so than in the Middle East. We will discuss this region further down in this analysis, but for now I will raise the obvious question stemming from this proposal: What if regional micromanagement is the only way to prevent any perceived adversary from displacing the USA in the Middle East?

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The war in Ukraine has now lasted as long as the massive one between the USSR and Germany in WW2. This fact shocks no one today, but if you predicted in 2022 that it would have lasted this long you would have been laughed out of any room where you said this out loud.

Punditry is one of the casualties of this brutal war. Who could have predicted that Russia would launch an invasion with a relatively light touch in terms of force? Who could have envisioned the war lasting as long as it has already? Who would have thought that the Russian economy would hold on this long in the face of a very punishing sanctions regime? There’s no shame in admitting that you made bad calls, and I certainly concede that I did not see the ‘light touch’ coming.

One prediction that I made only moments after the Russians attacked on February 24, 2022 still holds up…at least in my opinion. I think the facts as they exist now support the following:

Big Winner: USA

Small Winner: Russia

Small Loser: EU

Big Loser: Ukraine

There are two wars being fought simultaneously. In the war of attrition between Russia and Ukraine, the Russians clearly have the upper hand, and the tempo of their advances is noticeably increasing month over month. In the larger war between the USA and Russia, the Americans won on the first day of the invasion because Moscow finally opted to choose one of the only two possible routes to counter US/NATO designs in Ukraine. The Russians could have not invaded and permitted NATO to set up shop in their neighbour to the southwest and accept a strategic defeat, but instead they chose to invade to forestall such an outcome and have been forced to accept a bloody war, a divorce from Europe, and sanctions package after sanctions package.

The net effect of this ongoing conflict will be the agreement as to where the new border between Russia and the Transatlantic alliance (read: US Empire) will be. What we can be certain of is that whatever remains of Ukraine will definitely be in the western orbit, meaning that Russia will lose an important piece of real estate. Compensation for this loss will be some Ukrainian territory and possibly an agreement that Kiev will never be permitted to join NATO. Barring a complete collapse of Ukraine’s defense that permits Russians to stroll into Kiev and points further west, this is about as good an outcome as Moscow could hope for. For Ukraine, it’s a disaster.

For the Americans, it’s a victory. They clearly knew that Ukraine could not win this war, as even Obama conceded that Russia has “escalation dominance” and that for Moscow this conflict is an existential matter, unlike for the USA. Russia has been bled out to a fairly significant degree, it has been separated from Europe for the time being, and Europe’s entire economy has been reoriented to service the USA. The only problem that the Americans have is how to wrap this conflict up (so that they can move their primary focus to containing and strangling a surging China) without losing face. The Ukrainians have done a remarkable job in defending their country, something that the Americans have strategically benefited from. But at what cost to Ukraine?

When I say “the Americans”, it needs to be understood that there are different factions under this name. At present, Donald Trump resides in the White House. Alongside him is Congress, and also the CIA and other various intel outfits. Add to this mix business interests that are licking their lips at exploiting a post-war Ukraine. Not all of these factions are aligned, and some are at cross-purposes. Many have spent up to three decades working on putting a US puppet in the Kremlin, and they did come close with Yeltsin in his second term…but then along came Vladimir Putin to foil that plot.

It will be very, very difficult to convince this faction to accept any peace deal with iron-clad bilateral and international agreements, because it would put an end to their regime change ops. This faction will do whatever it takes to wait Trump out, whether it means subterfuge domestically, or even abroad with willing accomplices like former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Many individuals in government and in positions of influence in the USA at present are no doubt paying lip service to Trump’s demands for a peace deal, all the while looking forward to November 2028. China hawks want to wrap this war up and head out east, but Russia hawks would see any firm peace deal as fumbling the ball on the five yard line.

Russia’s predicament is even more complex: Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has described the USA as “agreement non-capable”, but at the end of the day it too needs to end this war, and to accomplish this it must come to a deal with the Americans. Not only that, but any deal requires iron-clad guarantees that cannot be undone by a future US administration. How does one agree on such an important matter with an opposing party they perceive as 100% untrustworthy? The Kremlin looks at any peace offering from the USA with justified suspicion, a fact that makes any real peace deal all the more difficult.

All of the points mentioned above must be factored into the equation when looking at the joint US-Russian framework peace deal proposal that US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll presented to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky yesterday. This is a 28 point plan to end the war and keep it from breaking out again in the future. It merits a closer inspection not just because of its content, but especially because it is a joint draft. This means that there is buy-in from the two major belligerents (Russia, USA) even if it is not a “take it or leave it” document. This leaves us with the question: why now?

From Politico:

Driscoll, who met with Zelenksyy, told a group of European ambassadors afterward that the continent couldn’t match the Russian defense industry’s output, so Ukraine won’t be able to claw back territory. The time for a settlement had arrived, he said, according to one diplomat, a European official in the room and a person familiar with the meeting. Some of Driscoll’s conversation, including his message about industrial capacity, has not been previously reported.

“No deal is perfect, but it must be done sooner rather than later,” Driscoll said, according to the European official at the meeting. U.S. armed forces “love” Ukraine and stand by its military, Driscoll said, but “the honest U.S. military assessment is that Ukraine is in a very bad position and now is the best time for peace.”

It’s been a grinding war of attrition between the Russian and Ukrainian forces on the ground, a situation that favours the side with more resources and shorter logistical routes. This means Russia, and this rule of warfare is being proven yet again as the Russians continue to make very slow, but notable, progress on various fronts.

However, the pace of Russia’s advances are picking up in certain spots, one being Northeastern Zaporizhzhia/Southeastern Dnipro regions:

It is here where the Russians are in a position to break out as there is little standing in the way between its forces near Huliapolye and the city of Zaporizhzhia on the Dnieper River. This worrying development no doubt lends credence to Driscoll’s negative assessment of Ukraine’s present position.

It is in the interests of the USA to forestall any Russian breakthrough that could lead to a collapse of the entire front or even large parts of it. This is common sense. The question that must be asked is the following: is the American intention regarding this framework peace deal intended to halt the Russian advance so that Ukraine can regroup? Or is it actually sincere? The answer is simple: it depends on which faction of USGov you ask.

As for the Russian side, they need to engage for the sake of PR.

According to the Russian president, Moscow confirmed during the talks that it agreed with the peace proposals. However, he added that after the Alaska meeting there was a pause from the US side, which he attributed to Ukraine’s rejection of Trump’s draft. This is why the “modernized plan” containing 28 points appeared later, Putin said, adding that Moscow has the document.

“I believe it could also form the basis of a final peace settlement. But this text is not being discussed with us in substance,” Putin said.

Zelensky seems to be aware of the gravity of the situation (if this isn’t kayfabe):

“This is one of the most difficult moments in our history [...] Currently, the pressure on Ukraine is one of the hardest. Ukraine may now face a very difficult choice, either losing its dignity or the risk of losing a key partner.”

One thing that immediately leaps out is that the EU has been entirely ignored in this draft proposal. Not only was Europe not asked to contribute to the framework plan, it seems that Europe’s leaders were caught completely off-guard about the entire proposal:

European leaders are preparing an emergency call to discuss U.S. President Donald Trump’s controversial proposal to end the war in Ukraine.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz cancelled a scheduled appearance to join the discussion, which will also include Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, and French President Emmanuel Macron.

The 28‑point plan caught European capitals off guard. Leaders were not directly involved in the U.S. effort and learned the details only after the document was made public.

Sidelining Europe works to the advantage of both Russia (which sees the EU as just a collection of American poodles) and those in the USGov who actually want to conclude a deal. Those in favour of extending the conflict want Europe to meddle on their behalf, and this includes a sizable portion of those in power in the USA at present. European meddling would muddy the waters and attempt to torpedo any possibility of a deal being reached between Washington and Moscow.

More European reactions:

Multiple EU diplomats and officials said they feared the proposals, from Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff, would wreck their chances of the loan proposal being agreed by the EU’s 27 governments. European leaders had been hoping to finalize the so-called “reparations loan” deal at a crunch summit next month.

A former French official, granted anonymity like others to discuss sensitive matters, said the Witkoff idea “is, of course, scandalous.”

“The Europeans are exhausting themselves trying to find a viable solution to use the assets for the benefit of Ukrainians and Trump wants to profit from them,” the person said. “This proposal is likely to be rejected by everyone.”

………..

One senior EU official in Brussels scoffed at the idea and noted that whatever he wants, Trump has no power to unfreeze assets held in Europe. An official from an EU government resorted to colorful swearing to express their dismay, while a senior EU politician said: “Witkoff needs to see a psychiatrist.”

The EU is being treated as an afterthought.

Reuters has reported that Trump wants Kiev to sign this framework deal by Thursday of next week, and if Zelensky doesn’t then: “The United States has threatened to cut intelligence sharing and weapons supplies for Ukraine to press it into agreeing to the framework of a U.S.-brokered peace deal, two people familiar with the matter said.” This is a serious threat, assuming that it is real in the first place and not a psy-op.

28 Points For Peace in Ukraine

Let’s look at each of the 28 points in the proposal, but please do bear in mind that these are a basis for direct negotiations and not set in stone:

1. Ukraine’s sovereignty will be confirmed

This is a very generic statement that is open to all sorts of interpretation….but only up to a point. What this means is that Russia must treat Ukraine as an independent state that is permitted its own system of governance, armed forces, security, ability to negotiate and enter into international agreements, and so on. It would be a recognition that Russia has lost rump Ukraine permanently (despite it already recognizing its independence).

Winners: Ukraine, USA, EU

Loser: Russia

2. A comprehensive non-aggression agreement will be concluded between Russia, Ukraine and Europe. All ambiguities of the last 30 years will be considered settled

This is a very big deal, because it would require a new security arrangement framework that would stretch from Lisbon to Vladivostok. This is a very time intensive process, one that could be spoiled by those seeking to run out the clock on Trump. It doesn’t just include Ukraine, it also refers to the outstanding issues of South Ossetia in Georgia, and Transnistria in Moldova.

A successful conclusion of such a wide-ranging security agreement would also mean that NATO’s original purpose (i.e. to keep the Russians out) would be achieved, opening up the question as to whether that organization is still required (see below for more on this).

Winners: Ukraine, Russia, EU, US China Hawks

Losers: US Russia Hawks and regime change enthusiasts on both continents

Potential Winners: Moldova, Georgia

Unknown: South Ossetian separatist state, Transnistria separatist state

3. It is expected that Russia will not invade neighboring countries and NATO will not expand further

These are worded as promises, and later in the document we see the carrots and sticks attached to them. Suffice it to say that Russia would be very, very happy to agree to this as it views NATO’s eastward push to its borders as an existential matter.

This should give (some) peace of mind to the Balts, and effectively inform Russian minorities in those states that Moscow will not be coming to attach them to the Motherland.

It also raises the question of NATO’s continued raison d’etre. There are fears that Trump wants to pull the USA out of NATO, and such a multilateral agreement could provide fuel for the fire.

Winners: Russia, EU, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo

Losers: NATO, Serbian ultranationalists

4. A dialogue will be held between Russia and NATO, mediated by the United States, to resolve all security issues and create conditions for de-escalation in order to ensure global security and increase opportunities for cooperation and future economic development.

This is very straight forward and speaks to the two previous points.

Winners: USA, Russia, EU

Losers: Russia Hawks, NATO

5. Ukraine will receive reliable security guarantees

• Update: A separate document details the terms of the security guarantee. The U.S. and its NATO allies would treat an attack on Ukraine as an attack on the entire “transatlantic community.”

This is little more than NATO-by-stealth, something that Moscow is adamant cannot be permitted to occur. It does fulfill Ukraine’s consistent message that it requires strong western security guarantees before it agrees to any final peace deal.

What this point means is that Ukraine is indirectly absorbed into Transatlantic security structures without it formally becoming a NATO member. Expect Russia to strongly reject this point and insist on a watered-down set of security guarantees for Kiev. This will be a key sticking point, and the devil will be in the details. For example, how many European states would be willing to provide such a guarantee to go to war against Russia over Ukraine?

Winners: Ukraine, USA, NATO

Losers: Russia, EU

6. The size of the Ukrainian Armed Forces will be limited to 600,000 personnel

• Note: Ukraine’s army currently has 800,000-850,000 personnel, and had around 250,000 before the war, according to a Ukrainian official.

I am instantly reminded of Versailles and how Weimar Germany was officially limited to an army of 100,000 soldiers. That limitation didn’t work back then, and such a proposal wouldn’t work in the future in Ukraine either as it would be open to all sorts of abuse if not strictly monitored. 600,000 is also very, very large in number. It would make Ukraine’s Army twice the size of the Germany’s for example.

This is one of the many points that Russia will push back on, because it would be very difficult to not just accept this number, but also to monitor it.

Winners: Ukraine, USA, NATO, EU

Loser: Russia

7. Ukraine agrees to enshrine in its constitution that it will not join NATO, and NATO agrees to include in its statutes a provision that Ukraine will not be admitted in the future

Point 7 retroactively proves that NATO enlargement to include Ukraine is one of, if not the major reason for this war breaking out, despite protests in the western camp to the contrary. Selling this to Kiev will be incredibly difficult in terms of optics, even though Ukraine has for some time now agreed that a set of strong security guarantees from the USA (and Europe) would suffice. One problem is that Ukraine’s Constitution includes accession to NATO as a state objective. This means that the Ukrainian Constitution would have to be amended, and that is not a certainty.

Winners: Russia (overwhelmingly), EU

Losers: Ukraine (overwhelmingly), USA, NATO

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At the most recent NatCon, Curt Mills of The American Conservative debated Max Abrahms, Associate Professor of International Security at Northeastern University, on the subject of US foreign policy and Israel. Both raised good points and made a respectable show of it. Max explained how rewarding US-designated “terror” groups such as Hamas only reinforces what they do, while Curt decried the incredibly amount of latitude (and support) given to Israel by the USA over the years, and how their acts threaten, rather than enhance, US interests regionally, and beyond.

I wouldn’t call Curt an Arabist, a term used to deride those at the US State Department either seeking a more balanced approach to regional US policy or those who favour Arabs over Israel, but it is a term often used to critique those critical of the State of Israel in a zero-sum game. Being critical of excessive permissiveness to Israel runs in parallel with US war fatigue/opposition to more US military ventures abroad. I lean toward this position, but I think that it is high time to consider how effective those arguments are in light of recent events in Israel and its neighbourhood, and in Iran as well. Max argued for what is essentially the old neo-conservative approach of strong support for Israel and a muscular US position in the region to counter “terror”.

The term “neo-conservative” (neo-con, for short) has fallen out of favour lately, and with good reason; the perceived failures of the “Great War on Terror” were in part laid at their feet for being the most vocal supporters of it. Secondly, that cohort has almost entirely drifted away from the Republican Party and towards a tactical support of the Democrats in the name of a popular front against Donald Trump, a man who they see as risking US hegemony via flirtations with what is incorrectly viewed as “isolationism”, along with his media-described “soft approach” to Vladimir Putin.

Third, by way of their migration to independent or Democrat camps, they have effectively blurred the very thin line that separated them from what were known as “liberal humanitarian interventionists”, a group firmly inside of the Democrat Party (think Samantha Power). There really is no significant difference between these two groups anymore, especially considering how the neo-cons of old have pretty much dropped whatever aspects of social conservatism they had once adopted (e.g. tough on crime).

“Okay Nic, what is, or what was, a neo-con anyway?”

I’m glad you asked. Some readers have asked me to do a geneaology of neo-conservatism, but that would require a huge effort that I can re-visit around Christmas when I have some down time. Suffice it to say that neo-conservatism arose in the late 1960s among a group of former Trotskyites like Irving Kristol (the brilliant father of the less-brilliant William) who were disaffected with the social liberalization that they viewed as going too far in the USA, particularly in its urban settings. More importantly, they wanted America to take a muscular approach on the world stage against the Soviet Union (the old Trotsky vs. Stalin feud refused to die down, even though times had changed). To them, detente was a risk that offered little in the way of reward. Lastly, Israel held a special place in their worldview, a “plucky” little state surrounded by enemies, “the only democracy in the Middle East”. It is not uncouth to state that the overwhelming majority of notable neo-conservatives were themselves Jewish.

It was with Ronald Reagan entered the White House where they began to exert some direct influence on US policy, but their real influence would have to wait until George W. Bush and Dick Cheney arrived on stage in 2001. W’s first term was the heyday of US neo-conservatism. Dubya speechwriter, David Frum, coined the term “Axis of Evil’ to denote US targets for regime change Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. He would go on to co-author the book “An End To Evil: How To Win the War on Terror” with fellow neo-conservative, Richard Perle, a proposed recipe that included direct military confrontation with several states targeted for regime change.

Like I said, I won’t go into full detail on the neo-conservatives and their background in this essay, but it must be re-stated just how influential they were during the first Dubya term in office. And because of that rapid rise influence, their downfall was just as fast; a lot of the blame for the failure to pacify Iraq were laid at their feet. In due time, “neo-con” became a pejorative, and rightly so.

Over the next several years, body bags containing the remains of US soldiers came home and questions about the justification for removing Saddam Hussein from office grew louder and louder. It turned out that Saddam did not have WMD of any type that could be deployed against other states, especially Israel. It also turned out that Iraq was not exactly welcoming US soldiers as liberators (outside of the Kurdish-heavy north of the country). The Afghanis too were mixed in their response to US boots on the ground, with the Taliban growing more confident by the year that the US forces and its allies, restrained by strict rules of engagement, would eventually leave and create a new vacuum for them to re-fill.

Furthermore, the bete noire of the neo-conservatives, the Iranians, actually gained from the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Pro-Iranian Shi’ites were now in control of the south of Iraq, and much of the centre, including most of Baghdad. Although not always in lockstep with the Iranian Mullahs, Iran’s zone of influence now stretched further west, to the point that it could transport weapons to its allies in Syria and Lebanon (Hezbollah), creating a “Shi’ite Crescent” to contest US, Israeli, and Saudi designs on the region. The Iranian nuclear program continued apace, despite international opposition to it, including at the UN. Would Iran get the bomb?

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In the Realist School of International Relations Theory, (nation -) states are the primary actors on the global stage, and through their leadership they are rational actors.1 They must be rational actors, because the world is in a constant state of anarchy and irrational behaviour is checked by other states, oftentimes proving to be a threat to its objectives…..or even its existence.

Israel is an interesting case study in that it is a state without any real checks on its behaviour thanks to the sponsorship and protection that it receives from the world’s foremost power, the United States of America. As this condition has been the norm between the countries for some time now, theoretically Israel should have engaged in some irrational behaviour due to the lack of checks placed on it. Suffice it to say, that has not come to pass at the time of this writing, and suffice it to say, Israel has acted very, very rationally in the pursuit of its perceived national security both at home and regionally.

This entry will not please everyone reading this, as there are those with vested interests in the conflict between Israel and Iran, and there are also those cheering one side or the other as part of principled stands that they hold. I have no desire to argue “good” and “bad”, but instead will present a cold, hard analysis of a short-lived war that should clear up many misconceptions about how power is distributed across the globe at this present time. The simplest summary is that the USA’s power is unrivaled on the world stage, that it is not in some form of retreat from it, and that revisionist powers are nowhere near the point of consolidating into a bloc that can challenge its pre-eminent position.

The Reports of the Decline of US Power Are Greatly Exaggerated

For some twenty years now, I have been reading predictions about how US power is on the wane globally from individuals who are much more schooled than I am, more well-known than I will ever be, and more prestigious than I could ever hope to be. The fact of the matter is that it’s taken as a given that as we progress through this century US power in relative terms will continue to decline, with the consensus agreeing that power will shift to East Asia. As many of you are already aware, I consider this to be over-exaggerated and even possibly wrong.

People will point to the failure of nation-building in Iraq or the bungled pullout of US forces in Afghanistan as “proof” of US decline, but I think that these two theatres are actual proof of continued American pre-dominance. In both countries, the USA had maximalist and minimalist aims: in Iraq the minimalist aim was to remove Saddam Hussein and the Ba’athists from power, the maximalist aim being to create a liberal democracy along the Euphrates. In Afghanistan, the minimalist objective was to capture Osama Bin Laden and unseat al-Qaida’s generous hosts, the Taliban, from rule in Kabul, with the maximalist aim being to transform the country into at least something resembling a modern state that would be pro-American.

In both instances, the minimalist goals were achieved rather easily (despite OBL’s capture taking some time), and the achievement of the minimalist aims is good enough to buttress the position that US power did not decline via the US actions in those countries. A challenger to the US position in the Middle East was eliminated (and along with it, a Russian client regime), while a threat to national security was liquidated in the other one. Any way you look at it, both of those must be counted as victories for the USA, despite the failure of the Americans’ maximalist goals in both instances.

It was the failure of these maximalist goals that has led many less savvy (and often opportunistic) pundits to declare the “death of the US Empire” as imminent, insisting that the USA was on its way to being turfed from the Middle East and elsewhere. People naturally pointed to an increasingly-confident China or a Russia that regained its footing as the vanguards of a new global order, one in which the Americans would not be able to act as unchallenged as they were in the immediate post-9/11 era. An “Axis of Resistance” was touted that would see Iran, Shi’a radicals in Iraq, Hezbollah, Ba’athist Syria, Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in the Gaza Strip band together to strike a death blow at the US Empire’s favourite client state, Israel. BRICS was touted as the inevitable counterweight to the USA and NATO on the wider stage.

None of this has come to pass. In the past three and a half years, the world has witnessed the USA engaging Russia in a proxy war on Ukrainian and Russian soil, the collapse of the Ba’athist regime in Syria and its replacement by way of a group more amenable to US interests (at present), the defeat of Hezbollah, the humbling of Iran and its exposure as a paper tiger, the eviction of Russia from the South Caucasus, the expansion of NATO in the Baltic Sea, and the consolidation of the European continent (give or take one or two exceptions) as an American protectorate. This is an incredible run and I fail to see how anyone can describe this as a USA that is either in decline or is less engaged on the world stage.

If we zoom out even further, we can add to the list the removal of Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein from power in their respective countries, and the expansion of NATO from the Fulda Gap to to the immediate east of Frankfurt, Germany all the way to the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Sure, there have been a few setbacks over the course of this time frame, but the trend is obvious: US power is expanding globally and there is no counterweight on the horizon. This second point has been proven by the recent conflict with Iran.

Tic-Tac-Toe

The problem with being a revolutionary state is that most people tire of revolution after a few months. Maintaining a constant state of revolutionary fervour requires a repressive state apparatus the likes of which can be seen today only in North Korea. Like the DPRK, Iran too is a revolutionary state, but its citizens are freer than those in Pyongyang, and much less invested in being revolutionaries at home, and especially abroad. The initial excitement that accompanies revolution inevitably leads to moderation as the state resumes its daily business under a new guise and ideology. Some take longer to enter this phase of stasis or stagnation, as both Mao’s China and Stalin’s USSR saw renewed (and very bloody) revolutionary fervour take hold decades after the initial revolution was successfully ushered in.

Another problem with maintaining the revolutionary aspect of a revolutionary state is that it naturally takes extreme positions that it cannot divest itself from without accusations of “failing the revolution”. Cuba backed itself into a corner a long time ago with its anti-American agitation, but luckily had the failure of the Bay of Pigs embarrassment prolong its meagre existence to the present.

Iran, and its shocking 1979 revolution, made it the global leader of Islamism, albeit Shi’ite rather than Sunni. They routinely chant “DEATH TO AMERICA!”, but Iranian political leadership will often openly state that they seek the destruction of the Zionist regime in Israel. Whether you are fond of Israel or not, you must agree that this is a threat from a country much larger than Israel, one that up until recently had fanatical proxy forces on its borders. To no longer desire the eradication of the Israeli state would be tantamount to declaring the revolution in Iran over. Like Cuba, the Iranian has long ago backed itself into a corner due to its inherently revolutionary nature.

Unlike Cuba, Iran has been able to project its power regionally, whether through its own military, or by way of proxy forces such as Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen. The removal of the Ba’athists from power in Iraq was seen by Tehran as a double-edged sword in that US forces would now be stationed on its immediate western border, but Iranian proxies would be able to fill much of the vacuum left by Hussein’s defenestration. This vacuum created the conditions that would result in the air and land bridge between Iran and Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon, as Iranian arms would now be able to travel by truck and plane through Iraq and Syria to its final destination.2 Iran’s ability to project power right up to Israel’s borders via proxy was an unexpected result of the war in Iraq.

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Four days ago, US Special Envoy Keith Kellogg suggested to the UK Times that Ukraine could be divided in a post-war settlement akin to what was done to Germany after WW2. A handy map was shared (see above) to illustrate such a proposal.

Joseph Keith Kellogg is one US envoy working on negotiating a settlement to end this war. Steve Witkoff is another. The Americans have been quite vocal in saying that only a negotiated settlement could end this war, and they have been saying it much louder since their own hawks were defeated during the failed summer counteroffensive of 2023. The position of the new US administration is no different, with the only notable change being that these discussions are now visible.

To me, the most notable element of these talks is how the USA is trying to position itself as some dispassionate neutral mediator between Ukraine and Russia, even though it has been an active belligerent on the side of Kiev throughout the entire war. This sleight-of-hand worked when managing the recent conflict between Israel and Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran, but Russia is Russia, with its own significant heft that cannot be dismissed nor even downplayed (especially with the failure of the sanctions regime leveled against it to date).

Unlike the Russians, the Americans are bogged down with a proxy in the form of a client state in this conflict. This means that any negotiated settlement has to be sold to them as they have “skin in the game”. Yet US objectives do not mirror those of Ukraine, meaning that the sponsor’s goals will win out in the end. At some point in the coming future, a conflict will break out on the Ukrainian side as to whether to accept a US-backed peace deal or not. Will it break out into open fighting between differing Ukrainian factions? I don’t know. But Ukrainians should look to 1920s Ireland to understand how prone they are to this actually coming about.

This war continues to be one of attrition, and even though the Ukrainians are and continue to fight bravely, the Russians have shown a strong capacity for being able to take hits as well. Once this became an actual war of attrition, the outcome was already decided….so long as politics did not interrupt the process. There has been no great Russian breakthrough, but they are grounding Ukrainian forces into dust while ever so slowly continuing to push the frontline north and west.

Which brings us to the Kellogg map……….

The map allows for the Russians to maintain control over the land that they have captured, buffered by a very wide de-militarized zone that reflects the power of new drone technology made available during this conflict. The most interesting part is the stationing of French and British forces to the west of the Dnieper River. Kellogg argues that this shouldn’t be viewed as provocative by the Russians, as it would not be a NATO force. Very funny.

The fact of the matter is that this would be NATO-by-Stealth, precisely the thing that caused the Russians to invade Ukraine in the first place. Kellogg is telling the Russians that NATO will now move its border eastwards to the Dnieper River, and that the Russians can have the 18% of Ukraine that they occupy as a consolation prize. The Ukrainians? They will just have to swallow it or risk losing the backing of the USA.

This war has been fought to determine the new border between Russia and the US Empire. As I’ve written here in the past, this conflict is now one of diminshing returns for the Americans, especially considering the fact that they want to move their primary focus to East Asia. That cannot be done without a settlement in Ukraine. Kellogg’s proposal does show us some of the cards in the hands of the USA, but this game is far from over.

We haven’t discussed this conflict here for some time, so this is your opportunity to share your thoughts on it as it stands today. Have at it!

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I think that some perspective is in order:

• The USA (or at least its allied in coordination with it) destroyed the Nordstream pipeline that connected Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea

• President Trump is adamant (at least publicly) about purchasing Greenland from Denmark

• In the meantime, the EU has been focused (albeit in a non-uniform way) on helping Ukraine defend itself against the Russian invasion of its soil

Ukraine is not a member of the EU. Denmark and Germany are. Europe’s focus seems to be helping non-member state Ukraine defend its territorial integrity, while its erstwhile ally seeks to upset the territorial integrity of EU member state Denmark.

I am not sure how sincere Trump’s desire to purchase Greenland from the Danes really is, as it could be a method to pressure Copenhagen and the rest of the continent to ramp up military spending and stop dealing with China, except where deemed “permissible” by Washington.

…but if we take him for his word, the question then becomes: who is the REAL threat to Europe?

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Previous Entry - Part 2

“Mediterraneo” is a fun 90s Italian comedy film about a misfit detachment of Italian soldiers who get stranded on a tiny Greek island during WW2. Each character presents a stereotype of the modern Italian, with only one of them being an actual believer in Mussolini and Italian fascism. The rest show no interest in a resurrected Roman Empire and just want to go home. In due time, the fascist becomes accustomed to his new surroundings, abandoning his own political fanaticism in the process, viewing it as an embarrassment in retrospect.

In 1861, Italian statesman Massimo D’Azeglio announced: “We have made Italy. Now we must make Italians.” Benito Mussolini’s totalitarian dictatorship went a long way towards realizing D’Azeglio’s dream. Although not yet fully complete (and still short of it to this very day), the differences between Neapolitans and Romans and Tuscans and Venetians shrank immensely. Provincialism did give way to a new, vital nationalism, a form of civilizational progress that has made Europe quite unique in comparison to most of the rest of the world. Yet those very same Italians who overcame parochial differences to unite under their national banner were not really all that interested in pursuing empire. Fascism did bring material, social, and even psychological benefits to Italians, and the price was sweat and tears. Empire meant spilling blood, a much larger “ask” of the Italian people.

Italian forces in WW2 did not uniformly perform poorly in the theatre of war, but quite a lot of its units did. Embarrassed by the Greeks and trounced by the British in North Africa, Italian fascism (and Benito Mussolini himself) took repeated reputational hits. By the time Italy had capitulated in 1943, only the diehard fanatics still believed in fascism. To all other Italians, it had failed them and their country, leading them to death and disaster. Mussolini did make Italians, but he was unable to turn them into fascists at the same time.

I bring up Italy and Italians because their national project has largely succeeded. Regional differences do exist and are very glaring, but almost all ethnic Italians on the Italian Peninsula today identify with the Italian nation. Like the Germans, they were late to the game when compared to the French or the English, both of whom managed to solidify their national identities prior to these two. However, not all projects as ambitious as these succeed. Spain has not managed to turn Basques (or even half of Catalans) into Spaniards. Yugoslavia totally failed in its quest to create Yugoslavs, with the identity peaking in the 1970s at around 10% of the overall population, collapsing entirely when war broke out in the early 1990s.

Ba’athism sought Arab unity across national and confessional lines, but it too has failed in its grand project. There are two main reasons for this:

1. National identity is not uniform across the Arab world, with national sub-tribalism still the primary non-confessional identity marker in places like the Middle East especially. The inability to cement national identity meant that the route to Pan-Arab identity was therefore blocked

2. Confessional differences within the Arab world continue to be too strong. There is no separation between State and Mosque in Islam, meaning that the two are very intertwined in the minds of all Muslims, even those who have been highly secularized. Christians are viewed as outposts of the West, often colonial remnants, if not outright enemies.

Nowhere is this failure more pronounced than in the struggle for standard-bearer of Ba’athism that took place between Hafez al-Assad’s Syria and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

From Syria and Egypt to Syria and Iraq

An ideology based around a very wide identity was ridden with local factionalism from the beginning. In previous entries in this series, we saw how personality clashes between the originators of Ba’athism in Damascus set the tone for its future. Class interests also played a part as a countryside military caste (which included a younger Hafez al-Assad) decided to do away with the bourgeois intellectuals of the capital. To continue on this theme, the joint Egyptian-Syrian state, one that was intended to set the example for Pan-Arab unity across the Arabic world, lasted but a mere three years before it also fell apart.

The Iraqi Ba’ath Party was established in 1951, and came to power via a successful military coup in 1963 when it deposed and assassinated Iraqi Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim (1914-1963). Replacing him as Prime Minister was high-ranking Ba’athist Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr (1914-1982), who led a government that only lasted for a single year before it was also ousted. In 1968, al-Bakr managed to regain power and consolidate Ba’athist rule over Iraq with the help of the military, one key figure among them being military officer and fellow Ba’athist Saddam Hussein.

In 1966, the Ba’athist old guard in Syria (led by Michel Aflaq), were forcefully removed from power by the military officers led by Salah Jadid. This faction became known as the “Neo-Ba’athists”, and under their rule they cemented militarism as a core element of their ideology. This coup forced Aflaq and other older party stalwarts to flee Syria, many of whom chose to go to friendly Iraq. It was this coup that formalized the rupture between Syrian and Iraqi Ba’athism.

Decried as a “Marxist takeover of Syria”, Iraqi Ba’athists took to Aflaq and sought guidance from him. One of his recommendations to al-Bakr led to Saddam Hussein being elevated to Deputy Secretary of the Regional Command in 1966.1 It was this move that emboldened Hussein to announce the formal split of Iraqi Ba’athism from its former Syrian sister party. It also granted him the power to create a Ba’athist security service that he alone controlled. Both he an al-Bakr hailed from Tikrit, and both were members of the al-Bejat branch of the Nasir tribe.

I cannot overstate just how important tribal identity is in Mesopotamia. Despite both al-Bakr and Hussein being the highest ranking members of the Pan-Arab Ba’athist party, both stemmed from the same tribe (estimates are that there are 35,000 Nasiris in total2), and both surrounded themselves with fellow tribesmen, no doubt for security reasons. This created a massive internal contradiction: how can Tikrits claim to be Pan-Arabs while concentrating all power in the hands of their tribe? Iraq was already split along ethnic lines between Arabs, Kurds, and Assyrians, and was divided along confessional lines between Sunnis, Shi’ites, Christians, and Jews. The natural assumption to make is that power would be shared across at least two groups to stabilize the country and the regime, but instead it was held in the hands of not just a Sunni minority (as Shi’ites were a plurality and now a majority in Iraq), but one specific tribe. Even al-Bakr’s Nasiri membership didn’t spare him as he was gradually pushed out of power in Iraq by Saddam over the course of the 1970s, dying in 1982 of “unknown causes”.

Aflaq would have a big influence on Iraqi politics for the next two decades, as he was treated with the utmost respect by Hussein, often seated next to him at state functions. His presence in Baghdad gave the Iraqi party legitimacy, permitting it (in their own eyes) to declare themselves as the ideology’s true representatives. In Iraq, Aflaq agitated for the Palestinian cause, one that remained central to Ba’athism to its dying days.

It would be remiss of me to leave you with the impression that the Ba’athist split between its Syrian and Iraqi branches was solely due to ideological reasons and/or personality conflicts. Salah Jadid was Alawite, an Islamic sect that spun off from Shi’ism way back in the 9th century. Much like how Saddam Hussein consolidated power in the hands of himself and his fellow Tikritis, Syria’s Neo-Ba’athists elevated the the minority Alawites of the coastal region of Latakia to prominence. To Sunni Muslims like Saddam Hussein, Shi’ism is a nasty heresy. To many Sunnis, Alawism isn’t even Islamic, but instead is a crypto-Christian cult. These distinctions are important in understanding why the two main branches of Ba’athism grew hostile with one another, despite sharing a desire to unify all Arabs under their banner.

There was a brief thaw in relations in the 1970s, with calls for a united Iraqi-Syrian project to counter Israel being the impetus, but they were quickly quashed by Saddam Hussein. Two years later, Iran and Iraq went to war with one another. Hafez al-Assad’s Syria decided to throw its support not behind its fellow Ba’athists in Iraq, but behind Iran, a country that had recently fallen to Islamic Fundamentalism.

A New Challenger Emerges

It is incorrect to paint the Arabic world with a uniform brush, but it is safe to say that wide swathes of it throughout the 20th century were not party to the rapid political, cultural, and social changes that took place in their capitals and cosmopolitan cities. Secularization was an urban affair, and was largely class-based to boot. Most Muslims in Arabic lands were less than one hundred years removed from centuries of Islamic rule, with Islam serving as the default setting for their conception of governance (with Christians and Jews as dhimmis). The Arab countryside still viewed almost all local relations through a confessional lens despite the imposition of kings and kingdoms, and experiments in modern ideologies like Ba’athist nationalism or communism.

Rocked by the collapse by the Ottoman Empire, and humiliated by western colonial rule, Arabs like the early Ba’athists felt it necessary to adopt certain elements of modern Western thought in order to better challenge it. To them, the old ways failed and were not applicable to a rapidly changing world. Why not use the Western creation known as nationalism against them?

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Part 1 of A Requiem For Ba’athism

The overwhelming global dominance of the West in the first half of the last century meant that those in the rest of the world had to respect the power of France, the UK, Germany, the USA, and so on. There was no benefit in just resenting them if you wanted to free your own people. That kind of thinking was defeatist, often fatalist, and only led to turning inwards or traveling down dead end paths.

Arabic/Islamic thinkers like Sayyed Qutb spent time living in the West and concluded that there was no liberation outside of Islam despite the obvious power imbalance between those cultures and the West at the time. Qutb felt that Muslims needed to return to basics, as straying from Islam is what caused the corruption that led them to fall behind the West. More recent Salafi thought leaders have gone further, insisting that everything non-Islamic was to be purged in the Islamic State that was to be ruled by Shari’a.

In parallel to these early Islamists, there were other Arab intellectuals who had also spent time in the West and yearned for Arab liberation from foreign dominance. Unlike the Islamists, they rejected the notion that freedom could only come through Islam. In fact, they liked what they saw in places like France and felt that secularism could unite Muslim and Christian Arabs against their Anglo-French occupiers. To these men, Islam was an impediment to both liberation and progress (even if they could not say it themselves), a ‘backwards’ and ‘superstitious’ faith that divided Arabs against one another. They also were romanced by the socialist strains in Europe, feeling that economic redistribution could serve reduce the lord/serf system still prevalent in Arabic society. These intellectuals were the original Ba’athists.

B. Ba’athism

It’s interesting to note just how many 20th century non-western revolutionary leaders spent time in the West. Iran’s first post-revolution Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomenei represents those whose sojourns were brief, having spent only the three immediate months in a suburb of Paris, France prior to his triumphal return to Iran in January of 1979. We find someone much more interesting at the other end: Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh. First arriving in France as a kitchen helper aboard a French steamer in 1911, he went on to become one of the founders of the French Communist Party in 1920 and gained most of his political philosophical education there before decamping to the Soviet Union, and later, China.

Emigres and exiles from the Arab world living in France did not fail to be influenced by the political trends taking place during the tempestuous interwar era. Two Syrian schoolteachers who had studied at the prestigious Sorbonne University had returned home to Damascus to teach at the all-male al-Tajheez school. Michael Aflaq (1910-1989) was Greek Orthodox, while Salah al-Bitar (1912-1980) was a Sunni Muslim. Both hailed from the conservative Damascus neighbourhood of al-Midan, and both came under the influence of the French Communist Party during their studies at Sorbonne.

Both had also been influenced by another Syrian alumnus of Sorbonne, Zaki al-Arsuzi (1899-1968). He too was a schoolteacher who went to France for training and education, and he too returned home under the influence of French political currents, setting up a movement of intellectuals called al-Baath (The Revival). Despite the obvious similarities, Arsuzi and Aflaq could never get along with one another, leading the younger figure to take a more pro-active approach on behalf of Arab nationalism, officially launching a political party with al-Bitar called al-Ba'ath, enraging the older man. Not only was Arsuzi not given a position within the newly-founded party, he was not even invited to its founding conference in April of 1947.

The Arsuzi-Aflaq rivalry having its beginnings at the very start of the Ba’athist movement symbolized the factionalism and personal rifts that went on to colour it over the course of its history. A Pan-Arab political philosophy succumbing to constant splits and schisms is ironic, but should surprise no one familiar with political history, not just in the Middle East, but beyond it as well. The fact that this initial split took place between two middle class Damascene school teacher Sorbonne alumni makes it rather humourous, at least in my opinion.

Aflaq and al-Bitar cast a wider net, seeking to incorporate more Syrians in their nascent movement, giving prominent positions to Jalal Sayyed of Deir Ezzor and Wahib Ghanem (1919-2003), an Alawite physician from Latakia.1 Syria was a very conservative country, only a little over two decades on from being part of the Ottoman Caliphate. Introducing a secularist ideology into a land that was guided by Islam for well over a thousand years was never going to be easy. Making it more difficult, secularism was a western import, a product of the very same contemporary occupiers and ruling authorities! For the first decade of its existence, Ba’athism in Syria remained largely a Damascene affair, with little to no penetration in the countryside.

War With Israel, Coups and More Coups, and Nasserism

Just as the Ba’athists were getting their feet wet in the political pond, the catastrophic Arab-Israeli War of 1948 upended everything in the Arab world. Aflaq personally volunteered for the war effort (in which he took part), and the disastrous performance of the Syrian Army led to him supporting a coup d'état in early 1949. Despite his support for General Husni al-Zaim’s2 toppling of the al-Quwatli regime, the Ba’ath party was outlawed, and Aflaq was imprisoned and tortured by the new authorities.

The al-Zaim coup ushered in a Spanish-like era of constant coup attempts, some more successful than others. Syrian Ba’athists lent support to Colonel Adib al-Shishakli (1909-1964), a powerful figure who launched two successful coups, the first being in 1949, and the second one following two years later. Despite al-Shishakli and Aflaq being comrades who knew one another as vets from the war a few years prior, the former had the Ba’ath party dissolved, forcing the latter and al-Bitar to flee into exile in Lebanon. It was there that the two decided to merge their party together with the Arab Socialist Party (whose leader Akram al-Hawrani (1912-1996) was also exiled there by al-Shishakli) to create the Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party.

Unlike the founding duo of the party, al-Hawrani was volatile, charismatic, and most of all, vengeful. He had come from a wealthy landowning family who had been dispossessed:

His Arab Socialist Party was founded on Marxist ideology and centred around a cult of personality. He lashed out against the feudal establishment, accusing them of hoarding the country's wealth and enslaving the farmers who ploughed the land.

The villages, he reminded the peasants, had no electricity, water, clinics or schools. Al-Hawrani called on farmers to rise in revolt. He would visit them at their homes, remind them they did not own their farms and say: 'If you work with me, this land could be yours!' He positioned himself as God-given saviour of Syria's peasantry, who made up 2 million of its 3.5 million population.

He is also credited with single-handedly introducing new terms into Syrian politics like 'classless society' and 'rule of the working class.' Before al-Hawrani, such terminology was completely absent from the Syrian dictionary.

Prime Minister Khalid al-Azm claimed that al-Hawrani pledged to 'fill the empty stomachs of farmers' with promises of land ownership. His 'Land Belongs to the Peasant' campaign took Syria by storm. Thousands answered his rallying cry and chanted: 'Fetch the basket and the shovel to bury the Agha and the Bey.'

Al-Hawrani turned agitation into violence and encouraged his supporters to burn crops, attack landlords, and make the villages too dangerous for their owners to enter. The Damascus daily al-Fayha wrote: 'Ever since your youth, you have been feeding on spite, malice, and dissension. You love to play with fire, even at the risk of burning yourself, your people, and your country.'3

al-Hawrani destabilized newly-independent Syria by way of the dreaded Agrarian Question, an issue that had vexed countries on several different continents.

1954 saw yet another coup in Syria, permitting the exiled Ba’athist leaders to return home and to participate in government. al-Bitar became the country’s foreign minister, while economics portfolio was given to Khalil Kallas, also a Ba’athist.

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It took less than two weeks for the Syrian government to fall and for Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) to almost effortlessly march into the country’s capital, Damascus, ending six decades of Ba’athist rule in the country, five of which were directly under the Assad family.

The collapse was quick; what was intended as a limited offensive to reach the Sunni suburbs of West Aleppo from Idlib Province ended up in the mass surrender of regime forces. Adolf Hitler is reported to have said of 1941 USSR that: “You only have to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down!”. That turned out not to be true in that case, but it aptly describes what we all just witnessed take place in Syria.

The rush to Aleppo seemed like another suicidal dash as is typical of extremist Sunni groupings….but then they captured the entire city, the second largest in the country. The HTS-led forces then streamed south towards Hama, easily capturing that city. “The regime could still survive this”, thought many, as it has always been a hotbed of Sunni radicalism. Everything rested on Homs, the next large city to its immediate south. If it fell, Damascus and its environs would be cut off from the coast, the heartland of the Alawites, the Shi’ite sect to which the Assad family belongs.

Homs fell without much of a fight, and regime forces were split in two. Shortly thereafter, Sunnis in Dara’a Province (to the south of Damascus) rose up and took over government and military facilities. The US-backed and Kurdish-led SDF had already begun moving days earlier to shore up their positions in the east of the country, taking over government positions without shots being fired. Homs fell to HTS on December 8th, with the capital Damascus capitulating only hours later.

And just like that, the Assad Dynasty came to an end.

I want to take a look at how the regime collapsed in Syria so quickly, but I think that it is more important to put what just took place into a larger context, geopolitically, historically, and culturally. Many others have published reports and essays on the events of the past several weeks and how they were the ‘inevitable result’ of the Syrian Civil War, but I think it would best serve us to peer deeper into the past to see beyond recent events in order to try and understand just how significant the changing of the guard in Damascus really is.

Tying Up Loose Ends

The ease with which HTS strolled into Hama signaled to me that the regime in Damascus was done for. Being a conservative type who likes to hedge, my gut was telling me that the rapid fall of Aleppo to the cleaned-up Islamists of al-Qaida’s re-re-re-named local branch office clearly indicated that Bashar Assad was approaching the end of his time in office, but the continuous bombardment of the advancing Mujahideen by Russian aviation served as a caution to not jump to that conclusion too quickly. Syria was not just a venue of the fight between government forces and the Sunni radicals (and Kurds too), but of outside forces like the Iranians, Hezbollah, ISIS, Turkey, Israel, and those very same Russians. Multiply the stakeholders and betting large becomes very, very risky.

By the time HTS rolled up to the outskirts of Homs, no rally was in sight. Despite persistent Russian airstrikes, Hezbollah had not moved a muscle to aid its Syrian ally, and even more importantly, Iran didn’t lift a finger to rescue its protege. Worse still, the Syrian Arab Army no longer had any fight left in it, as demoralization, defections, and outright betrayal had set in. There was to be no heroic last stand, just a domino effect of local deals to hand over power, all beginning with that nudge towards West Aleppo and ending with Bashar Assad fleeing into exile in Moscow.

Prior to the outbreak from Idlib, things seemed to be quieting down in the Levant: Hezbollah had agreed to a ceasefire with the IDF, while the latter kept re-arranging the rubble in Gaza through bombing strikes. Most eyes were diverted elsewhere, divided between Trump’s cabinet picks and appointment nominees, and the war in Ukraine where the incoming White House administration is expected to force Kiev to come to an agreement with Moscow to wind down that war. The events in Syria arrived like a bolt from the blue, and when the dust (what little was thrown up into the air) settled after HTS seized Aleppo, my mind was immediately taken back to one generation ago, to precisely when then-ex US General and presidential candidate Wesley Clark said the following:

A former commander of NATO’s forces in Europe, Clark claims he met a senior military officer in Washington in November 2001 who told him the Bush administration was planning to attack Iraq first before taking action against Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan.

The general’s allegations surface in a new book, The Clark Critique, excerpts from which appear in the latest edition of the US magazine Newsweek.

Clark says after the 11 September 2001 attacks, many Bush administration officials seemed determined to move against Iraq, invoking the idea of state sponsorship of terrorism, “even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever”.

Ousting Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action, the general writes, dismissing it as a “Cold War approach”.

Clark criticises the plan to attack the seven states, saying it targeted the wrong countries, ignored the “real sources of terrorists”, and failed to achieve “the greater force of international law” that would bring wider global support.1

I have never found out if there was any truth to this charge, but it would not surprise me one bit if it were true; this was the peak era of US neo-conservatism after all.

Immediately after recalling Clark’s incendiary charge, my next step was to tie it into the war in Ukraine, specifically the moves to begin negotiations to end the fighting. I thought to myself: “Syria is an important asset to Moscow as it is both a client state and the location of its naval re-filling station, permitting it to project its power further away onto the African continent. To take away this vital asset would give the USA more leverage over Russia regarding negotiations over Ukraine.”

Syria was taken off of the table in less than two weeks. Several have argued with me, insisting that HTS’ ‘speedrun’ was entirely a Turkish affair, but I refuse to believe that the Turkish military did not coordinate it with the USA and get its blessing from the Department of Defense, and by extension, the White House. US forces are still on the ground in Syria, some 2,000 strong, and US aviation helped clear the way for HTS to seize power from the government in certain parts of the country.2 Was the surprising collapse of the Syrian regime actually not that surprising to at least one of its major enemies? Did the Americans take advantage of the diverted attention of Russia, Hezbollah, and Iran to capture an opposing rook? And lastly, was the fall of the Assad regime the tying up of loose ends left over from the 2003 Iraq War?

What can be stated with 100% certainty is that the Assad regime was an anachronism, a relic of the long-gone Cold War era. Its collapse also officially ends the political philosophy known as Ba’athism, one of the two main reformist strains that dominated the post-WW2 Arab World.

A Century of Arab Humiliation

It started off so promising.

The Ottoman Empire had thrown its lot in with the Germans and Habsburgs in WW1, a move that resulted in the final deaths of all three empires, two of them centuries-old. Long-deried as the “sick man of Europe”, the Ottoman Empire still laid claim to being the Caliphate and therefore the leader of the Islamic world. However, it had been fraying at the edges for some time, and the First World War created an opportunity for those living under the rule of the Sultan to chip away at its crumbling facade, aided by outside forces such as the British who rallied Arab tribes south of Anatolia. The sick man of Europe breathed his last, his corpse pulled in several different directions all at once.

To many an Arab, the fact that the Caliphate was for centuries in the hands of the non-Arabic Turks was a major insult.3 After all, Allah’s greatest prophet, Mohammad, was himself an Arab, and the two holy cities, Mecca and Medina, lay within Arab lands. Futhermore, the Qur’an was “revealed” to Mohammad by the angel Gabriel, and royal scribes were ordered to record it in its entirety shortly after the Prophet’s death. The language that it was transcribed in was Arabic. Nor was this resentment entirely a confessional one as many Arabs are Christian, making the Turk an even more foreign ruler in their eyes. The collapse of The Porte opened the path to Arab liberation from the Turkish yoke, even if technically the Ottoman Empire was the Caliphate and therefore non-ethnic in legal and philosophical terms.

“Isn’t there someone that you forgot to ask?” That someone was Europe. Battered, bloodied, and bruised from the most savage and deadly war known to mankind up until that point in history, Europe’s great powers were somehow still not exhausted by it. Having raced ahead of the rest of the world in terms of technological and industrial advancement, they glanced over to the Middle East with envy, seeing the incredible bounty of oil that they did not have at home, but that did lay under the ground there, oil that they needed to power their modern national (and still imperial) economies. The Russians had locked down Baku and its oil wells for some time, but France and Britain would not let the barely-exploited oil fields of Mesopotamia, the Persian Gulf, the Hejaz, etc., out of their grasp. France and Britain moved quickly to re-partition the Middle East, denying the Arabs (and others) their perceived right to self-rule. The Arabs went from the frying pan into the fire.

Many of you are familiar with the Sykes-Picot Agreement in which the British and French hatched a secret plan to partition the Middle East in the event of a Triple Entente victory in WW1. The plan was leaked in 1917, upsetting the Arabs who felt that the British had stabbed them in the back after promising them self-rule, and delighting the Turks who told their Arab subjects that they were being used by the West for their own purposes. This essay is not the place to delve into the double-dealing and triple-crossing that coloured the war years and the first few years after its end, but suffice it to say that Britain and France got their way, a Turkish state was born on the ashes of the now-defunct Ottoman Empire (stymying Anglo-French plans in Eastern Anatolia and the Sea of Marmara), and the Arabs found themselves under western rule, largely cheated of their desired liberation from foreign domination. Most ominously of all, the British secured a mandate to rule Palestine.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916)

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Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an al-Qaida-led force of jihadis (and who are also backed by Turkey) based in Syria’s northern Idlib province have conducted a lightning offensive towards the country’s second largest city, Aleppo. They managed to cut the main highway between the city and the Syrian capital, Damascus. It appears that they have taken the Syrian Government by surprise:

The fighting is some of the deadliest in years, with 255 people killed, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Most of the dead have been combatants but the toll also includes 24 civilians, most killed in Russian air strikes.

The offensive began on Wednesday, the same day that a fragile ceasefire took effect in neighbouring Lebanon between Israel and Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah.

By Friday, the jihadists and their allies had wrested control of more than 50 towns and villages in the north, according to the Britain-based Observatory, in the government's biggest loss of territory in years.

They then entered western districts of Aleppo, a city of some two million people that was Syria's pre-war manufacturing hub.

"Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and allied factions... were able to enter the outskirts of the Al-Hamdaniya and New Aleppo neighbourhoods... after carrying out twin suicide attacks with two booby-trapped cars," the war monitor said.

HTS, a jihadist alliance led by Al-Qaeda's former Syria branch, shelled a student residence in the city, killing four civilians, state media reported.

Syrian and Russian warplanes launched intense air strikes on the rebel enclave around Idlib, where the jihadists are based, carrying out 23 raids, according to the Observatory.

This is a serious problem for the Syrian government:

Damascus relied on the significant amount of support that it received from both Lebanon’s Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) during its recent civil war. Both of these forces have been tied down in Lebanon, trying to block the IDF’s offensive there. This has no doubt weakened the position of pro-Syrian government forces along the ceasefire line to the west of Aleppo. Naturally, the jihadis have taken advantage of this situation for their own benefit.

Chechen and Dagestani jihadis have provided the spearhead of this offensive, attacking under the banner of Ajnad al-Kavkaz (Soldiers of the Caucasus), alongside another Chechen jihadi group, Jaysh Muhajireen wal-Ansar.

These Chechen jihadis are not too fond of Russia, Vladimir Putin, and especially Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov.

I don’t know how critical the situation is just yet. What I do know is that Hamas’ October 7th raid on Israel has left large parts of Syria exposed to jihadi attacks, with this one being by far the largest since the conflict began last year.

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A lame duck government in the USA means that we get to witness quite a lot of prognostication of what is to come, and threats of what “will” be done. Most of these can safely be ignored, as everyone is waiting to see just what the second Trump administration has in store for Ukraine, a conflict that the 45th/47th President of the United States has publicly promised to end as quickly as possible.

The ‘fun’ part is that he has yet to take office, which allows the lame duck Biden regime to present him with a set of fait accomplis that he will have to deal with upon moving back into the White House. These last minute policy changes will serve to shape the position of the US-led West as it seeks to negotiate a (temporary) end to the conflict, making Trump’s projected efforts all the more difficult to conduct. Biden’s predictable about-face on permitting the use of US-supplied missiles to strike further into Russian territory is the best example of the spoiling effect that US foreign policy planners produce on the battlefield.

What made this latest western escalation more interesting was Russia’s rapid response in the form of a new ICBM known as the “Oreshnik” (hazel tree) that was launched at a military industrial facility in the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro:

The US military said the Russian missile’s design was based on the design of Russia’s longer-range RS-26 Rubezh intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

The new missile was experimental and Russia likely possessed only a handful of them, officials said.

The Pentagon said the missile was fired with a conventional warhead but that Moscow could modify it if it wanted.

“It could be refitted to certainly carry different types of conventional or nuclear warheads,” Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh said.

…….

US and UK sources indicated that they believed the missile fired on Dnipro was an experimental nuclear-capable, intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), which has a theoretical range of below 3,420 miles (5,500km). That is enough to reach Europe from where it was fired in south-western Russia, but not the US.

Ukraine’s air force initially said the missile was an ICBM. While launching an IRBM sent a less threatening signal, the incident could still set off alarms and Moscow notified Washington briefly ahead of the launch, according to US officials.

Per Putin:

The Russian president acknowledged in a television address to the nation that Moscow had struck a Ukrainian military facility with a new ballistic missile and said it was called “Oreshnik” (the hazel).

He said its deployment “was a response to US plans to produce and deploy intermediate and short-range missiles”, and that Russia would “respond decisively and symmetrically” in the event of an escalation.

……..

“I believe that the United States made a mistake by unilaterally destroying the treaty on the elimination of intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles in 2019 under a far-fetched pretext,” the Russian president said, referring to the intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) treaty.

(Click here to see an amazing video of the target being hit)

The message was two-fold:

1. to the USA, as Putin described above

2. to the Europeans to show them that they have no defense against such an attack

This Russian retaliation was intended to show that they would match the western escalation, showing that they fully intend to achieve their stated war aims no matter what it takes. It also set off a flurry of alarmist reports that the world is headed towards a nuclear exchange, but I am very confident that this is not the case. This escalation was as much about sending a message to Trump as it was about continuing the bleeding of Russia, the core purpose of this conflict in the USA’s overall strategy.

The Russians are no fools, and do not expect the incoming administration to change much in terms of its Russia policy:

Lavrov in the wide-ranging interview on state-owned channel Russia-1 articulated that Moscow's view is that Washington's stance on the Ukraine conflict is unlikely to change significantly even under the Trump administration.

He explained that the United States will essentially always seek to dominate areas which fall under NATO influence, and that Trump too is likely to do the same, despite campaign promises to rapidly achieve a peace deal ending the conflict.

Ultimately, Lavrov's position is that it doesn't matter who is president of the US. Below is what he said according to Russian media translation:

"I have no doubt that they will want to keep these processes under their control… Washington’s attitude towards Ukrainian affairs and European affairs will not change in principle, in the sense that Washington will always strive to keep under its watchful eye everything that happens in the areas near NATO and the NATO area itself."

The top Russian diplomat was also asked about recent widespread reporting that Trump is mulling concrete plans to 'freeze' the conflict while pressuring Kiev to give up its aspirations to join the NATO alliance for at least 20 years.

"Some [Western politicians] have started to look more soberly at the Ukrainian situation and say, ‘what’s lost is lost, let’s somehow freeze this entire thing.’ Yet… they still suggest having a truce along the contact line for ten years. These would be the same Minsk accords in a new wrapping, or even worse," Lavrov said. The Kremlin's position is that Minsk was a sham, and was simply used to buy time while the West armed Ukraine.

"The Minsk accords were final. They were about a small part of Donbass, to be honest. But everything collapsed because [the Kiev regime] categorically did not want to grant this part of Donbass – which would have remained part of Ukraine – special status, primarily in the form of the right to speak their native language," Lavrov explained further.

Lavrov has in the past publicly described the USA as “agreement non-capable”, which is a serious indictment. It leads me to question how Russia can enter into negotiations if it believes that it is impossible for the Americans to stick to an agreement.

On the ground, the tempo of the Russian advance in Southwestern Donetsk continues to pick up:

Will winter come to the rescue of the UAF?

Arrest Warrants for Bibi, Gallant, and Hamas’ Deif

The International Criminal Court at The Hague (ICC) has issued arrest warrants against Israeli Premier Bibi Netanyahu, its ex-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and just to create the appearance of balance, it has also issued one for Hamas’ Mohammed Deif.

Bibi now joins Vladimir Putin as a national leader who is accused of war crimes by the UN’s body tasked with bringing justice to those on the receiving end. Like Putin, Bibi will never sit in the dock at The Hague, and this is entirely due to American protection. Making matters more interesting is the fact that many western governments have publicly stated that they will adhere to international treaties and arrest Bibi if he lands on their soil. France has indicated that they will arrest him, as has Canada, and many more American allies.

Here’s the real fun part: the Americans are threatening to sanction those involved at The Hague in issuing these arrest warrants targeting Bibi and Gallant:

US President Joe Biden blasted the ICC’s charges as “outrageous”. The White House said it “fundamentally rejects” the Court’s order.

Washington is working with Israel to make a list of ICC officials whom they plan to sanction.

……..

Some far-right members of Congress have gone even further. In response to the ICC’s arrest warrant for Netanyahu this November, Republican Senator Tom Cotton threatened a military assault on the Hague.

Cotton referenced a law approved by the US government in 2002, known as the Hague Invasion Act (officially called the American Servicemembers Protection Act of 2002). This legislation “permits” the White House to unilaterally send troops to the Hague, in the Netherlands, to physically remove any officials from the United States or its allies who face justice at the ICC.

The Hague Invasion Act allows for a surreal scenario in which the USA invades a long-standing ally to shut down a court procedure against two individuals who are not American.

I am not going to discuss the merits of the case against Bibi and Gallant beyond saying that if we apply existing precedents to them, then there definitely is a case that can be made against them. This is a very, very long process, which means that we will have a lot of time to discuss it.

More importantly (at least to me), the circus that has resulted from these issued warrants has severely impacted the credibility of the US-led “rules-based order”. The Americans pushed the hardest to get the ICC to issue a warrant against Vladimir Putin, and have now turned around to threaten that very same institution for ordering Bibi’s arrest on war crimes charges. America is The Boss, but everyone can see the hypocrisy here, including its closest allies. The few remaining states who wrongly viewed the USA as an impartial power on these matters no longer do so, seeing them as partisan actors on the world stage. Even though all people are hypocrites and even though all states engage in hypocritical actions, no one likes hypocrisy.

On the charges:

The charges of the court against Netanyahu are severe. The three-judge panel unanimously said that he and Gallant are “co-perpetrators for committing the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare, and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts”.

The judges also “found reasonable grounds to believe that they bear criminal responsibility” … “for the war crime of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population.” The charges are also backed by the work of the International Court of Justice, which has found that it is “plausible” that Israel has committed acts in Gaza that violate the Genocide Convention.

If arrested, Netanyahu would go through a trial, and he could then be acquitted, or convicted. In the latter case, Netanyahu would join the ranks of leaders considered perpetrators of crimes against humanity, such as Charles Taylor of Liberia, Hissène Habré of Chad, Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Augusto Pinochet of Chile, Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, Radovan Karadžić of Serbia, Idi Amin of Uganda, Pol Pot of Cambodia, Joseph Stalin of the former Soviet Union, Mao Zedong of China, and Adolf Hitler of Germany.

As mentioned, Bibi, like Putin, will not be sitting in the dock at The Hague any time soon. However, these charges do harm him in terms of his own legitimacy, and they severely restrict his ability to travel outside of Israel. The greater harm has been leveled against the so-called “rules-based order”, as Israel does not care for global opinion so long as it has the protection of the USA.

Brussels and the “EU-Critical” Scene

As many of you have already read, I participated in a conference last week in Brussels where I spoke and also took part in a panel to discuss the Culture War and how it will impact geopolitics in Europe and beyond.

This was my second appearance at an MCC event, and I am truly grateful that they invited a lunatic like me back for a second time. The crux of my speech was to put current events into a larger historical and geopolitical context, informing the audience and my colleagues that pinning hopes on groups like BRICS to offset American clumsiness is a wrong strategy. I proceeded to explain to everyone that at present there is no “multipolar order”, even though there are moves being made to use BRICS and/or the SCO to try and create such a climate.

I also did my usual song and dance about how the EU needs to get its shit together as a bloc and not be led by the nose by the USA, as the Americans are in the extractive phase of their imperial arc. I then went on to lay out how Trump’s victory does present opportunities for Europe, but that “America First” means precisely what it says, and that there will be downsides to it too (industrial/economic realignment to favour the USA being the best example).

Most other panelists were onside with respect to calling for Europe to pursue a more independent strategy, but there was a strong cohort of Eastern Europeans who, with total justification, are in living fear of the Russians. Two Ukrainian journalists expressed this fear during a Q&A session, with one stating that Ukrainians worry that Trump will do to them what Biden did to Afghanis in Afghanistan.

One of the things that I like most about MCC events is that there is ideological diversity, meaning that the audience is not hearing the same thing over and over again, allowing for debates to follow afterwards. Some participants were unintentionally funny, with one academic from Austria praising the UK Conservatives for reasons that I still have not managed to figure out, and elevating Margaret Thatcher to the level of a figure that should be emulated on the continent today. An English academic made a cogent point about migration and assimilation, rhetorically asking what these migrants should assimilate into since the elites continue to deconstruct (always negatively) what their nations are and how they are defined.

I am proud to report that my segment was very well-received (although not unanimously), and that the vast majority of the questions during our panel were directed to yours truly.

Germany - The Sick Man of Europe

The above shows recently announced job cuts in Europe’s most important country: Germany. This was shared before Thyssenkrupp announced that it will soon lay off 11,000 workers:

DUESSELDORF, Nov 25 (Reuters) - Thyssenkrupp's (TKAG.DE) steel business plans to cut some 40% of its workforce over the coming years, it announced on Monday in the latest painful overhaul of a German industrial giant, with workers promising fierce resistance.

Germany's largest steelmaker, a division of Thyssenkrupp AG, is under pressure from cheaper Asian competitors, high power prices and a weakening global economy, leading to operating losses in four of the past five years.

Under the restructuring, Thyssenkrupp Steel Europe (TKSE), which has a workforce of 27,000, said it would cut 11,000 jobs in total - 5,000 of which would be axed by 2030 and another 6,000 shed through spin-offs or divestitures.

The goal is to reduce personnel costs by some 10% on average in the coming years.

More bad news:

Germany's industrial star has been fading in recent months as production slows, foreign demand ebbs and costs rise.

Other big German companies are considering shutting down factories. Last week, workers and management at carmaker Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) held a third round of crunch talks over pay cuts and possible factory shutdowns in Germany.

Earlier this month, Thyssenkrupp wrote down the value of its steel division by another 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion), blaming the sector's worsening outlook.

TKSE is now valued at 2.4 billion euros in the group's books, less than half what it was worth two years.

These numbers don’t tell the whole story. For one, other companies plan to announce mass layoffs soon. Secondly, each layoff in the automotive industry means that another 4-5 people will be laid off in the secondary and tiertiary tiers as well, as these suppliers will lose contracts from the big producers.

I was with a friend from Hamburg yesterday who told me that the mood in Germany is very grim, much worse than it was a little over twenty years ago when the country was experiencing an economic crisis. In fact, every single person from Germany that I have spoken to these past few months have landed on the same page: Germany isn’t what it used to be. When you factor in an economy in crisis with severe issues regarding migration, the naturally conservative Germans will beging to seek answers outside of the traditional ruling parties.

Romanian Surprise!

Calin Georgescu took pole position in Romania’s two-stage Presidential election by coming first in the preliminary round of voting, meaning that he and the second place candidate will face off against one another on December 8th to decide who will be the country’s next President.

I am not going to pretend that I know much about Georgescu. What I will say is that despite being an Eastern NATO rampart (alongside Poland) against Russia, the pandemic, inflation, and general fatigue with the existing ruling parties have led many Romanians to vote for a populist option. This IS a continent-wide trend.

Naturally, establishment media smells a Russian hand in this surprise:

Călin Georgescu barely registered in national opinion polls, didn’t take part in big TV debates, and doesn’t even belong to a political party. But he’s leading the race to become Romania’s next president. 

……..

At stake is the stewardship of a pivotal member of the Western alliance at a critical time. Ukraine and its allies are holding out against the forces of Russian President Vladimir Putin, conscious that Donald Trump will be taking office in the United States in January and has pledged to end the war within a day.

Until now, Romania has played a supportive role in the West’s backing for Ukraine, opening the Port of Constanţa as a vital route to ship Ukrainian grain exports out and send military supplies in. The war has also raised the strategic importance of the Mihail Kogălniceanu air base on the Black Sea, which is on course to become NATO’s largest.

But all that could change if Georgescu takes charge. 

Silver-haired, slim and clean-shaven, Georgescu spent much of his career in officialdom, specializing in agricultural affairs. Indeed, food policy has loomed large in his politics, and he has called for the country to be more self-sufficient in both farm and energy output.

In Romania he became active in nationalist politics and was mentioned as a potential prime ministerial candidate for the hard-right AUR party. Like several other leading right-wing radicals in Europe, including France’s Jordan Bardella and Britain’s Nigel Farage, Georgescu has won a mass following on social media, which is where he appears to have mounted his campaign for the presidency this year. 

Your standard fare EU populist:

In many ways, Georgescu fits the mold of the radical right-wing populist in 2024. He speaks plainly, shuns Western orthodoxy, is loathed by mainstream media, and has sounded more than friendly toward Russia.

Among Europe’s former Communist states, Romania has historically been one of the most skeptical toward Moscow, but Georgescu’s enthusiasm for Putin seems not to have cost him at the polls. Putin shows he loves his country, Georgescu has said, adding that Romania could do with some Russian wisdom. 

He has also criticized the EU; claimed that NATO would never intervene to fight for Romania if it were attacked; and called for an end to the war in Ukraine, arguing that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is bad for his country. Meanwhile, the U.S. ballistic missile defense system housed at the Deveselu military base in southern Romania is a matter of national “shame,” Georgescu has argued, and promotes conflict. 

Romania is generally anti-Russian due to historical reasons, but not as radically as the Poles, Balts, and Finns are. Romania has benefitted from Euro-Atlantic integration in many sectors, so the notion that the country will flip if Georgescu somehow miraculously manages to sneak into office are very far-fetched.

Only Eastern Europe and the Balkans can produce this type of character:

He has described the 1989 revolution that ended decades of Communist rule as a coup d’état used by the West to steal Romania’s resources, and claims the country is now enslaved by the West.

He was investigated by prosecutors for claiming in 2022 that Ion Antonescu, Romania’s World War II prime minister who facilitated the Holocaust, and Corneliu Zelea Codreanu — another violent, antisemitic nationalist — were heroes.

Georgescu has also embraced a selection of conspiracy theories and wears his religious beliefs on his sleeve, playing to the country’s Orthodox Christian core electorate.

In 2020 he posted a video of himself bathing in cold water, saying it was the best vaccine against coronavirus. In a 2024 podcast he said Covid doesn’t exist, that no one has ever seen the virus, and that “the only real science is Jesus Christ.”  

A political maverick and populist without a party to back him, he will find it very, very tough to win on December 8th.

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All the ingredients were there: a post-communist European country whose citizens want to join the EU, a government in power that is rather hesitant about doing so, accusations of Russian interference and control, calls for the country to join NATO, a land awash in foreign-funded NGOs, and most importantly, a national election which produced an outcome that has been contested by pro-western forces.

This is not going to be a long entry, and this is largely due to what has happened (or more accurately, what hasn’t happened) since election night in Georgia. Observers were anticipating the usual Colour Revolution playbook to be dusted off and put back into use over two weeks ago, but for the most part it has been nothing but silence. The Americans were busy with their own election night that took place shortly after Georgia’s, but Europe’s activity has been rather downbeat.

Greta Thunberg did make an appearance, but her stock has dipped in value due to her support for Palestinians in Gaza, something that creates distance between her and many of the financiers of the NGOs who were supposed to be raising hell in Tbilisi these past two weeks. To describe the reaction to the “fixed” election as “subdued” would be an understatement.

Georgia is no stranger to Colour Revolutions, with the Rose Revolution of 2003 being such a success that it served as a template for future attempts elsewhere:

The Rose Revolution managed to dethrone old Soviet fossil Eduard Shevardnadze from power, and yank the Caucasian country out of Russia’s orbit, turning it to the West, towards both the EU and NATO.

Western hopes were pinned on Georgia’s new President, Mikhail Saakashvili, to deliver his country on a plate to both NATO and the EU. Instead, personal hubris got in the way, and it led to Russian forces entering inner Georgian territory after Saakashvili’s army attempted to take back control of the breakaway province of South Ossetia. The American cavalry did not come to the rescue, Georgia was partitioned, and Saaskashvili was humiliated. To make matters worse, his rule became increasingly authoritarian and corrupt:

One of the most intriguing people at the recently concluded Munich Security Conference, the annual gathering of international relations nabobs from Europe, North America and elsewhere, was erstwhile Georgian President and Odessan Governor Mikheil Saakashvili. Saakashvili is no longer president or governor of anything, and is also no longer a citizen of Georgia, but remains a fascinating figure, and a bit of a cautionary tale.

Saakashvili, for many years the darling of the west because of his record on fighting low-level corruption in Georgia and hawkish rhetoric towards Russia, usually delivered in near-native English, has had a rough few years since his party resoundingly lost a parliamentary election in Georgia in 2012, and he was then term-limited out of office in 2013. After leaving the presidency, Saakashvili, after a year or so, due to his relationship with Petro Poroshenko, who was elected president of Ukraine in 2014, became an adviser to the Ukrainian government and then governor of Ukraine’s Odessa oblast. However, the Saakashvili that took over Odessa was no longer the energetic reformer who changed Georgia so much and proved unable to accomplish much there.1

From pro-Western NGO Transparency International (2019):

The Georgian opposition and local branches of foreign-funded NGOs pin the blame on their failure to win the election on billionaire oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, deaf to the fact that they are supported by foreign billionaire oligarchs themselves in their quest to turn Georgia to the West once again. What the Georgian government learned from the Rose Revolution was that it needed to clamp down on these NGOs, which is why legislation was passed this past August to specifically do so:

In May 2024, Georgia’s parliament voted to uphold a law labeling many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as foreign agents. Advocates of Georgian democracy fear that its implementation will bring the country closer to Russia and crush its hopes for future European Union (EU) accession, pushing it further down a path of illiberal reform.

Enacted on August 1, the law requires NGOs that receive 20 percent or more of their funding from abroad to officially register themselves as “pursuing the interests of a foreign power.” This would affect many of the roughly twenty-six thousand NGOs in Georgia; according to a 2020 report by the Asian Development Bank, Georgian civil society organizations receive more than 90 percent of their funding from abroad. Failure to register by September 1 could result in fines of up to $9,300.

NGOs are a neat way to do an end run around democracy. Furthermore, foreign NGOs are a way for ordinary Georgians to find employment with pay well above the average in that very poor country. Georgia has 26,000 NGOs that get funding from foreign sources, meaning that in a country of 3.76 million, there is a foreign-funded NGO for every 1 in 144 citizens. This law led the EU to suspend accession talks with Georgia, but the government was not cowed and passed the law over two months later.

Georgians do desire to join the EU, but not enough to topple the government. There is a long list of issues that Georgians have with these NGOs and the changes to Georgian culture and society that they have demanded be implemented in this conservative country. It’s this gap, along with the fear that the country could get dragged into another war with Russia should a pro-Western government take power, that has allowed the current ruling party, Georgia Dream, to plot a somewhat neutral course between the West and Moscow. Western countries insist that this is not the case, and the government is doing the bidding of Vladimir Putin, but this charge is to be expected from a collection of countries for whom there is no legitimate alternative to their own self-styled “liberal democracy”, a system that serves the interests of locals less and less these days.

What remains curious to me is just how “low energy” the demonstrations have been in Tbilisi. Reporting on events there has been almost entirely absent from English language Western media. A delegation of foreign policy committees from several European countries did visit on Monday for talks, but the government refused to meet them. Things are quite muted, and I can’t explain why this is the case. I am certain that no deal behind closed doors has been struck, because there is no room for one, and because these visiting Europeans are crying “foul!” about the results of the election. Is it fatigue? Or is it something else?

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Out of everything that I have written on this Substack, the concept that has gained the most traction has been the one that I call “Turbo-America”. Published back in April of 2022, you can read it here:

Many people found the concept interesting enough to share, discuss, and debate. I am happy that I was able to introduce a concept that generated a fair bit of interest.

On the other hand, it has also been a victim of misunderstandings, purposeful-misconstruing, ignorance, and “strawmanning”. The concept is very, very simple, but I now feel the need to dumb it down even more/re-state it because I find myself being confronted by people, either innocent or acting in a malevolent fashion, who mangle this simple concept and waste my time over and over again.

Therefore, I am going to do the following:

1. re-state the definition of Turbo America

2. why I originally introduced it

3. explain what it actually means in concrete terms

4. explain what it does not mean

5. list conditions for when it no longer is applicable

Turbo America is my concept. I defined it. You can critique it, you can agree with it, and you can also reject it. You can add to it/borrow from it to create your own concept. What you cannot do is argue with me as to its definition because I am the one who defined it.1

Definition

In the original essay, I wrote the following:

Still others want to go for gold and take on BOTH China and Russia at the same time. This screams of hubris, and we can now safely conclude that the various moving parts of the USGov and non-governmental centres of power have agreed on this approach. The drive for global hegemony whereby both China AND Russia are targeted simultaneously is what I mean by the term “Turbo America”.

That’s it. That’s the definition….and that is precisely the condition that exists today. No more, no less.

The Reason Why I Introduced the Concept

When you read this portion now, it might seem like a “no brainer”, which is testament to the strength of the overall concept. The reason why is simple: today, the USA seeks to both weaken Russia and contain China simultaneously.

This is an undeniable fact today, but only recently were we not absolutely certain that this would be the foreign policy of the USA. Recall that during the Trump administration, the mainstream media partnered up with what we call the “Deep State”, Big Tech, and NGOs to promote a discredited conspiracy theory that centered around the accusation that Donald Trump was in league with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Quite a lot of people have very short memories, but that was the actual colour of the room during those four very annoying years.

At the same time, Trump was pursuing a more belligerent strategy against Beijing, something that won him bipartisan support and that resulted in some fairer treatment from mainstream media.2

With Trump’s exit from the stage in early 2021, many observers and analysts were left wondering what the incoming Biden regime would choose to do, as the previous four years saw the temperature rise to boiling hot when it came to Russia and Putin. Would the Biden administration seek a confrontation with Russia? Or would it look to finally complete the long-awaited Pivot to East Asia?

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