It is all a part of the same phenomenon. Western governments actively assisting genocide in Gaza; attacks on benefits for the disabled; a deliberate official narrative of Russophobia; rampant Islamophobia boosting the rise of extreme right wing parties and fuelled by government anti-immigrant rhetoric; an incredible accumulation of wealth by the ultra-rich; rampant erosion of freedoms of speech and expression.

It is not happenstance that all of this is happening at the same time. It represents a radical shift in western philosophy.

This shift is not simple to trace because anti-intellectualism is an essential part of the new philosophy. Therefore this philosophy does not really have its equivalent of Bertrand Russell or Noam Chomsky, whose careful exposition of societal analysis and ideals, based on a comprehensive understanding of previous philosophical discourse, is being superceded.

If there is a current equivalent we may look at Bernard Henri Levy, whose rejection of collectivism and support of individual rights moved ever rightwards into support of raw capitalism, invasions of Muslim countries and now outspoken support for the genocide in Gaza. If you want to find an embodiment of the shift in western philosophy, it might be him. But few any longer pay attention to academic intellectuals sitting in their studies. The now threadbare mantle of “public intellectual” in the West has passed to lightweight figures like Jordan Peterson and populist Islamophobes like Douglas Murray.

Part of this is institutional. In my youth, Bernard Russell or AJP Taylor were quite likely to turn up giving serious talks on the BBC, and John Pilger was the most celebrated documentary maker in British media. But now left wing voices are effectively banned from mainstream media, whilst now left wing academics ware most unlikely to progress in academia. Academia is itself now entirely run on a corporate model in the UK as throughout all the West.

A young Noam Chomsky would almost certainly be told by the University authorities to stick to linguistics and leave aside the philosophy and politics, or not get tenure. Chomsky was already a renowned linguist in 1967, when he published his breakthrough essay “On the Responsibility of Intellectuals”. Essentially a call for academics to support the protest movement, a young professor who published it today would almost certainly get suspended if not sacked and even, in today’s climate, quite possibly arrested.

The deportations of students from the USA who have broken no law but protested against genocide; the fines there on universities for allowing free speech; the deportations of EU citizens from Germany for speaking out on Palestine; the police raid on the Quaker meeting house in London and the widespread “terrorism” charges against peaceful journalists – these are just examples of a wave of repression sweeping the major western states.

They are all linked. It is a structural movement in government of the worst kind. It can only be compared to the wave of fascism that swept much of Europe in the 1930’s.

The great irony of course is that it is the western destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and the western destabilisation of Syria that led to the massive wave of immigration to Europe that caused the rise of the far right. Over 1.5 million Syrian “refugees” were granted asylum in the EU, because they claimed to be on the anti-Assad side, which the west was supporting. AfD is very much a result of Merkel’s decision to accept 600,000 Syrian refugees in Germany.

Fascinatingly, now their side has “won” and a western backed government been installed in Damascus, less than 1% of these refugees have returned to Syria. Despite the official anti-immigrant narratives of almost all western governments, there seems to be no attempt to suggest that they might return. Indeed, those western politicians most keen on deporting immigrants are the least likely to suggest that the reliably zionist Anti-Assad Syrians should leave, even though those same politicians portray Syria under al Jolani as a liberal paradise and rush to give it money.

The neo-con immigration narrative in Europe is peculiarly complex and flexible. Effectively immigrants viewed as on the West’s sides side in its wars (Sunni Syrians, Ukrainians) have an open door.

Mass immigration to Europe is therefore a direct result of imperialist foreign policy, and that plays out in complex ways, with the West’s victims arriving against official disapproval and the West’s clients arriving with official approval.

Equally, the economic dislocation and large rise in inflation which also has strengthened the populist right, is itself exaggerated by western foreign policy. The proxy war in Ukraine is largely responsible for the step change in Europe’s energy prices, with the destruction of the Nordstream pipeline
a key factor in the major struggles of German manufacturing industry.

Incredibly, for a year the entire western media and political class tried to enforce the lie that Russia destroyed its own pipeline – just as they claimed Hamas blew up the first of the dozens of hospitals and health centres destroyed by Israel.

We come back to Gaza, as all serious discussion must at present. I cannot come to terms with the fact that the takeover of the political Establishment by zionist interests – itself a consequence in the massive growth of the comparative wealth of the ultra-rich – is making it possible for the most brutal genocide possible to happen before the eyes of the world, with active support for the western establishment.

It is not that the people do not want to stop it. It is that there is no mechanism connecting the popular will to the instruments of government. The major parties all support Israel’s genocide in almost all the western “democracies”.

It has become impossible to deny the intention of Genocide now. Israel has stepped up its killing of children to dozens every day, is openly executing medics and destroying all healthcare facilities, is bombing desalination plants and is blockading all food.

The zionist narrative on social media has shifted from denial of genocide to justification of genocide.

I simply cannot understand the mainstream tolerance of this Holocaust. I am living in an age where the power structures and social narratives I do not recognise as part of a societal organisation to which I can consent to belong. It is the British Labour Party which is actively supporting genocide whilst targeting the most vulnerable at home for cuts in income. It is the EU which is doing everything possible to promote World War 3 and transforming into a militarily aggressive organisation of Nazi leanings.

The UK, US and other first world nations are radically cutting overseas aid to provide money for imperialist military aggression. The broadly social democratic consensus of the western world in my youth involved much dull compromise: but it was infinitely better and more hopeful than this Hell we are creating.

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A dear friend reached out to me today, an esteemed elder in the Way of Council, to ask how I was doing. I told her I have the sensation of watching a slow-motion car crash, yet feeling an odd sense of serenity as the catastrophe unfolds. Because, the time of pleading with the drivers to turn the wheel and hit the brakes is over. We did that for a long time, but they accelerated instead, and now the long-foreseen collision is inevitable. In fact it is already happening.

Someday everyone, drivers and passengers and onlookers, will step out from the wreckage and dust, sober, eyes blinking, to tend the injured and grieve the dead and ask what they shall create together in their new-found freedom.

Who knows when that day will come. In one timeline, it is about three years. That timeline depends on our collective willingness to accept and integrate information that profoundly violates the old consensus reality. This information will feed a new human drama, if we so choose.

Predictions of a new chapter in the human story starting (fill in the date: 2028, or was it 2012, or perhaps the Harmonic Convergence in 1987) are not actually predictions, but prophecies. A prediction is objective. It denies the agency of the participant. When I predict the winner of a football game (that’s my side gig), I assume that I have no way to influence the result. I am not a player. A prophecy, on the other hand, becomes true only if people align their choices with the possibility it invokes.

I used to believe that collapse would save us; that we would stop destroying nature, each other, and our own bodies because we would have to stop. I no longer believe that, any more than hitting bottom can rescue an addict. “Bottom” is the moment when the addict makes a different choice. The collapse of first one, then another, then another dimension of his life—his work, his marriage, his family, his health, his freedom—offers him a series of invitations. These are moments when a choice is available, when the momentum pauses and he is asked whether he is ready to take a different path. What is bottom for one addict is, for another, just a way-station on the road to hell.

Our society is approaching just such a moment, just such a choice point.

Of our many collective and individual addictions, the one I will speak of now is the addiction to the habits of war.

War mentality isn’t a thirst for violence nor a lust for fighting. War mentality is a pattern of thinking and a habit of seeing. It organizes the world into us and them, friend and foe, hero and villain. It poses solutions in terms of victory and success in terms of winning. It traffics in punishment and blame, deterrence and justification, right and wrong. It is addictive, because when it fails to solve a problem, the solution is to up the dose. It escalates to new enemies and new battles. If there is no obvious foe to blame for the worsening situation, it looks harder to find one, or creates one instead.

The solution that war mentality offers for every problem is to find the bad thing and eradicate it. That solution applies to diverse areas of human activity: agriculture (kill the pests); medicine (find a pathogen); speech (censor bad ideas); political conflict (kill the terrorists); public safety (lock up the criminals). Complex problems, such as mass fentanyl addiction in America or industrial decline, collapse into simple but futile solutions as soon as someone can be found on which to pin the blame. The Chinese! The Mexican cartels! There is a kind of relief in this formula, even though it rarely succeeds.

The disastrous public health response to Covid drew on war mentality. After decades of declining health and rising chronic disease, for which no single external culprit could be identified, finally here was a threat that could be identified and controlled. So, all of the public’s anxiety was projected onto the new scary bad guy. The habit of find-the-enemy thinking is what made the public so susceptible to policies that ranged from the foolish to the absurd to the tyrannical.

Our leaders construct a narrative that locates evil in a certain person, nation, or group, and the habit of war thinking does the rest. Soon the public is ready to support war, censorship, lockdown, suspension of civil liberties and the rule of law, and crimes against humanity.

The same basic pattern of thought also drives conspiracy narratives. If we can locate the cause of the world’s injustices and horrors on a discrete set of bad actors, a psychopathic cabal, then in theory our problems are easy to solve.1 Just as, if a disease is caused by a pathogen, killing the germ cures the disease, so also can we cure society’s malady by removing the pathocrats from power.

Even in cases where a pathogen is the direct cause, we still have to ask what conditions make the organism vulnerable to that pathogen. Some of my readers think me naive for understating the influence of a satanic cabal within the power elite orchestrating world events. For me though, the most important question isn’t whether such a cabal exists. It is the psychosocial patterning that allows it to maintain control whether it exists or not.

That patterning is, again, war mentality. It is us-versus-them thinking. It is dehumanization and othering, the division of the world into the full human and the subhuman. The latter category can adopt the form of racism, sexism, homophobia, and so forth, or just simple contempt for an opposing opinion tribe.

Once two sides are locked into war thinking, it escalates like an addiction until all else is consumed.

Hate and contempt have spiraled out of control in American politics. Trigger warning: it is impossible to write about this while remaining faithful to the narrative of either side. If you are fully convinced either (1) that Trump represents a fascist oligarchic takeover of democracy drawing on the worst racist, misogynistic, xenophobic elements of the American psyche to destroy everything good and humane about America, or (2) that the MAGA revolution will restore freedom and sanity to a system that had been taken over by a deep state that used environmentalism and social justice as excuses to implement a totalitarian control system, or (3) any other narrative that cleaves the world into Team Good and Team Evil, then, well, you will shake your head in consternation that Eisenstein has taken leave of his senses. You will feel frustration, even rage, that I’m making any argument that does not include a full-throated denunciation of the bad guys. When you face pure evil, no response is valid except to fight it by any means necessary.

How simple things would be then. How easy to be the hero of the story.

The paramount goal in war is, of course, to defeat the opponent. The difference between war and games, sports, market competition, and, in normal times, politics, is that in the these latter arenas both sides hold something higher than winning; namely, the rules of the game. Football teams normally do not attempt to poison their opponents. The game itself is more sacred to them than winning it. In a functioning democracy in which all parties believe in a constitution or in a set of norms and values, there are certain taboos they will not violate for victory’s sake. Politics in the United States and many other countries is veering closer and closer to war—inevitable when each side sees the other as the embodiment of evil. Today in my country, both left and right are quite certain that the other side is a “threat to democracy itself.”

In that certainty, each becomes exactly what the other fears. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. The old political elite and the Trumpian usurpers are locked in a vicious spiral. If either side stints in its all-out pursuit of power, curtailing its ruthlessness out of respect for democratic principles, the other side will exploit this as a weakness. Once one side dispenses with scruples, all sides must. When one team in a football match cheats, the other can win only if it cheats too.

When you are fighting evil, all means are justified. You might need to destroy democracy in order to save it, suppress free speech in order to preserve free speech, cancel elections in order to defend elections. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. It is no longer enough merely to defeat one’s opponents in an election; they must be imprisoned as well. The United States, Turkey, France, Brazil, and Romania have all prosecuted opposition politicians during the last year on specious charges, signalling a reversion to the historical mean.

In the United States the opposition politician, Donald Trump, survived the lawfare and won the election. The question is, is that a victory for democracy, or is it just a victory for Donald Trump? Will he end the political weaponization of federal agencies like the Justice Department, the IRS, the State Department, CISA, the CIA, and the FBI, or will he merely direct them at new targets? Will he restore free speech and civil liberties, or will he apply the tools of censorship and surveillance to new enemies?

Will Donald Trump throw the Ring of Power into the cracks of doom? Or has the Ring merely changed hands, even as technology further magnifies its powers (censorship, propaganda, surveillance, debanking)?

I’m sorry, but it isn’t looking good. To take one example, “antisemitism” (defined as any criticism of the state of Israel) has replaced “combating misinformation” as the pretext for violating freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures (surveillance) and the right to due process. The arrests of Rumeysa Ozturk and Mahmoud Khalil for “supporting Hamas” (i.e. opposing Israel’s slaughter, starvation, and ethnic cleansing of Gaza), and the pressure on universities to shut down student protests, set a chilling precedent.

Meanwhile, although Trump is, thank goodness, turning the country away from the warpath with Russia, he is not turning the country away from war’s path. War mentality suffuses the upper echelons of his administration. Instead of Russia, the warpath leads now to Iran and China.

War mentality always requires an enemy. If no enemy presents itself, war mentality creates one. The hero nation requires a villain. The winner requires a loser. If I expect you are seeking to profit at my expense, and treat you accordingly, then you will probably fulfil my expectation. See a world full of enemies, and legions of enemies will appear.

To be fair, Donald Trump is by no means an aberration in believing that everyone is trying to get the best deal. That’s a basic principle of classical economics, even of evolutionary biology, in which our genes program us to maximize reproductive self-interest. Those paradigms, however, are long obsolete. The discrete-and-separate self is a prism that reveals one wavelength of the rainbow of life, but obscures what we urgently need to recognize today.

Because the world is so much more than a collection of separate competing entities, but is interconnected and interdependent, policies that draw on us-versus-them thinking will inevitably harm “us” as well as “them.” War abroad brings tyranny at home. Domestic violence arises to mirror foreign violence. Environmental degradation engenders human illness. And any economic policy that ignores the interconnectedness of the modern economy will backfire on its creator.

Permit a brief digression into economics and Trump’s tariffs. There is actually some virtue in their conception. Carefully targeted tariffs, implemented at a pace that allows business to adapt to them, could contribute to positive goals: revitalizing local and bioregional economies, reversing the financialization of the national economy, and ending free trade’s global “race to the bottom” that pits workers around the world against each other. Unfortunately, Trump’s abrupt across-the-board tariffs are neither carefully targeted nor paced. They are likely to destroy hundreds of thousands of businesses and impoverish millions of families, both in the U.S. and abroad. The tariffs will introduce acute dislocation in the short term and massive inefficiencies in the long term. There are further complexities here about which I will write separately; what’s relevant for present purposes is that the error in the tariff policy stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of economic interdependence, a misunderstanding that occurs naturally to anyone locked into us-versus-them thinking.

From what I have observed through my friends and acquaintances on the “inside,” Trump’s team genuinely believe themselves to be upholding the rule of law, prosecuting their political opponents for real criminality, and defunding corrupt NGOs (that also happen to be run by their political opponents). Indeed, incumbent institutions are profuse with criminality. The agencies that Trump is destroying, like USAID, the NED, and the USIP, were instrumental in maintaining the neoliberal world order and applying the neoconservative program of full spectrum dominance. Trump’s team see themselves as reformers restoring honor and prosperity to the nation. “Drain the swamp” and “Make America Great Again” are not cynical slogans.

Intoxicated with heady ideals, Team Trump cannot see that their program equally fits another description: seizing power.

Confronted with that assessment, some in Trump’s circle would probably agree with it. They might respond: “What choice do we have, faced with a ruthless and corrupt deep state?” Similarly, his opponents might, in a moment of honesty, admit that yes, they did weaponize the courts, the FBI, etc. against Trump and his allies, and engage in various kinds of cheating, but what choice did they have, when a neo-fascist movement was about to take over the country?

What both sides believe is that the other side lusts for power more than it values democracy. But for the game to function and not devolve into war, each side must believe the other holds the game itself (fair elections, the Constitution) more important than winning the game. If you are convinced the other side will cheat, you must cheat too.

No doubt many on each side believe these are temporary “extraordinary measures”; that when they have finally triumphed over the anti-democratic forces on the other side, they will cede power back to the people. That is never how it works. Each side believes, with good reason, that victory by the other side will be permanent. Thus, the escalating fight-to-the-death, the vicious spiral, the inevitable car crash.

What has alarmed me the most in my last decade of pleading for peace is not the actions and attitudes of politicians, but the infiltration of war mentality into the general public, the rising level of ambient hate. That is the energy that feeds the most psychopathic elements of the oligarchy. It is its lifeblood. It is its power source. It is how it rules—by turning their subjects against each other. (I say “it” [the oligarchy] and not “they” [the oligarchs], because the latter are puppets of system dynamics that are independent of the individuals who occupy their roles.) The key trick in its toolbox of psychopolitical legerdemain is to redirect the primal anger of the dispossessed toward a false target; essentially, to transmute anger into hate. Paradoxically, even when the elites themselves are the objects of the hate, the system that elevates them still flourishes. One elite can be switched out for another, new wine in an old skin.

In preparing this essay, I sought some personal stories of the impact of the DOGE cuts to illuminate and humanize the damage. A friend introduced me to some small farmers in a certain left-leaning back-to-the-land region. They were unwilling to speak with me. One of them, a queer person, expressed fear that they would be put in danger (I assume by my frothing transphobic MAGA audience). Another, who described herself as being on the autism spectrum, was concerned by my association with people who promote deranged theories that vaccines have a causal link to autism. I assured them that no harm would come to them, even if someone might read my essay who harbors fear and hatred toward queer people, since I had no reason to identify them by name or mention their gender identity when discussing the impact of funding freezes on regenerative farmers. As for the vaccine issue, well, OK, I do actually believe that the childhood vaccines are partly to blame for the explosion in autism and childhood chronic disease. But that is no reason to shame the autistic or other neurodivergent people. On the contrary: these people carry gifts that are crucial for the metamorphosis of our society.

But I digress. What was really going on here was that my associations and opinions on certain politicized topics marked me as a member of the opposing side, the bad side, the untouchable side. In a sense, it is “unsafe” to associate with me. I have cooties, you see, and anyone who associates with me might catch them. During the McCarthy era, merely to be seen in the company of a communist could devastate your career. To associate with Jews under Hitler was to risk imprisonment or worse yourself. For a Caucasian to be friendly with dark-skinned people in the Jim Crow era South was to risk ostracism or even lynching. It is scary, to associate with the socially unacceptable, because that status is contagious. The fact that my intention was to showcase some stories that might wake people up from Trump Adulation Syndrome (the mirror-image of Trump Derangement Syndrome), doubtless a worthy goal in the eyes of my correspondents, was insufficient to overcome the taboo of associating with a socially unacceptable person.

This widening gulf within our society also tends to feed on itself. Once it gains enough momentum, it proceeds inexorably toward civil war or genocide. I have pleaded with the drivers of these vehicles for many years to steer in a different direction. Now I am done pleading. The drama will play itself out. Why am I done? A feeling of futility and weariness. Well, I guess I am not quite done—I’m writing about it right now. And I can already anticipate the hate I will generate by violating the narrative of both sides, my “failure to consider X,” my “white privilege blinding me to Y,” my “unwillingness to accept the reality of evil,” or that I have fallen for Trump, or wimped out and betrayed him, or am a cowardly fence-sitter, or indulging the luxury of both-sides-ism… It isn’t so much that I take personal offense at these accusations, but they are an alarming sign of the times. If I, a peace evangelist, am so easily cast into the ranks of the untouchable, what hope is there for understanding or reconciliation among society’s warring factions?

Yet I do not feel hopeless. Last week I consulted a wise man, one of my spiritual guides. I won’t reveal his name, so as not to infect him with my cooties. I’ll just say he is of African descent, and a high initiate in south and west African wisdom lineages as well as the Western hermetic tradition. His fixed me with a penetrating, kind gaze, and told me that my adrenal and blood sugar issues are because my public work has made me a projection figure. The attacks land on my body, he said. I asked him what can I do when society seems to have gone mad. He said, “Wait.”

That injunction, “Wait,” is not a call to passivity. It is to recognize when it is time to act, and when action is futile or counterproductive. It is to recognize as well that there are powers operating in the world far beyond our own. And it is to accept that certain dramas must play out to their conclusion before a new act can begin. Now is perhaps not the time, at least for me, to urge warring parties to reconcile. The urging falls on deaf ears. Each side sees the peace proponent as a traitor to the cause, since to humanize the other side or acknowledge that it too has a sincere worldview based on its own set of experiences, dampens war fever. Hate is a necessary tool of war—and of politics too, when politics becomes war.

What is futile quickly becomes exhausting, Maybe only when the warring parties have exhausted themselves too, with the drama of us-versus-them, might a new drama, of forgiveness, remorse, and reconciliation, unfold.

That is a heartbreaking proposition, because the human cost is enormous. The kind of violence suffered in places like Palestine, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, the DRC, Iraq, Yemen, Uganda, Cambodia, or Vietnam has long spared my homeland, but we are not immune. Something primal and terrifying lurks behind civilization’s thin veneer. It does not take much for murderous impulses to erupt. They bubble already in social media. We are not a different species from the perpetrators of past or current genocides. I am not saying it is certain to happen in my country, but it is far from certain not to happen.

In a sense it has long been underway in covert form. How many millions have died or suffered interminably from incarceration, violence, domestic abuse, child abuse, addiction, depression, and chronic disease? Through long and tortuous pathways, all of these originate in the same root cause as overt war and genocide. They source from the reduction of human beings to something less than sacred. Yet all of them proceed under a facade of normalcy. That facade will drop over the next three years.

The disintegration of normalcy is ultimately a good thing. When the dust clears, we will stand amid the wreckage of our prison, full of new questions.

Then we may see that cleaving the world into us and them, and the blame diagnostic that accompanies that cleavage, has failed. We will see that war has failed to bring peace, hate has failed to bring justice, domination has failed to bring security, and control has failed to bring freedom. Those failures of purpose will mirror a deeper failure, a failure of understanding. The ways we made sense of the world will no longer make sense. Will we have the fortitude to abide in bewilderment long enough for new understanding to grow? Or will we jump fearfully into a new variation on an old story, substituting a new set of villains for the old, a new us and a new them, to enact the same drama once more?

March 9, 2025 © Photo: Public domain

There are still some good people in the corridors of power we can appeal to and, if we can leverage them, then maybe, just maybe, the Chinese will finally do the right thing and oppose these ongoing genocides.

Since I last wrote about NATO’s ongoing genocide of the Alawites in mid January, their plight has deteriorated to one of absolute desperation. There are open culls of entire Alawite villages, female students and men in their 90s are being systematically executed, Christians are also being slaughtered and thousands of civilians have fled into Russia’s air force and naval bases in hopes of being spared this latest Holocaust.

Not only must we oppose this, but we must oppose those European fat cats, who rubber stamp genocides like this. Though these include senior British, French and German collaborators like the notorious Annalena Baerbock, who flocked to Damascus to wish their puppet, Jolani, happy hunting, a special shout out goes to Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Najib Mikati, who collaborate with Jolani’s moderate rebels, who previously beheaded Lebanese soldiers they took hostage.

Make no mistake about it. Once NATO’s proxies hack their way through Syria, Lebanon will be next in line literally for the chopping block. The situation in Lebanon is that their economy is totally in the toilet, with the lira trading at 90,000 to the Yankee dollar, down from its long term average of 1500 to the dollar. As in Syria itself, starvation is prevalent and the Lebanese are in no doubt that the worst lies ahead. Though Hezbollah are keeping their heads down as they dig in and make preparations for their own last stand, they can be under no illusion that the same ultimate fate the Alawites are now enduring awaits them.

Khazuk خازوق

To NATO’s Syrian regime, all minorities are fair game. Google words like Khazuk خازوق and these links here and here will show you the horrors of the Ottomans. The Ottomans were such medieval barbarians that the Syrians almost kissed the feet of the French when they replaced the Turks, following the division of spoils at the end of the Great War.

And, though the Druze led the rebellion against the French and were very prominent leaders in the Syrian Arab Army, NATO’s current head hacking proxies have worked hard to prise them away from their motherland, with Israel guaranteeing their security if they surrender to them in the south and NATO’s Jumblatt mob trying to wean them away to the west of Damascus. Add to that that the Kurds and Turks are ethnically cleansing northern Syria as part of their own land grabbing scams and Syria is on the rack.

This process of national dismemberment is made far easier by the dire economic situation of both Syria and Lebanon, with the latter being kept afloat by some $6.7 billion in remittances family members send home to Beirut every year. As these remittances now constitute 30.7 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Lebanon, which represents the third highest in the world, behind Tonga (41 percent of GDP), and Tajikistan (39 percent), NATO and their local Israeli enforcers have Lebanon rightly on the ropes and, Hezbollah perhaps apart, there are few forces on the horizon that will slow their pending apocalypse.

Assad rises from the political ashes

NATO media echo chambers, such as this Irish state media site, have blamed the current Alawite genocide on their victims or, as they put it, the head hackers are trying “to crush a nascent insurgency by fighters from Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite sect” with Jolani saying.”We will continue to pursue the remnants of the fallen regime… We will bring them to a fair court, and we will continue to restrict weapons to the state, and no loose weapons will remain in Syria.”

Fair court, my royal, proletarian arse. The reality is Alawites, Kurds, Christians and other meddlesome minorities are being lynched and shot out of hand, and helicopters are firing into Alawite homes just for the hell of it. Latakia students Hazar Issa, Nour Issa, Zaina Jadeed, Shinda Kashko and Ahmad Haydar are just some of the many innocent students shot out of hand in the last few days by these jihadist savages. Maronite Tony Boutros and his son, Fadi, are just two of the most recent Christians these liberators dispatched. Sheikh Shaiban Mansour was a 90 year old Alawite they murdered and mutilated and, to give you a feel of the sort of Syrians Baerbock and her equally depraved sort get off on, here is a video of an Alawite winemaker being executed, and his body desecrated by Jolani’s finest, Baerbock’s buddies.

In trying to get at the root of the loathing Baerbock and her buddies have for Alawites and those, like Asma Assad, married to them, we must never leave Western fools and knaves out of our frame. Though we all recall this glowing Vogue review of Asma Assad, here is its author literally swallowing her own words and thereby showing what a contemptible swamp creature she and all journalists like her are. As regards Asma Assad splurging out on clothes, just as well no one told this pretend journalist that Gulf State princesses commute on private jets to Italy to get their feet measured for the custom made shoes these plastic Cindarellas while away their time buying by the truck full.

Then there is [Dr Hafez Assad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafez_Bashar_al-Assad#:~:text=Hafez%20Bashar%20al-Assad%20\(Arabic,regime%20on%208%20December%202024.), Asma’s son, who was ridiculed for not winning the various maths competitions he entered when he was a schoolboy. Not only do I know Irish maths geniuses who got nowhere in those competitions because of how the United States and other heavy hitters load the dice but, given that Dr Assad is galaxies ahead of any of his critics in the maths stakes, the old adage that one should only write about what one knows holds true in this case. But hey, if the Assads’ critics wrote about what they know about, they would have nothing at all to write about for the story, if such it was, was not about Hafez’ prowess (or lack thereof) in maths but as a vehicle to have a pop at the Assads and the Alawites and to thereby help the head hackers rid the world of them.

And, as for Bashar al-Assad, what about him? Not only was Jolani’s original war cry to send Alawites to the grave, but the Uyghur shock troops he has pouring into Latakia to finish off the Alawites are screaming about revenge for battles that happened all of 1,500 years ago. Baerbock’s heroes are not mine but then, unlike her, I was never a fan of Nazi Germany’s Einsatzgruppen.

Russia, Mother Russia

Although the immediate Assad family are now residents of the Russian Federation, there is little beyond giving them bed and board that Russia can do. Not only is Russia bogged down resisting another German-backed genocide on its very doorstep, but any serious intervention by Russia outside of using its platform in the United Nations to stop the genocide would not end well. I say that, because Russia’s original intervention in this NATO proxy war caused the United States to change the facts on the ground by levelling Raqqa and its own proxy ISIS forces garrisoned there along with it, so that the heroic Syrian Arab Army, with the Russian Air Force in the van, might not liberate it.

Israel, the United States and their cronies have dark plans not only for the Alawites but for all of Syria and Lebanon and heaven help those, like the Alawites and the Armenians who get in the way. Russia, sadly, cannot be the saviour of the world. That is the job of Jesus.

Qatar and the Palestinians

Qatar’s role was to bankroll the overthrow of the secular Syrian government, not to fund any Syrian economic recovery. Sure, they throw the Syrians the odd plane full of cheap aid but that is it. Best for the Gulf State despots to have the Syrians desperate than to have them making subversive waves.

As for Hamas, who fought against the Syrian Arab Army on behalf of their Qatari paymasters, what is there to say, except if they had brains, they might be dangerous? Their situation is as bad as that of the Alawites and the Jolani regime, which has surrendered most of southern Syria and the Druze areas to Israel without even throwing a cabbage at them, are as much enemies of the Palestinians as are the most fanatical Israelis. There was never any plan, and was never meant to be any plan beyond overthrowing the secular Syrian Arab Republic and that Hamas could not see that shows brains are not their strong suit. That the head hackers of Dera are swarming northwards to massacre Alawites even as the Israelis occupy Dera show what a waste of political space these Uyghur, Jordanian, Turkish, Egyptian and Albanian “new Syrians” are.

And, perhaps the Chinese too. Chinese Uyghur militant Abdulaziz Dawood Khudaberdi, also known as Zahid and the commander of the separatist Turkistan Islamic Party’s (TIP) invasion forces in Syria, is now a brigadier-general in Jolani’s ramshackle army, and Mawlan Tarsoun Abdussamad and Abdulsalam Yasin Ahmad, two other notorious Uyghur head hackers, are colonels. Though China labels TIP a terrorist organisation responsible for plots to attack overseas Chinese targets, there is more hope of the Alawites defeating TIP than there is of the Chinese, who are big on statements but AWOL on actions.

The Turks meanwhile, financed by the Qataris, have sent a further 3,500 of their mercenaries into the Syrian coast, with the objective of seizing its ports, stealing its resources and slaughtering Alawites, Armenians and the various other minority groups that get up their noses.

The end result of all is that Israel will succeed in dividing and conquering Syria and being in a very good position to finish off the Shias of Lebanon, before moving on to Iraq, Yemen and Iran.

Civilisation’s Last Stand

Next month should see me writing an article timed for Thursday 24th April, the 110th anniversary of the Armenian genocide. When I spoke at a function in Damascus University to mark the 100th anniversary of that unspeakable crime, I said that, of all the speakers who had gathered in Yerevan to commemorate it, only Russian President Putin had the right to be there, because, of all Europe’s countries, only Russia had come to the aid of the Armenians.

I had spent that morning in Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp watching the young mothers with their babies wince as Jolani’s mortars landed amongst us and the women in the bread queues nearby. Though Jolani has other targets for the moment I, for one, do not forget the Palestinian children they beheaded in Aleppo, just like I do not forget so many others.

Still, remembrance is not enough. I am still collecting money here for distressed Syrians and I am working with Syrian lawyers and similar people of good will to collate, collect and disseminate information indicting Jolani. Just as with the Armenians, this will be a long and, perhaps, fruitless journey. But, leaving aside that it is better to be a fool on the side of the persecuted Armenians and Alawites than it is to be a bought and bribed genius on the side of Baerbock and her head hacking buddies, there are still some good people in the corridors of power in America and in central Europe we can appeal to and, if we can leverage them, then maybe, just maybe, the Chinese will finally do the right thing and oppose these ongoing genocides. There is, after all, a first time for everything.

Jeffrey Sachs asks the EU Parliament to open their eyes

Few can match Professor Sachs’ bonafides with regard to academic appointments, advisory roles to the most influential bodies of power and breadth of understanding of geopolitics and economics as it pertains to “sustainable development”. He is (very briefly):

• Former Harvard professor of Economics and director of the Harvard Institute for International Development

• A Columbia University Professor and director of its Center for Sustainable Development

• Recipient of numerous awards including being named among Time’s “100 most influential people” twice, recipient of the Padma Bushan, India’s third highest civilian award

• Author and/or co-author of dozens of books on the topics of economics, global inequality, American foreign policy

Beyond that, Sachs has held advisory roles to foreign governments on all major continents as well as UN Secretaries General, the W.H.O. and the World Bank. He is, in other words, extremely well connected and influential academically, politically and socially.

The question is, should you trust him?

The answer is, no. In this environment of misinformation peddled by sources on all sides of topics, trust in anyone cannot be justified, least of all on the basis of stature granted by institutions which in turn cannot be trusted to defend the interests of the 99%. Sachs himself admitted that “we don't speak the truth about almost anything in this world right now”.

Sachs has been an advocate for the disastrous WHO biosecurity agenda which would have secured a commitment from nation signatories to continue with gain-of-function research, the development of countermeasures (i.e. mRNA “vaccines”) and the implementation of tighter liability shields for damage resulting from their use.

As the chair of The Lancet’s Covid-19 Commission, he was a fierce critic of the lab-leak theory, blaming such notions on right-wing ideologues who sought to push the world into conflict using arguments that were not supported by biology and chronology.

He subsequently altered his position after appointing Peter Daszak, the notorious director of EcoHealth Alliance, to head a task force investigating SARS-COV2 origins, only to learn that his Columbia University colleague was not being transparent for obvious conflicts of interest. He has since publicly opined that lab-leak is a viable hypothesis and, in doing so, impugned the integrity of public health officials like Anthony Fauci.

Has he had a reckoning? Is he playing both sides? Who knows? At the very least he has demonstrated the wisdom of being able to change his mind and admit that he was wrong. That certainly counts for something in today’s world.

As long as we do not seek to place trust in an individual, it doesn’t matter. But we can, however, endeavor to get better at trusting our own discernment as we assess what is being offered without having to guess at the hidden motivations of the person who is doing the offering.

Here is my general approach. I ask myself:

• Is the person’s central message worthwhile and helpful? (Is there a good reason to listen closely in the first place)

• Do they present a cohesive and logical argument?

• Are they demanding that you trust them because they are an appointed authority or are they asking you to use your own logic and sensibility?

• What proof do they offer to support their thesis?

I invite you to approach Sachs’s speech to the EU Parliament on March 3 that way. Here is his commentary, in full. A Warning: If you absolutely cannot live without a “I stand with Ukraine” banner in your front yard, DON’T LISTEN TO IT:

To Summarize:

• The war in Ukraine will come to an end and that is a good thing for the Ukrainians and for Europeans

• The fear that Russia’s incursion into Crimea and the Donbass regions of Ukraine is an indication that Putin has his eyes on Brussels next is an absurd idea promulgated by war-mongering propagandists in America and Europe

• Anyone who concludes that Russia’s move to annex these areas was an act of pure aggression and not a desperate attempt to keep NATO off of her borders has no grasp of the historical events that led to this conflict

• Sachs reminds the audience that he knows all the players on all sides of this issue, but rather than demanding we genuflect to his opinion he encourages us to examine the historical record which clearly demonstrates that NATO, under US direction, has a 30 year history of violating agreements in order to provoke an inevitable Russian response.

• The EU should regard Russia as a vital and natural trading partner, not as an existential threat. Antagonizing their giant neighbor to the East serves only American Imperialism and not anyone else.

So by my standards, Jeffrey Sachs hit it out of the park.

Moreover, Sachs was frank and did not limit his critique of American foreign policy to the Russian issue. Sachs reminded the world that the wars in the Middle East were Netanyahu’s wars, not anyone else’s. He cited NATO Commander General Wesley Clark’s surprise when he learned, on September 20, 2001, that the United States had already committed to starting seven wars in the Middle East, years before any kind of 9/11 investigation had been conducted.

Obviously, these plans were hatched years before the events of 9/11 and can be traced to a white paper, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” written in 1996 by American Neo-cons for then (and present) Israeli PM Netanyahu.

He explained America’s foreign policy to the EU parliament like he was speaking to an auditorium of undergraduate students, because, sadly, that is what was necessary. Here are some of his best eye-openers:

• The American political system is a system of image; it's a system of media manipulation every day

• The U.S. has done the most to extinguish peace under President Joe Biden because he was not compos mentis for at least the last two years of his Presidency

• Being an enemy of the United States is dangerous, but being a friend is fatal (attributed to Henry Kissinger)

• Any place without an American military base is an enemy

• Neutrality is the the dirtiest word in the US political lexicon because “at least if you're an enemy we know you're an enemy. If you are neutral you're subversive because then you're really against us because you're not telling us—you're pretending to be neutral”

• With regard to the Middle East: “US completely handed over foreign policy 30 years ago to Netanyahu. The Israel Lobby dominates American politics. Have no doubt about it. I could explain for hours how it works. It's very dangerous”

• Netanyahu is a war criminal, properly indicted by the ICC (International Criminal Court)

• “By the way if anyone would like to discuss how the US blew up Nordstream,

  I'd be happy to talk about that”

Some will complain that all this has been obvious. I would agree. However it hasn’t been obvious to many who sat among Sachs’ influential audience. And Sachs is not a host of a popular podcast speaking to his subscribers. He is a respected voice on the international stage addressing the European political leadership’s failure to formulate any kind of foreign policy. He was politely chastising the leadership of 400 million people to their faces.

I didn’t know who Jeffrey Sachs was four years ago. I was (and still am) unaware of many things. I was, however, aware of NATO’s inexorable march eastward despite the requests, turned demands, turned ultimatums from Russian leadership to relent. This is why I have been flabbergasted by the left leaning intellectuals in this country who paint anyone who asserts that both sides share the blame around the war in Ukraine as “Putin apologists” or spineless cowards for not coming to the defense of the Ukrainian people.

Why has this been lost on the “well-informed”? Who are they listening to?

With regard to the Middle East, Sachs never directly implicates Israel in the events of 9/11 but clearly has no reservations about acknowledging the plain fact that Israeli leadership under Netanyahu had the most to gain by those horrific events. Stating the obvious has sadly never been so dangerous as it is now.

The overwhelming evidence proves that three skyscrapers could not have been leveled in a matter of seconds by two plane collisions. Those events were planned and executed by unknown entities who not only had open access to the guts of those secure buildings but also to highly energetic explosives and, most importantly, the power to steer all major media outlets towards a single explanation. By doing so they got them to undermine their fundamental mission to use skepticism and rigor to hold authority in check.

Though President Trump has responded to the growing demand for a reinvestigation of the events of 9/11, we must ask, why has it taken so long? On what grounds are we to trust what we are now told two decades later? Who would be against transparency? How powerful would they have to be to be able to suppress a movement that has been demanding it for over two decades?

We may never discover who the real perpetrators were, but it is clear that at least one entity, the Israeli messaging platform Odigo, had foreknowledge of the events of that day. Here is the 2001 article from Haaretz which reported that Odigo themselves admitted that someone on their staff notified at least two of its users to stay away from the World Trade Center Complex that morning.

And then there were the group of five young men working for a moving company called Urban Moving Systems. Sivan Kurzberg, Paul Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Yaron Shimuel and Omar Marmari were spotted in the parking lot of the Doric Apartment Complex in Union City, New Jersey, just after 8am on 9/11 where they were seen taking pictures and filming the attacks while also celebrating the destruction of the towers.

The so-called “Dancing Israelis” were detained, interrogated and eventually sent back to Israel. Very little can be confirmed about these young men. Did they have foreknowledge of the event as well? Did one have $4,700 dollars stuffed in his sock? Did another fail an FBI polygraph test? Did they all appear on Israeli TV months later claiming to be Mossad intelligence agents? We simply cannot confirm any of these things, however one point cannot be contested. They were celebrating. Why?

Could Professor Sachs be the next advocate for a 9/11 Reinvestigation?

Former number 2 of Daesh and current self-proclaimed president of Syria Ahmad al-Shareh said on March 9: “We must preserve national unity, civil peace as much as possible, and, God willing, we will be able to live together in this country as much as possible.”

The new regime increased the humiliations of the Alawites (Nuçairïs). They are fired from their jobs without being paid. In the street, the jihadists arrest them, and force them to bray like donkeys, or bark like dogs, before beating them in public. In three days, one to three thousand of them were murdered in pogroms, first on the Mediterranean coast, then throughout the country.

Thousands of Alawites took refuge in the Russian military bases in Tartus and Hmeimim where they were welcomed.

With all the jihadists currently grouped on the coast and in Damascus, the rest of Syria is free of fighters. The Turkish army took advantage of this to attack the cities of the north.

☞ Takfiri groups (i.e. those who seek to designate and kill heretics), which had been expelled in Idlib during the war against the Syrian Arab Republic, have returned to “useful Syria”. They were able to pass the roadblocks of the forces of the new government without any problem until they reached the coast and massacred the “heretics”. The Syrian population gave up its arms when President Bashar al-Assad fell. It is therefore defenseless in front of the army and the current security forces that are made up of former jihadists, generally Turkish-speaking, often Chechens, Uzbeks or Tajiks, supervised by Turkish officers.

Historically, massacres of Alawites have always been followed by massacres of Christians.

☞ The Alawite community was formed in the ninth century around Muḥammad ben Nuṣayr al-Namīrī.

It considers Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad’s son-in-law, to be God, and Jesus and Muhammad to be his prophets. However, according to René Dussaud, who was curator of the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the Louvre Museum and private secretary to Anatole France, this community did not arise from nothing. It is said to have been constituted during antiquity, to have converted to Christianity, then to Islam, without abandoning its previous faith, such as the belief in reincarnation. It is this French theory that Israeli researchers have explored and developed.

The Alawites do not worship in public. They refer to three reference books: their Fatihat al-Kitab (catechism), the Gospels (not the Bible) and the Qur’an. For them, only the principles present in each of these three books should be considered revealed.

They were enslaved over the centuries before they were recognized as Muslims by Ayatollah Khomeini and considered equal.

Today, culturally, it is the religious group closest to Europeans, particularly in terms of women’s rights.

☞ The Assad family is Alawite. Presidents Hafez and Bashar el Assad often chose their advisers from among their close friends, i.e. from this community, but not senior civil servants who were systematically appointed with due respect for a community balance. Alawites enlisted massively in the armies, a poorly paid and dangerous profession, which other communities neglected.

☞ Ahmed el-Shareh, arguing that it was an insurrection orchestrated by General Ghiath Dalla, Maher al-Assad’s former right-hand man (now exiled in Iraq with several thousand of his men), presents these pogroms as political revenge, which makes no sense, as this community has never linked its fate to that of the Assads. This lie makes it possible to hide the resumption of the religious war that has swept across the Middle East since the Anglo-Saxons relied on the political branch of the Muslim Brotherhood to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan (recall that in Germany, the Nazis ransacked Jewish businesses and killed many of them during “Kristallnacht” while claiming to avenge the murder of a diplomat with no connection to their victims).

Last month, General Ghiath Dalla founded Awli el-Bas (Islamic Resistance Front in Syria), a militia close to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. He is in no way the representative of the Alawite community, but of the fallen regime. He managed to mobilize many supporters of a secular and egalitarian state and to successfully attack several police stations and jihadist barracks.

☞ How can we not wonder about the considerable quantity of weapons and ammunition that the takfirists have today? Similarly, how can we ignore the fact that Daesh is reconstituting its forces on the Syrian-Iraqi border?

Christoph Heusgen, former permanent representative of Germany to the United Nations and current president of the Munich Security Conference, cries upon discovering the divorce between the United States and the Europeans.

The last two weeks, we have experienced a turning point in History comparable to that of the Battle of Berlin, in April-May 1945, when the Red Army took Berlin and overthrew the Third Reich: this time, it was the Trump administration which definitively put the European Union back on the ropes.

For the moment, the EU, the G7 and the G20 have not yet been dissolved, but these three structures are already dead. The World Bank and the United Nations could follow.

Let’s look back at these events, which happened so quickly that almost none of us followed them and understood their consequences.

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 12

The major European powers (i.e. Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Poland, the United Kingdom and the European Union), who feared what the Trump administration might decide, met in Paris on February 12 to develop a common position on the Ukrainian conflict. In this case, they agreed to continue what they have been doing for three years:
* deny having violated the commitments made during German reunification not to extend NATO to the East,
- deny that Ukraine is in the hands of “integral nationalists” (i.e. the party of Nazi collaborators)
-and continue the Second World War, no longer against the Nazis, but against the Russians.

Meanwhile, in Kiev, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent presented the US aid bill: $500 billion and proposed paying it by exploiting the rare earths of which the country is proud. I have already explained that this proposal was only a response from the shepherd to the shepherdess: Ukraine having falsely claimed to ultimately offer Westerners the opportunity to exploit these riches which do not exist. However, from a European point of view, what was going on was frightening: if the United States seized these so-called riches, they excluded the Europeans from benefiting from the sharing they had agreed upon. Without informing their fellow citizens, they shared Ukraine between them during its reconstruction: to the British, the ports, to the Germans, the mines, etc. They had already done this during the invasions of Iraq and Libya and during the war against Syria.

Above all, while Washington and Moscow were exchanging prisoners, the American presidents, Donald Trump, and Russian presidents, Vladimir Putin, spoke by telephone for an hour and a half. This summit was preceded by a conversation, in the Kremlin, between President Putin and Steve Wilkoff, President Trump’s special envoy who came to organize the prisoner exchange. Wilkoff had given his president a report on his mission that shattered everything NATO claimed to know about Ukraine.

Both bosses now had the same information.

The direct line between the White House and the Kremlin had just been reestablished.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 14

On February 14, the Vice President of the United States, JD Vance, addressed the diplomatic and military elite of the EU at the Security Conference in Munich. He drew up an indictment against the autism of European leaders: They refuse to respond to the concerns of their fellow citizens in terms of freedom of expression and immigration. However, if they are afraid of their people, the United States will be able to do nothing for them, he asserted, making the president of the conference, the German ambassador Christoph Heusgen, cry.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 17

A second meeting was held on February 17, still in Paris, with the same participants, plus Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, and Mark Rutte, Secretary General of NATO. They agreed to stand together against Donald Trump and not to accept any questioning of Western policy towards Russia.

Olaf Scholz, outgoing German chancellor, declared after the summit: “There must be no

division of security and responsibility between Europe and the United States. NATO is built on the fact that we always act together and share risks […]. This should not be questioned. »

Donald Tusk, Prime Minister of Poland, said: “No matter what everyone may say to each other, sometimes in harsh words […], there is no reason why the Allies cannot find a common language among themselves on the most important issues. [It is] in the interest of Europe and the United States to cooperate as closely as possible. »

Also on February 17, the Ukrainian army attacked US, Israeli and Italian interests in Russia. It bombed facilities partially owned by Chevron (15%), ExxonMobil (7.5%) and ENI (2%). Around twenty drones caused serious damage to the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC), which supplies Israel with Russian oil.

The Europeans reacted no more to this operation than when the CIA sabotaged the Nord Stream gas pipeline (September 26, 2022), although it is owned not only by the Russian Gazprom (50%), but also by the Germans BASF/Wintershall and Uniper, the French Engie, the Austrian OMV and the British Royal Dutch Shell. This sabotage has thrown Germany into an economic recession, which continues to spread to the rest of the EU, not to mention increasing energy prices for all EU households.

In both cases (the Nord Stream sabotage and the CPC attack), the Europeans were unable to defend their interests. They successively let their main ally hurt them, then their allies fight each other.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 18

The European powers learned with astonishment that, at their first meeting in Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), on February 18, the US and Russian delegations agreed:
 to denazify and neutralize Ukraine,
 to respect the commitments made during German reunification and to withdraw NATO troops from all countries that joined the Atlantic Alliance after 1990.

President Trump had suddenly abandoned the plan of General Keith Kellogg, his special envoy for Ukraine, as it had been published in April 2024 by the America First Foundation. On the contrary, he had used the plan of his friend Steve Witkoff, special envoy for the Middle East, who had met Vladimir Putin in Moscow through the Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman (known as “MBS”), hence the choice of Riyadh for these negotiations. Kellogg reasoned with NATO’s ideas, while Witkoff listened, heard and verified the validity of the Russian position.

The European powers were quickly able to verify that the order to withdraw had been transmitted to certain US troops, in the Baltic countries and in Poland. The security architecture in Europe, that is to say the system ensuring peace, was destroyed. Of course, there is no immediate threat of invasion, Russian or Chinese, but in the long term and given the time required for rearmament, everyone must immediately prepare for the best or the worst.

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 19

On February19, EU ambassadors approved the 16th package of unilateral coercive measures (misleadingly called “sanctions” by Atlantic propaganda) against Russia. It was to be officially approved on 24 February by the Foreign Affairs Council on the occasion of the third anniversary of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine. In addition, the EU decided to disconnect 13 banks from the Swift system and to ban three financial institutions from trading. In addition, 73 ships of the Russian “ghost fleet” were sanctioned, and 11 Russian ports and airports that circumvent the oil price cap were banned from trading. Finally, 8 Russian media outlets also had their broadcasting licenses in the EU suspended.

Meanwhile, on the same day, February 19, President Donald Trump vented his anger at his unelected Ukrainian counterpart, calling him a “modestly successful comedian” and an “unelected dictator,” and then accusing him of provoking the war. Meanwhile, General Kellogg, the White House’s special envoy to Kiev, canceled his press conference with Volodymyr Zelensky. The Trump administration had broken with the Kiev government that the Biden administration had praised to the skies.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 20

Libertarian Senator Mike Lee (Utah) introduced a bill in the Senate on February 20 to completely withdraw the United States from the United Nations. Representative Chip Roy (Texas) introduced the same bill in the House of Representatives the following day.

While President Donald Trump is a “Jacksonian” (i.e., a disciple of Andrew Jackson, who wanted to replace war with business), Washington has now embraced “American exceptionalism.” This is a political theology according to which the United States is a chosen people who must bring the light they have received to the rest of the world. As such, they do not have to negotiate anything with others and especially not be accountable to them.

“American exceptionalism” should not be confused with the “isolationism” that led the Senate to refuse to join the League of Nations in 1920. This organization, unlike the UN that succeeded it, had provided for military solidarity between states that recognized international law. Consequently, the United States would have had to maintain troops to maintain peace in Europe and the Europeans could have intervened in Latin America (Washington’s “backyard” according to the “Monroe Doctrine”) to maintain peace there.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 22

Without waiting, Polish President Andrzej Duda went to Washington uninvited on February 22. He managed to meet President Donald Trump for ten minutes, not at the White House, but on the sidelines of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). He asked him not to withdraw US troops from his country, giving Poland time to complete its military restructuring. Since Warsaw has already initiated a profound internal revolution by reestablishing universal military service and building a very large army, he managed to get him to postpone, not cancel, his order.

Andrzej Duda is Polish President, at least until the May elections. Constitutionally, he does not exercise executive power, but he is nonetheless the head of the armed forces. His Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, had promised in Paris not to negotiate separately with the United States.

So, whatever one might say, the united front of the Europeans was broken. It had only lasted ten days.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 24

On the third anniversary of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine, on 24 February, Roberta Metsola, President of the European Parliament, António Costa, President of the European Council and Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, issued a completely out-of-place joint statement. In it, they called for “a comprehensive, just and lasting peace based on the Ukrainian peace formula”, meaning they stuck to the old narrative: there are no Nazis in Ukraine and Russia is the aggressor. In doing so, they contradicted not only the facts, but also the recent statements of their economic and military overlord, the United States.

On the same day, French President Emmanuel Macron travelled to Washington, on behalf of all Atlanticist Europeans. Before receiving him, President Donald Trump had his chief of staff take him to a wing of the White House to participate in a G7 video conference that he was chairing… from another room.

For two hours, the heads of state and government of the G7, plus the Spanish Prime Minister and the unelected Ukrainian president, tried in vain to make their overlord relent. He would not budge: the Ukrainian conflict was not started by Russia, but by the Ukrainian fundamentalist nationalists hiding behind Zelensky alone. In any case, as a matter of principle, it is not possible to defend people who have just attacked US interests, even if they are located in Russia. To make himself clearly understood, Donald Trump refused to sign the final communiqué prepared by the Europeans and announced to them that, if this text were published (it had already been distributed under embargo to journalists), he would deny it and his country would leave the G7.

Only after this scandal did he receive President Emmanuel Macron. The latter chose not to confront him, but to celebrate transatlantic friendship. At the joint press conference, he interrupted his host when the latter repeated that Ukraine, not Russia, had provoked the war, but ultimately did not dare contradict him.

Meanwhile, in New York, the UN General Assembly was debating a resolution proposed by Ukraine. It denounced “the total invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation” and demanded that it withdraw “immediately, completely and unconditionally all its military forces from the territory of Ukraine within the internationally recognized borders of the country and that the hostilities conducted by the Russian Federation against Ukraine, in particular all attacks against civilians and civilian objects, cease immediately.”

For the first time in history since World War II, the US delegation voted against a text, along with that of Russia, against those of Canada, the Europeans and Japan who approved it.

Then, the United States presented a second resolution itself so that “the conflict be ended as soon as possible.” This text aimed to align the General Assembly with the position of the US negotiators in Riyadh. But Russia voted against it because the text “advocates for a lasting peace between Ukraine and the Russian Federation” and not for a “lasting peace within Ukraine.” As a result, the United States, considering that it had poorly drafted its proposal, abstained on its own text, while Canada, the Europeans and Japan condemned it.

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 25

Kaja Kallas, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, travelled to Washington to meet with Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The meeting, which had been announced for a long time, was cancelled at the last minute by Mr Rubio’s secretariat, officially due to his overbooked schedule.

Ms Kallas said that instead, she would meet “with senators and (…) members of Congress to discuss Russia’s war against Ukraine and transatlantic relations”.

After EU members voted against the US at the UN, the Secretary of State refused to meet his European counterpart.

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 26

At a press conference in kyiv, Volodymyr Zelensky assured on February 26 that without security guarantees from the United States and NATO, any peace agreement would be unfair and there would be no real ceasefire.

THURSDAY 27 FEBRUARY

Before leaving Washington, Kaja Kallas, High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, gave a lecture at the Hudson Institute on February 27. She said: “We need to put pressure on Russia to also want peace. It is in a position where it does not want peace.”

Keir Starmer, British Prime Minister, went to the White House, carrying an invitation from King Charles III for a second state visit to the United Kingdom. Her Majesty’s diplomats believe that President Trump greatly enjoyed the premiere and that, given his pride, he would be sensitive to the pomp of the Crown.

During the two leaders’ press conference, President Trump claimed not to remember calling Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator” (“Did I say that? I can’t believe I said it!”). In addition, he expressed openness to the idea of the 25% tariff hike not affecting the United Kingdom and to London returning the Chagos Islands (including the Diego Garcia base) to Mauritius.

On the substance, Keir Starmer managed to renew his country’s "special relationship" with the United States. This includes the "Five Eyes" global interception and espionage system and the delegation of the strike force (remember that the British atomic bomb could not work without the support of US military scientists).

Meanwhile, US and Russian negotiators met for six and a half hours at the US Consulate General in Istanbul for a second round of negotiations, at a "technical level". It was not a question of progress on the substance, but of resolving problems that had been addressed by the ministers in Riyadh. Namely, the operating conditions of the respective embassies in Washington and Moscow, which President Joe Biden had considerably supervised and to which Moscow had responded identically.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 28

The unelected Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, visited the White House on February 28. President Trump and Vice President Vance received him, not to listen to his version of events, but to sign an agreement on rare earths that Ukraine claims to possess. Of course, he could not have done so, since they do not exist, but it was a way for the Trump administration to show the man who is no longer known whether it considers him a “democrat” or a “dictator” that he no longer had any cards in his hand.

The welcome press briefing will be remembered. The Western press was shocked by the altercation between President Trump and his guest. We must be wary of images here: they do not say the same thing at all if we stick to a selected excerpt or if we listen to the entire exchange. In an excerpt, we remember the arguments that are stated, while overall, we understand why they are stated.

During the fifty minutes of this press briefing, President Donald Trump constantly recalled that he was not aligned with either party, Russian or Ukrainian, but that he was negotiating with Russia to defend the interests of his country and, ultimately, for all of Humanity. As President of the United States, he speaks with everyone, is careful not to insult anyone and recognizes the positive points of each. On the contrary, Volodymyr Zelensky has constantly accused Russia of aggression since 2014, of murders, kidnappings and torture. He even claimed that President Vladimir Putin had violated his own signature 15 times.

Contrary to what the Western press saw, this press briefing did not focus on military aid, rare earths and even less on a division of territories. It escalated when Vice President Vance noted that his host’s narrative was “propaganda,” then returned to the charge, declaring of both versions of the facts: “We know you’re wrong!” Ultimately, President Trump noted that Ukraine was in bad shape and that his guest not only was not grateful for U.S. support, but did not want a ceasefire. Exasperated, he observed that Vladimir Putin had never violated his signature, neither with Barack Obama nor with him, but only with Joe Biden because of what the latter did to him. He then recalled the repeated false accusations made against Russia by President Biden.

SUNDAY, MARCH 2

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Europe is “at a crossroads of history” as he welcomed to Downing Street the leaders of Ukraine, France, Germany, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Canada, Finland, Sweden, the Czech Republic and Romania, as well as the Turkish foreign minister, the NATO secretary general and the presidents of the European Commission and European Council.

The UK and France are competing to replace the US and guarantee peace on the European continent. Both countries are said to be prepared to guarantee the security of others with their nuclear weapons. However, no one seriously considers that these would be sufficient to ensure peace in the absence of serious conventional forces, which neither London nor Paris has. At most, Warsaw began reorganising its armies and generalising conscription for its young people more than two years ago, but it still does not have enough weapons.

After the meeting, which aimed to create a “coalition of the willing”, Keir Starmer said on behalf of all participants:

“Today I welcomed to London counterparts from across Europe, including from Türkiye, as well as the Secretary General of NATO and the Presidents of the European Commission, the Council of the EU and Canada, to discuss our support for Ukraine.

Together, we reaffirmed our determination to work towards a permanent peace in Ukraine, in partnership with the United States. Europe’s security is our primary responsibility. We will tackle this historic task and increase our investment in our own defence.

We must not repeat the mistakes of the past when weak agreements allowed President Putin to invade again. We will work with President Trump to secure a strong, just, and lasting peace that ensures Ukraine’s future sovereignty and security. Ukraine must be able to defend itself against future Russian attacks. There must be no talks on Ukraine without Ukraine. We agreed that the United Kingdom, France, and others will work with Ukraine on a plan to end the fighting that we will discuss further with the United States and move forward together (…) In addition, many of us have expressed our readiness to contribute to Ukraine’s security, including through a force of European and other partners, and will intensify our planning. We will continue to work closely together to advance next steps and make decisions in the weeks ahead.”

The participants in this summit have not changed their analysis of the Ukrainian conflict at all. They remain deaf to the United States and, as a result, no longer understand it. They managed to unite not to deploy a peace stabilisation force in Ukraine, but to protect critical infrastructure in western Ukraine or in similar strategic areas. They agreed not to make fragmented national efforts, but to take advantage of the economic power of the European Union (EU) by redirecting its recovery funds. They therefore convened a special European Council on March 6. However, to transform the EU from a common market to a military alliance, they will need not a majority, but the unanimity of the 27 Member States, including Hungary and Slovakia.

And yet, already, Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian Prime Minister, has responded to the draft final declaration of the European Council by stressing that there are “strategic differences” between the EU states. He therefore advocates that there should be no written conclusions, because "any attempt to do so would project the image of a divided European Union."

Thierry Meyssan

Translation
Roger Lagassé

In November 2022, the book The Philosophy of War by the famous philosopher Henri-Paul Hude was published in French by the Economica publishing house in France. Its appearance was an event in the academic life of France and other countries, which resonated with scholars, intellectuals and those interested in the problems of war and peace. This philosophical essay has also been translated and published in English (2023), Spanish (2024) and Russian (2025). The book addresses the fundamental problem of modernity—war and peace.

Philosophy of war as one of the most important areas of political philosophy has a long history. As a direction, the philosophy of war begins to take shape in the 18th century. Spanish nobleman and military man Alvaro Jose de Navia-Osorio y Vigil de la Rua (1684-1732) used this term in one of his works. In its expanded form, the term is found in the English military writer Henry Lloyd (1729-1783) in a fragment from his Political and Military Memoirs, translated into French. The period of the Napoleonic Wars accelerated the process of synthesizing philosophy and military strategy. It is not accidental that in France this direction found fertile ground for development. A participant of the Napoleonic campaign in Russia, later promoted to the rank of general, Marquis Georges de Chambre published a book entitled Philosophy of War, where he substantiated the importance of a philosophical approach in the study of the phenomenon of war. This line of research was continued in the book of French captain R. Henri, published in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century , in the works of Olivier , Lanet, Lagorgette, Lavis, Letourneau, Rambaud and other compatriots of J. de Chambre. At the outbreak of World War II, the French were again reminded of the philosophy of war . A significant contribution to the development of the philosophy of war was made by Ch. de Gaulle in his works devoted to the issues of war, security and construction of the armed forces of France. The post-war period is characterized by an increased interest in the problem of war. Serious philosophical studies appear, to which can be attributed the work of the French author A. Filonenko “Essays on the Philosophy of War.” The book examines the work of various thinkers from Machiavelli, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, St. Just, Clausewitz to Prudon, L. Tolstoy, and Ch. de Gaulle. There he dwells on the problems of the correlation between war and language, logic and strategy. In the 21st century, interest in the problem of war does not disappear. This is facilitated by the trends in the development of international life, indicating that it is too early to forget about war. Thus, in 2003-2004, the Nantes Philosophical Society held lecture-debates on the theme “Philosophy in the Face of War,” which included presentations and debates with the participation of such philosophers as J. Gobert, T. Menissier, J. Ricoeur, B. Benoit, and P. Assner.

In Russia, too, there were and are proponents of a philosophical approach to the study of war. Modern Russian researchers write about them, for example, in the collection “Russian Philosophers on War” . This publication includes works by Russian philosophers on the problems of war, primarily touching on the meaning and nature of war, its spiritual and civilizational origins, Russia’s relations with the East and the West. One of the Russian philosophers and practitioners of war was Andrei Evgenievich Snesarev (1865-1937), who published in 1930 the book A Philosophy of War, which analyzes the social and epistemological foundations of war, its various forms, and reveals the evolution of this social phenomenon.

One should also pay tribute to the representatives of the Russian Abroad, who, far from their homeland, continued not only to empathize with all the events taking place there, but also tried to theoretically analyze all the processes related to the war (past and future). The heyday of their activity fell on the 30s of the last century. In 1995, a collection entitled A Philosophy of War was published , which included the works of famous representatives of military culture abroad: A. A. Kersnovsky, A. L. Mariushkin, N. N. Golovin, P. I. Zaleskii, A. K. Bayov. It is worth mentioning the works of E.E. Messner, which to a large extent anticipated the development of theoretical views on hybrid forms of warfare.

A deep interdisciplinary analysis of the totality of available works on the philosophy of war still awaits its researchers. In this regard, the book A Philosophy of War by French philosopher Henri-Paul Hude seems to be a worthy continuation of the tradition of his predecessors.

Reflecting on Hude’s scholarly contribution to the development of the philosophy of war, we would like to note a number of points.

First, the author addresses war as a social phenomenon in new socio-cultural civilizational conditions, which highlight it in a completely different way compared to previous philosophical and theoretical studies.

Secondly, this work is distinguished by the originality of its approach to the phenomenon of war through the clearly visible image of the Universal Leviathan as a project of total power, and thus war, of the postmodern era.

Thirdly, war is considered in political discourse, ways of forming a culture of peace in modern conditions are pointed out.
Fourthly, the question of the role of religion and philosophy and their synergistic influence on a world without war seems interesting.

When reading the work of the French Professor, the most important aspects in terms of content attract attention.

The main problem that the author poses is related to the concept of the Universal Leviathan (hereinafter referred to as UL), which appears as a rational project and is interpreted as a single, universal, total power. This Leviathan is already in the stage of formation.

The determinants of UL are determined by the development of technologies that increase the amount of totalitarian power.

An important question posed by the author of the book : “Can we, should we make peace with or without the Universal Leviathan (UL).”
The total subjugation of the entire world by the UL implies the imposition and formation of a culture of powerlessness, understood as the total subjugation of everyone and everything to this UL. It “leads to the powerlessness of those who accept it.”

The author formulates a paradoxical thesis that in order to prevent war it is necessary to constantly wage war. And this war will not be between different individual states—not a constitutional war, but a war on the part of a single, universal state, and such a war will be called a constitutive war. This war, whose subjects are guided by the requirements of absolute security, is directed against any kind of political pluralism, against any kind of culture (except for the so-called culture of powerlessness), against freedom, both possible and real.

The UL is endowed with unique rights:

• the right to use the means of armed violence to be created from armed forces transformed into international mobile gendarmerie squadrons;
• the right to view all their opponents as irresponsible madmen, lunatics, rioters, terrorists, criminals;
• the right to suppress any manifestation of the struggle for freedom, any demand to respect natural rights;
• the right to wage war against any manifestation of pluralism;
• the right, at its discretion, to neutralize any threat, even preventively;
• the right to exceptional political, social, economic and cultural stratification in which the majority of the population, under the influence of a culture of powerlessness, would perceive their slavery as an opportunity for a life of security and freedom;
• the right to regulate demographic processes and to impose morality in this regard;
• the right to be controlled by the Authority of all and everyone: access to political, cultural, social, medical and psychiatric data; access to everyone’s body and brain;
• the right to determine who should live and who should die. The pinnacle of humanism could be human murder. New Leviathan humanism will be only for the chosen ones, and the world will be divided into its rulers and the biological mass without the right to vote.

The social class structure of the world Leviathan will include: oligarchs, a useful class of free citizens-people (policemen, soldiers, judges, engineers, etc.), who together form the “totalitarian elite,” the “party of Leviathan.” In addition, a significant part of society will be represented by useless people (as a consequence of technological progress).

“In the end, this is what Leviathan is: it is a universal Empire, a totalitarian political regime that disposes for its elite a culture of power and war, an essentially non-egalitarian, liberal and technocratic economy in various ratios, a culture of powerlessness for society,” the author emphasizes.

This is the picture of the future if we do not strive for profound cultural change.

Reflecting on the underlying causes of war from the perspective of human nature, the author poses a number of questions. In what does belligerence lie? Is it the natural (animal) beginning of man or does it have a social (civilizational, technical, cultural) conditioning?

If we take the biologizing position, war is unnatural by virtue of the fact that: humans wage wars within their own human species, not against other species; wars as a distinctively human phenomenon are waged between social groups.

What is the specificity of man as a spiritual being? The determinants lie both in the metaphysical plane and in the realm of politics, economics, etc., as well.

According to Hude, it is legitimate to appeal to the psychological roots of war. The mechanisms of involvement in war can be: Freud’s concepts of the unconscious – war is born from the frustration of aggressive impulse; in the confrontation between good and evil a person is able not only to fight evil as an absolute enemy, but also to reach for it, to be in love with this evil. As a result—inner psychic crisis leads to violence and cruelty; no less interesting is the interpretation of waging war for the sake of the war process itself—people like to do it.

The above-mentioned mechanisms, burdened with a set of civilizational and cultural factors (technological progress, transformation of humanism, urbanization), only intensify the existentially pathological craving for war.

Ultimately, Hude concludes that war is the “outward manifestation of the absence of inner peace.”

As opposed to psychological explanations of the origins of war, individual-personal (the opportunity to demonstrate one’s superiority, sense of self-worth, overcoming fear against death, etc.) and social (service to the country, struggle for peace, justice, promotion, etc.) motives are given.

At the end of Chapter 1, the author concludes that the threat of war is more than real, and with the rapid development of technology and techniques, it will have the character of the Apocalypse. The universal Leviathan as an anti-war project will impose its will on the whole world and will wage “its War.”

At the beginning of Chapter 2, Hude puts forward the thesis that “Leviathan cannot be the solution to the problem of war.”

The institutionalization of UL requires the formation of an illusion of freedom in the public consciousness. The means will be information control mechanisms, inculcating a culture of powerlessness, deconstructing thinking and all of existence, and creating an atmosphere of constant fear, real or imaginary.

It is difficult for the UL project to come true because of a number of reasons that hinder the stability of its existence and functioning (economic, technical, political). It is hardly possible for it to ensure lasting peace due to a number of contradictions: between the need for a unified, holistic UL and the culture of powerlessness that it forms and that permeates it; between the importance of possessing rationality on the part of UL and the absence of it as such, without which UL itself is impossible.

The manifestation of growing irrationality, the loss of the sense of objectivity of truth and goodness, the fear of war with the simultaneous fear of loss of power, and the UL elite’s propensity for suicide constitute the grounds for the growing threat of probable war.

Hude analyzes the political world without the Universal Leviathan. A justified appeal to world history leads him to the conclusion: all wars were carried out by nations, between nations.

At the beginning of Chapter 3, he articulates the following thesis: If UL does not solve the problem of war through monism of political wills, there must be another way – “consistent pluralism among nations.”

At the same time, each nation can be a factor in war. Guided by the ideal of freedom, it strives for independence, while falling into the temptation to reduce, or better, to deprive other nations of their freedom. Hence the nations’ focus on domination, their competition, makes the potential for their belligerence irreducible. Therefore, modern culture, in which freedom is absolutized, leading to political-ideological fanaticism, is positioned as a culture of war. While the culture of peace is based on the culture of love—philia.

History testifies to wars of empires, for empires and against empires. If in the modern era the creation of a universal empire (read UL) is an unfulfilled, delusional project, then the realization of the imperial function (management of universal goods by each nation) is a legitimate goal and duty of each nation.

A civilized path of peaceful coexistence can be proposed in the direction of a “coherent pluralism of structured nations” based on a culture of peace implicitly funded by philia.

If the absolute moral ideal of modern culture is freedom, the foundation of postmodern culture is greed and aggression. These feelings were fully manifested in the first postmodern culture (before 1945), while in the second postmodern culture the flourishing of greed is accompanied by the condemnation of violence and aggression. Postmodern civilization has unleashed vitality and sensuality by abandoning rationalistic morality. While seemingly striving for pacifism, postmodern culture is not a culture of peace. This type of civilization has nurtured a generation of hedonists, adherents of a culture of powerlessness, bad citizens and soldiers who are not prepared to fight for their freedom.

Meanwhile, within the framework of postmodernity, an anti-nationalism gradually emerged, which is considered by Hude on three levels:

• The ethico-strategic level is characterized by the rejection of nationalism because of the change in the content of war under the influence of superpower means of mass destruction;
• The ideological level is associated with the gradual emergence of neoliberalism, which is characterized by: the strengthening of the oligarchy in liberal states; the creation of unelected international organizations controlled by the liberal oligarchy at the international level; an unelected judiciary; control over the media; the imposition of sexual freedom; and an emphasis on the physical body of man to the detriment of the social body;
• at the level of the anti-national Leviathan there is an interpenetration of neoliberalism and Leviathan ideology, where the deconstruction of cultures leads to the destruction of nations and their identity.

According to Hude, since the late 2010s, postmodern culture has been characterized by a tendency to shift the vector of movement towards “enlightened despotism” on the part of Leviathan, who, under the pretext of fear of war, and actually through war itself, paves the way.

Is there a political solution to the coexistence of nations without Leviathan, and thus without war? Hude asks a rhetorical question. And he answers that there is, he sees it in the unification of nations, in their “ultramodern” alliance against UL, built on the principles of new humanism.

In Chapter 4, the author makes a judgment: a portrait of the political structure of a world without UL must be complemented by the culture of the world and the cultural structure of a world without it.

The culture of peace can be provided by religion, primarily Christian religion as the most humanistic, according to Hude.

In this case, the main principles of the culture of peace are: the principle of social understanding (philia); the principle of correlation of reason with philia; the principle of metaphysicality, which includes a close unity of ontology, theology and their critical reflection.

The philosophical foundation of the new culture of peace should be a philia that balances nature—society—man, his freedom and equality.

The culture of peace must be based on the inseparable union of religion and wisdom (philosophy), in which reason is directed to the search for truth. This union will be characterized by friendly and interested dialogue between civilized, intelligent and spiritually developed people.

Turning to religion, Hude emphasizes the idea that it should not be considered a universal factor of war; religious wars are a relic of the past, and modern wars have other reasons related to human benefits. All war has underlying economic, political, cultural grounds, taken in different ratios, in different hierarchies. Religious war in this context appears only as a special case of the war of cultures.

The future of humanity should be sought in the plane of religious and philosophical (wise) humanism, the union of which constitutes the culture of peace.

In fact, belief in the Absolute (in God) does not guarantee whether or not there will be war. On the one hand, in order to achieve the religious goal—the salvation of the human soul—war is possible, which justifies the use of force. But, on the other hand, the freedom of the individual in relation to the Absolute gives hope for the transformation of religion into a factor of peace.

What are the “causes of the world” or, in other words, what does the world depend on?—asks the author of the book. And explains it by the interaction of reason, aimed at understanding the absolute Truth, and faith, aspiring man to the Absolute, which emphasizes the harmonious union of religion and the wisdom of philosophy.

Emphasizing the adherence to laws, Hude argues that divine laws and state laws should be harmonized with each other. At the same time, the law is interpreted extremely broadly and abstractly: as a natural law and, accordingly, the law of the Absolute (since nature is a work of the spirit) and as the laws of reason.

Law must include Nature, Reason and the Absolute taken together, undivided and united through philia.

Recognizing natural law as the dominant principle promotes the peaceful coexistence of different cultures and religions.

But law without force support, without the right to use force (judicial, police, military) can lead to arbitrariness, anarchy. Then Power is justified and “legitimate to the extent that it ensures compliance with the natural law.”

Religion, embedded in the world of culture and civilization, can manifest itself both as a culture of peace (through teaching people the natural law of peace) and as a culture of war (meaning constitutive war).

Any law must be the result of a contract between individuals. Neglect of this postulate leads inevitably to polytheism of the Superman as God and ultimately to war.

The law is the foundation of all religion as well as all wisdom. Love of the law can be interpreted as a manifestation of the law of love. The law is not important in itself, but in its relationship to the people who live in accordance with the provisions of that law.

The natural law of peace, according to T. Hobbes, correlates with religious laws coming from Christ. At the same time, the defense of self and others does not contradict this natural law, which inevitably puts before us again the dilemma of peace-without-war or war-without-peace.

Hude repeatedly emphasizes the determining role of religion and philosophy, which “along with natural families as guardians of the idea of nature and natural law” oppose Man to the newfangled Leviathan.

Interesting is the author’s message about the formation of the culture of courage, connecting and disconnecting the materialistic culture of Leviathan’s power and the culture of powerlessness of his subordinates. In contrast to the courage of those who are ready to risk their lives to protect everyone they love, Leviathan will: promote the ideas of material goods (egoism, hedonism, consumerism); erase social and historical memory; devalue the belief in the immortality of the soul; destroy the family, culture, civilization; parasitize on the fear of ecological crisis; transform the social structure (increase the number of the rich, minimize the number of the poor, replacing them with robots).

Leviathan’s practical activity involves choosing several courses of action:

• First option is to support “passéists” whose thoughts and aspirations turn to the past in favor of UL interests;
• The 2nd option is to bet on “modernists” who have come under the expanding influence of a culture of powerlessness;
• The 3rd option is to seek to split religions and wisdom by cultivating animosity between them;
• Option 4 is the separation of religion and wisdom, forming a relativism of powerlessness.

Are there possibilities to counteract these practical actions of the UL? The survival of nations and humanity is seen in the direction of: preserving the identity of religions and wisdom; their mutual support, respect; preventing ideological polarization within individual religious confessions.

The deep essence of the spiritual conflict between UL and the whole world in all the diversity of its religions and wisdom is Leviathan’s desire to level people and man’s struggle for the right to be Man.

In the conclusion of his book, Hude emphasizes the grave concern that all right-thinking people have that humanity is once again on the brink of a “nuclear abyss.” This “nuclear storm,” as the author calls it, is the most dangerous and prolonged since 1962.

On the one hand, sane people realize that nuclear war would mean the end of humanity; on the other hand, what happens if Leviathan, as a consequence of postmodern culture, does lose its sanity?

What can motivate people to do this? Hude draws several options for answering this question: belief in the immortality of the soul – the possibility of going to heaven themselves with the hope that the enemy will be in hell; fatigue with life and hopelessness, as a consequence – willingness to commit suicide; a shift from rationalism to irrationalism with all its consequences; a game of blackmail, where the supporters of Leviathan do not seem to inspire fear, but, realizing this humiliation, are nevertheless ready to commit suicide.

It seems that the world has never known such a clear threat of nuclear war. That is why the thought of the seventeenth-century Spanish philosopher Balthasar Gracian crowns the end of the book: “To live, let us live. The peace-loving not only live, but also reign.”

Thus, a careful and close analysis of the presented work gives grounds for a conclusion: the work is of undoubted interest, first of all, for those in power, in whose hands is the present and future of human civilization; for the scientific community. To a certain extent, Hude’s work can serve as a theoretical and methodological reference point for military science.

The monograph is attractive because the author creatively uses the rich scientific potential accumulated by mankind on this problem from Antiquity to the present day. Naturally, his monograph reflects the ideas put forward by French politicians, thinkers and philosophers in the course of several centuries. Continuing the solid tradition in France of viewing war through the prism of philosophy, the author of the book raises the problem of the emergence and the possibility of eliminating war from the life of mankind in our time.

Henri-Paul Hude is a worthy successor of the established national tradition. Undoubtedly, his life and creative path played a certain role in the formation of scientific interest, which was reflected in his work A Philosophy of War. The professional interest and moral side of the problem of ethics in military affairs were predetermined by his professional interest and the moral side of the problem when he was the founder and head of the center “Ethics and Legal Environment” at the Military Academy of Saint-Cyr-Coetquidan and his participation as a co-founder and member of the Board of Directors of the International Society of Military Ethics in Europe. The result of fifteen years of reflection in the process of teaching military ethics to senior French officers was his book Philosophy of War. As French readers have noted, his book turned out to be a philosophy of war in the spirit of Sun Tzu and Clausewitz. Of course, this is not enough to characterize the work of Hude, as it is marked by the author’s desire to penetrate into the essential aspects of military activity, relying on the world humanist tradition of high level. In the spirit of the European tradition, his A Philosophy of War differs from the works of his predecessors. The appeal to the figure of Hobbesian Leviathan and its connection with the phenomenon of war seems to be successful. This runs through the entire work of Hude, which is evident from the table of contents.

The reader’s desire to understand the book’s place among other contemporary works on war is understandable. In this regard, Martin van Creveld’s The Transformation of War (2008) and Mary Kaldor’s New and Old Wars (2015) involuntarily come to mind. Without trying to compare them in order to determine the authors’ contribution to the problem of conceptualizing war as a socio-political phenomenon, it is the philosophical orientation of Hude’s work that should be noted. While the above-mentioned authors emphasize the transformations of war, its changing nature, the French author focuses rather on the invariant side of the phenomenon under study. It can be said without any stretch that implicitly the author constantly refers to the problem of freedom and justice in relation to war, the state, and the individual. When trying to define the methodological and conceptual style of the work, the notion of “political theology” in the context of philosophical understanding of the phenomenon of war is suggested. This is confirmed by the impressive list of authors to whom Hude.

In part, the style of the work is reminiscent of J.P. Sartre’s famous play “The Devil and the Lord God.” Of course, there are no direct analogies, but the problem of Good and Evil is clearly present in both works, with the difference that one work is a literary play with philosophical overtones, and the other is a philosophical essay in which the path to peace, freedom and truth is sought. Both there and there we see dialectical transitions of some phenomena into others. The high philosophical level of Hude’s work is evidenced by the absence of ideologization of the problem, but the desire for a philosophical vision of the contradiction between Leviathan and what contextually opposes it. In the epilogue, Prof. Hude draws attention to the relevance of the philosophy of war. The author writes that while he was teaching military ethics to French officer trainees, he emphasized the crucial role of nuclear deterrence in shaping their professional skills. When everything seemed to have been said about deterrence, the philosopher thought it appropriate to try to rethink it. According to Hude, it is the human heart, “so great and unhappy,” that could be the best counselor in this matter.

Undoubtedly, the book ha has a philosophical character. It is felt that the author attaches great importance to the problem of war and the possibility of its elimination. The book is not so large in volume, but deep in its penetration into the causes of wars. There is a strong ethical message to find ways to prevent a nuclear apocalypse threatening modern civilization.

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We were searching for a site in the northern Bekaa valley recently bombed by Israel. Hadi knew near which village it was located but, as we drove between large expanses of fertile, well-cultivated fields, it was plain his information was vague.

We pulled up at a garage to ask the way. Lebanon has not gone the way of Western economies in making consumers perform the very service for which they are paying, and in Lebanese service stations they still have attendants. A scruffily dressed old man sat on the front step of a dilapidated and very basic kiosk constructed of concrete blocks. He came over to the driver’s window.

First Hadi ordered fuel, and the old man filled the car, washed the windscreen and took payment. His hair was white and his beard short, but not from the obsessively neat trimming that is universal in Beirut. When he returned with change, Hadi asked him if he knew where to find the bomb site.

The old man replied with questions. I did not understand the Arabic, but from the body language there was a marked shift in the interaction between the two, from the man serving Hadi to the man interrogating Hadi. He lost his shuffle, notably straightened his back and stood taller.

They were talking through the driver’s window, and with a very definite movement the man moved forward and rested his forearm on the sill, intruding his head into the vehicle assertively. He looked at me with searching eyes, and looked at Niels sitting in the back seat with his camera equipment. His questioning of Hadi became terse.

I looked into his eyes. He had the distinct, piercing gaze that I used to note in the special forces officers I occasionally came across in my Foreign Office career. He then walked away from the car, took out his phone and made a call.

After a while he handed the phone to Hadi, who looked both serious and worried. Hadi listened, handed the phone back to the attendant, said goodbye and thank you, and reversed out of the garage. Hadi told us we were not permitted to go to the bomb site.

We had just encountered Hezbollah. The important thing to understand in this encounter is that it is not that the man was an undercover Hezbollah operative posing as a garage attendant. He was a garage attendant who was a Hezbollah operative.

Hezbollah is not an organisation comparable to the IRA, in which a relatively small number of members operated within the context of a community in which they enjoyed very large sympathy. Hezbollah operates in a community in which almost everybody is an activist and pretty well every adult is prepared to pick up a gun or an RPG and knows how to use it.

This is a key to understanding how Hezbollah became the only military force that has ever been able to defeat the IDF in pitched ground warfare. In this respect, Hezbollah’s crucial advantage compared to Hamas is that it has had practical access to weapons deliveries to build its arsenal, whereas Hamas has been greatly constricted by Israel’s control of goods entering Gaza.

Ending the weapons supply to Hezbollah has been a key US/Israeli strategic objective this last year, and they have in large part achieved it. I shall return to that.

On a personal level, this encounter with the garage attendant was fairly typical of my interactions with Hezbollah in my four months in Lebanon. They had detained me in a rather frightening manner on first encounter, and in general treated me with a suspicion which is understandable given my British diplomatic background.

I saw literally thousands of buildings in Lebanon that Israel had destroyed. The most haunting part of the entire experience was the frequent event of finding the clothing and toys of small children among the rubble: I still have bad dreams about it.

However this was the second of the two occasions when we were able to identify that Israel had struck an actual Hezbollah military installation, rather than a civilian building. Both times Hezbollah prevented me from going to see. In terms of maintaining the security of the military site, this strikes me as shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.

Having been denied access to that particular bomb site, we drove on into the village and met with some locals Hadi knew. In this small village there had been over 70 Israeli bombings, 8 of them since the ceasefire.

They took me to one large house which had been completely destroyed, a pile of rubble spread over a large area. Twelve members of the same family had been killed in this house, seven of them children. The head of the family had left in late afternoon to go to the butcher’s to buy dinner, when his home and family was destroyed behind him.

The explosion was so enormous that the body of one of the children was found in the neighbouring orchard of olive trees, clean across the road, about seventy yards away. Many of the olive trees had been shredded and debris from the house was strewn across the field and beyond.

The next house was not greatly damaged, but there a father and his two daughters were killed by the shock wave as they sat on their terrace drinking coffee.

There are so many important points to make about Hezbollah, but let me start with these three.

The first is that support for Hezbollah among their own Shia communities in Lebanon is extremely strong. They are far more than a military organisation. They are Lebanon’s largest legitimate political party.

At the 2022 election Hezbollah received 19.9% of the vote, and their close ally the Amal Movement received another 10.5%. The party with the second highest vote behind Hezbollah, the neo-fascist Lebanese Forces, received 11.6% of the vote.

[The Lebanese Forces political party should not be confused with the Lebanese Armed Forces, with which it has no connection. The Lebanese Armed Forces remain under effective US control and fired not a shot against the Israeli invasion and occupation. But like so much in Lebanon, the situation should not be simplified and the majority of the rank and file of the LAF are Shia Muslims sympathetic to Hezbollah, and a large majority of the rank and file of any denomination would be happy to fight the Israelis were they ever allowed to do so.]

Under Lebanon’s extraordinary constitution, Lebanese Forces with 11.6% received 19 seats in parliament while Hezbollah with 19.9% received 15 seats. Of which again more later.

But when it comes to political legitimacy, it is worth noting that the combined Hezbollah/Amal vote percentage is equal to the Labour Party percentage at the last General Election in the UK. There is no argument that Hezbollah are not a legitimate democratic political force.

The second point is that it is absolutely wrong to see Lebanon in purely sectarian terms. Hezbollah has supporters and allies across all religions in Lebanon and, in a country where politics is officially and constitutionally organised on religious lines (a “confessional” constitution), there are minor parties of all religions aligned with Hezbollah, of which several had ministers until appointment of the new Cabinet last month (of which again, more later).

Perhaps a quarter of those at the funeral for Nasrallah were not Shia Muslims.

The third point is that Hezbollah is much more than a political party with a military wing. In a country in which central government has all but collapsed (Lebanon has no income tax), Hezbollah provides hospitals, schools, banking, pensions and welfare benefits.

When Niels and I witnessed refugee returns to evacuated areas following the “ceasefire”, a very substantial percentage of the population were waving Hezbollah flags or Lebanese flags, with some waving both. Hezbollah is an integral part of Lebanese society, entirely born within the country out of the resistance to Israel’s 1982 occupation, and is in no sense alien or anti-Lebanese.

The elephant in the room is that in the UK and other Western states, this highly complex social and political movement is designated as a terrorist organisation in its entirety. Ironically, the justification for this given in Westminster in 2019 was that Hezbollah was destabilising the Middle East and prolonging the conflict in Syria – where the very Western powers that proscribed Hezbollah have just assisted another proscribed terrorist group into power.

The truth is that terrorist proscription by the NATO powers of organisations in the Middle East is simply a tool for taking whatever decisions are expedient at that moment to promote the interests of apartheid Israel. The “terrorist acts” of Hezbollah that led to proscription of the entire organisation in 2019 consisted of fighting ISIS, Al Qaeda and Al Nusra in Syria.

We all suffer from the temptation of assuming that others share our prejudices. I assume that like me, many in the West find it difficult to empathise with Hezbollah because of its Islamic philosophy and – I know this is petty – appearance.

Hassan Nasrallah was the most important and steadfast leader of resistance to the mass murderous Zionist project of the last forty years. He was also, by all accounts, a hugely charismatic figure to Arabic speakers. But his very appearance made it easy for him to be represented to Western audiences as an alienating, even evil, character, due to the state-promoted Islamophobia in the Western world which has been universally projected in the media this last quarter century.

But here honesty is required. I myself do not like to see political leaders with a religious function and am simply against theocratic rule. I am entirely in favour of freedom of religion, but utterly opposed to religion ruling any state.

There is an element of smoke and mirrors here. In the glorious mosaic of Lebanon, Hezbollah exist jumbled with those of other sects and religions, and in practice rub along very well.

Nasrallah spoke like all committed Islamists of his desire to seeing a united Muslim rule over Muslim lands, with the state under firmly religious leadership and Sharia law. But in practice Hezbollah are highly tolerant.

In those large areas of Lebanon where they both have physical military control and dominate the elected local authority, Hezbollah do not ban the sale of alcohol by the Christian minority or enforce hair covering, even on Muslims.

This is an area where my prejudices were disabused. I did not expect to find this.

All this caused me some difficulty in Lebanon. I was frequently asked whether I supported Hezbollah. As I was spending much of my time in those areas attacked by Israel – which largely are the Hezbollah areas – in general the question came from Hezbollah supporters.

I would always reply that I supported absolutely the right of occupied people to conduct armed resistance, and the duty to do everything possible to prevent genocide. Both are established principles of international law. But I did not support Hezbollah per se, and would not vote for it were I Lebanese, because it is an openly Islamist organisation and I am opposed to theocratic rule and religious legal codes.

Being in Lebanon did however allow me to overcome some of the gulf of my cultural understanding. The practice of calling those killed by Israel “martyrs” and frequently referring to them as such in conversation, is alien to a Western ear where the word has largely outdated religious connotations.

When you live amongst a community where everybody has friends or relatives who have been killed in the decades-long aggression of Israel, the revering of the fallen as martyrs, and their omnipresence in everyday thought, starts to make much more sense.

Similarly to Western eyes the widespread display of large images of the “martyrs” is peculiar. These are along every roadside and atop every ruin. There are always posters at the site where the person was killed, and frequently dozens of other posters of that individual at sites of importance to them.

I overcame my incomprehension of this practice by thinking of it in reference to my own culture, that these were posters of people put up to mark where they fought and died to defend their wee bit hill and glen. In those terms it made sense to me.

I am extremely conscious that religious faith has played a very positive role in both Palestine and South Lebanon in enabling people to endure the unendurable and to maintain Resistance against impossible odds. But it is not possible to ignore the fact that there remain substantial differences between my world view and an Islamist world view.

This has been brought into urgent focus by the attitude of many Sunni Muslims to the overthrow of Assad in Syria. In my world view, this has been a disaster for the Palestinians. It has seriously and perhaps permanently damaged the flow of arms and other resources to Hezbollah, the Palestinians’ most important ally. And it has enabled the Greater Israel project to expand substantially into Syria.

Try now to imagine that you are a Sunni Muslim scholar who believes that only by becoming Sunni Muslim can people obey God. You believe that the benefit to mankind of bringing Sunni Muslim rule to most of Syria outweighs the loss of part of Syria to Israel. You believe that Palestinian martyrs killed by Israel are going immediately to Heaven anyway, so in spiritual terms there is no real loss to the “martyrs”.

That really is the position of many of the leaders of the Saudi- and Gulf-sponsored Muslim religious community. Just like there are a great many shades of Christian, there are a great many shades of Islam and there are many Muslims, including Sunni Muslims, who would not share that viewpoint. But to a religious Islamist it makes perfect sense.

I cannot find it again because it was deep in replies on a thread, but I had a very interesting exchange with a Muslim intellectual on Twitter on precisely this topic. He accused me of “orientalism” for denigrating an Eastern spiritual viewpoint in favour of a Western secularist narrative, in seeing the installation of HTS as a reverse for Palestine. He pointed out that Hamas, a fellow Sunni Islamist movement, had welcomed the triumph of HTS.

The exchange was welcome for its honesty and intellectual acuity. I said I did not believe Edward Said would have welcomed the accompanying expansion of Israel into Syria or cutting off of supplies to Hezbollah. He called in a nephew of Said to bolster his view that my viewpoint is orientalist.

I have thought about this deeply; I do not think my viewpoint can fairly be described as orientalist. The truth is that all mainstream Western thought would have entirely concurred with the view that the expansion of rule by a particular religious sect was more important than associated temporal reverses that did not affect the faith of the people: but Western thought was exactly that 500 years ago.

I do not see my view as orientalist. I see it as anti-medievalist.

The fall of the Assad regime was deeply desired by western neoliberals and Zionists in order to replace it with a western democratic model, and they are desperately pretending that is what they have got in al-Jolani. As atrocities against Shia, Alaouites and Christians in Syria mount, the one thing that cannot be disputed is that al-Jolani is steadfastly Zionist, as he allows Israel daily to occupy more of Syria and destroy more of its infrastructure, without a single shot fired in response.

There is no doubt that the position of the Resistance to an expansionist apartheid Israeli colonial project has worsened considerably since my arrival in Lebanon in October. While Israel could not progress a ground offensive, the almost total absence of any air defences for Lebanon meant it could murder and destroy with impunity from the air.

Israel embarked on a campaign of devastation of purely civilian areas by aerial bombardment. Of that I am an eye witness. I can say from personal inspection that the claims that the tens of thousands of homes destroyed had any military use are a massive lie.

With no defence against a relentless bombing campaign, and with most of their leadership eliminated, Hezbollah were obliged to accede to a suicidally unbalanced “ceasefire agreement”. It is plain on the actual face of the agreement that only one side will cease fire.

All Lebanese groups are to cease fire without qualification whereas Israel is only to cease “offensive” operations. Israel of course claims all its attacks as defensive. This is absolute nonsense, but despite over 500 violations of the ceasefire agreement, killing hundreds of people, Israel has not been held accountable because Hezbollah acceded to a ceasefire guaranteed by a “Mechanism” which is chaired by a United States General.

I think my discussion on this point with the UN Spokesman in Lebanon was extremely important, especially where he explicitly states that the Ceasefire Agreement was drafted by the USA. This link takes you to the key point in the interview.

The members of the “Mechanism” overseeing the ceasefire are the United States, France, Israel (sic), and the Lebanese government of General Aoun, a total US puppet.

Furthermore while the Ceasefire Agreement provides for a zone south of the Litani river from which Hezbollah must remove its weapons, it also calls for Hezbollah disarmament throughout the whole of Lebanon, which the Israelis and Americans have used to justify numerous continuing Israeli strikes in the Bekaa Valley, the Syrian border and even Beirut.

Hezbollah are not a formal party to the Agreement but it was sanctioned by them before signature. Personally I find it difficult to imagine that Nasrallah would ever have accepted such a position.

At the same time, Hezbollah’s domestic political position has been also greatly weakened. They were obliged to accept effectively the US imposition of General Aoun as President, which they had been resisting for over two years. They also then found themselves accepting his nomination of the openly anti-Hezbollah Nawaf Salam as Prime Minister.

I referred earlier to Lebanon’s “confessional” constitutional arrangements, and said I would give more detail. The President must be a Christian, the Prime Minister a Sunni and the Speaker of Parliament a Shiite.

But it does not stop there. The governing agreement specifies the division of ministerial positions too. Not only between Sunni, Shia and Christian, but to include several other groupings, of which the best known is Druze and there are others, particularly various specific sects of Christianity.

Hezbollah has operated through the Amal movement in providing the Shiite ministers, but it is a key fact that it has always had important allies among Christian anti-Israeli occupation factions who have filled important ministerial posts.

The loss of Hezbollah power within Lebanon is to be found within the detail of all these ministries. In claiming to appoint a “technocratic”, apolitical administration, Aoun and Salam have in fact excluded most of Hezbollah’s support.

It is in practice almost impossible to find a Shiite in Lebanon who is not pro-Hezbollah, but Aoun and Salam have certainly done their best. More pertinently, they have almost totally excluded Hezbollah and anti-Zionist sympathisers from the ministerial representation of Sunni and the assorted minority and smaller Christian groups, while simultaneously boosting the de facto influence of the fascist Lebanese Forces sympathisers.

Hezbollah has not been this politically weak in the Lebanese institutions for 20 years, which is why the show of mass popular support at Nasrallah’s funeral was so important to them. However, given Lebanon’s electoral system with its deliberate Christian bias, piling up popular support is of little use to Hezbollah electorally. There are Christian MPs in parliament elected with under 500 votes, while Hezbollah could put on another 100,000 votes without significantly increasing their representation.

Crucially the “Ministerial statement” of the aims of the new government excluded resistance to Israel as an objective – a key change – and specified the state’s monopoly on carrying arms, a reference to the full disarmament of Hezbollah.

Finally, of course, Hezbollah’s archenemies, HTS, are now in power in Damascus. Hezbollah fought off repeated Al Qaeda/Al Nusra/ISIS attempts to invade Lebanon and also intervened against these forces within Syria. Al-Jolani coming to power represents a major disruption to Hezbollah’s supply lines from Iran.

The US and Israel are attempting to turn up this pressure by frequent aerial attacks on border crossings from Syria and on Hezbollah individuals within Lebanon. Recently they took the additional measure of banning pilgrimage flights to and from Iran, which greatly angered the Shia community and was aimed at cutting off a route for physical supplies of cash.

What is uncertain is what secret accommodations General Aoun may have reached with Hezbollah, over whether their physical disarmament throughout Lebanon under SCR 1701 and the Ceasefire Agreement is a genuine process or a show. Politically, Aoun and Salam have strongly planted their banner for real disarmament of Hezbollah.

What appears beyond dispute is that the Israelis receive a continued flow of intelligence from Lebanese sources on Hezbollah personnel movements and sites, and the US-sanctioned intense Israeli bombing campaign shows no sign of abating.

We can add to this sad fact that Israel was able to use the Ceasefire Agreement to occupy parts of Southern Lebanon which Hezbollah had successfully defended during the war, and that Israel has destroyed by demolition thousands of homes and other civilian buildings under cover of the ceasefire to add to those destroyed during the war.

Indeed Israel demolishes more buildings in Southern Lebanon every day still, and has now destroyed over 90,000 buildings in Lebanon in total. As I predicted, Israel is building 5 permanent military outposts in Southern Lebanon and has made plain it has no intention of leaving.

The US puppet government in Beirut, like the US puppet government in Damascus, plainly has no intention of any realistic action against de facto Israeli annexation of its land. While Hezbollah has signalled a reversion to past tactics of guerilla warfare, I have serious doubts about both its current capacity, both political and military.

Of the enduring heroism of the people of South Lebanon I have no doubt, and I also have no doubt that as Israel is maintaining an illegal occupation, their legal right of armed resistance in unimpeachable.

It is however foolish not to acknowledge that with Israel expanding into Lebanon and Syria, with US puppet regimes in Syria and Damascus, with genocide about to restart in Gaza and spreading into the West Bank, and with an apparently crazed level of open Zionist support from Trump that is in fact only more honest than the pro-Genocide positions of the large majority of Western governments, the current position looks bleak indeed.

The only grounds for hope is that I cannot imagine that the people of the region are going to tolerate Israeli collaborationist regimes in Damascus, Beirut and Ramallah much longer. Indeed with slight variations you might say the same of the entire Arab world.

I hope you will forgive this being a very personal post as I try to make sense of my experiences and assimilate much new knowledge into my view of the world.

I went to Lebanon knowing literally nobody in the country, and with an introduction to just one person who helped us through immigration, but whose assistance thereafter did not work out. I did so accompanied by Niels as cinematographer, despite my never really having worked in video before, and my not being very accomplished at it. On top of which we had no financial resources except for our crowdfunding, which was not going well.

I now realise just how deeply ignorant I was about Lebanon before arriving.

The truth is, I wanted to go to Gaza but could find no way to get in. I had then had applied to Israel for the required permission from COGAT to enter the West Bank, but had been refused. So Lebanon was the one place under Israeli aggression where I could actually hope to get in to document and report on Israeli atrocities.

This venture was also born out of a rather desperate feeling that I must try to do something. I had been involved in the genesis of the ICJ case and in international campaigning for Palestine, but felt so helpless watching murdered children in Gaza every day on social media, that I felt compelled to do more.

With war against the Israeli invaders raging in Lebanon, I admit I also had a compulsion to share at least some of the danger of those putting their lives at stake. In truth, I felt something of a fraud to be writing about it from home if I was not prepared to experience it.

Well, at times Lebanon really was dangerous for us, but I am extremely proud of what Niels and I achieved. The six mini-documentaries reached millions of people and I think genuinely informed the Western public. I think the interview with the UN was extremely revealing and important and wish I had been able to get a rather wider audience for it. On top of which we produced numerous shorter video pieces, written articles and interviews with alternative media outlets across the globe, as well as doing a lot of Arab mainstream media.

In the end we had to leave because it proved simply not possible to meet the substantial costs of the venture by individual subscriptions and donations, and I ran out of money. It was a bold experiment in being able to do the kind of real, on-the-ground journalism that legacy media has abandoned, but to continue would require more fundraising ability or organisational ability than I possess.

There is no doubt that we suffered – and still suffer – massive social media suppression, and this limitation of reach is what crippled fundraising efforts. Essentially we were asking the same people for donations again and again, which is both impractical and, I admit, I found personally difficult and undignified.

So I shall continue reporting from my base in Scotland, travelling the world as occasion demands. My knowledge has been hugely expanded by my time in Beirut. I will now largely revert to written rather than video format. The struggle for justice goes on, and my commitment to it remains.

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My reporting and advocacy work has no source of finance at all other than your contributions to keep us going. We get nothing from any state nor any billionaire.

Anybody is welcome to republish and reuse, including in translation.

Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of payment including a Patreon account and a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post. You can if you wish subscribe free to Substack and use the email notifications as a trigger to come for this blog and read the articles for free. I am determined to maintain free access for those who cannot afford a subscription.

Trump and his team have been busy dismantling – and exposing to public view – the mechanism to the all-encompassing narrative control machine which has been shown to be both authoritarian and industrial in its global scope.

The Musk investigations have begun to peer into the USAID complex. They reveal

The big picture however is not that USAID has been a sub-silo for CIA; that is not revelatory. What is revealing, however, is the evidence that USAID was so heavily involved in domestic influence operations. This latter aspect serves to highlight USAID’s relationship with the CIA and the fact that CIA, FBI, Dept. of Homeland Security and USAID were one big Intelligence Community structure, held together (in flimsy legal terms) by the Office of Director of National Intelligence (the role that Tulsi Gabbard will fill now she has been confirmed in post).

Trump’s insistence on Gabbard for the post reflects his absolute need for Intelligence ‘truth’; but it is also likely that the DNI will become the locus for unscrambling and revealing the shadow ‘Intelligence Control Machine’ that is twin to the narrative manipulation complex.

Likely more revelations will follow, as part to a carefully managed release of further exposés – adding to the atmosphere of a breathless hurtling towards a new era. And keeping the opposition off-balance.

The Spectator magazine correctly observes that the head-spinning acceleration towards a new era is not confined to America, Canada, Greenland and Panama: “There is a wind of change blowing through the West. It emanates from Washington DC”, Gavin Mortimer writes.

A number of EU leaders congregated last weekend at a ‘Patriots for Europe’ (PfE) summit in Madrid. Geert Wilders declared:

“We are living in an historic age, and my message to all the old leaders from Macron to Scholz, to your own Pedro Sánchez?: It’s time. It’s over now. They are history”.

Viktor Orbán said:

“The Trump tornado has changed the world in just a few weeks … Yesterday we were heretics, today we’re mainstream”.

Marine Le Pen claimed that the West is “facing a truly global turning point … Meanwhile, the European Union seems to be in a state of shock … [in the consensus Brussels view however], Trump isn’t an inspiring figure – but an antagonizing one”.

Nonetheless, in the U.S., the first CBS-YouGov snapshot poll; n) shows what public sentiment thinks of Trump: 69% see him as tough; 63% as energetic; 60 % as focussed, and 58% as effective. His overall job rating stands at 53%. Just how Trump would like his image to be, we imagine.

Trump’s ‘showman’ image and ‘shock psycho-therapy’ clearly works for domestic America. In the world beyond, it is another story. There they have only Trump’s ‘reported’ rhetoric by which to judge. They do not get to see the full theatrical ‘global leadership show’, so his conjuring is understood more literally. And the rest of the world is only too aware of America’s history of broken-words (and withdrawals from agreements).

Overseas, Trump sticks with this same strategy of presenting shock interventions, or rather, an image (Gaza, for example) of an aspirational outcome that is intended to be novel, and to evoke surprise and evenshock. The purpose seems to be to toss a psychological grenade into congealed and stultified political paradigms, hoping to find movement and intending perhaps, to trigger changed conversations.

There can be validity to such an approach, providing it does not just stick a wrench into complex geo-politics. And for Trump, this is a real danger: Advancing extreme and unrealistic notions that can simply confuse and undermine confidence that his outcome could be realistic.

The inescapable fact is that the three key foreign policy issues which Trump faces however, are not ‘conversations’ – they relate to existential wars; to death and destruction. And wars are not so susceptible to off-hand grenade tossing. Worse, ‘careless words’ fired from the hip, have real import and may produce unintended and distinctly adverse consequences.

The cease-fire between Israel and Hamas remains close to the brink of collapse, as [“the magician” [Netanyahu] continues working to sabotage it](https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-02-12/ty-article/.premium/netanyahu-works-to-derail-gaza-cease-fire-but-trumps-agenda-could-override-his/00000194-f9d8-df1c-ad94-fbfe38a00000 "https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-02-12/ty-article/.premium/netanyahu-works-to-derail-gaza-cease-fire-but-trumps-agenda-could-override-his/00000194-f9d8-df1c-ad94-fbfe38a00000"evertheless Hamas’ pressure in recent days worked, and the ceasefire (for now) continues.

Trump may have believed that by unilaterally raising the stakes (demanding publicly the release of “all” Israeli hostages this Saturday) – thereby collapsing a complex process down to just one single release – he would be able to bring more hostages home quicker. However, in so threatening, he risked the complete collapse of the deal, since the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails, and the withdrawal of the IDF from Gaza in Phase Two, form the absolute bedrock to Hamas’ continued participation in the negotiations.

Any resulting resumption of the Israeli destruction of Gaza would also constitute a black stain on Trump’s aspiration to end wars – for he would then ‘own’ the consequences to a renewal of war in the Middle East.

Netanyahu’s principal concern primordially lies with not completing the deal, but with the continued survival of his government. This was the meaning to his statement in reaction to Trump’s ‘threats’ (hell let loose) that Israel would halt negotiations on Phase Two of the Gaza deal, and in Netanyahu’s echoing of Trump’s demand that Hamas release “all” the hostages on Saturday – or else. The Israeli government however, duly has backtracked under pressure from Hamas – Israel, officials report, has conveyed the message to Hamas that the ceasefire will continue, should the three hostages be released this Saturday.

Whilst it is now obvious from the Trump Team’s discourse that the U.S. is intent to present a new face to the coming multipolar world – “with multi-great powers in different parts of the planet”, as Marco Rubio outlined in a recent interview – it is also true, however, that this change came about (was driven, in fact) by a seismic shift in how the world views America. Rubio effectively admits to this ‘truth’ when he adds that “the postwar global order is not just obsolete; it is now a weapon being used against us”.

Some members of the Trump Team, however, persist with threats (‘inflicting maximum pain’, ‘bombing to extinction’) that hark back to the old era of U.S. imperium. That is to say, some of Trump’s Team repeat Rubio’s rubric well enough, but without showing any indication that they have been affected or transformed by the new understanding. The ‘seismic shift’ is two-way.

The World is in a new era too. It has had enough of western unlateral impositions. It is this that triggered their shift. Their swivel of ‘the face that the U.S. presents to the world’ – the one outlined by Rubio. Understanding that both Hegemon and its vassals have transformed demands new approaches by all sides.

When Trump signed a Presidential Order for maximum pressure on Iran, the Supreme Leader simply said “No” to all talks with the U.S. Trump was just too unpredictable and untrustworthy, Khamenei said. Kellogg’s exaggerated claim that Iran ‘is scared’ and effectively defenceless, didn’t bring the expected response of talks. It brought defiance.

The West’s insensibility to what is going on in the world – and why the world is what it is – has been made possible because it was partially disguised through the ability of the U.S. – in the past era – to be able to impose itself on crises, and control the way that those problems were presented across the global narrative machine.

Trump’s Ukraine Envoy Kellogg said recently that Russia’s current sanctions ‘pain level’ is at about 3 out of 10, and that Trump has much more room to raise that ‘pain level’ by putting sanctions pressure on Russian oil and gas:

“You have to put economic pressure; you have to put diplomatic pressure, some type of military pressures and levers that you’re going to use underneath those to make sure [this goes] where we want it to go”.

The arrogance and misreading of the Russian position in Kellogg’s statement is so complete that it brought Russian Deputy FM Sergei Ryabkov to warn that Moscow-Washington relations are “teetering at the brink of complete rupture”; the ‘antagonistic content’ of Russian-U.S. relations has become ‘very critical’ today, Ryabkov cautioned:

“Washington’s attempts to give Moscow demands or to demonstrate the alleged doing of ‘a great favour’ in exchange for unacceptable U.S. demands are bound to end with failure in the dialogue with Russia”.

This ominous signal was stated by Ryabkov, despite Russia actively wanting a strategic, big-picture, written security deal with the U.S. – albeit one achieved on equal terms.

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism has cataloged the deep-seated Russian experience (and resentment) for the West’s history of duplicity. It runs deep, and begs a question whose answer is yet to be seen: ‘The elephant in the room’. Drafting a paper of understandings on Ukraine is one thing. But Russians remain sceptical as to whether it can achieve a process that is written, binding and trustworthy.

Behind this lies a second question: Russia can see Trump searching for leverage over Moscow. But time (what Yves Smith calls “military time”) runs to a different tempo to that of “political time”. Trump wants to end the conflict, AND be seen to have ended it. The point here is that Russia’s slower military time may end with Trump falling into what Steve Bannon warned could be a deadly trap: ‘Too long, and you (Trump) will end by owning it’ (as Nixon ended up ‘owning’ Vietnam).

Trump Team members may, at one level, ‘understand’ the new balance of power. Yet culturally and unconsciously, they adhere to the notion that the West (and Israel) remain exceptional, and that all other actors only change behaviour through pain and overwhelming leverage.

What did emerge from the transcript of Trump’s long call with Putin was that it touched on big issues and did not at all stay captive to the Ukraine issue.

Yves Smith puts the ‘elephant in the room’ issue this way:

“It took a full 17 years from Putin’s 2008 Munich Security Conference speech, where he called for a multipolar world order, for the U.S. to officially acknowledge, via Mark Rubio, that the U.S. unipolar period was unnatural and had ended”.

Let us hope it will not take as long for Russia to achieve a new European security architecture. As The Telegraph avers: “This is Putin and Trump’s world now”.

Video Link

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation by permission of author or representative)

As you read this, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, a Palestinian doctor from Gaza, is likely still in Israeli detention – and, according to mounting evidence, being tortured.

Despite the recent hostage swap with Hamas, multiple health professionals are still being held captive, with abundant reports of mistreatment, neglect and torture. One of these is Dr. Abu Safiya, arrested on December 27 and transferred to the notorious Sde Teyman prison camp (dubbed Israel’s version of Guantanamo Bay).

As each day passes, and with reports from released prisoners who attest Dr. Abu Safiya was being tortured while they were in the same prison, fears of his death grow. At least three Palestinian doctors abducted from Gaza have died in Israeli prisons since October 2023.

Dr. Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, was abducted after the Israeli army had repeatedly attacked the hospital over the course of over three months, ultimately invading it, burning and severely damaging essential buildings, and detaining dozens of medical staff. By now the chilling scene of Dr. Hussam walking toward the Israeli tank has gone viral, as people around the world demand his release.

According to Medical Aid for Palestinians,  a British charity working in Palestine, when the Israeli army invaded the hospital, _“an estimated 350 people, including patients, were forced to leave the hospital. Some patients arrived at the Indonesian Hospital, which was not able to provide any care after being forced out of service by the Israeli military on 24 December. The last remaining partially operational hospital in the North Gaza Governorate, al-Awda Hospital, is on the brink of collapse, struggling to function amid relentless attacks and resource shortages.”_

The non-profit Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reports that after abducting him, “the Israeli army subsequently transferred Dr. Abu Safiya to a field interrogation site in the Al-Fakhura area of Jabalia Refugee Camp: where he was stripped and whipped with a thick wire commonly used for street electrical wiring.”

The torture of Palestinians in Israeli prisons has been widely reported. Methods include electric shocks to genitals, stress positions, psychological torture, near-starvation, and rape resulting in serious internal damage, sometimes leading to death.

Following a request by the non-profit organization Physicians for Humans Rights-Israel (PHRI) for a legal visit to  Abu Safiya, the Israeli military claimed that it had “found no indication of the arrest or detention of the individual in question.” 

https://twitter.com/PHRIsrael/status/1875906201206300999

However, one report cites Palestinians released from Sde Teiman detention camp on December 29th 2024 saying Dr. Abu Safiya was being held at Sde Teiman. One of the released Palestinians said the doctor had given him the phone numbers of his sons, and requested that The Red Cross and media look into his situation.

On January 5, PHRI posted on X, “The Israeli military also continues to withhold information about Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya’s detention location, despite retracting their earlier claim that he isn’t being held in Israel.”

A more recently-released detainee, Hazem Alwan, said he had been abducted from Jabalia by the Israeli army and used as a human shield before ultimately being taken to an Israeli prison, where he says he spent two days with Dr. Abu Safiya.

“It was clear the brutal methods of torture used by the occupation on him. Dr. Hussam is in danger, nobody is looking after him. His mental state is completely shattered, completely…”

https://twitter.com/EvaKBartlett/status/1877970695558189344

In October 2024, when the Israeli army invaded Kamal Adwan Hospital, they killed Dr. Abu Safiya’s son, Ibrahim. But Dr. Abu Safiya continued to work to help injured Palestinians in the dire conditions of northern Gaza.

In November 2024, he was injured in an Israeli quad-copter drone attack, believed to be, “an assassination attempt by Israel due to his unwavering commitment to providing medical care to patients in northern Gaza.”

He continued his updates from the besieged hospital, on December 6, 2024, noting, “The situation inside and around the hospital is catastrophic. There are a large number of martyrs and wounded, including 4 martyrs from the hospital’s medical staff, and there are no surgeons left.”

He spoke of the series of Israeli airstrikes, just outside the hospital, and of being forced by Israeli soldiers to evacuate all patients, displaced persons and medical staff to the hospital yard and forcibly take them out to the checkpoint.

“In the morning, we were shocked to see hundreds of dead bodies and wounded people in the streets surrounding the hospital.”

On January 9, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, , an NGO based in the Gaza Strip, noted that, Dr. Abu Safiya’s detention was extended until February 13, 2025 by an Israeli Court” and that his legal counsel – which has been prevented from seeing him – will remain banned from visiting the doctor until January 22. 

Still another doctor, Dr. Akram Abu Ouda, head of Orthopedics at the Indonesian Hospital (also in northern Gaza) is missing. Ramy Abdu (of Euro-Med) noted, “He has been detained by Israel for over a year, and it is our duty to remind the world he is wrongfully imprisoned, suffering under torture, with his health deteriorating.”

Isr**ael tortured Palestinian doctors to death**

In September 2024, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to health, Tlaleng Mofokeng, stated, “Dr. Ziad Eldalou is the third doctor confirmed to have died while being detained by Israel since 7 October 2023.”

Eldalou was, the OHCHR [notes](https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/09/un-expert-shocked-death-another-palestinian-doctor-israeli-detention#:~:text=“Dr.,Hospital, located in Gaza City), was an internal medicine physician at Gaza’s Al Shifa Hospital, detained with other healthcare workers by invading Israeli soldiers on March 18, 2024, who died just three days later, while in detention.

In its report on Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, Euro-Med recalls the murders of Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh, head of the orthopedics department at Al-Shifa Hospital, who was “killed under torture at Ofer Detention Centre on April 19, 2024,” and Dr. Iyad Al-Rantisi, head of the obstetrics department at Kamal Adwan Hospital, who was “killed due to torture at an Israeli Shin Bet interrogation center in Ashkelon, one week after his detention in November 2023. Israeli authorities concealed his death for more than seven months.”

Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh was “likely raped to death,” wrote United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese.

These murders, and the imprisonment and torture of numerous Palestinian doctors from Gaza, and the killing of over 1,000 Palestinian health and medical professionals, are part of Israel’s systematic attack on every aspect of Gaza’s health care system, as well as on the Palestinians’ morale: seeing doctors who didn’t abandon their patients be imprisoned, tortured and killed is a crushing blow.

Both Mofokeng and Albanese at the beginning of January, 2025, issued an urgent warning: “We are horrified and concerned by reports from northern Gaza and especially the attack on the healthcare workers including the last remaining of 22 now destroyed hospitals: Kamal Adwan Hospital.”

https://twitter.com/drtlaleng/status/1872212664946250184

“We are gravely concerned with the fate of Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, yet another doctor to be harassed, kidnapped and arbitrarily detained by the occupation forces, in his case for defying evacuation orders to leave his patients and colleagues behind. This is part of a pattern by Israel to continuously bombard, destroy and fully annihilate the realisation of the right to health in Gaza.”

The lack of information on Dr. Abu Safiya’s well-being, the testimonies from released abductees that he was being tortured, and the prohibition on him accessing his lawyer have heightened fears that he could die in Israeli detention. 

This must not be allowed to happen. As Euro-Med stated, immediate international intervention is needed for his release. What’s even more tragic is that were he being held by one of the West’s proclaimed ‘adversaries’, rather than its allies, such intervention would not be long in coming.

*Warning: this post contains disturbing, violent, videos: the violence & terrorism of US/Turkish/Israeli-backed terrorists against Syrian civilians.

The following is on the hell of the "new Syria" ruled by al-Qaeda/ISIS terrorist Joolani, where his co-terrorist thugs run around hunting down minorities, torturing & killing them.

There are countless such videos, and worse, being shared on Telegram & social media, from Syrians who film these terrorists' attacking civilians (because media in Syria is now under control of HTS/al-Qaeda, you won't see reports there...nor from the influencers chirping about how great & free Syria is now, and hey, _ISIS are very helpful_ people...)

Following are just some examples of the lawlessness and pure terrorism that has been unleashed on Syria, on Syrian civilians. This is what the idiots who cheered the toppling of the former Syrian government have endorsed.

Alawites in Syria are facing genocide at the hands of jihadists targeting their sect. The lie about holding so-called war criminals accountable is clear to anyone who understands Arabic and isn’t a jihadist—videos speak for themselves. In this video, they openly say, "You are Alawite," as they torture their victims. The sole reason for this brutality is their faith. Do not stay silent. There is a sectarian massacre happening in Syria! [source]

January 4, 2025, 6:00 PM

Location: Western Talkalakh countryside, Kherbet Al-Ashari Incident: At 6:00 PM today, unarmed Alawites were brutally attacked, beaten, insulted, and cursed by HTS , with the participation of some local residents affiliated with them." [source]

“In the Homs countryside, young Alawites are being arrested and murdered without any valid reason.” [source]

“Al-Tall - Damascus Countryside

The Commission’s members continue their crimes. Yesterday, an operation took place to liquidate Samer Daas and another person on charges of belonging to the former regime. They were shot in the car and their bodies were burned near one of the ovens, without being subjected to the judiciary or the courts.

In the second video, the car is documented after it was burned and the bodies were removed from it.” [source]

**By the way notice (in 2nd video) the White Helmets cleaning up after terrorist murder a civilian, just like they did throughout their existence, hand in hand with the terrorists.

“HTS accounts shared videos of civilians being tortured in Homs countryside, accusing them of collaborating with the former regime or being Alawite or Christian, framing it as “revenge.”” [source]

“Horrific Crime in Latakia: HTS killed a man and dragged him publicly, with the crowd cheering. This brutal act highlights the absence of justice and accountability in Syria.” [source]

"The blessings of revolution and freedom in Syria..." [source]

“Homs - Dallal Nashiwati St., Wadi al-Dahab, January 2, 2025

Hundreds of unarmed civilians were beaten, humiliated, arrested, and tortured by HTS due to sectarian motives. Their fate remains unknown." [source]

“Jubb al-Jarrah, Homs: Mass arrest of Alawite villagers by what appears to be HTS terrorists.” [source]

[source]

“New Syria. Arrest on identity! You are Sunni?! Are you Alawite or Shiite?!

Execution! This is what the internationally wanted Al-Julani gangs do.” [source]

*Btw, @ 0:49, one man replies he is from Harem, the terrorist curses him and says everyone from Harem are pigs! He curses another man from Harem and repeats his cursing against people from Harem.

In Syria, in 2014, I met a man from Harem, right near the Turkish border, who spoke of (in 2013) being kidnapped by terrorists for 3 months and 5 days…and of them kidnapping others, murdering them, and sending their decapitated heads back to the families.

“They had tanks and guns, like an army, just like an army. They killed around 110 people, and kidnapped around 250… children, civilians, soldiers. Until now, we don’t know what’s happened to them.”

This list is not complete, sadly, it is a glimpse into what hell Syrians are enduring now, to the criminal silence of global media.

For continued updates, please follow Syr Doc on their Telegram

Meanwhile, in the ancient town of Maaloula, the only town in Syria where inhabitants still speak the ancient Christian language of Aramaic, has been under siege for two weeks, reducing its population from 1,000 to just 200. [source]

Maaloula was occupied by terrorists from September 2013 to May 2014. I visited exactly two months after it was liberated by Hezbollah, the Syrian army, local defenders and allies. The destruction the West’s terrorists meted out was horrific, devastating.

See one of my prior posts for my writings on Maaloula, based on my 2014 and 2016 visits there. There are many photos and testimonies to highlight the destruction and terrorism of this cherished historic town.

In 2018, I went back there during the Festival of the Cross, during which time I attended a moving mass and saw the enthusiastic celebrations afterwards.

From my overview of this:

I asked Abdo Haddad to summarize the importance of the Festival of the Cross. He said (video):

“Tonight we are celebrating the finding of the cross that happened 1700 years ago. This celebration is represented by putting fire on top of the mountains, from Jerusalem to Constantinople, to tell the people in Constantinople that the cross was found.

Maaloula is the only place in the world that is still celebrating this custom.

The only time that this custom stopped is when the so-called rebels and other “revolution” people in Syria invaded Maaloula, and instead of putting fire on top of the mountain, they put our houses on fire. But since we are sons and daughters of life, we kept on celebrating it since Maaloula was liberated by the Syrian army in 2014.

So we celebrate life now, and we celebrate the cross.

We were born here 3,000 years ago and we’ll keep existing until the end of time.”

At the time, I mistakenly thought the worst was behind the town and that their history would be preserved. Now, I fear for the worst.

Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin (photo from 2018).

US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin have officially begun negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. Whatever the territorial solutions, they will not resolve the entire dispute. It will probably persist beyond peace.

Three problems overlap:

1) NATO’s expansion to the East and the Brzeziński Doctrine

When the East Germans themselves tore down the Berlin Wall (November 9, 1989), the West, taken by surprise, negotiated the end of the two Germanys. Throughout 1990 the question arose whether German reunification would mean that East Germany, by joining West Germany, would enter NATO or not.

When the Atlantic Alliance Treaty was signed in 1949, it did not protect certain territories of certain signatories. For example, the French territories in the Pacific (Réunion, Mayotte, Wallis and Futuna, Polynesia and New Caledonia) were not covered. It would therefore have been possible that, in a unified Germany, NATO would not have been allowed to deploy in East Germany.

This issue is very important for the Central and Eastern European states that were attacked by Germany during the Second World War. In the eyes of their populations, seeing sophisticated weapons being installed on their borders was worrying. Even more so for Russia, whose immense borders (6,600 kilometres) are indefensible.

At the Malta Summit (2-3 December 1989) between the US and Russian Presidents, George Bush (the father) and Mikhail Gorbachev, the US argued that it had not intervened to bring down the Berlin Wall and that it had no intention of intervening against the USSR at that time [1].

West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher stated that "the changes in Eastern Europe and the process of German unification must not lead to an ’attack on Soviet security interests’". Consequently, NATO should rule out an ’expansion of its territory towards the east, i.e. a rapprochement with the Soviet borders’"

The three occupying powers of Germany, the United States, France and the United Kingdom, therefore made repeated commitments not to expand NATO towards the East. The Moscow Treaty (12 September 1990) assumed that a reunified Germany would not claim territory from Poland (Oder-Neisse line), and that no NATO bases would be present in East Germany [2].

At a joint press conference in 1995 at the White House, President Boris Yeltsin described the meeting they had just had as "disastrous", provoking laughter from President Bill Clinton. It is indeed better to laugh than to cry.

However, the Russians were informed that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke was touring the capitals to prepare the NATO membership of former Warsaw Pact states. President Boris Yeltsin therefore harangued his counterpart, Bill Clinton, at the Budapest summit (5 December 1994) of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). He declared: "Our attitude towards NATO’s enlargement plans, and in particular the possibility of infrastructure progress to the East, remains and will remain invariably negative. Arguments such as: enlargement is not directed against any state and is a step towards the creation of a unified Europe, do not stand up to criticism. This is a decision whose consequences will determine the European configuration for years to come. It may lead to a slide towards the deterioration of trust between Russia and the Western countries. […] NATO was created at the time of the Cold War. Today, not without difficulty, it is seeking its place in the new Europe. It is important that this approach does not create two zones of demarcation, but on the contrary, that it consolidates European unity. This objective, for us, is contradictory to NATO’s expansion plans. Why sow the seeds of distrust? After all, we are no longer enemies; we are all partners now. The year 1995 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Half a century later, we are increasingly aware of the true significance of the Great Victory and the need for historic reconciliation in Europe. There must no longer be adversaries, winners and losers. For the first time in its history, our continent has a real chance of finding unity. To miss it is to forget the lessons of the past and to call into question the future itself. Bill Clinton replied: "NATO will not automatically exclude any nation from membership. […] At the same time, no external country will be allowed to veto expansion.” [3].

At this summit, three memoranda were signed, including one with independent Ukraine. In exchange for its denuclearization, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States committed to refraining from resorting to the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.

However, during the Yugoslav wars, Germany intervened, as a member of NATO. It trained Kosovar fighters on the basis of the Incirlik Alliance (Türkiye), then deployed its men there.

However, at the NATO summit in Madrid (8 and 9 July 1997), the heads of state and government of the Alliance announced that they were preparing for the accession of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. In addition, they are also considering that of Slovenia and Romania.

Aware that it cannot prevent sovereign states from entering into alliances, but worried about the consequences for its own security of what is being prepared, Russia intervened in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) at the Istanbul summit (18 and 19 November 1999). It had a declaration adopted establishing the principle of free membership of any sovereign state in the alliance of its choice and that of not taking measures for its security to the detriment of that of its neighbours.

However, in 2014, the United States organised a colour revolution in Ukraine, overthrowing the democratically elected president (who wanted to keep his country halfway between the United States and Russia) and installing a neo-Nazi regime that was publicly aggressive against Russia.

In 2004, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia joined NATO. In 2009, it was Albania and Croatia. In 2017, Montenegro. In 2020, North Macedonia. In 2023, Finland, and in 2024, Sweden. All promises have been broken.

To understand how we got to this point, we also need to know what the United States was thinking.

In 1997, former security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, the Polish-American Zbigniew Brzeziński, published The Grand Chessboard. In it, he discusses “geopolitics” in the original sense, that is, not the influence of geographical data on international politics, but a plan for world domination.

According to him, the United States can remain the world’s leading power by allying itself with the Europeans and isolating Russia. Now retired, this democrat offers the Straussians a strategy to keep Russia in check, without however proving them right. Indeed, he supports cooperation with the European Union, while the Straussians wish on the contrary to slow its development (Wolfowitz doctrine). In any case, Brzeziński would become an advisor to President Barack Obama.

Monument in Lviv to the glory of the criminal against Humanity Stepan Bandera

2) Nazification of Ukraine

At the beginning of the special operation of the Russian army in Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin declared that his first goal was to denazify the country. The West then pretended to ignore the problem. They accused Russia of exaggerating some marginal facts although they had been observed on a large scale for a decade.

This is because the two rival US geopoliticians, Paul Wolfowitz and Zbigniew Brzeziński, had formed an alliance with the “integral nationalists” (i.e. with the disciples of the philosopher Dmytro Dontsov and the militia leader Stepan Bandera) [4], at a conference organized by the latter in Washington in 2000. It was on this alliance that the Department of Defense had bet, in 2001, when it outsourced its research into biological warfare to Ukraine, under the authority of Antony Fauci, then Health Advisor to Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. It was also on this alliance that the State Department had bet, in 2014, with the Euromaidan color revolution.

The two Ukrainian Jewish presidents, Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelensky, allowed memorials to be built throughout their country paying tribute to Nazi collaborators, particularly in Galicia. They allowed Dmytro Dontsov’s ideology to become the historical reference. For example, today, the Ukrainian population attributes the great famine of 1932-1933, which caused between 2.5 and 5 million deaths, to an imaginary desire of Russia to exterminate the Ukrainians; a founding myth that does not stand up to historical analysis [5], in fact, this famine affected many other regions of the Soviet Union. Moreover, it is on the basis of this lie that Kyiv managed to make its population believe that the Russian army wanted to invade Ukraine. Today, several dozen countries, including France [6] and Germany [7], have adopted, by overwhelming majorities, laws or resolutions to validate this propaganda.

Nazification is more complex than we think: with NATO’s involvement in this proxy war, the Centuria Order, that is to say the secret society of Ukrainian integral nationalists, has penetrated the Alliance forces. In France, it is already present in the Gendarmerie (which, by the way, has never made public its report on the Boutcha massacre).

The contemporary West wrongly perceives the Nazis as criminals who primarily massacred Jews. This is absolutely false. Their main enemies were the Slavs. During the Second World War, the Nazis murdered many people, first by shooting and then, from 1942, in camps. The Slavic civilian victims of Nazi racial ideology were more numerous than the Jewish victims (about 6 million if we add the people killed by shooting and those killed in the camps). Moreover, since some victims were both Slavic and Jewish, they are included in both assessments. After the massacres of 1940 and 1941, approximately 18 million people from all backgrounds were interned in concentration camps, of whom 11 million in total were murdered (1,100,000 in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp alone) [8]..

The Soviet Union, which was torn apart during the Bolshevik revolution, did not reunite until 1941 when Joseph Stalin formed an alliance with the Orthodox Church and put an end to the massacres and political internments (the "gulags") to fight against the Nazi invasion. The victory against racial ideology founded today’s Russia. The Russian people see themselves as the slayers of racism.

3) Russia’s rejection from Europe

The third bone of contention between the West and Russia arose not before, but during the Ukrainian war. The West adopted various measures against what symbolized Russia. Of course, unilateral coercive measures (abusively called “sanctions”) were taken at the government level, but discriminatory measures were also taken at the citizen level. Many restaurants were banned for Russians in the United States or Russian shows were canceled in Europe.

Symbolically, we accepted the idea that Russia is not European, but Asian (which it also partially is). We rethought the Cold War dichotomy, opposing the free world (capitalist and believer) to the totalitarian specter (socialist and atheist), into an opposition between Western values (individualist) and those of Asia (communitarian).

Behind this shift, racial ideologies are resurfacing. I noted three years ago that the New York Times’ 1619 Project and President Joe Biden’s woke rhetoric were in reality, perhaps unwittingly, a reverse reformulation of racism [9]. I note that today President Donald Trump shares the same analysis as me and has systematically revoked all of his predecessor’s woke innovations. But the damage is done: last month, Westerners reacted to the appearance of the Chinese DeepSeek by denying that Asians could have invented, and not copied, such software. Some government agencies have even banned it from their employees in what is nothing other than a denunciation of the “yellow peril.”

Should Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), the author of "War and Peace", be censored as Ukraine does, where his books are burned because he was Russian?

4) Conclusion

Current negotiations focus on what is directly palpable by public opinion: borders. However, the most important thing is elsewhere. To live together, we need not to threaten the security of others and to recognize them as our equals. This is much more difficult and does not only involve our governments.

From a Russian point of view, the intellectual origin of the three problems examined above lies in the Anglo-Saxon refusal of international law [10]. Indeed, during the Second World War, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill agreed at the Atlantic Summit that after their common victory, they would impose their law on the rest of the world. It was only under pressure from the USSR and France that they accepted the UN statutes, but they continued to flout them, forcing Russia to boycott the organization when they refused the People’s Republic of China the right to sit on it. The glaring example of Western duplicity is given by the State of Israel, which tramples on a hundred resolutions of the Security Council, the General Assembly and opinions of the International Court of Justice. This is why, on December 17, 2021, when the war in Ukraine was looming, Moscow proposed to Washington [11] to prevent it by signing a bilateral treaty providing guarantees for peace [12]. The idea of this text was, nothing more, nothing less, that the United States renounce the "rules-based world" and fall in line with international law. This right, imagined by the Russians and the French just before the First World War, consists solely of keeping one’s word in the eyes of public opinion.

Israel isn't eradicating 'the terrorists'. It's turning Gaza into a wasteland, a hellscape, where doctors no longer exist, aid workers are a memory, and compassion a liability

[First published by Middle East Eye]

If there was an image from 2024 that captured the year’s news, it was this one: Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, in a white lab coat, picking his way through the wreckage of the Kamal Adwan hospital he ran – the last surviving major medical facility in northern Gaza – towards two Israeli tanks, their gun barrels aimed at him.

The past year has been dominated by the death and destruction Israel has wrought throughout the tiny enclave.

It has been marked by the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians – the deaths we know about – and the maiming of at least 100,000 more; the starvation of the entire population; the levelling of the urban and agricultural landscape; and the systematic erasure of Gaza’s hospitals and health sector, including the killing, mass arrest and torture of Palestinian medics.

2024 was dominated, too, by a growing consensus from international legal and human rights authorities that all this amounts to genocide.

Here was an image, from the very final days of the year, that said it all. It showed a lone doctor – one who had risked his life to keep his hospital operational as it was besieged by Israeli forces, battered by Israeli shells and drones, and had its staff picked off by Israeli snipers – bravely heading towards his, and his people’s, exterminators.

He had paid a personal price, just as much as his patients and staff. In October, his 15-year-old son, Ibrahim, was executed during an Israeli raid on the hospital. A month later, he himself was wounded by shrapnel from an Israeli strike on the building.

By 27 December, the hospital could no longer withstand Israel’s savage onslaught. When a loudspeaker demanded that Abu Safiya come towards the tanks, he set off grimly across the rubble.

It was the moment that the Kamal Adwan hospital’s fight to protect life was brought to a sudden end; when the genocidal Israeli war machine notched an inevitable victory against the last outpost of humanity in northern Gaza.

Held in torture camp

The image was also the last known one of Abu Safiya, taken minutes before his so-called “arrest” – his abduction – by Israeli soldiers, and his disappearance into Israel’s system of torture camps.

After days of claiming it had no knowledge of his whereabouts, the Israeli military finally confirmed it was holding him incommunicado. The admission appears to have come only because of a petition to the Israeli courts from a local medical rights group.

According to a growing number of reports, Abu Safiya is now in the most notorious of Israel’s torture facilities, Sde Teiman, where soldiers were caught on video last year raping a Palestinian inmate with a baton until his insides ruptured.

The hope is that Abu Safiya will not suffer the fate of his colleague, Dr Adnan al-Bursh, the former head of orthopaedics at Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital. After four months of abuse at Ofer prison, Bursh was dumped by guards in its yard, naked from the waist down, bleeding and unable to stand. He died a short time later.

Reports by human rights agencies and the United Nations – as well as testimonies from whistleblowing camp guards – tell of the systematic beating, starvation, sexual abuse and rape of Palestinian prisoners.

Israel has accused Abu Safiya, Gaza’s best-known paediatrician, of being a Hamas “terrorist”. It has abducted a further 240 people from Kamal Adwan Hospital who it claims are “terror suspects” – presumably chiefly among them patients and medical staff – and they are being held in similarly horrifying conditions.

Psychotic logic

According to Israel’s psychotic logic, anyone who works for Gaza’s Hamas government – meaning anyone like Abu Safiya employed in one of the enclave’s major institutions, such as a hospital – counts as a terrorist.

By extension, any hospital – because it falls under the Hamas government’s authority – can be treated as a “Hamas terrorist stronghold”, as Israel has termed Kamal Adwan. Ergo, all medical facilities should be destroyed, all doctors “arrested” and tortured, and all patients forcibly “evacuated”.

In Kamal Adwan’s case, the wounded, the seriously ill and those about to give birth were allowed 15 minutes to unhook their drips, get out of their sickbeds and make their way into the wrecked courtyard. Then the Israeli army set the hospital on fire.

An “evacuation” of this kind means only one thing: patients being left to die of their wounds, illnesses or malnourishment – and increasingly from the cold, too.

A growing number of babies have been dying of hypothermia as their families huddle through winter nights under canvas, without blankets or proper clothing, in the tent encampments that have become home to most of Gaza’s population.

The photograph of Abu Safiya’s surrender made it only too clear who is David and who Goliath; who is the humanitarian and who the terrorist.

Most of all, it demonstrated how the West’s political and media classes have spent the past 15 months promoting a grand lie about Gaza. They have not been seeking to end the bloodshed, but to cover it up – to excuse it.

This might explain why the most defining image of 2024 was barely visible in establishment media outlets, let alone on their front pages, as Abu Safiya was abducted by Israel and his hospital destroyed.

Most foreign editors and picture editors – dependent on salaries from their billionaire owners – appeared to prefer to pass on the news photograph of the year. Social media, however, did not. Ordinary users spread it far and wide. They understood what it showed and what it meant.

'Consciousness warfare'

Late last month, Israel announced that this coming year, it would be spending an extra $150m on what it has termed “consciousness warfare”.

That is, Israel is upping its budget 20-fold to improve its media disinformation campaigns – to whitewash its image as the slaughter in Gaza continues.

Israel has killed many of Gaza’s journalists and barred foreign correspondents from its undeclared “kill zones”. But in an era of live-streaming on phones, concealing a genocide is proving far harder than Israel imagined. It is not enough, it seems, to have the western establishment peddling your disinformation.

Israel is particularly concerned about young people – such as students on campuses – who do not consume news filtered through the BBC or CNN, and thus have a much clearer grasp of what is happening. Their senses and sensibilities have not been dulled by years of western corporate propaganda.

They are much less likely, for example, to fall for the Israeli fake news – recycled and given credence by western media – that has justified over the past 15 months the complete destruction of Gaza’s hospitals, or the kind of disinformation that entertains the idea that an esteemed physician like Abu Safiya is secretly a terrorist.

The genesis of Israel’s campaign to erase Gaza’s health sector started within days of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack. Less than two weeks later, Israel fired a powerful missile at the courtyard of Gaza City’s al-Ahli hospital; dozens of Palestinian families who had fled there, seeking protection from Israel’s military rampage, were caught in the explosion.

But the media laundered this opening shot in the war on Gaza’s hospitals by credulously echoing Israel’s preposterous assertion that a misfired Palestinian rocket, rather than an Israeli missile, had done the damage.

The attack on al-Ahli set out Israel’s blueprint for genocide, one it has followed closely over the past 15 months. It made clear to Palestinians that nowhere would be safe from Israel’s onslaught, not even established sites of sanctuary such as hospitals, mosques and churches. There would be no place to escape its wrath.

And it made clear to western leaders and media that Israel was ready to breach every known precept of international humanitarian law. There was no atrocity, no war crime it would not commit, including destroying Gaza’s medical system. Israel’s patrons were expected to give their full backing to the war, however far Israel went.

And that is exactly what they did.

Red herrings

Looking back, the brief furore over whether Israel was responsible for the attack on al-Ahli seems nightmarishly quaint now. With the lack of any pushback, Israel intensified its “consciousness warfare”, creating a bubble of fake news to connect Gaza’s hospitals to Hamas terrorism.

Within weeks, Israel was claiming to have discovered a Hamas terrorist base under Gaza’s al-Rantisi children’s hospital, with weapons stashes and a guard duty rota in Arabic for the Israeli hostages – except the rota was quickly shown to be nothing more than an innocuous calendar.

Israel’s biggest target was al-Shifa hospital, Gaza’s most important medical facility. Israel released a CGI-generated video showing it sitting atop an underground “Hamas command and control centre”. The claims were once again credulously aired by western media, though the Hamas bunker was never found.

These lies served their purpose, nonetheless. Even as Israel wrecked Gaza’s hospitals and denied entry to medical aid, leaving Gaza without any way to treat the men, women and children maimed by Israel’s relentless bombing, the media turned its focus away from these all-too-obvious crimes against humanity.

Instead, as Israel hoped, journalists expended their energies chasing after red herrings, trying to verify each individual lie.

The media’s working premise appeared to be that, should the faintest hint of complicity between Hamas and a single hospital, or doctor, in Gaza be confirmed, Israel’s campaign to erase all medical facilities in the enclave and deny healthcare to 2.3 million people caught in its killing fields would be justified.

Mass graves

Notably, none of the stream of senior western doctors who volunteered in Gaza reported upon their return home having seen any sign of the armed “Hamas terrorists” who were supposedly crawling all over the hospitals in which they had worked.

These western doctors were rarely interviewed by the media as a counterpoint to Israel’s endless disinformation, which created the rationalisation for Israel to lay waste to Gaza’s hospitals and medical centres with utter abandon.

Soldiers invaded the hospitals one after another, destroying the wards, operating rooms and intensive care units.

Each forcible “evacuation” created its own trail of misery. Premature babies were left to starve or freeze to death inside their incubators. The critically ill were forced from their beds. Ambulances that tried to collect them were blown up. And each time, Gaza’s medical staff were rounded up, stripped of their clothing and disappeared.

Western journalists showed little interest, too, in the discovery of unidentified corpses in makeshift mass graves on hospital grounds after Israeli soldiers had finished their assaults – bodies that had been decapitated or mutilated, or showed indications of having been buried alive.

For these reasons and more, the UN Human Rights Office concluded last week that Gaza’s hospitals, “the one sanctuary where Palestinians should have felt safe, in fact, became a death trap”.

Similarly, a World Health Organisation official, Rik Pepperkorn, observed: "The health sector is being systematically dismantled." The WHO is seeking urgent, life-saving treatment abroad for more than 12,000 people, he added. "At the current rate, it would take five to 10 years to evacuate all these critically ill patients."

In another statement last week, two UN experts warned that Abu Safiya’s arbitrary detention was “part of a pattern by Israel to continuously bombard, destroy and fully annihilate the realization of the right to health in Gaza”.

They noted that, in addition to the mass round-ups, at least 1,057 Palestinian health and medical professionals had been killed so far.

Trajectory to genocide

The truth is that Israel’s new, better-funded disinformation campaign will prove no more effective than its existing ones.

Avi Cohen-Scali, the head of Israel’s ministry for combating antisemitism, said a decade of such programmes against what Israel calls its “delegitimisation” – that is, the exposure of its apartheid and now genocidal character – had yielded “nearly zero results”.

He told Israeli media: “This activity has failed by every conceivable parameter.”

The reality of a genocide will be impossible to airbrush away. Over the coming months, more Israeli atrocities – new and historic – will come to light. More legal and human rights organisations and scholars will conclude that Israel has committed a genocide in Gaza.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) will issue more arrest warrants for war crimes, following those against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant.

At the weekend, an Israeli soldier on holiday in Brazil was forced to flee the country after he was warned he was under investigation.

But there is more. Leading rights organisations and scholars will have to reformulate their historical understanding of both Israel and its founding ideology of Zionism. They will need to acknowledge that this genocide did not come out of nowhere.

The trajectory began when Zionism was established as a settler-colonial movement more than a century ago. It continued when Israel was created through a mass ethnic cleansing operation against the native Palestinian population in 1948. And it gathered speed in 1967 as Israel formalised its apartheid system, engineering separate rights for Jews and Palestinians, and forcing Palestinians into ever-shrinking ghettoes.

Unchecked, Israel’s ultimate destination was always towards genocide. It is an ideological compulsion embedded in Israel’s notions of ethnic supremacy and chosen-ness.

Mad Max vision

Even after the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant in November, Israeli leaders continued their explicit incitement to genocide.

Last week, eight legislators from the Israeli parliament’s foreign affairs and defence committee wrote to the new defence minister, Israel Katz, demanding that he order the destruction of the last sources of water, food and energy in northern Gaza.

It was precisely Israel’s current starvation of Gaza’s population that led to Netanyahu and Gallant being charged with crimes against humanity.

Meanwhile, the destruction of Kamal Adwan Hospital clears the ground for a new policy in northern Gaza: what Israel is chillingly calling “Chernobylisation”.

Named after the Soviet nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, the policy views the Palestinian presence in Gaza as a comparable threat to the 1986 radioactive leak. The military’s goal is to erase all Palestinian infrastructure above and below ground, echoing Soviet emergency efforts to contain Chernobyl’s radiation.

Where does this lead?

Louise Wateridge, the senior emergency officer for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, noted at the weekend that Israel was accelerating Gaza’s complete social collapse by driving Unrwa out of the enclave.

Israeli legislation coming into effect at the end of this month will bar the refugee agency from operating in Gaza to provide families with what little food and shelter is available, given Israel’s aid blockade.

It will also, in the absence of hospitals, deprive Gaza of its last meaningful health services. Wateridge noted: “Unrwa does something like 17,000 health consultations a day in the Gaza Strip. It’s impossible for another agency to replace that.”

The danger she underscores is that Gaza will become completely lawless. Families will face not only Israel’s bombs, assassination drones and starvation programme, but also the dystopian rule of criminal gangs.

This is exactly what Israel intends for Gaza. As a report in Haaretz last week revealed, following the “Chernobylisation” of northern Gaza, Israel is mulling plans to let two big Palestinian crime families rule the south. These are likely to be the same gangs that are looting the few aid trucks that Israel allows into Gaza, assisting Israel in depriving the population of food and water.

Israel’s vision for Gaza’s future is a post-apocalyptic cross between the Mad Max film franchise and Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road.

Cover story

The trajectory to genocide might have been hardwired into Zionism’s coding, but it has been the task of western leaders, media outlets, academia, think tanks and even human rights organisations to pretend otherwise.

They have spent decades holding the line on what should long ago have been a thoroughly discredited western narrative: that Israel was only ever a sanctuary for Jews from antisemitism, that it is “the only democracy in the Middle East”, that its occupation is largely benign and its illegal settlements a necessary security measure, and that the Israeli army is “the most moral in the world”.

Those fictions are unravelling faster than Israel’s disinformation can ever hope to stitch them back together.

So why do more of it? Because Israel’s “consciousness warfare” is not primarily directed at you and me. It is directed at western leaders. This is not to persuade them of anything; British Prime Minister Keir Starmer knows full well there is a genocide going on in Gaza, as does Donald Trump, the incoming US president.

They simply do not care – not least because you cannot reach the summit of a western political system unless you are prepared to think sociopathically about the world. There is a western military industrial complex to placate, and western corporations to service that expect to maintain their dominion over global resource extraction.

This is why in the dying days of his presidency, with no votes to win, Joe Biden has dropped the pretence of “tirelessly working for a ceasefire” or demanding that Israel send in at least 350 aid trucks a day. Instead, he has announced as a parting gift to Israel a further $8bn in arms, including munitions for fighter jets and attack helicopters.

No, the goal of Israel’s disinformation campaign is to provide a cover story. It is to muddy the waters just enough to obscure western leaders’ support for genocide; to give them an excuse for continuing to send weapons, and to help them evade a war crimes trial at The Hague.

The goal is “plausible deniability”: to be able to claim that what was obvious was not too obvious, that what was known to ordinary onlookers was unclear to those directly participating.

Western leaders know that Israel has dragged off Abu Safiya – one of Gaza’s great healers – to one of its torture camps, where he is almost certainly being starved, intermittently beaten, humiliated and terrorised, like the other inmates.

Israel’s work now is to weaken and destroy his physical and mental resilience, just as it has dismantled Gaza’s hospitals.

Israel’s goal is not to eradicate “the terrorists”. It is to turn Gaza into a wasteland, a hellscape, in which no one good, no one who cares, no one trying to cling on to their humanity can survive. A place where doctors do not exist, aid workers are a memory, and compassion is a liability; a place where tanks and criminal gangs rule.

The job of the western political and media class is to make all this appear as routine and normal as possible. Their job is to deaden us inside, to hollow out our ability to care or resist, to leave us numb. We must prove them wrong – for Dr Abu Safiya’s sake, and for our own.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

The Genocide of the Palestinian people began 76 years ago. What may be drawing to a close is merely a particularly intense phase in the Genocide.

Gaza is destroyed. 92% of its housing has gone. Its water treatment and sanitation, electricity generation, food processing, farming, and fishing are all now incapable of sustaining much life. Its hospitals, health centres, universities, colleges, and schools are all now destroyed, as are its municipal buildings, waste disposal, road surfaces, drainage channels, theatres, cultural centres, cinemas, cafés.

What is left is 1.8 million cold and starving people, malnourished, soaked, ill-clothed, living in tents and defecating in trenches. Tens of thousands will die in these conditions however fast aid comes – and you can be 100% certain Israeli obstructionism will prevent it from coming fast.

But even if they can be physically saved, the culture and fabric of society are damaged beyond repair. The psychological damage is immense. The institutions of normality that might permit recovery are non-existent.

Nobody really knows the true number killed so far in the genocide. The Palestinian health authorities, run by the elected Hamas representatives, have been scrupulous in giving out numbers only of those officially certified dead following the recovery and identification of their bodies.

Given the almost total destruction of Gaza’s buildings and the unavailability of rescue equipment and the lack of ceasefire for body recovery, I suspect the 46,707 official death toll as of last night (and the Israelis already killed over 80 again today) may prove to be way short of the truth, which could be double or more from unaccounted bodies.

That is without the Lancet study suggesting that 50% again may have died subsequently from wounds. A similar number to the dead are permanently maimed.

The worst effects may not in the long term even be in Palestine at all. The Western world has, in the support of its rulers for Israel as it commits Genocide, abandoned any pretence to wish to maintain the system of international law that had been extended and developed post World War 2. Untold horrors of war may be unleashed as a result in the next decade.

In both the USA and the UK, governments ignored their own senior officials and legal advisers to break the human rights constraints which those nations had imposed upon their foreign policy, particularly with regard to the supply of weapons.

In Poland, France and several other NATO countries, the governments have openly repudiated their duty to enforce warrants of the International Criminal Court.

In the UK, Germany, USA, France and throughout the Western world, there has been a massive rolling back of long-cherished and hard-won rights of freedom of expression and assembly, explicitly to prevent criticism of Israel and support for Palestine.

There has been concerted social media suppression to the same end on all major online platforms, and a seizure of Tik Tok in the USA avowedly because of its failure to repress speech critical of Israel.

The unanimity of mainstream media support for Israel, and the tiny or no space for any dissenting view, has become so established a part of the political landscape it can go unnoticed. But it needs to be highlighted.

In his closing address, the one useful thing Biden said was the correct observation about the USA becoming an oligarchy. The whole world is becoming intensely oligarchic, with an astronomical expansion of the wealth gap between rulers and ruled these past twenty years.

The impunity of Israel, and the decline of international law, is a direct consequence of this. There is a particular truth that encompasses almost every Western country and, interestingly, unites both the Arab and the Western worlds.

That truth is this. The wealthy oligarchic elites who control media and politics are extremely pro-Israel. The people are not.

The gap between the support for Israel among the super wealthy and powerful, and the view of the majority of normal people, really deserves serious study to explain it. Not the least interesting is the fact that not even the almost 100% mainstream media pro-Israeli propaganda has been enough to convince the peoples of the world to support the Genocide, outwith the special cases of Germany and the US religious Zionists.

So, what happens now? Well, I was in Beirut when it was carpet bombed in the hours immediately before the ceasefire here took effect, and I expect Israel to massively bomb Gaza’s tent cities in the next three days.

I have also seen Israel break the ceasefire in Lebanon every single day, and I expect them to do that in Gaza too.

Israel daily breaches the ‘ceasefire’ in Lebanon both inside and outside the demilitarised zone. Three days ago they killed 5 civilians. pic.twitter.com/MiAQpZ4AZI

— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) January 15, 2025

So long as the USA and Israel designate Hamas as a terrorist organisation, they will claim the right to bomb and kill at any time as a “counter-terrorism operation”, irrespective of any ceasefire agreement. That is their formal position, just as it is their formal position with regard to Hezbollah and the ceasefire agreement with Lebanon.

The Israelis did not start killing Palestinians on 8 October 2023 and they will not stop killing them now.

I expect the ceasefire agreement to go ahead as projected, with occasional Israeli “anti-terrorist” attacks continuing in Gaza. The prisoner exchanges will happen. The Israelis will continually delay and renege on the provisions on aid access and on withdrawal of troops. Palestinians in Gaza will die in large numbers of disease, hunger and poor sanitation.

Just as the ceasefire in Lebanon led to Israel immediately invading Southern Syria, Israel will now increase its activity in the West Bank, suppressing resistance together with its proxy “Palestinian Authority” forces and continually seizing land from Palestinians.

I do not doubt that it is true that the Gaza ceasefire is due to Trump telling Netanyahu to stop. As I continually said, Biden’s attempts to restrain Netanyahu were a complete subterfuge and Biden was absolutely committed to the Genocide.

Trump is very difficult to read. When he was elected in 2016, I believed he was less hawkish in foreign policy than Hillary Clinton. Had Clinton been elected, for example, I am sure that she would have immediately laid waste to Syria, which would have been destroyed like Libya – eventually achieved by Biden.

Trump II had seemed an altogether more aggressive persona than Trump I, particularly as regards the Middle East. Yet Trump II has told Netanyahu to stop the Genocide – confirming incidentally that Biden could have done so had he wished.

Biden wanted Genocide.

The myth of Western support for international law and human rights died in Gaza, along with the myth of Western support for the “two-state solution”. There never was a viable two-state solution and it was those states who were loudest in pretending to support it, who vehemently refused to recognise the Palestinian state.

The “two-state solution” was only ever a cover for Zionism. With Gaza now utterly smashed and its population ruined, and the West Bank almost totally expropriated, the pretence of a “two-state solution” has to be finally killed off.

Israel has lost any moral authority for its continued existence. It has proven itself to be a genocidal entity driven by ethno-supremacism. (A people who believe themselves to be a superior or divinely favoured race are ethno-supremacists, regardless of whether their claim of ethnic homogeneity is founded or not.)

Within 48 hours of the Hamas breakout on 7 October I wrote my first piece about it. Often in retrospect reactions to a major incident are too influenced by the emotion of the moment, but actually I am as proud of this as of anything I ever wrote.

Asymmetric warfare tends to be vile. Oppressed and colonised peoples don’t have the luxury of lining up soldiers in neatly pressed uniforms and polished boots, to face off against the opposing army in an equality of arms.

A colonised and oppressed people tends, given the chance, to mirror the atrocities perpetrated on them by their oppressor.

This of course feeds in, always, to the propaganda of the Imperialist. A paroxysm of resistance by the oppressed always ends up portrayed by the Imperialist as evidence of the bestiality of the colonised people and in itself justifying the “civilising mission” of the coloniser.

Which is not to say I relish violence, quite the opposite. I am in fact pleased that Israeli prisoners as well as Palestinian prisoners will be returned as part of a ceasefire deal.

While the Palestinian resistance are fully entitled to take as many IDF members and reserves prisoner as they can, I cannot approve of the illegal practice of taking children and other complete non-combatants prisoner – and yes I know the Israelis do it on a much larger scale.

Behaving better than the Israelis should be a permanent guide in life.

Unfortunately, it is not the case that colonial settler, racist states cannot triumph. The white settlers in the USA, Canada and Australia did manage to permanently subjugate and almost extinguish the local populations. I have spoken to some wonderful Arab intellectuals these last few weeks who all tend to take the view that Israel’s ultimate defeat is inevitable because the colonial settler state will never be accepted by the Arab populations. I wish I were so confident.

Where I agree with them totally is that the abolition of the terrorist state of Israel must be the goal, not an accommodation with it.

Israel’s pariah status is now assured for a generation, it is deeply split internally and it is dependent on a parent state, the USA, which is losing its relative power and hegemony. Yet for now Israel is expanding. It occupies significantly more territory than it did two years ago and in Syria and Lebanon it has seized control of vital regional water sources. Israel currently has full military control of over 30% of Syria’s fresh water.

Trump probably supports Israeli annexation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza and more. But that does not of necessity mean he supports either the expulsion of their populations or an apartheid state. He may see such heavy state interventions as an interference in the freedom of business to make money, and even undesirable per se.

It is impossible to be certain about what Trump sees as the end goal. From this first indication, it is fair to say his influence is, to this point, more benign than feared.

It is all a house of cards. As of today, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon all have leadership which is, broadly speaking, pro-USA and pro-Israel. Will that still be the case in a decade? Because it is the fact on which Israel depends for its existence.

The other point on which Israel relies is the support of Western governments. But throughout the Western world, the electoral and party systems which maintain the neo-liberal consensus and give voters no real choice at elections across issues ranging from economic policy to support for Israel, are fracturing.

This requires an article in itself, but in the UK, France, Germany and countless other states there is a tectonic shift happening with voters demanding a shift away from the tiny window of orthodox policy.

To date, the populist right has been quickest to take advantage of this shift, and of course benefited from mainstream media cooperation. But the fluidity indicates an impending seismic shift in western domestic political alignment.

That coincides with the disillusionment of Eastern Europe with the EU and NATO and the consequent desperate attempts of the NATO powers to subvert democracy in Georgia, Romania and Moldova.

At some stage China will take a more active interest in the Middle East. Once the Ukraine war has concluded, Russia will undoubtedly turn more attention to the Mediterranean again.

The situation is dynamic. I would not know whether to be more surprised if Trump initiated US attacks on Iran or initiated rebooted nuclear talks and the lifting of sanctions. I suspect the latter surprise to be the more likely.

Today there is at least a moment of hope that the horrible deaths and mutilations in Gaza may be slowed. Let us take that for a moment of respite, and feel the sun upon our faces. Then we continue the fight against evil.

———————–

To be blunt, our two months in Lebanon before Christmas made a slight financial loss. I was delighted with the output of four mini-documentaries and numerous short video reports and articles, some of which individually had millions of viewers. But to date the model of reader-sponsored real overseas journalism is not proven nor stable.

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In his 1959 classic book, The Sociological Imagination, the American sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote that ordinary people are often reduced to moral stasis and feel trapped and overwhelmed by the glut of information that is available to them. They have great difficulty in an age of fact to make sense of the connections between their personal lives and society, to see the links between biography and history, self and world. They can’t assimilate all the information and need a “new” way of thinking that he called “the sociological imagination” that would allow them to connect history and biography, to see the connections between society and its structures. He wrote:

What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summation of what is going on in the world and what may be happening within themselves.

That was long ago and is obviously much truer today when the Internet and digital media, not the slow reading of books and even paper newspapers and magazines, are the norm, with words scurrying past glazed eyes on cell phones and computers like constantly changing marquees announcing that the clowns have arrived.

In an era of soundbites and paragraphs that have been reduced to one sentence in a long campaign of dumbing down the public, it may seem counterintuitive to heed Mills’ advice and offer summations. However, as one who has written long articles on many issues, I think it is a good practice to do so once in a while, not just to distill conclusions one has arrived at for oneself, but also to provoke readers into thinking about conclusions that they may question but may feel compelled to reconsider for themselves. For I have reached them assiduously, not lightly, honestly, not guilefully.

With that in mind, what follows are some summations.

• With the musical chair exchanges between Democratic and Republican administrations, now from Biden to Trump and previously the reverse, we are simply seeing an exchange of methods of elite control from repressive tolerance (tolerant in the cultural realm with “wokeness” under the Democrats) to tolerant (“promotion” of free speech, no censorship) repression under the Republicans. Under conditions of advanced technological global capitalism and oligarchy, only the methods of control change, not the reality of repression. Free elections of masters.

• The exertion of power and control always revolves around methods of manipulating people’s fear of death, whether that is through authority, propaganda, or coercion. It takes many forms – war, weapons, money, police, disease (Covid-19), etc. Threats explicit and implicit.

• Contrary to much reporting that Israel is the tail wagging the U.S. dog, it is the U.S. dog that wags Israel as its client state, doing what is best for both – control of the Middle East. Control of the Middle East’s oil supplies and travel routes has been key to American foreign policy for a very long time.

• There is no deep state unless one understands that the U.S. government, which is an obvious and open warfare state, is the “deep” state in all its shallowness and serves the interests of those who own the country.

• The CIA’s public assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, sixty-one years ago to the day as I write, is the paradigmatic example of how the power elite uses its ultimate weapon of coercion. Death in the public square for everybody to see together with the spreading of fear with all its real and symbolic repercussions.

• The mass acceptance and use of the cell phone by the public has exponentially facilitated the national security state’s surveillance and mind control. People now carry unfreedom in their pockets as “the land of the free” has become a portable cage with solitude and privacy banished. What evil lurks in the hearts of men? the 1930s popular radio show’s “Shadow” once asked – now the phone knows and it is shadowing those who carry it.

• The power of art and the artist to counter and refuse the prevailing power structure has been radically compromised as alienation has been swallowed by technology and dissent neutralized as both have become normalized. The rebel has become the robot, giving what the system’s programmers want – one dimensional happy talk.

• Silence has been banished as ears have been stuffed with what Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 called seashells (earbuds). Perpetual noise and screen-watching and being watched have replaced thought in a technopoly. Musing as you walk and dawdle is an antique practice now. Smile for the camera.

• The U.S. wars against Russia, China, and the Palestinians have been waged for more than a century. Like the slaughtered native peoples, American black slaves, the Vietnamese, Iraqis, and so many others around the world, these people have been considered less than human and in need of elimination. There is no end in sight for any of this to change. It is the American Way.

• The pathology of technophilia is connected to the quantification of everything and the transhumanist goal of making people into dead and inert things like the consumer products that are constantly dangled before their eyes as the next best secret to happiness. I have asked myself if this is true and the answer that came back is that it is a moot point with the margin of error being +/- 11.000461 %.

• Then there is the fundamental matter of consciousness in a materialist society. When people are conditioned into a collective mental habit of seeing the outside world as a collection of things, all outsides and no insides, contrary to seeing images with interiors, as Owen Barfield has written in History, Guilt and Habit, they are worshiping idols and feel imprisoned but don’t know why. This is our spiritual crisis today. What William Blake called the mind-forg’d manacles. Those manacles have primarily been imposed on people through a vast tapestry of lies and propaganda directed by the oligarchs through their mass media mouthpieces. Jim Garrison, the former District Attorney of New Orleans who brought the only trial in JFK’s assassination, called it “the doll’s house” in which most Americans live and “into which America gradually has been converted, [where] a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory.” There are signs that some people are awakening to this fact, with the emphasis on “some.” It will take the use of all the sociological and spiritual imagination we can muster to get most people of all political persuasions to recognize the trap they are in. Barfield writes: “It sounds as if it ought to be easy enough, where the prison in question is not made of steel and concrete, but only a mental habit. But it is not. Remember it is not just my mental habit, or your mental habit. It is our mental habit. . . . [a] collective mental habit, which is a very different matter.”

But I am getting wordy and drifting from Mills’ advice to create lucid summations, some of which I have listed above.

So let me just quote a few true words from Pete Seeger:

We’re — waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on

Bad advice.

There is no better time than now to read E. H. Carr\u2019s The twenty years\u2019 crisis 1919 39. It could have been written last month. The similarities of the situation that Carr describes (the first edition of the book was published in 1939) and today are striking. Not solely in the most recent events including the disregard of international law by the signatories of the Rome Statute which would not have surprised Carr since he believed that such a law cannot exist, or can exist only when it is supported by force, but more importantly and more ominously in the structural characteristics of the international system then and today: those that have led to the World War II and that seem to lead us to a new war.

Both systems were badly structured at their very inception (Versailles and the end of the Cold War). Both contained within themselves the seeds of destruction. The Versailles system began as a utopian and seemingly principled endeavor. The greatest responsibility for that is rightly laid by Carr and many others (including memorably by Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace) on the doors of Woodrow Wilson. When we say \u201Cresponsibility\u201D it seems strange to blame somebody for the utopian or seemingly idealistic ways in which the international system should be organized. But at the very first step the application of the principles that were brought from Princeton and Washington D.C. to the world stumbled. It exposed hypocrisy more strongly than had the principles been less idealistic. The right of self-determination was doled out inconsistently to some nations while denied to others. As Harold Nicolson writes in his beautiful The Peace-Making 1919:

The most ardent British advocate of the principle of self-determination found himself, sooner or later in a false position. However fervid might be our indignation regarding Italian claims to Dalmatia and the Dodecanese it could be cooled by a reference, not to Cyprus only, but to Ireland, Egypt and India. We had accepted a system for others which when it came to practice, we should refuse to apply to ourselves. (p. 193).

Colonies, protectorates, trusteeships (with open-ended period of such trusteeship) were given to the lesser nations. Racial equality was rejected even as a rather benign formal principle despite the lofty rhetoric about equality of men. That rejection, bad in itself, was accompanied by the most cynical transfer of German-controlled possessions in China to Japan, thus leading to the May 4 movement and the beginning of modern Chinese nationalism.

The Carthaginian peace of Versailles created two types of nations according to Carr. The satisfied Anglo-Saxon nations and to some extent France (although France not feeling herself strong enough always had trepidation about its status) and the trio of large unsatisfied states of Germany, Italy, and Japan. The latter two were Western allies unhappy with the division of the spoils at Versailles. Germany tried in the twenties to change or invalidate some of the covenants of the Treaty by extracting herself from the obligation to pay the rather exorbitant sums in the form of reparations (which it indeed never paid in full) and surreptitiously initiated military cooperation with Soviet Russia thus trying to avoid the limits on the type and size of its army. But overall it led to very little gain and dissatisfaction increased. When Germany began to overturn, with gusto, the letter and the spirit of Versailles, it was done through military force and intimidation. \u201COur enemies are little worms\u201D, opined Hitler. The irony, as Carr notes, is that the more Germany was able to overturn the rules imposed on her, and the more those like Carr who disagreed with inequity of the Treaty in the first place thought that this would satisfy her, the more angry Germany was getting. Thus German (by then Nazi) anger increased in proportion to its success in overturning Versailles. What could have been given peacefully and would have been met with gratitude was now given under the threat of the gun and received with contempt.

In retelling of this well-known story although Carr never assigns the blame for the collapse of the system directly, he implicitly splits the responsibility between the two sides. He blames the satisfied nations for not being willing to share some of the gains obtained from having won the war. Carr often compares international with domestic relations. For the domestic relations to be stable the rich have to give up little bit more than in proportion to what they have. In other words, if a political system is to be stable\u2014whether domestically or internationally\u2014the strong have to be willing to make sacrifices, to accept \u201Csome give or take\u201D as Carr calls it. To create a sustainable international system, the satisfied powers have to share the spoils with other powers or impose relatively equitable (\u2018balance of power\u201D) peace so that others have a stake in the system. If they do not, the unsatisfied powers will have no stake. This is exactly, Carr writes, what happened between 1919 and 1939.

Any international order must rest on some hegemony of power. But this hegemony, like the supremacy of a ruling class within the state, is in itself a challenge to those who not share it; and it must, if it is to survive, contain an element or give or take, of self sacrifice on the part of those who have, which will render it tolerable to the other members of the world community. (p 168)

Even the peacefulness of the satisfied power is explained by Carr by analogy with domestic politics. The rich promote domestic peace because the maintenance of the current order is beneficial to them. \u201CJust as the ruling class in a community prays for domestic peace, which guarantees its own security and predominance, and denounces class-war, which might threaten them, so international peace becomes a special vested interest or predominant Powers\u201D (p. 82).

Calls for peace are not explained by varying morality of powers or classes but by the difference in their positions. Calling for peace is not per se something that may be considered morally superior. Should have American revolutionaries in 1776 followed the calls for peace?, Carr asks. Moralizing, sometimes made by the powers that want to maintain peace, is devoid of ethical superiority. It is simply based on the interest of such powers to maintain the status quo.

As this brief description makes clear similarities with today\u2019s situation are many. Whereas the conclusion of the Cold War did not have an official ending similar to Versailles, its main contours reproduced Versailles. The satisfied powers, the winners of the Cold War, were the US, UK, France and foremost Germany that regained unity. On the other hand, the \u201CNew World Order\u201D produced one large power (Russia) that was from the very beginning unsatisfied with the outcome, especially since Russia, like Germany in 1918, did not at all feel defeated. From the very beginning when under Yeltsin the country was half-destroyed and internationally behaved more or less like a US vassal, Russia was resentful of one aspect of the victors\u2019 policies: the extension of their military alliance to Russia\u2019s borders. As in the collapse of the system of Versailles we see the same dynamic here. Russia objected to the expansion throughout even when it reluctantly reconciled itself with NATO membership of its former East European satellites and the inclusion of Baltic republics but could not, or didn\u2019t want to, accept more.

The complaints, like in the German case, lasted for a very long time. They started under Yeltsin, continued during the first and the second Putin administrations and produced nothing. The by-now famous Putin\u2019s 2007 Munich speech brought no results. The message was very similar to the message that was absorbed by Germany in the 1930s: the structural features of the system cannot be changed peacefully and they cannot be changed by entreaties or complaints of the dissatisfied power. The dissatisfied power took more or less the same course of action that Germany took in the 1930s: the inequities, in its view, could not be set aright by conversations, discussions and negotiations but only through the sheer exercise of military power. The war with Ukraine was a way to overturn some of the implicit covenants of the end of the Cold War in the same way that for Germany the Anschluss and the occupation and the division of Czechoslovakia were the ways in which Germany took it upon herself to implement the principles of self-determination proclaimed by Wilson but denied to Germany.

Despite such similarities one would hope that the outcome would not be the same. It is nevertheless interesting to reflect on the fact that the book was written in 1938 and published in September 1939. Let us hope that we are not at the same historic point now as Carr was then.

There’s an old saying, “Fool around and find out.” On November 19, Ukraine fired six US-made missiles at a target located on Russian soil. On November 20, Ukraine fired up to a dozen British-made Storm Shadow cruise missiles against a target on Russian soil. On November 21, Russia fired a new intermediate-range missile against a target of Ukrainian soil.

Ukraine and its American and British allies fooled around.

And now they have found out: if you attack Mother Russia, you will pay a heavy price.

In the early morning hours of November 21, Russia launched a missile which struck the Yuzmash factory in the Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk. Hours after this missile, which was fired from the Russian missile test range in Kapustin Yar, struck its target, Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared on Russian television, where he announced that the missile fired by Russia, which both the media and western intelligence had classified as an experimental modification of the RS-26 missile, which had been mothballed by Russia in 2017, was, in fact, a completely new weapon known as the “Oreshnik,” which in Russian means “hazelnut.” Putin noted that the missile was still in its testing phase, and that the combat launch against Ukraine was part of the test, which was, in his words, “successful.”

Russian President Putin announces the launching of the Oreshnik missile in a live television address

Putin declared that the missile, which flew to its target at more than ten times the speed of sound, was invincible. “Modern air defense systems that exist in the world, and anti-missile defenses created by the Americans in Europe, can’t intercept such missiles,” Putin said.

Putin said the Oreshnik was developed in response to the planned deployment by the United States of the Dark Eagle hypersonic missile, itself an intermediate-range missile. The Oreshnik was designed to “mirror” US and NATO capabilities.

The next day, November 22, Putin met with the Commander-in-Chief of the Strategic Missile Forces, Sergey Karakayev, where it was announced that the Oreshnik missile would immediately enter serial production. According to General Karakayev, the Oreshnik, when deployed, could strike any target in Europe without fear of being intercepted. According to Karakayev, the Oreshnik missile system expanded the combat capabilities of the Russian Strategic Missile Forces to destroy various types of targets in accordance with their assigned tasks, both in non-nuclear and nuclear warheads. The high operational readiness of the system, Karakayev said, allows for retargeting and destroying any designated target in the shortest possible time.

Scott will discuss this article and answer audience questions on Ep. 215 of _Ask The Inspector

“Missiles will speak for themselves”

The circumstances which led Russia to fire, what can only be described as a strategic weapons system against Ukraine, unfolded over the course of the past three months. On September 6, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin traveled to Ramstein, Germany, where he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who pressed upon Lloyd the importance of the US granting Ukraine permission to use the US-made Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) missile on targets located inside the pre-2014 borders of Russia (these weapons had been previously used by Ukraine against territory claimed by Russia, but which is considered under dispute—Crimea, Kherson, Zaporizhia, Donetsk, and Lugansk). Zelensky also made the case for US concurrence regarding similar permissions to be granted regarding the British-made Storm Shadow cruise missile.

Ukraine was in possession of these weapons and had made use of them against the Russian territories in dispute. Other than garnering a few headlines, these weapons had virtually zero discernable impact on the battlefield, where Russian forces were prevailing in battle against stubborn Ukrainian defenders.

Secretary Austin listened while Zelensky made his case for the greenlight to use ATACMS and Storm Shadow against Russian targets. “We need to have this long-range capability, not only on the divided territory of Ukraine but also on Russian territory so that Russia is motivated to seek peace,” Zelensky argued, adding that, “We need to make Russian cities and even Russian soldiers think about what they need: peace or Putin.”

Austin rejected the Ukrainian President’s request, noting that no single military weapon would be decisive in the ongoing fighting between Ukraine and Russia, emphasizing that the use of US and British weapons to attack targets inside Russia would only increase the chances for escalating the conflict, bringing a nuclear-armed Russia into direct combat against NATO forces.

On September 11, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, accompanied by British Foreign Secretary David Lammy, traveled to the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, where Zelensky once again pressured both men regarding permission to use ATACMS and Storm Shadow on targets inside Russia. Both men demurred, leaving the matter for a meeting scheduled between US President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Kier Starmer, on Friday, September 13.

The next day, September 12, Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke to the press in Saint Petersburg, Russia, where he addressed the question of the potential use by Ukraine of US- and British-made weapons. “This will mean that NATO countries – the United States and European countries – are at war with Russia,” Putin said. “And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.”

President Biden took heed of the Russian President’s words, and despite being pressured by Prime Minister Starmer to greenlight the use of ATACMS and Storm Shadow by Ukraine, opted to continue the US policy of prohibiting such actions.

And there things stood, until November 18, when President Biden, responding to reports that North Korea had dispatched thousands of troops to Russia to join in the fighting against Ukrainian forces, reversed course, allowing US-provided intelligence to be converted into data used to guide both the ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles to their targets. These targets had been provided by Zelensky to the US back in September, when the Ukrainian President visited Biden at the White House. Zelensky had made striking these targets with ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles a key part of his so-called “victory plan.”

After the approval had been given by the US, Zelensky spoke to the press. “Today, there is a lot of talk in the media about us receiving a permit for respective actions,” he said. “Hits are not made with words. Such things don’t need announcements. Missiles will speak for themselves.”

The next day, November 19, Ukraine fired six ATACMS against targets near the Russian city of Bryansk. The day after—November 20—Ukraine fired Storm Shadow missiles against a Russian command post in the Kursk province of Russia.

The Ukrainian missiles had spoken.

The Russian response

Shortly after the Storm Shadow attacks on Kursk occurred, Ukrainian social media accounts began reporting that Ukrainian intelligence had determined that the Russians were preparing an RS-26 Rubezh missile for launch against Ukrain[

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Trident D5 missile launch from an Ohio-class submarine
e. These reports suggested that the intelligence came from US-provided warnings, including imagery, as well as intercepted radio communications from the Kapustin Yar missile test facility, located east of the Russian city of Astrakhan.

Test launch of an RS-26 missile

The RS-26 was a missile that, depending on its payload configuration, could either be classified as an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM, meaning it could reach ranges of over 5,500 kilometers) or an intermediate-range missile (IRBM, meaning it could fly between 1,000 and 3,000 kilometers). Given that the missile was developed and tested from 2012-2016, this meant the RS-26 would either be declared as an ICBM and be counted as part of the New Start Treaty, or as an IRBM, and as such be prohibited by the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. The INF Treaty had been in force since July 1988 and had successfully mandated the elimination of an entire category of nuclear-armed weapons deemed to be among the most destabilizing in the world.

In 2017, the Russian government decided to halt the further development of the RS-26 given the complexities brought on by the competing arms control restrictions.

In 2019, then-President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the INF Treaty. The US immediately began testing intermediate-range cruise missiles and announced its intention to develop a new family of hypersonic intermediate range missiles known as Dark Eagle.

Despite this provocation, the Russian government announced a unilateral moratorium of producing and deploying IRBMs, declaring that this moratorium would remain in place until the US or NATO deployed an IRBM on European soil.

In September 2023, the US deployed a new containerized missile launch system capable of firing the Tomahawk cruise missile to Denmark as part of a NATO training exercise. The US withdrew the launcher from Denmark upon conclusion of the training.

In late June 2024, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would resume production of intermediate-range missiles, citing the US deployment of intermediate-range missiles to Denmark. “We need to start production of these strike systems and then, based on the actual situation, make decisions about where — if necessary to ensure our safety — to place them,” Putin said.

At that time the western media speculated about the mothballed RS-26 being brought back into production.

When Ukraine announced that it had detected an RS-26 being prepared for launch on November 20, many observers (including me) accepted this possibility, given the June announcement by President Putin and the associated speculation. As such, when on the night on November 21, the Ukrainians announced that an RS-26 missile had been launched from Kapustin Yar against a missile production facility in the city of Dnipropetrovsk, these reports were taken at face value.

As it turned out, we were all wrong.

Ukrainian intelligence, after examining missile debris from the attack, seems to support this assertion. Whereas the RS-26 was a derivative of the SS-27M ICBM, making use of its first and second stages, the Orezhnik, according to the Ukrainians, made use of the first and second stages of the new “Kedr” (Cedar) ICBM, which is in the early stages of development. Moreover, the weapons delivery system appears to be taken from the newly developed Yars-M, which uses independent post-boost vehicles, or IPBVs, known in Russian as blok individualnogo razvedeniya (BIR), instead of traditional multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles, or MIRVs.

In the classic weapons configuration for a modern Russian missile, the final stage of the missile, also known as the post-boost vehicle (PBV or bus), contains all the MIRVs. Once the missile exits the earth’s atmosphere, the PBV detaches from the missile body, and then independently maneuvers, releasing each warhead at the required point for it to reach its intended target. Since the MIRVs are all attached to the same PBV, the warheads are released over targets that are on a relatively linear path, limiting the area that can be targeted.

A missile using an IPBV configuration, however, can release each reentry vehicle at the same time, allowing each warhead to follow an independent trajectory to its target. This allows for greater flexibility and accuracy.

The Oreshnik was designed to carry between four and six IPBVs. The one used against Dnipropetrovsk was a six IPBV-capable system. Each war head in turn contained six separate submunitions, consisting of metal slugs forged from exotic alloys that enabled them to maintain their form during the extreme heat generated by hypersonic re-entry speeds. These slugs are not explosive; rather they use the combined effects of the kinetic impact at high speed and the extreme heat absorbed by the exotic alloy to destroy their intended target on impact.

Oreshnik missile impact on the Dnipropetrovsk military industrial complex

The military industrial target struck by the Oreshnik was hit by six independent warheads, each containing six submunitions. In all, the Dnipropetrovsk facility was struck be 36 separate munitions, inflicting devastating damage, including to underground production facilities used by Ukraine and its NATO allies to produce short- and intermediate-range missiles.

These facilities were destroyed.

The Russians had spoken as well.

Back to the future

If history is the judge, the Oreshnik will likely mirror in terms of operational concept a Soviet-era missile, the Skorost, which was developed beginning in 1982 to counter the planned deployment by the United States of the Pershing II intermediate-range ballistic missile to West Germany. The Skorost was, like the Oreshnik, an amalgam of technologies from missiles under development at the time, including an advanced version of the SS-20 IRBM, the yet-to-be deployed SS-25 ICBM, and the still under development SS-27. The result was a road-mobile two-stage missile which could carry either a conventional or nuclear payload that used a six-axle transporter-erector-launcher, or TEL (both the RS-26 and the Oreshnik likewise use a six-axle TEL).

In 1984, as the Skorost neared completion, the Soviet Strategic Missile Forces conducted exercises where SS-20 units practiced the tactics that would be used by the Skorost equipped forces. A total of three regiments of Skorost missiles were planned to be formed, comprising a total of 36 launchers and over 100 missiles. Bases for these units were constructed in 1985.

The Skorost missile and launcher

The Skorost was never deployed; production stopped in March 1987 as the Soviet Union prepared for the realities of the INF Treaty, which would have banned the Skorost system.

The history of the Skorost is important because the operational requirements for the system—to mirror the Pershing II missiles and quickly strike them in time of war—is the same mission given to the Oreshnik missile, with the Dark Eagle replacing the Pershing II.

But the Oreshnik can also strike other targets, including logistic facilities, command and control facilities, air defense facilities (indeed, the Russians just put the new Mk. 41 Aegis Ashore anti-ballistic missile defense facility that was activated on Polish soil on the Oreshnik’s target list).

In short, the Oreshnik is a game-changer in every way. In his November 21 remarks, Putin chided the United States, noting that the decision by President Trump in 2019 to withdraw from the INF Treaty was foolish, made even more so by the looming deployment of the Oreshnik missile, which would have been banned under the treaty.

On November 22, Putin announced that the Oreshnik was to enter serial production. He also noted that the Russians already had a significant stockpile of Oreshnik missiles that would enable Russia to respond to any new provocations by Ukraine and its western allies, thereby dismissing the assessments of western intelligence which held that, as an experimental system, the Russians did not have the ability to repeat attacks such as the one that took place on November 21.

As a conventionally armed weapon, the Oreshnik provides Russia with the means to strike strategic targets without resorting to the use of nuclear weapons. This means that if Russia were to decide to strike NATO targets because of any future Ukrainian provocation (or a direct provocation by NATO), it can do so without resorting to nuclear weapons.

Ready for a nuclear exchange

Complicating an already complicated situation is the fact that while the US and NATO try to wrestle with the re-emergence of a Russian intermediate-range missile threat that mirrors that of the SS-20, the appearance of which in the 1970’s threw the Americans and their European allies into a state of panic, Russia has, in response to the very actions which prompted the reemergence of INF weapons in Europe, issued a new nuclear doctrine which lowers the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons by Russia.

The original nuclear deterrence doctrine was published by Russia in 2020. In September 2024, responding to the debate taking place within the US and NATO about authorizing Ukraine to use US- and British-made missiles to attack targets on Russian soil, President Putin instructed his national security council to propose revisions to the 2020 doctrine based upon new realities.

The revamped document was signed into law by Putin on November 19, the same day that Ukraine fired six US-made ATACMS missiles against targets on Russian soil.

After announcing the adoption of the new nuclear doctrine, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitri Peskov was asked by reporters if a Ukrainian attack on Russia using ATACMS missiles could potentially trigger a nuclear response. Peskov noted that the doctrine’s provision allows the use of nuclear weapons in response to a conventional strike that raises critical threats for Russia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Peskov also noted that the doctrine’s new language holds that an attack by any country supported by a nuclear power would constitute a joint aggression against Russia that triggers the use of nuclear weapons by Russia in response.

Shortly after the new Russian doctrine was made public, Ukraine attacked the territory of Russia using ATACMS missiles.

The next day Ukraine attacked the territory of Russia using Storm Shadow missiles.

Under Russia’s new nuclear doctrine, these attacks could trigger a Russian nuclear response.

The new Russian nuclear doctrine emphasizes that nuclear weapons are “a means of deterrence,” and that their use by Russia would only be as an “extreme and compelled measure.” Russia, the doctrine states, “takes all necessary efforts to reduce the nuclear threat and prevent aggravation of interstate relations that could trigger military conflicts, including nuclear ones.”

Nuclear deterrence, the doctrine declares, is aimed at safeguarding the “sovereignty and territorial integrity of the state,” deterring a potential aggressor, or “in case of a military conflict, preventing an escalation of hostilities and stopping them on conditions acceptable for the Russian Federation.”

Russia has decided not to invoke its nuclear doctrine at this juncture, opting instead to inject the operational use of the new Oreshnik missile as an intermediate non-nuclear deterrence measure.

The issue at this juncture is whether the United States and its allies are cognizant of the danger their precipitous actions in authorizing Ukrainian attacks on Russian soil have caused.

The answer, unfortunately, appears to be “probably not.”

Rear Admiral Thomas Buchanan

Exhibit A in this regard are comments made by Rear Admiral Thomas Buchanan, the Director of Plans and Policy at the J5 (Strategy, Plans and Policy) for US Strategic Command, the unified combatant command responsible for deterring strategic attack (i.e., nuclear war) through a safe, secure, effective, and credible global combat capability and, when directed, to be ready to prevail in conflict. On November 20, Admiral Buchanan was the keynote speaker at the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Project on Nuclear Issues conference in Washington, DC, where he drew upon his experience as the person responsible for turning presidential guidance into preparing and executing the nuclear war plans of the United States.

The host of the event drew upon Admiral Buchanan’s résumé when introducing him to the crowd, a tact which, on the surface, projected a sense of confidence in the nuclear warfighting establishment of the United States. The host also noted that it was fortuitous that Admiral Thomas would be speaking a day after Russia announced its new nuclear doctrine.

But when Admiral Buchanan began talking, such perceptions were quickly swept away by the reality that those responsible for the planning and implementation of America’s nuclear war doctrine were utterly clueless about what it is they are being called upon to do.

When speaking about America’s plans for nuclear war, Admiral Buchanan stated that “our plans are sufficient in terms of the actions they seek to hold the adversary to, and we are in a study of sufficiency,” noting that “the current program of record is sufficient today but may not be sufficient for the future.” He went on to articulate that this study “is underway now and will work well into the next administration, and we look forward to continuing that work and articulating how the future program could help provide the President additional options should he need them.”

In short, America’s nuclear war plans are nonsensical, which is apt, given the nonsensical reality of nuclear war.

Admiral Buchanan’s remarks are shaped by his world view which, in the case of Russia, is influenced by a NATO-centric interpretation of Russian actions and intent that is divorced from reality. “President Putin,” Admiral Buchanan declared, “has demonstrated a growing willingness to employ nuclear rhetoric to coerce the United States and our NATO allies to accept his attempt to change borders and rewrite history. This week, notwithstanding, was another one of those efforts.”

Putin, Buchanan continued, “has validated and updated his doctrine such that Russia has revised it to include the provision that nuclear retaliation against non-nuclear states would be considered if the state that supported it was supported by a nuclear state. This has serious implications for Ukraine and our NATO allies.”

Left unsaid was the fact that the current crisis over Ukraine is linked to a NATO strategy that sought to expand NATO’s boundaries up to the border of Russia despite assurances having been made that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.” Likewise, Buchanan was mute on the stated objective of the administration of President Biden to use the conflict in Ukraine as a proxy war designed to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia.

Seen in this light, Russia’s nuclear doctrine goes from being a tool of intimidation, as articulated by Admiral Buchanan, to a tool of deterrence—mirroring the stated intent of America’s nuclear posture, but with much more clarity and purpose.

Admiral Buchanan did couch his comments by declaring from the start that, when it comes to nuclear war, “there is no winning here. Nobody wins. You know, the US is signed up to that language. Nuclear war cannot be won, must never be fought, et cetera.”

When asked about the concept of “winning” a nuclear war, Buchanan replied that “it’s certainly complex, because we go down a lot of different avenues to talk about what is the condition of the United States in a post-nuclear exchange environment. And that is a place that’s a place we’d like to avoid, right? And so when we talk about non-nuclear and nuclear capabilities, we certainly don’t want to have an exchange, right?”

Right.

It would have been best if he had just stopped here. But Admiral Buchanan continued.

“I think everybody would agree if we have to have an exchange, then we want to do it in terms that are most acceptable to the United States. So it’s terms that are most acceptable to the United States that puts us in a position to continue to lead the world, right? So we're largely viewed as the world leader. And do we lead the world in an area where we’ve considered loss? The answer is no, right? And so it would be to a point where we would maintain sufficient – we’d have to have sufficient capability. We’d have to have reserve capacity. You wouldn’t expend all of your resources to gain winning, right? Because then you have nothing to deter from at that point.”

Two things emerge from this statement. First is the notion that the United States believes it can fight and win a nuclear “exchange” with Russia.

Second is the idea that the United States can win a nuclear war with Russia while retaining enough strategic nuclear capacity to deter the rest of the world from engaging in a nuclear war after the nuclear war with Russia is done.

To “win” a nuclear war with Russia implies the United States has a war-winning plan.

Admiral Buchanan is the person in charge of preparing these plans. He has stated that these plans “are sufficient in terms of the actions they seek to hold the adversary to,” but this clearly is not the case—the United States has failed to deter Russia from issuing a new nuclear war doctrine and from employing in combat for the first time in history a strategic nuclear capable ballistic missile.

His plans have failed.

And he admits that “the current program of record is sufficient today but may not be sufficient for the future.”

Meaning we have no adequate plan for the future.

But we do have a plan.

One that is intended to produce a “victory” in a nuclear war Buchanan admits cannot be won and should never be fought.

One that will allow the United States to retain sufficient nuclear weapons in its arsenal to continue to “be a world leader” by sustaining its doctrine of nuclear deterrence.

A doctrine which, if the United States ever does engage in a “nuclear exchange” with Russia, would have failed.

There is only one scenario in which the United States could imagine a nuclear “exchange” with Russia which allows it to retain a meaningful nuclear weapons arsenal capable of continued deterrence.

And that scenario involves a pre-emptive nuclear strike against Russia’s strategic nuclear forces designed to eliminate most of Russia’s nuclear weapons.

Such an attack can only be carried out by the Trident missiles carried aboard the Ohio-class submarines of the United States Navy.

Hold that thought.

Russia is on record as saying that the use of ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles by Ukraine on targets inside Russia is enough to trigger the use of nuclear weapons in retaliation under its new nuclear doctrine.

At the time of this writing, the United States and Great Britain are in discussions with Ukraine about the possibility of authorizing new attacks on Russia using the ATACMS and Storm Shadow.

France just authorized Ukraine to use the French-made SCALP missile (a cousin to the Storm Shadow) against targets inside Russia.

And there are reports that the United States Navy has just announced that it is increasing the operational readiness status of its deployed Ohio-class submarines.

It is high time for everyone, from every walk of life, to understand the path we are currently on. Left unchecked, events are propelling us down a highway to hell that leads to only one destination—a nuclear Armageddon that everyone agrees can’t be won, and yet the United States is, at this very moment, preparing to “win.”

A nuclear “exchange” with Russia, even if the United States were able to execute a surprise preemptive nuclear strike, would result in the destruction of dozens of American cities and the deaths of more than a hundred million Americans.

And this is if we “win.”

And we know that we can’t “win” a nuclear war.

And yet we are actively preparing to fight one.

This insanity must stop.

Now.

The United States just held an election where the winning candidate, President-elect Donald Trump, campaigned on a platform which sought to end the war in Ukraine and avoid a nuclear war with Russia.

And yet the administration of President Joe Biden has embarked on a policy direction which seeks to expand the conflict in Ukraine and is bringing the United States to the very brink of a nuclear war with Russia.

This is a direct affront to the notion of American democracy.

By ignoring the stated will of the people of the United States as manifested through their votes in an election where the very issue of war and peace were front and center in the campaign, is an affront to democracy.

We the people of the United States must not allow this insane rush to war to continue.

We must put the Biden administration on notice that we are opposed to any expansion of the conflict in Ukraine which brings with it the possibility of escalation that leads to a nuclear war with Russia.

And we must implore the incoming Trump administration to speak out in opposition to this mad rush toward nuclear annihilation by restating publicly its position of the war in Ukraine and nuclear war with Russia—that the war must end now, and that there can be no nuclear war with Russia triggered by the war in Ukraine.

We need to say “no” to nuclear war.

I am working with other like-minded people to hold a rally in Washington, DC on the weekend of December 7-8 to say no to nuclear war.

I am encouraging American[

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Trident D5 missile launch from an Ohio-class submarine
s from all walks of life, all political persuasions, all social classes, to join and lend their voices to this cause.

Watch this space for more information about this rally.

All our lives depend on it.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

Donald Trump will become the 47th president of the United States and given the host of global debacles the US has its hands in—ranging from the genocide in Gaza, to Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and Iran to the Ukraine war—nobody is quite certain what direction the country will take with the former president at the helm again.

Joining host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report is Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. With his extensive insights and expertise into the Middle East and American foreign policy, Wilkerson provides a valuable understanding into what a Trump presidency may look like outside of the borders of America.

Wilkerson predicts Trump will stay true to “his disdain for war,” emphasizing “it's genuine. I don't think he likes war. I don't think he likes starting wars.” Regarding Ukraine, Wilkerson thinks Trump will shut down the war effort. But when it comes to the Middle East, that commitment clashes with one of Trump’s long standing loyalties: unwavering support for Israel.

War with Iran seems increasingly likely by the day despite, according to Wilkerson, resistance from the Pentagon and prior administrations. In the case of Trump, however, “you wonder how long that resistance can hold up if the president of the United States is intent on—and this is the one place where Trump really worries me—doing everything in his power for Israel,” Wilkerson notes. He adds, “Trump has made it quite clear that that's his policy, that's his belief, and I think he's being honest about it.”

Citing war-game simulations, reports, personal sources as well as his own expertise, Wilkerson lays down the reality of potential war with Iran: sheer disaster. With sources saying that the IDF is already taking heavy casualties in Lebanon, any sort of escalation with Iran would compound the suffering of the US and Israel. “Iran will top $10 trillion, take 10 years to pacify, if it's even moderately pacified, and cost a fortune in blood and treasure,” Wilkerson warns.

Transcript

Chris Hedges  

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, retired and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. He is a Vietnam War veteran, who attended Airborne School, Ranger School and the Naval War College, and who as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam logged over 1,000 hours on combat missions. He went on to serve as deputy director of the Marine Corps War College at Quantico and was executive Assistant to Admiral Stewart A. Ring, United States Navy Pacific Command and Director of the United States Marine Corps War College. His disillusionment with the trajectory of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East followed the revelations of detainee abuse, the ineptitude of post-invasion planning for Iraq and the secretive decision-making by the Bush administration that led to the invasion of Iraq. At a congressional hearing recorded on C-SPAN in June 2005, he gave his analysis of the Iraq war's motivation: "'I use the acronym OIL,' he said, 'O for oil, I for Israel and L for the logistical base necessary or deemed necessary by the so-called neocons – and it reeks through all their documents – the logistical base whereby the United States and Israel could dominate that area of the world.'" Wilkerson has said that the speech Powell made before the United Nations on February 5, 2003—which laid out a case for war with Iraq—included falsehoods of which he and Powell had never been made aware. "My participation in that presentation at the UN constitutes the lowest point in my professional life,” he has said. “I participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community and the United Nations Security Council." He called the U.N. presentation "probably the biggest mistake of my life.” He has taught at the College of William & Mary and George Washington University. He is a Senior Fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network, a group of former military, intelligence and civilian national security officials who describe themselves as  offering "alternative analyses untainted by Pentagon or defense industry ties" and countering "Washington’s establishment narrative on most national security issues of the day." Joining me to discuss U.S. foreign policy, the conflicts raging in the Middle East, including the genocide in Gaza, and the fate of the American empire is Lawrence Wilkerson. 

Let's begin with the election and its effect. I mean, you saw the intelligence community, Milley, all sorts of figures essentially joined the Democratic campaign in support of Kamala Harris. Let's talk about why Trump triggers such deep animus within the Pentagon and the intelligence community, and what you see happening during a second Trump administration.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

I think the animus was created—within my community anyway, I still call it that, the Pentagon, the military in general—because they don't see any concerted effort on his part to express a strategic appraisal that agrees with theirs. Theirs being the one most parroted by the New York Times, for example, and others of their ilk, who are simply spokespersons for the military industrial complex and for the national security state, which we have most assuredly become. And so they're worried about anyone who would come in and threaten to break the china. And that's what Trump that's what his forte is, starting to break the china. And they're very protective of their china, just as are the national security agencies in general and the 16, I guess it's 16 now, entities that we have that are supposed to be our intelligence eyes and ears, led by the CIA. Not led by the DNI, because he still has no real power over the CIA, but led by the CIA. I would say Bill Burns is the most powerful guy in the United States with regard to intelligence and what goes to the White House and what doesn't go to the White House. So that's part of the reason they just don't know this guy, except from the first term. And the first term would not, through Kelly and Milley and other people's eyes, give you much hope if you were a Pentagon member of the bureaucracy, if you will. The second reason, I think, is because he's so mercurial. He's all over the map, and the military doesn't like that at all. They like constancy, even if it's incorrect constancy. They prefer constancy to change and mercurial nature. And I think that's a problem with them. And there's a third reason too, and that is that they're worried about what I call Christian nationalism, some of them anyway, others are aiding and abetting it. And what that means, in essence, is not just this far flung, but very ripe and alive effort by certain Christian groups in America to make Christianity the national religion, to change the Constitution in that effect, or to discard the Constitution with regard to religion, but they're worried that they have flag officers in the military who are very much Christian nationalists. We have an occasion right now that we're looking at it, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, Mikey Weinstein's group out in New Mexico, where the [inaudible], the three star general who is the chief of personnel, the personnel man for the Chief of Staff of the Army is married to a woman who rolls in the aisle and speaks in tongues. And Mikey's obtained a video of this general in uniform being at one of her gatherings with this group. That's just the surface, if you will. There are people like General Flynn, for example, who are still in the military. So that's disconcerting for the bulk of the military that doesn't subscribe to this theory or this desire to do away with the Constitution when it comes to freedom of religion. Those things are bothering them, and Trump has shown a propensity to use the Christian movement in this country for political gain and to not have much in the way of regard for what that might mean otherwise. So that's disturbing.

Chris Hedges  

Yeah, I graduated from Harvard Divinity School and wrote a book on the Christian right a little over a decade ago, called American Fascist: The Christian Right and the War on America. And of course, I know Mikey's work well. Let's just unpack that. Why do they see Christian nationalism—it's interesting that you raise that as an issue—why do they see that as such an important issue? Just explain, in their vision, and perhaps yours, how that could roll out in a really negative way. You're

Lawrence Wilkerson  

You're talking about the way the military looks at it, yeah, at least those who aren't... Yeah, I think they're most concerned about it in terms of what it might mean for the tyranny that would have to come along with it, and they're having to enforce that tyranny, because if you make Christianity the national religion, and that's their ultimate goal, is to not just put Bibles in classrooms and stop abortions completely, not those social issues that always loom up, and paint them with their brush. The secret that they want no one to know until it happens is they do want Christianity to be the national religion. In that regard, we even have a branch of American Catholics who are working on this. If you look closely at what's happened in the last 50 years, in particular, with the Catholic Church. My wife was Catholic, so I'm aware of some of the things in the Catholic church that I wouldn't have been aware of had she not been. She's passed away now. But if you look closely at it, there is this behind the scenes movement in America to create an American Catholic Church. We don't like it being in Rome, its head being in Rome. We don't like Francis in particular. We despise Francis. And when I say, "we" I'm using a rhetorical device to describe these people. We'd like to have our own Pope and our own Catholic Church. And there are people, some would say, one or two on the Supreme Court right now, are of that mind too, and would work for that, or might be working for that, were they given the occasion to do so. You put that together, that Roman Catholicism, Opus Dei like Roman Catholicism, and the other people who are, for example, like John Hagee fund funding millions of dollars to West Bank settlers in Israel, even now. And you've got a real fear on the part of rational military people, this might get out of hand Be more specific, in what way? If you make Christianity the national religion, and you do all the things that you would have to do, constitutionally and otherwise, or just totally disregard the Constitution in that process. What you get, as we have just seen probably enough Americans behind you to do it, then you have a whole different ball game for the military. Because the military then is called on, domestically and otherwise, and most Americans don't understand the domestic missions that the Army in particular, but the military in general, has to defend that, and they don't want to. They think that's fractious, they think that's unconstitutional. They think that's something that would cause more harm than good. And I'm glad to say that there are still some people like that left in my military.

Chris Hedges  

Well I mean, Trump has an ideological void, of course, but we saw in his first term that he filled it with these Christian nationalists or Christian fascists, Betsy DeVos, Mike, Pence, Bill Barr and others. Certainly it appears that they will fill that void again. I want to talk about Ukraine.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

Let me add one other thing. This is not just Trump. Remember, I served in the George W. Bush administration. I cannot tell you how many times I had to deal with the White House personnel office over such things as this man can't go to Iraq. Why can't he go to Iraq? Why can't he serve in Iraq? He's not a Christian. Talk about counterintuitive.

Chris Hedges  

Let's talk about Ukraine. I mean, Trump has deviated from the establishment consensus on Ukraine, I never understood, perhaps you can unpack it for me, the whole Ukraine policy, other than as a kind of proxy war to degrade the Russian military and isolate Putin. I was in East Germany when the Berlin Wall came down as a reporter. I was there when the promises were made to Gorbachev not to extend NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany. And of course, as you know, the Soviet Union had to acquiesce to the reunification of Germany. And that was the promise made. And I'm not defending the invasion, obviously, of Ukraine, but we certainly baited the Russians and Putin. But let's talk about Ukraine. I don't see how any military strategist seriously could think that in a war of attrition, the Ukrainians could dominate, but explain what's happening and then how you see if there isn't going to be a difference, how you see a difference in a Trump administration's policy towards Ukraine and Russia.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

Let me say, first I was there too. I was special assistant to Chairman Powell, and the change that took place with the advent of Bill Clinton was absolutely disastrous, and I attribute to William Jefferson Clinton a lot of the problems we're living with today, including the violation, major violation of that promise not to expand NATO. That's a longer story, better enough for another time. I think what we're looking at in Ukraine vis a vis Trump, or Trump vis a vis Ukraine, is his—and I think Doug McGregor, for example, is right about this, I just watched him on Judge Napolitano's show—is his disdain for war. I think it's genuine. I don't think he likes war. I don't think he likes starting wars. I don't think he would be a president who... He'll go off and kill someone like the Iranian IRGC member or other people whom he's told are terrorists or whatever. But I don't think he wants war. [inaudible] war, and so he's willing to shut down Ukraine. Now there's another reason too. I think he detests NATO for different reasons than I. I don't like NATO much either. I think it's well beyond its sell by date. And he sees NATO as being—and he's right in this—as being an aider and abettor, Brussels is, of the war in Ukraine, as Washington is, led by that perfidious [inaudible]. And so he wants to shut that down. And I think his ultimate goal is to not abandon NATO per force, but he wants to get the United States out of its relationship with NATO, which he thinks we pay for everything we do, all the heavy lifting they do very little. Come back to the United States, as it were, and say you've got our nuclear envelope, but everything else you do because we're not with you anymore, and of course, save the money that that saves too. I think it was part of his first term, and he just didn't get to do it the way he wanted to do it. So those, I think, are the major reasons that he will be positive with regard to Ukraine. Because you're right, Ukraine is a disaster right now. Yeah, and most apparently, for Ukraine, they're dying by the dozens every day now, and they have no people left. They're having difficulty, they're having to impress young people, bring them into the military to get them to fight. And they're lucky if they don't desert within the first week, because either going over to the Russians or running away wherever they can go. It's a disaster. And we don't have generals in the Pentagon saying this. Now we have Lloyd Austin, he's right there with Joe Biden. But we don't have generals in the Pentagon, in my view, anyway, who are expressing these kinds of views that generals on the outside are expressing like David Petraeus and Barnes and other generals, who are saying, well, Russia is losing. They're lying through their teeth. They're lying through their teeth, either that or they're just stupid and incredibly dumb, really, not just stupid. So I think Trump would shut that down. And I'm looking forward to that. I hope he does. I hope he shuts it down forth with,

Chris Hedges  

Well, they should have read the history of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union. Stalin would send out a million men who would either get captured or die, and then he'd just send out another million, kind of the Putin strategy.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

And people don't realize that the Wehrmacht—right after it invaded, really, the first 14 months—began to lose almost immediately, partly because of its repine as it moved along, it made enemies of everyone in its path, even Napoleon wasn't that stupid. And partly because they overextended and partly because the rule of thumb that Hitler thought would work, his food minister told him it would work, that all that food coming from Ukraine and the steps of Russia would feed not only the Wehrmacht forces going that way, but Germany, too didn't come true.

Chris Hedges  

Yeah, that's because the Russians destroyed everything, scorched earth policy, we can do another show on World War II, which I have an obsession with, but he also split his forces because of Stalingrad. Let's talk about the Middle East. What will be the difference between a Biden administration and a Trump administration vis a vis the genocide in Gaza, in Lebanon, the attacks in Lebanon, which I want you to talk about, because they're not going particularly well for Israel. And then this knife's edge we're sitting on between Israel and Iran.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

I could get very complicated and complex here and try to describe what I think is going on over there, and I've made as much of an effort as probably anyone in this country to keep up with it. But let me just say right now what I'm concerned about with Trump coming in. I'm concerned about something happening between the time that this is all consolidated, which won't be long, apparently, and the inauguration and what the Biden administration does this. 

Chris Hedges  

Let me just interrupt you, Larry, what do you mean by consolidated?

Lawrence Wilkerson  

Well, there's going to be some court cases and other things, I'm sure, but it's going to be pretty quick. I think, because the margin of victory is so great. May look razor thin, but it's pretty great, from what I've seen, popular vote and electoral college. So all those things that the election task force I was a member of, for example, were worried about with a razor thin margin aren't going to happen. So we're going to get satisfied, and the votes to the Electoral College, and the process complete pretty quickly. I don't think the Democrats will be like the Republicans would be had it been the other way around. And I'm a Republican, so I can get away with saying that. I'm worried about what's going to happen because I think Bibi [Netanyahu] is still intent, and firing Yoav Gallant was indicative of this par excellence. He's still intent on going after Iran, but he's intent on the United States going with him. And the force deployments that we've made, the force deployments we're making right now, the number of troops we're sending actually to Israel right now, indicates to me that we are cognizant of this fact. We might not be yet ready to go along with it, but we are cognizant of it to the point where we're putting the forces in place that we think will be necessary. I think we're wrong. I think we're going to get our rear ends handed to us if we do what Netanyahu wants to do with regard to Iran, which is full bore war. We're going to find out how weak we are when we do it. If Iraq and Afghanistan weren't sufficient, this will certainly seal the deal. But I'm worried about this interim period, and what the Biden administration might actually do in this interim period, not just to do what Bibi wants them to do, and what I think Joe Biden is inclined to do, but to mess Trump up. I mean, what better way than for the inauguration takes place while we're involved in a huge war in the Middle East, and it would be a huge war if we go at it big time the way Bibi wants, and we discover immediately that we can't do what we think we're going to do in a short period of time. It's the old bugaboo again. You know, air power, air power, air power, air power is not going to defeat Iran. It is not going to stop their nuclear program, it's not going to defeat them. So you wind up with a choice, you either invade or you stop. And that's not much of a choice, very bad choice, as a matter of fact.

Chris Hedges  

So my understanding is the Pentagon was always reticent. They did not want, they blocked, I mean, there was a huge push in the interim between Bush and Obama to go to war with Iran and you know more about it than I do, my understanding is the Pentagon just said absolutely not.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

They are saying that now, but you wonder how long that resistance can hold up if the president the United States is intent on—and this is the one place where Trump really worries me—doing everything in his power for Israel. And Trump has made it quite clear that that's his policy, that's his belief, and I think he's being honest about it. Of course, there's the AIPAC business and the money involved, and Trump is, if anything, a transactional, "I want the money" man, but I think he's committed to it in a way that Miriam Adelson, for example, indicates in the amount of money that she gave.

Chris Hedges  

She's his largest donor, I think, $100 million, right? Well, what would be the difference, then, between a Trump administration vis a vis Israel and a Biden administration? Can't get any worse for the Palestinians in Gaza. What would be the difference?

Lawrence Wilkerson  

I agree with you, although there was, I think, and perhaps this is applicable on the other side too, but there was some political space opening up for Harris. I think she was made aware, vividly aware, of how much the Gaza policy, if you will, with regard to the Biden administration, had harmed them. I would say it probably lost them almost a quarter of the progressives that would have voted for them otherwise, particularly in some of the battleground states, key states. And that political space opening up, might have changed policy with her somewhat. I'm not saying it would be a [inaudible] but I am saying it might have been a more mellow policy with regard to Israel, and a harder policy on Netanyahu and a complicit policy—and we could do this if we wanted to—to get him out of there. We have the power to get him out of there if we wanted to use it. He's his own worst enemy in that regard. But we're not. We're not doing that. We're leaving him in there, partly because we know that those around him who might replace him would be just as bad as he, but with maybe a little bit better record and a little bit better outlook on things, especially getting the hostages back. And we've got some hostages that are left alive there too, so that political space would have given her room, I think to change policy somewhat, to meddle our policy a little bit. I don't think Trump will do that. I think Trump is in for a penny, in for a pound for Israel. And that's dangerous. I just was looking this morning at the meeting between the Saudi National Security Advisor, Blinken and Jake Sullivan and others, and very indicative of what's happening right now. The Saudis were very forceful about not making a deal until there was a Palestinian state deal that looked like it might have some viability politically, if not in reality. Now they are here, and he just inked the deal, so to speak, making a bilateral relationship go. Israel's not even in it, a security relationship. And this adds to the one we just did with the UAE, we just did with Bahrain. All of them are different deals, but they all amount to almost non-NATO major ally status. We just did one with Qatar, where  Al Udeid is, the biggest Air Force base in the world, and it looks as if the GCC, the Gulf Cooperation Council, is sort of being wedged aside and we're doing all these bilateral treaties, if you will, with these countries. They don't have the force of treaties, but they're executive agreements for defense cooperation and so forth, and so that means Mohammed bin Salman is now playing the typical Saudi game of "I like Russia, I like China, but the United States is my old haven, and I need the United States," so I'm gonna make a bilateral deal with them. If that's happening, they're worried about Iran, even though they're talking more with Tehran than they've done in the past, as are all the states, they're worried. They're worried about what might happen. They're worried about what Iran might do if Israel doesn't attack Iran's oil facilities, because Iran will wipe out all the oil facilities it can in the Gulf region, 20% of the world's oil supply. It won't make any difference that we're 22 million barrels a day now if they do that, because the price of oil will go to $300 a barrel, insurers won't insure and shippers want ship, then we'll have a real problem. And the Saudis know that, that's their nest egg, that's their future. They don't want to put that in jeopardy, so they're back with the United States. Now this is a very strange meeting, in my view, because the words were not there to support it, and then suddenly he's here doing this. I'm worried. I'm worried that we might be walking into a war that we cannot walk away from because of Netanyahu.

Chris Hedges  

But the Saudis, Qatar, they've all made it very clear that the US is not allowed to use these bases if there are strikes against Iran.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

Well, the prime minister in Baghdad did too, but we went ahead and let the Israelis fly over Iraq. And I'm told that the King of Jordan said no. Then we did it anyway, and rather than looking like a fool, he said he had grudgingly given permission, so we don't seem to care about what they think. And if it comes down to it, as this visit has just testified to I think, if it comes down to it, and they have to choose, they're going to do what we want to do.

Chris Hedges  

I want to talk about what a war with Iran would look like. The Iranian Air Force, as I understand, is pretty decrepit, not very effective, outdated fighters, many going all the way back to the Shah. I don't know what their air defenses are like. Certainly it would start out as an aerial bombing campaign. Would it look like the bombing campaign that we carried out under the Clinton administration against Iraq during the sanctions? Well, what's it going to look like?

Lawrence Wilkerson  

It's not going to look anything like that. In fact, it's going to look quite different. And it's principally because of China, but more so Russia. I think the Israelis, in this last attempt, they're lying about it now, and I have that from very good sources, they're lying about it. They're propagandizing it. They didn't do any damage at all to speak of to Iran, and the reason they didn't was because they ran into a buzz saw of Russian provided air defense systems. They didn't know what to do. They didn't know how to read the radars. They didn't know how to jam the radars. Their suppression of enemy air defense, SEAD, did not work. They took a few out, but it didn't work enough to where the pilots thought they could go any further. So they launched all their missiles, as I think was the plan originally, for the first echelon. After the SEAD got through from outside Iran, they were deterred from going inside, and they would be deterred again. And there's every reason to believe that there might be some S400s, as well as S300s on the ground and the S400, sorry Lockheed Martin, sorry, Raytheon consumed by Lockheed Martin, is the best air defense system in the world. That's another thing that's happening right now that's disturbing our defense contractors, Chinese and Russian equipment is out doing in Ukraine and in the Middle East, American equipment, which is three or four times as expensive. One of the reasons India is back with Russia again for its armaments and such, despite what our protests are. So we're looking at a situation where we will think that aerial will be all we'll have to do, that is to say bombing. Israel is going to think that, Israel really can't do anything other than bomb Iran, ballistic missiles and bombing, air launched cruise missiles and such as that. It's not going to do it. It's not going to work. It's simply not going to work. There'll be some damage done. There will be some toll in Tehran and elsewhere, in the outlying territories where the nuclear facilities are and such. But it's not going to work. So what do you do then? I've war gamed this. I war-gamed it with the Lieutenant General in the Marine Corps who took great censure from his own buddies in the Pentagon. He was retired at the time, but he used to be my boss when I was down at Quantico War College, and he said we would lose. He ran the war game two times just to prove that the computers were not wrong. I think he's right. I think one of the things the Iranians will do is take out a US aircraft carrier, that's 5,000 US souls on the bottom of the sea or in the water. And incidentally, we now have so few escorts for our CVs, our aircraft carriers, that let's say there are 2,000 sailors in the water, we couldn't rescue them all because we don't have birth space on the escort ships. Interesting development there. We can't even man some of our ships because we're so short in terms of recruiting. I think it would be a disaster. And what do we do when we get into a disaster like that? It's America. We don't back away. We don't retrench. We don't check our six and look around and say, maybe we made an error. We double down. That's what we'll do, and then it will be a full fledged war. And if you like Iraq, and you like Afghanistan, Iran will top $10 trillion, take 10 years to pacify, if it's even moderately pacified and cost a fortune in blood and treasure. 

Chris Hedges  

You're talking about ground forces going in?  

Lawrence Wilkerson  

That's the only way you rid the country... 

Chris Hedges  

Yeah, that's true. But where do they go in from? Iraq?

Lawrence Wilkerson  

Well, you'd have to sit down and do what we did in the Pacific when we were... I actually had the war plan for taking on the Soviets in Iran. You recall, we were very worried about them, looking for a warm water port around [inaudible] a typical Russian Empire thing to do, go back and check the history of the Russian Empire. We thought that was the case. So out in the Pacific, the force provider for all of this, we were war planning for fighting the Russians, the Soviets, inside Iran, in the Zagros Mountains and elsewhere. I know that terrain really well. It's not Iraq, very different country. Great strategic depth, 53% Persian. Great homogeneity amongst that 53% lot of problems around the periphery, but basically a homogeneous population, 10 years, $10 trillion and you still haven't solved what you wanted to solve, which was to defeat the nation anymore than...

Chris Hedges  

I'm just curious, where would the ground troops go in from? I have a hard time believing the Iraqi government, which is...

Lawrence Wilkerson  

We are illegal, illegal under international law and under our own domestic law. We are illegally present in Syria right now.

Chris Hedges  

That's true.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

We're there protecting oil going to Israel.

Chris Hedges  

Which Trump said, got him in a lot of trouble, but was an honest statement.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

Yeah, and we would go through Syria without batting an eye.

Chris Hedges  

Yeah, let's talk about how it might start...

Lawrence Wilkerson  

Incidentally, when we were doing the war gaming out in the Pacific, our major invasion was amphibious. That'd be a little difficult today, we had a lot of amphibious bottoms. The ones we have today are broken. Ask the [inaudible] Marine Corps, and we don't have many.

Chris Hedges  

How would it start? So there would be an Iranian strike on Israel with significant Israeli casualties. What do you see as the trigger?

Lawrence Wilkerson  

The debate in Tehran is heated right now, I'm told. This is about 48 hours old, but Doug Macgregor sort of confirmed it this morning. The debate is between the different groups of security personnel in Tehran, the IRGC, The Guardian Council, the Ayatollah, the new president, so forth. Do we continue with our previous plan? And the previous plan was we're going to smack them and we're going to smack them really hard. Israel has seen nothing like what's coming. Much in the way they're seeing real casualties, significant casualties in Lebanon right now. The debate as to whether to go ahead and do that or not, because they don't want the new president in particular, doesn't want war with the United States. They got enough problems. They don't want war with the United States. I don't know how that debate is going to fall out, but if they decide, and Netanyahu wants them to decide this, I'm quite confident of that, to go back whole hog at Israel and do some really significant damage that his propaganda machine cannot hide, which he has done a lot of up to this point, like, for example, hiding the casualties in Lebanon. The casualties are enormous in Lebanon right now, for the IDF, they're enormous.

Chris Hedges  

Have you heard a figure? I have not. Have you heard a number?

Lawrence Wilkerson  

I've heard 4,000. And here's the kicker, modern armies do not show loss or win by KIA [killed in action], battle, tactical, operational, whatever. They show it by WIA [wounded in action] because they have such sophisticated battlefield surgery and such sophisticated hospitals that... look at our casualties in Afghanistan, what you have is high rates of WIA, the WIA is over 4,000. That's missing arms, missing legs, you know, whatever. So when you're looking at a modern army fighting on interior lines in Israel, it's very interior lines. No evacuation route, hardly at all. You look at the WIA, not the KIA and the WIA in Lebanon are screamingly high right now, particularly for the IDF. I think you'll see them leaving very shortly, you'll see them leaving or moving.

Chris Hedges  

They haven't moved very far. 

Lawrence Wilkerson  

No, not at all. 

Chris Hedges  

In terms of interior lines, they haven't gone very far into Lebanon.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

What they're doing is precisely what they do almost every time they encounter this kind of resistance, though they've never encountered this stiff resistance, they bomb the hell out of the cities and the infrastructure, right? They killed Lebanese,

Chris Hedges  

They got driven out in '82 and of course, that's the invasion that created Hezbollah. I remember Sy Hersh telling me a little while ago that the reason that Netanyahu wants the United States to engage Iran is because he needs the US to take out Iran's air defense systems, which seems to be in agreement with what you said. Would that be correct?

Lawrence Wilkerson  

I think so. But I think we are going to get a rude surprise too, when we lose F-35s, extended range F-15s, F-16s and other flights that will come out of Al Udeid and off carriers, F-18s and such. We're going to lose a lot too. The war game said 30% attrition.

Chris Hedges  

And is Israel's motive the same as pushing us to invade Iraq, which is Iran is a powerful center within the region that it wants to essentially cripple the way it crippled Iraq, is that the motive behind the Israeli push for a war with Iran?

Lawrence Wilkerson  

I think that's the major motive behind it. They see Iran as the last impediment to their hegemony in the region.

Chris Hedges  

Let's talk about Israel from a military perspective because you know so much more about this than I do. How do you look at Israel in the Middle East from a strategic point of view, as a US ally?

Lawrence Wilkerson  

As a total liability. A strategic liability of the first order. And right now, at this moment, right now, I would say Ukraine, notwithstanding, they're the greatest strategic liability we have.

Chris Hedges  

Explain why. Why?

Lawrence Wilkerson  

Because there's no positivity to it. Everything is us, nothing is them.

Chris Hedges  

But we took out a lot of those missiles coming in from Iran.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

We did. We depleted our supplies to the point now where I'm not sure even if we decided we were going to do a major aerial attack on Iran, we wouldn't run out of munitions very shortly.

Chris Hedges  

And the genocide. I mean, I think we supply 68% at this point of munitions to sustain the genocide in Gaza. Is that correct?

Lawrence Wilkerson  

At least that much. If you look at the entire panoply of things we've given Israel, I'd say, Gideon Levy at Haaretz is right when he says, you share 50/50 responsibility for every death in Gaza and, for that matter, in Lebanon too.

Chris Hedges  

How do you see it playing out in Gaza? I've actually been in the Middle East quite a bit in the last year, in Egypt twice, spent much the summer in Jordan, was in Qatar, was in the West Bank. And everything I can glean, Israel, of course, wants to push them into the Sinai. In the Egyptian military, I was told by Egyptian journalists in Cairo, has just been adamant, has told Sisi that there's no way. A Palestinian is, in fact, according to them, if Israel attempts to push the Palestinians into the Sinai and Sisi accepts them, he's finished. That's what they said. But how do you see it playing out? We know what Israel's intent is, which is, of course, depopulating, annexing northern Gaza. They're largely towards that goal, creating a humanitarian crisis in the south, but eventually ethnic cleansing, these genocidal tactics are now increasingly being used in the West Bank. How do you see it going? The US must be completely aware of what Israel's intent is. But where do you see that developing?

Lawrence Wilkerson  

There are two sets of thoughts, I think, or beliefs, strategic goals in the US, and it depends on what body of people you're talking about. Are you talking about Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz and a host of others, Lindsey Graham? Or are you talking about saner people, I would say, on the other side of the aisle, or even in the Republican Party. They think that Israel is doing our job for us, as Bibi Netanyahu is want to say if Israel was not killing or ridding the region of these Arabs, Palestinian or otherwise, and think about how MBS must think about this, we'd have to be doing it. And so he's doing us a great favor. He's doing our dirty work for us. He even has said that publicly. The other side says, No, Israel is our ally and our friend, and we have to stand by them no matter how heinous Bibi is. We'd like to get rid of Bibi. We'd like to put a different picture on Israel, but he's there, and he's in charge, and he's doing what he needs to do. And then there's the group that I belong to, I think, that says this is horrible, what we're doing. And we all warned about this in the military, we warned about this. David Petraeus even testified to Congress one day and let it slip that Israel was a greater liability than a strategic asset, and maybe we ought to think about rearranging the relationship. After that got out, of course, he walked those remarks back, as David is want to do, but the military understands how much a strategic liability Israel truly is, especially down in the ranks, where people have actually had a chance to look at it, to study it, to look at the history and to understand what's happened and understand the real history of it, which is often propagandized by the Israelis and the US for consumption by the public. But the military understands that history. The military understands [USS] Liberty, for example, they understand that those sailors were machine gunned.

Chris Hedges  

Now we should explain. That was the ship that the Israelis attacked and killed, was it 36 or something? I can't remember. 31 US sailors were killed.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

Yeah, and a bunch wounded, and I don't think there's any question, having looked at some of the investigation and some of the obscuration of that investigation, there's any doubt in my mind that Israel did it intentional.

Chris Hedges  

That was the '73 war.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

Yeah, I don't know whether it was because they thought we were picking up information that they were uploading an atomic weapon, or they thought we were sharing some of the information we were picking up with a very sophisticated spy ship, which Liberty was, with Moscow in an attempt to bring pressure on Israel. I don't know what the reason was, because they wouldn't let the investigators get into the real nitty gritty. President cut it off. But I do know that Israel knew what they were doing.

Chris Hedges  

Israel had carried out a series of massacres of captured Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai. That was one of the theories. And the ship obviously would have known about that.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

Well, you remember in the London Times, I think it was reported. And then, when the London Times was a good newspaper, and it was reported by the BBC, on Panorama, by the I can't remember his name now, terrible short term memory. I was just reading his piece last night where he's having the conversation with Golda Meir. He sent her a dozen or two or three red roses every time before he went to Israel. And she really appreciated that. So she'd give him the first interview whenever he was there. This time, she wouldn't give it to him. She said, I have to give it to the Americans, I'm sorry. And he just sent her the roses and everything. Anyway, he did talk to her on the telephone, and he reported this in that article in the London Times and on Panorama. He asked her, point blank, would you use the Samson option? I don't think he used that phrase. He said, would you use a nuclear weapon if Israel's existence were in question? Without batting an eye she said, of course. And he said, you understand what that means? And she said, Yes. Now was that for public consumption so that people would understand that Israel was serious about winning this conflict, a conflict they started? The Egyptians didn't start the '73 war.

Chris Hedges  

Yeah, I know. That's another myth they peddled.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

But I do think that Netanyahu, if his back was to the wall and he were forced to do so, the big question, of course, that was being asked was, even if you knew you would be taking the world into a nuclear holocaust, would you still do it? Yes.

Chris Hedges  

I mean, how much damage do you think Iran can inflict on Israel? Israel's a small country. I think it has a population of 6 million. What does Iran have 90 million? I mean, I can't remember.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

If you're talking about between the river and the sea, about 14 million Israeli citizens. 7 million plus are Palestinian and 7 million, not quite as much, are Jews. Very small, not as small as Gaza, no bigger than the Greater London, or smaller than Greater London. Gaza is where they're dropping all that ordinance, just putting the military template on it and saying, how many casualties, how many casualties have been... that ordinance, that concrete, that rebar, those streets, those buildings, the template puts down on the terrain and says, with great accuracy, how many casualties? It's 200,000. Guarantee it's not 40 or 50,000. The template says it's well north of 100,000 and we'll not know, because you won't find some of these people, they're buried so deeply under rubble. If Israel were to really be attacked by the full weight of Iran, it would be a nightmare for Israel. It's becoming that way just with Hezbollah. You're never going to get those Israelis to go back to their homes. They're going to evacuate Israel eventually. I was told the other day by a friend in Tel Aviv that already, by his count, a million Jewish Israelis have departed.

Chris Hedges  

Since October 7, yeah, that's numbers they've hidden. But I've heard 500,000 but certainly a significant number have just left the country. And these are often the best educated, they tend to be the secular part of society.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

Putin was exercising his prudence and strategic verve by offering any of the Russians who had immigrated to Israel: come back, we need you, you're our brain trust.

Chris Hedges  

Yeah. I mean, one of the things, just to talk about the Israel-US relationship, is that [Jonathan] Pollard who gave Israel all sorts of intelligence information, he gave them information on CIA and Russian assets, which allowed the Soviets to roll it all up but he gave it to Israel, and then Israel was giving it to the Soviet Union in exchange for the release of Jewish citizens of the Soviet Union. But it destroyed the, obliterated the intelligence operation of the US in the Soviet Union.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

And Pollard is now, I'm told, I learned this 24 hours ago, Pollard is now instrumental in and very important to Bibi's propaganda effort with regard to Gaza and Lebanon. A traitor, and we let him go, and Bill Clinton did almost as much damage as Trump in that regard with Pollard. Bill Clinton pardon Marc Rich as his last ignominious act in office. I think it was David Rothkopf, or someone, said that was the most ignominious use of the pardon power by the president in the history of the country. I think they were right.

Chris Hedges  

You should explain who he was.

Lawrence Wilkerson  

Marc Rich really ran a company that, a huge company that sold, amongst other products, discounted price oil to Israel, and was responsible, in large measure, for Israel's economic success under the finance minister named Bibi Netanyahu, and then later, as he became prime minister, interrupted only by his fellow mate, Ari Sharon. Marc Rich made sure that Saddam Hussein's oil in the UN Oil-for-Food Programme was stolen and shipped to Israel. He also made sure that the pipeline in Syria, the one we were just talking about, was pumping to Israel. And he made sure that, eventually, the pipeline out of Kirkuk, out of northern Iraq, which has always had a problem with Baghdad, was shipping to Israel. So one of the reasons Israel's neo... what do you call their system of capitalism? It's not quite what ours is, but they have more billionaires per capita than we do. He made that happen with that discounted oil and now look at what Netanyahu has done. He had inked an agreement with Lebanon for the richest gas field in the Mediterranean thus far. That's abrogated, it's all belonging to Israel. Now there was a deal that Gaza had the second richest gas field in the Mediterranean for its own. That's gone, he's got that too. 30 years of the future needs of Israeli energy are contained in those two gas fields. He's got them both. Yeah, they're off the coast of Lebanon and Israel. That's an important point that's often missed in terms of the occupation of Northern Gaza, because they need the coastline. Let's just close by talking about the institutions themselves, the CIA, the Pentagon, which, and I mean, I'll characterize it, but you can correct me if I'm wrong, these institutions appear hostile to a Trump presidency, especially the intelligence community. How much can they damage, constrain, control Trump? That's an excellent question. First of all, the intent has to be there, and it has to be at some of the higher levels in order to do that. I'm not sure it's going to be particularly because he can take care of those levels if he wants to. But if it is there at the second echelon, so to speak, or the second, third echelons, it can be disturbing of anything that he wants to do as it could any president. It can falsify intelligence. It can lead the president astray with regard to serious national security issues. Right now, one of the most serious issues Trump's going to face, I think, I'm no economist, but I know a lot of economists, and they're telling me, the bond market right now is what we should be looking at, not the stock market. In fact, the stock market is euphoric and for the rich. The bond market is saying Trump is going to have one of the worst economic situations by midterm in our history. Our aggregate debt is also saying that. CBO released a report saying it's $50.2 trillion in a decade, decade and a half. The interest payments on that debt are already the defense budget equivalent, almost a trillion dollars, this year, almost a trillion dollars. By the end of that period, the CBO looked at about 10 to 12 years, and they think they're being optimistic, it's going to be 2 trillion. It's going to be the equivalent of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the defense budget combined. We cannot sustain that under anybody's rules of gerrymandering the financial system in the world or whatever, we just can't stand that. And when the American people understand some of this intuitively, and the crisis of confidence comes with that understanding, and many are saying it's going to happen on Trump's watch, he's going to have a real problem, and he's going to have to retrench majorly. I don't know what they're going to do. I don't know what we're going to do as a country when this comes to bear with full force.

Chris Hedges  

All right. Well, that was Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. I want to thank Diego [Ramos] Sofia [Menemenlis], Thomas [Hedges] and Max [Jones] who produced the show. You can find me at Chris Hedges.Substack.com.

What if there simply is no alternative to America's permanent war party?

[The firing of an Iskander ballistic missile. Photo Credit: By Mil.ru, CC]

What if politics in America plays out not so much via presidential elections, but through a constant, if often obscured, struggle between the permanent war party (the hawks) and, well, everyone else?   If this is the case, then it is not going to be enough to just hold our breath and wait for a more peace-loving Trump to assume office on January 20, at which time, supposedly, the threat of WWIII will be called off.  Instead, a strategy must be devised that hard-headedly accepts that the permanent war party is not going anywhere, even after January 20, and therefore a strategy must be devised which accepts this tragic circumstance, while still giving us a chance to survive.  Such is the conceptual framework which political historian Victor Taki uses as his starting point for discovering a response to the Ukraine war. -The Editors

In the old Soviet anecdote, Radio Armenia is asked about the likelihood that a Third World War will take place. Upon reflection, Radio Armenia declares that a Third World War is unlikely, but it expects such a ferocious fight for peace that not a single stone will be left standing. This joke about Soviet-American relations at the time of the (first) Cold War acquires an uncanny relevance today, now that President Biden’s permission to Ukraine to use American missiles for strikes inside Russia has shifted the discussion from possible scenarios for building a stable peace to ways of avoiding WWIII.

Paradoxically, an ostensible willingness on the part of the nascent Trump administration to end the war in Ukraine has helped the globalist hawks to secure Biden’s consent to take this highly provocative measure. Its limited potential impact on the purely military aspect of the Russian-Ukrainian confrontation has long been emphasized by this policy’s opponents. After all, the Russians have already placed their bombers out of range of those few ATACMS missiles and launchers that Ukraine currently has. However, any analyst who attempts to describe the actions of the Ukrainian leadership and its Western backers in terms of purely military rationality will necessarily miss the intended political and psychological effects of those actions.

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For almost a year the theme of “permitting” Ukraine to use the ATACMS and Storm Shadow/SCALP missiles for strikes into Russia’s interior has served as clickbait to offset Ukraine’s steady loss of ground. It has helped create the impression that it is Russia’s and not Ukraine’s fate that hangs in the balance, and that the articulate representatives of smaller or bigger (East) European nations can decide this fate by convincing the American president to call Putin’s bluff. After the clearly disappointing results of the US presidential elections from the perspective of Zelensky and his American and European backers, this “permission” becomes the last trump card to be thrown on the table in a reckless attempt to thwart Trump’s announced pacification of Ukraine.

The move is Machiavellian enough. In view of Putin’s September announcement that “authorization” of such strikes would be tantamount to NATO’s entry into the conflict, it will indeed be difficult for the Russian leader not to retaliate without losing face once these strikes actually take place. Russia’s retaliatory measures will in turn make it difficult for Trump to continue presenting Ukraine as “Biden’s war.” Apart from the danger of nuclear escalation that this scenario harbors, it will surely bury the prospect of a stable peace in Ukraine, however much the returning American president and his unchanging Russian counterpart would like to see it happen. 

The desire of some to stop the war turns out to be what gives others the opportunity to continue it. Given this circumstance, the doves might have to focus on ways of keeping the conflict within acceptable limits and forsake for the time being the different peace formulas meant to bring the war to a rapid end. Even if some variant of the “Vance Plan” (i. e. Ukraine’s neutral and demilitarized status plus the [existing] frontline as the new de factor Russian-Ukrainian border) could ultimately be accepted by Moscow, last Sunday’s news demonstrates that the global war party will not step back and simply let such an outcome materialize. 

Conclusion 

When an escalating provocation becomes the only way for the sidelined hawks not to lose badly from a prospective peace, the doves might need to reappraise their attitude towards the conflict itself. Continued within certain limits, the conflict represents the lowest common denominator between the otherwise incompatible interests and stakes of the different parties involved. At the same time, once the conflict becomes routine, the logic of de-escalation is likely to eventually prevail, if only because of the implacable law of universal entropy.  

Taking this into consideration, the doves’ strategy should be the opposite of the strategy of the Sicilian aristocracy at the time of Risorgimento, which was famously expressed in Giuseppe Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard (1958). Lampedusa’s characters repeatedly state that “[i]f [they] want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” By contrast, today’s doves should realize that if they want things to change, things will have to stay as they are. This minimalist approach to conflict resolution in Ukraine might strike some as cynical in light of the daily losses of hundreds of soldiers on both sides of the frontline. However, a straighter road to peace contains the even deadlier traps that have been set by those who would rather flip over the grand Eurasian chessboard than admit their defeat.

A guest post by

Victor Taki

I am a historian interested in imperial Russia’s Balkan entanglements and the intellectual history of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. My latest book Russia’s Turkish Wars was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2024.

I’ve written a number of times now about the unreality with which the West habitually approaches the continuing crisis in and around Ukraine, and the almost clinical dissociation from the real world that it displays in its words and its actions. Yet as the situation deteriorates and Russian forces move forward everywhere, there is no real sign that the West is becoming more reality-based in its understanding, and every probability that it will learn nothing, and continue to live in its constructed alternative reality until it is dragged out forcibly.

True, some daring leading-edge thinkers in the West are starting to wonder about the need for negotiations, even if they are on the West’s terms. They have begun to accept that perhaps some of Ukraine’s 1991 territory will have to be considered lost, if only in the short term. Perhaps, they muse, there will be a Korean-style DMZ in place, guaranteed by neutral troops, until such time as Ukraine can be rebuilt to take the offensive again. And then they look at the map of Russian advances, and they look at the size and power of the two armies, and they look at the size and readiness of NATO forces and they fall into despair.

But actually, no: scrub that last sentence. They don’t look, and if they did, they wouldn’t really be able to understand what they were seeing anyway. The “debate” (if you can call it that) in the West largely excludes real life factors. It takes place at a high normative level, where certain facts and truths are simply assumed. Why that is so, and what its consequences are, is the subject of first part of this essay, and then because these subjects are inherently complex, I go on to set out how to understand them as straightforwardly as possible.

We’ll start with some practical considerations of political sociology and psychology. The first is that politics is the classic example of the Sunk Costs phenomenon in action. The longer you continue with a course of action, no matter how stupid, the less willing you are to change it. Changing it will be interpreted as acknowledging error, and acknowledging error is the first stage in losing power. In this case the old defence (“personally I always had doubts…”) is just not going to wash, give the gratuitously psychopathic terms in which western leaders have expressed themselves about Russia.

The second is the absence of any articulated alternative. (“So, Prime Minister, what do you think we should do instead then?) The very fact of not understanding the dynamics of a crisis means that you are helpless to propose a sensible solution to it. It’s better to stay with a sinking ship in the hope of rescue than to jump blindly into the water. Maybe a miracle will happen.

The third is to do with group dynamics, in this case the dynamics of nations. In a situation of fear and uncertainty like the present, solidarity comes to be seen as an end in itself, and nobody wants to be accused of “weakening the West” or “strengthening Russia.” If you have to be wrong, best be wrong in the company of as many others as possible. There are enormous disincentives to being the first to suggest that maybe things are looking pretty bleak, and in any event what are you going to propose instead? The chances of thirty-odd nations being able to agree on a different approach to the present one are effectively zero, not helped by the fact that the United States, which might otherwise give a lead, is politically paralysed until perhaps the spring of next year.

The fourth is to do with isolation and groupthink. Everybody in your own government, everybody you speak to in other governments, every journalist and pundit that you come across says the same thing: Putin can’t win, Russia is taking massive casualties, we must rebuild Ukraine, Putin is scared of NATO blah blah. Everywhere you turn, you get the same messages, and your staff write the same messages for you to deliver to others. How could you not wind up assuming all this is true?

These are what we might call Permanently Operating Factors in politics, common to any crisis. But there are also a number of special factors operating in this particular crisis which seem obvious to me, but which I haven’t seen much discussion of. So let’s look at a few.

To begin with, the current generation of western politicians is especially incapable of understanding and managing high-level crises of any kind. The modern western political class—the Party as I call it—resembles more and more the ruling party in a one-party state. That is to say, the skills that lead to success are those of advancement in the Party apparatus itself: climbing the greasy pole and backstabbing rivals. Even managing a purely national crisis—as we saw during Brexit, or as we are seeing now in France and Germany—is actually beyond their abilities, except perhaps the ability to turn a crisis to their own personal political advantage. The result is that they are utterly overwhelmed by the Ukraine crisis, which is of a scale and a type that occurs perhaps once every couple of generations. The fact that it’s also a multilateral crisis means that it ideally requires advanced skills of political management just to ensure that things don’t fall apart, and they don’t even have those. In turn, the ever-increasing reliance on “advisers” linked to the personal fortunes of the politician concerned means both that professional advice is increasingly excluded, and also that professional advisers are often selected and promoted because they are willing to give the advice that politicians want.

So far, so generic. But we are also confronted here with a security crisis, and our political classes and their parasites are completely ignorant of how to deal with such crises, or even how to understand them. During the Cold War, governments were forced to confront security issues regularly: often, they were also domestic political issues. Security issues were also objectively important, as East and West glared at each other across a militarised border, with the possibility of nuclear annihilation never very far away. None of that is true now. NATO summits still happen of course, but until recently they have been concerned with peacekeeping deployments, counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan and the endless succession of new members and partnership initiatives. No fundamental security decisions of any kind have been needed in the political lifetime of any current head of a NATO (or EU) country, until now.

This is the more unfortunate because a security crisis is a highly complex thing, and involves a whole series of levels from the political down to the military/tactical. And a security crisis is just about impossible to manage multilaterally: the only remotely comparable example I can think off is the 1999 Kosovo crisis, when a much smaller NATO effectively stopped working after the first week, and came quite close to breaking down completely.

I’ve pointed out before that NATO has no strategy for Ukraine, and no real operational plan. It just has a series of ad hoc initiatives, glued together by vague aspirations unrelated to real life, and by the hope that something will turn up. In turn, this is because no individual NATO nation is in a better state: our current western political leadership has never had to develop these skills. But it’s actually worse than that: not having developed these skills, not having advisers who have developed these skills, they cannot actually understand what the Russians are doing and how and why they are doing it. Western leaders are like spectators who do not know the rules of Chess or Go trying to work out who is winning.

Now, western leaders are not themselves expected to be military experts. It’s common to sneer at Defence Ministers with no military background, but this is to misunderstand how defence works in a democracy, and for that matter how a democracy itself works. Let me put on my lecturer’s hat for a moment, and explain that.

Governments have policies at different levels. One of those policies will be a national security policy, which in turn is the basis for more detailed policies in subordinate areas: in this case, defence. Conventionally, these policies are managed by Ministries, headed by political figures or appointees, who have advisers, and in most cases operational organisations to turn policy into actual activity on the ground. In the case of the Education Ministry, the operational units are schools and universities. In the case of the Defence Ministry, they are the armed forces and the specialist defence establishments. You would no more expect a defence minister to be a former soldier than you would an education minister to be a former teacher or, for that matter, a transport minister to be a former train driver. The responsibility of a Minister is to make and apply policy within the larger government strategic framework, and to manage the budget and programme of their area.

So it’s the responsibility of the political leadership—normally including the head of state or government—to say what the strategic purpose of any military operation actually is, and to set out  a situation (the “end-state”) where this purpose will have been realised. If this is not done, military planning and operations are pointless, no matter how good your forces and how destructive your weaponry is, because you won’t actually know what you are trying to do, and so you won’t’ be able to tell whether you’ve done it. This, not lack of military knowledge, is the fundamental problem of western political leaderships today. Indeed, it would be better to call them “managerships,” because they have no aspiration to lead. They are just MBA-trained fiddlers and bodgers, for who the concept of a strategic goal in the true sense of the term is basically meaningless. Instead of actual strategic objectives, they have slogans and fantasy outcomes. It is, after all, obvious that the strategic objectives government sets have to be actually realisable, or there is no point in pursuing them. They must also be clear enough that they can be passed to the military for the military to make an operational plan to deliver the “end-state.” And in addition, the political leadership has to set out constraints and requirements within which the military have to work. Because western leaders and their advisers do not know how to do this, they cannot understand what the Russians are doing, either.

After that, of course, you need a politico-military layer that is capable of doing operational planning, and so answering a series of questions like: what military outcomes will deliver the political end-state? how do we get there? what forces will we need? how should they be structured and equipped? how do we cope with political imperatives and limitations? Whilst these questions are generic, and it can be argued that they apply even to peacekeeping operations, they obviously apply with more and more force as operations become larger and more demanding.

And this is the essential problem. The war in Ukraine involves forces which are an order of magnitude larger than those sent on operations by any western nation since 1945. Indeed, it can be argued that the only time that forces of comparable size have been deployed in Europe is between 1915 and 1918, and again in 1944-45. European armies certainly studied these campaigns at one time, but with the passing of time they became historical examples, not things to learn applicable lessons from. And the planning from about 1950 to 1990 was for a short, defensive war which would probably go nuclear. It’s questionable whether there is actually anything at all in recent western military history that would help today’s commanders really understand what they are seeing.

Nor do they have the recent professional experience. It’s become fashionable also to sneer at western military commanders, but in many ways that’s unfair. In peacetime, the role of senior military leaders is only partially to prepare for war. There are also a thousand other issues to do with budgets, programmes, personnel questions, contracts, the future size and shape of the military, and many others. Senior military figures need of be capable of understanding all these issues and dealing with political leaders, diplomats, civil servants and their opposite numbers in other governments, as well as with parliament and the media. It is obvious that in peacetime you are not going to select a Chief of the Army just for putative war-fighting skills, if that person is an abrasive individual who is always arguing with the Minister.

This is why it is almost universally the case that military commanders are replaced wholesale at the start of a war. Some commanders may turn out to be natural war-fighters and others will not. Widespread personnel changes are therefore common because the task is very different: we have seen this with the Russian Army since 2022. Likewise, a peacetime army as a whole takes time to adjust to being a war-fighting one. The problem western experts have is that they are watching this process from a distance, without going through it themselves. Armies that still only know peacetime modes of operation are trying to understand the activities of armies that have completely transitioned to war-fighting.

Finally, western military specialists are limited by their own experiences. Imagine you are the Chief of Operations in a medium-sized western country. You joined the military in the 1990s, when the last senior officers who had known the Cold War were retiring. Your actual experience has been on peacekeeping operations and a couple of deployments in Afghanistan. The largest unit you have ever commanded on operations is a Battalion (say 5-600 personnel) and the last time you actually came under fire, you were a Company commander. How can you be reasonably expected to grasp the mechanics and complexities of manoeuvring armies hundreds of thousands strong, along lines of contact hundreds of kilometres long, and understand what the commanders involved are doing, and how they think? You will unconsciously focus on the things you can understand, at the scale that you can understand them. You will inevitably concentrate on the detail—some tanks destroyed here, a new variant of artillery deployed there—rather than the big picture.

All this seems to me to explain several things, including the curiously episodic nature of Ukrainian initiatives. Some of these were clearly suggested by the West, others by a political class in Ukraine which is highly westernised and thinks in western terms. (Ironically, the Army is probably more realistic and more able to grasp the wider picture.) But there has been very little sense of any long-term strategy, or even thinking. Take the attacks on the bridge to Crimea, for example. What were they supposed to achieve exactly? Now replies like “sending a message to Putin” or “complicating Russian logistics” or “improving morale at home” are not allowed. What I would want to know is, what is expected to follow, in concrete terms?  What are the tangible results of this “message” supposed to be? Can you guarantee that it will be understood? Have you gamed out possible Russian reactions and what will you do then? Supposing, again, that you complicate Russian logistics? What will be the direct result, and how easy will it be for the Russians to get round the problem. (Answer, fairly.)

Western political and military leaders have no answer to these questions, because they have no strategy, and do not really understand what a strategy is. What they have is a consistent habit of coming up with clever, publicity-generating ideas that are disconnected from each other, but all sound good at the time. Broadly, they reflect the following “logic.”

• do something that humiliates Russia.

• miracle happens.

• change of government in Moscow and end of war.

And I’m not exaggerating. This is all the “strategic planning” that the West is capable of, and all it ever has been capable of. I’ve stressed before the necessity of separating aspirations from strategy. For a good twenty years, important constituent parts of western governments have had the aspiration of removing Putin from power, and somehow creating a “pro-western” government in Moscow. From time to time they have come up with disconnected initiatives—sanctions, for example—which they believed might move events in that direction. But mostly it’s just hope, manured with the belief that no “anti-western” leader can ever be representative of his or her people, and so will not last very long anyway. But this approach ignores the most fundamental issues of strategy: what is the clearly-defined end-state you are seeking, how precisely will you achieve it and is it, in fact, achievable? Because if you can’t answer those questions, then any amount of “strategic” planning is pointless. As regards the last question, any military expert will tell you that although the military can create the conditions for political developments to take place, they can’t make them happen. The actual relationship between the two is very complex. Recall that in 1918, the German Army, badly hurt by the Allies’ attrition strategy, was in full retreat but still on Allied soil, and that the Allied armies advancing from the Balkans were still well outside German territory. What ended the War earlier than expected was a nervous breakdown in the German High Command.

And the West cannot answer those questions. The end-state is vaguely defined as “Putin gone,” the mechanism is “pressure” of an ill-defined nature, and the idea that a “pro-western” government will emerge is just an article of faith. So even if a “strategy” could somehow be constructed from these fragments, it would stand no chance of working. Thus the essentially reactive nature of western actions. I’ve talked before about the Boyd Cycle, of Observation, Orientation, Decision and Action. Whoever can go round this circle faster, and “get inside” the Boyd Cycle of the enemy, controls the development of the battle, or the crisis. This is essentially what the Russians (who understand such things) have been doing since the start of the crisis, well before 2022.

Conversely, the West, confusing vague aspirations with an actual strategy, has not understood what the Russians are trying to do, and has treated every Russian setback, or presumed setback, as a step on the road to victory without looking at the bigger picture. Take one simple example. From the beginning of the war, the Russian strategy was to bring about specified political changes in Ukraine by degrading and destroying Ukrainian forces, and so removing Ukraine’s ability to resist Russian political demands. Once the West became involved, this strategy, whilst the same overall, was nuanced to include the destruction of western-supplied equipment and, to a degree, western-trained units. (Though the latter without the former were not so much of a threat.) Two things followed from this.

The first was that the reduction of Ukrainian fighting capability on terms favourable to the Russians was independent of the larger ebb and flow of battle. Destroying stored equipment was if anything better than destroying that equipment in combat. Destroying stored ammunition was better than destroying it once it was deployed in units. Now generally, defenders in a military conflict have fewer casualties than attackers. If your objective is to destroy your enemy’s fighting power, especially if you know that it will be difficult and expensive for them to replace it, then it makes more sense to let the enemy attack you, where they will lose more resources than you. If you have a functioning defence industry and ample reserves of manpower and equipment, this is unarguably the best strategy, and was practised by the Russians in 2022-23. But the West seems incapable of understanding this, and massively over-interpreted Russian strategic withdrawals as crushing defeats which would soon “bring Putin down.”

The second is that, to the extent that Russia has territorial objectives, it is better to degrade Ukrainian forces to the point where they cannot defend territory and have to withdraw either preemptively or after a cursory defence, than it is to stage deliberate attacks to seize territory. The Russians have a whole series of technologies which enable them to attrit Ukrainian forcers from a position a long way behind the contact line. They can thus progressively destroy the Ukrainian ability to hold ground without needing to risk their own troops and equipment in direct attacks. Over the last few months, we have seen that this stage has effectively been reached, and that the Russians are advancing quite quickly in certain key areas. But the West, which is obsessed with the control of terrain as an index of success, cannot understand this, having forgotten how the War in the West ended in 1918, when Allied territorial gains were still quite modest.

To be fair (assuming that one wants to be fair), these issues are very complex: not more complex, perhaps, than neurosurgery or the taxation of multinational companies, but not any less complex either. They require years of study and experience, and a willingness to master strange and sometimes counter-intuitive concepts. The western Liberal mind has never wanted to do this: its ideology of radical individualism is incompatible with discipline and organisation, and its search for instant gratification is incompatible with any long-term planning and careful implementation. In retaliation, it likes to dismiss the military as stupid and war-mongering. When Liberalism was constrained by other religious or political forces all this was less obvious, but with the emancipation of Liberalism from all controls over the last generation, and its dominance of political and intellectual life, western societies have now pretty much lost the ability to understand conflict and the military. It is striking, indeed, that most western military personnel are still recruited from the more conservative and traditional elements of society where Liberalism has made less of an impact, and not from Liberal urban elites.

Since the nineteenth century, and especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, the Liberal mind has oscillated between dislike and disdain for the military in normal times, and panicked demands for their use in periods of crisis, or when Liberal norms need to be enforced somewhere. The spread of the Liberal mindset to countries like France, which has historically been proud of its military, has produced a European political and media class largely unable to understand military issues. American Liberals, so far as I can see, themselves oscillate between fear of the military and endless citation of the warnings by Eisenhower’s speechwriter about the Military-Industrial Complex, and demands for the use of the military to enforce their norms. (Eisenhower’s remarks were, of course, a cliché of the time: there was nothing original in them.)

The result is a decision-taking and influencing class that has no real idea about strategy and conflict at all, and just repeats words and phrases it has heard somewhere, as magical incantations. One minute “F16s” (whatever they are precisely) will save the day, the next, “deep strikes” are going to bring Putin down.

So for example, it is impossible for a society brought up on just-in-time delivery and impulse purchases on Amazon to understand the importance of logistics and the nature of the attrition war the Russians are fighting. If you look at a map and try to understand it (I know!) you can see the the Ukrainian forces are fighting at the end of very long supply lines, especially for western equipment and ammunition, whereas the Russians are only a few hundred kilometres, at most, from their borders. The fuel consumption of heavy armoured vehicles is measured in gallons per mile, and even if they can be delivered to the area of operations by train or transporter (which has its own problems) they consume frightening amounts of fuel, all of which has to be brought, dangerously and expensively, into the operational area. They also break down, require new tracks and new engines and an endless supply of ammunition, all of which has to be brought forward. So Leopard tanks are not just teleported into the battle area, and when they are damaged they have to be sent back to Poland for repairs. And just about every aspect of military operations requires electrical power: yes, even drone operations.

The Russians of course know this, and have been targeting power generation and distribution systems, bridges and railway junctions, ammunition and logistic storage sites and troop concentrations and training areas. But they are not capturing large amounts of territory with daring armoured thrusts, so the Ukrainians must be winning, mustn’t they? Yet tanks without fuel or ammunition, or whose engines have broken down, are useless, and once Ukrainian forces are operationally isolated from their supply lines it’s only a question of time before they lose their combat capability and have to surrender or make a run for it. This is what appears to be happening now around Kursk. And if you are fighting an attrition war, and your stocks and replenishment capabilities are greater than your enemy’s, you want your enemy to use up those stocks as quickly as possible. So why not send, for example, large numbers of cheap drones that can be replaced, to soak up large numbers of defensive missiles that can’t? But this is too much for most alleged western experts to wrap their neurones around.

Of course the logic applies both ways. It defies belief that anyone with a functioning brain-cell would ever have thought that the Russians planned to “occupy Ukraine,” let alone in a matter of days. Insofar as the idea had anything real behind it at all, it was a folk memory of the rapid advance of US forces to Baghdad in 2003, against no opposition and with complete air supremacy. A simple practical example: a NATO Mechanised Division (in the days when NATO had them), advancing against no opposition, would take up some 200km of road, and take several days just to organise, leave, arrive and deploy into combat formations. And that’s just one Division. The idea of doing this against a battle-hardened Army two to three times the size of the attacking force, and beating them in a few days at that, is beyond ridiculous. Again, look at the map. And while you are at it, think about the current hysterical cries that “Putin wants to invade NATO.” Everything I’ve said about the difficulty of NATO going Eastward applies to the Russians going Westwards, should they be insane enough to consider the idea.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the Russians chose Kursk as a jumping-off point, then it’s about 2000 kilometres to Berlin, which is the first remotely plausible objective I can think of. (Oh, they would have to go to Poland to get there.) Just to give you an idea, in the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s Group of Forces in Germany was about 350,000 strong, supplemented by recalled reservists in an emergency. They would have attacked NATO forces in Germany, but they were only the first echelon, and were expected to be wiped out. Two more echelons would therefore follow them. The total distance needing to be travelled was a couple of hundred kilometres. As far as we know, subduing and occupying Western Europe alone would have required perhaps a million men in combat units, never mind the western flanks and countries like Turkey. This was in the context of an existential struggle, probably involving nuclear weapons, which a victorious Russia would take a generation to recover from. We are a little way from that at the moment.

I think that what we are seeing, as well as culpable deliberate ignorance, is the beginning of a gnawing realisation that NATO is not strong but weak, that NATO equipment is mediocre, that talk of “escalation” is meaningless in the absence of something to escalate with, and that if the Russians felt so inclined they could do a lot of damage to the West. But even there, western pundits are stuck in narratives of armoured warfare and territorial conquest. The Russians don’t need to do that, of course. With their missile technology, which the West has consistently ignored and downplayed, they can make a mess of any city in the western world, and no western state is in a position to respond. Of course the Russians, who understand these things, realise that they don’t need to actually use these missiles: the psychological leverage they have from just possessing them will do quite nicely. Ironically, I think the Ukrainians do understand these things, better than their supposed NATO mentors. Their Soviet heritage and the large Army they retained gave them an awareness of how large-scale operations are conducted at the political and strategic levels even if, since then, they have been got at by NATO

The French historian and Resistance martyr Marc Bloch, who fought in the Battle of France in 1940, wrote a book about it, only published posthumously, after the war, called L’Étrange défaite, or The Strange Defeat, in which he tried to explain what had happened. His central conclusion was that the failure was intellectual, organisational and political: the Germans employed a more modern style of war that the French were not expecting and could not cope with. Time has nuanced that conclusion: the German tactics were certainly innovative, involving fast-moving, deep penetration armoured units and close cooperation with aircraft, but they were also extremely risky and required a lot of luck to pull off successfully. But Bloch was right that the Germans had developed a style of warfare, dictated by the need to avoid long wars, to which there was no counter at the time, and which posed unexpected and, for a period insoluble, problems for the defender.

There’s something about the dazed incomprehension of the French political and military class and the people themselves, in the summer of 1940 that seems very relevant today. The defeat of the West—not yet even recognised as such—is at once intellectual, organisational and political. The ruling classes of the West seem to have no idea at all what has happened to them and why, nor what is likely to follow.