April 22, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - Recent comments from current US Secretary of State Marco Rubio have signaled Washington’s intent to abandon peace efforts if progress isn’t made between Russia and Ukraine.
The United States could end its efforts on ending the Ukrainian conflict within “days” if there are no signs of progress, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned Friday.
“If it is not possible to end the war in Ukraine, we need to move on,” he told reporters before departing Paris, where he had held high-level talks with European and Ukrainian officials. “We need to determine very quickly now, and I’m talking about a matter of days, whether or not this is doable,” he said.
This is framed as if the US is serving as some sort of mediator between Russia and Ukraine. In reality, the US is one of two primary parties to the conflict - the other being Russia with whom this war was provoked.
A US War on Russia Since the Cold War Ended…
The US had since the end of the Cold War invested billions of dollars in political interference within Ukraine, including regime change operations attempted in 2004 and successful regime change finally taking place in 2014. From 2014 onward, Ukraine was transformed into a military proxy of the United States aimed specifically to threaten the Russian Federation just as a politically captured Georgia in 2003 was used to attack Russian peacekeeping forces in 2008.
The growing security threat this posed to Moscow precipitated the launching of Russia’s February 2022 Special Military Operation (SMO) and the subsequent fighting that has continued ever since.
A series of articles from the Western media itself has revealed over recent years the degree to which the US had not only politically captured Ukraine, but also institutionally captured its military and intelligence agencies, reconfiguring them to operate as armed extensions of the US along Ukraine’s border with Russia, and even across it within Russia itself.
Among these admissions is the New York Times’ February 2024 article titled, “The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin,” which admits to, “a C.I.A.-supported network of spy bases constructed in the past eight years that includes 12 secret locations along the Russian border.”
April 8, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - With the rollout of sweeping US tariffs aimed at nations worldwide, economists and geopolitical analysts alike are astounded by what at face value looks like irrational self-sabotage attributed to incompetence within the White House.
In reality, the tariffs are a central pillar of bipartisan foreign, trade, and economic policy implemented first during the previous Trump administration, continued and even expanded upon during the following Biden administration, before being expanded further still under the current Trump administration. Rather than a random idea that formed within the mind of President Donald Trump himself or among those within his cabinet, sweeping tariffs are the stated policy of unelected corporate-financier interests, articulated in-depth within the pages of special interest-funded think tank documents including Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” paper under Chapter 26: Trade Policy.
The policy, far from a sound plan to re-industrialize America or genuinely balance America’s trade deficit, is instead meant to maintain America as “the world’s dominant superpower.”
The paper claims that:
To maintain that global positioning—and thereby best protect the homeland and our own democratic institutions—it is critical that the United States strengthen its manufacturing and defense industrial base at the same time that it increases the reliability and resilience of its globally dispersed supply chains. That will necessarily require the onshoring of a significant portion of production currently offshored by American multinational corporations.
While this seems to at first suggest a general re-industrialization of America’s economy, none of the actual measures required to do so are discussed with any serious attention - measures such as the sweeping education reforms and massive state investment in infrastructure and industry required to actually re-industrialize America.
The policies described within the pages of Project 2025 and now being implemented further under the current US administration are meant instead to disrupt global economic activity including trade and industry, particularly those of China, while compelling industry abroad to be moved to the United States.
An example of this is semiconductor manufacturer TSMC which was forced to move facilities to Arizona in the continental United States. A combination of poor infrastructure, weak supply chains, and a lack of skilled workers have caused massive budget and schedule overruns as well as necessitating the movement of hundreds of workers from Taiwan to the United States to fill roles American employees are incapable of fulfilling themselves.
Similarly, beginning in 2014 with the US-engineered overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government and the triggering of a proxy war with the Russian Federation, subsequent sanctions applied by the US and Europe and the deliberate destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines have crippled the latter’s supply of cheap Russian hydrocarbons.
This has forced European manufacturing to relocate to the United States, as DW in its 2023 article, “Is German industry migrating to the US?,” noted, claiming:
"One is the increase in geopolitical tensions. Many German companies see the US as a 'safe harbor.' Other reasons are the comparatively low energy costs and the very generous subsidies provided under the Inflation Reduction Act."
In the long-term, as more industry is forced to move from regions of the world like Asia and Europe to the United States through a combination of US tariffs and geopolitical sabotage, stress on America’s insufficient infrastructure, supply chains, human resources, as well as inadequate education and healthcare systems will only increase.
Even if sufficient resources are channeled into improving any or all of the above fundamental factors for transplanting industry to the United States, it will take years to catch up.
In the short-term, as a now 8 year-spanning policy of imposing tariffs and triggering trade war has demonstrated, an already immense cost-of-living crisis is set to expand even further, impacting the lives of tens of millions of Americans already struggling with grocery bills, rent, fuel, healthcare, and education.
April 3, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - US President Donald Trump has recently sent a “letter” to Iran’s leadership providing it with a two-month deadline regarding a new “nuclear deal” - this after President Trump during his first term in office in 2018 unilaterally and baselessly withdrew from the previous Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and as the US builds up military forces as a direct threat to Iran’s government.
While President Trump has suggested drastic measures may be applied if Iran doesn’t meet the deadline, neither he nor anyone in his administration has explained under what authority the US has created this deadline, with what authority it intends to enforce it with, or how the threat of this war of aggression differs from the long line of US wars of aggression President Trump campaigned for office vowing to end.
The Trump administration is posing as if its primary motivation is to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons as part of a wider narrative regarding US leadership in maintaining peace and stability worldwide. In reality, this most recent escalation is part of a wider US policy spanning multiple presidential administrations aimed at dismantling Iran’s network of allies across the region, isolating Iran, before pursuing regime change operations against Iran itself.
With the removal of a sovereign Iran in the Middle East, the US can advance a decades-spanning agenda of establishing and maintaining primacy both over the Middle East and well beyond it - an agenda that has served in actuality as the single greatest threat to peace and stability worldwide.
If Real - Iranian Nuclear Weapons Would Be Rational, Not Radical
It should be noted that the US is the only nation on Earth in human history to use nuclear weapons against another nation - twice. Throughout post-WW2 history, the US has considered using nuclear weapons again - including against North Korea, China, Vietnam, and even Afghanistan. This, combined with a long history of conventional wars of aggression, makes the US the most dangerous nuclear-armed nation on Earth - its belligerence a key factor in driving nations like China and North Korea to develop and expand their nuclear programs in the first place. Regarding Iran specifically, the US has created a decades-spanning national security threat to Tehran including regime change in 1953 as part of Operation Ajax, decades of economic sanctions meant to strangle Iran’s economy, the sponsoring of armed opposition groups inside Iran including listed terrorist organizations, as well as backing proxy wars against Iran - most notably the deadly 8 year Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, as well as proxy wars against Iranian allies arraying Israel, Al Qaeda, and the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” (ISIS) against Lebanon-based Hezbollah, Syria, Iranian-friendly militias in Iraq, as well as Ansar Allah in Yemen.
The US has also invaded and destroyed nations bordering Iran to the east and to the west - beginning with Afghanistan in 2001 and then Iraq beginning in 2003. US forces remain in Iraq to this day.
In the last several years, the US and its proxies have successfully destroyed Hezbollah’s senior leadership in Lebanon, toppled the Syrian government, and is conducting a bombing campaign against Ansar Allah in Yemen.
Were Iran pursuing nuclear weapons, it would be more rational than “radical” - a response to US military aggression that has ravaged the Middle East and has openly and constantly threatened Iran itself. Despite Iran’s status as a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the United States - through serial acts of military aggression against non-nuclear armed states - has created a geopolitical environment voiding the core objectives of the treaty. The world cannot eliminate nuclear weapons if the US is committed to creating threats requiring nuclear deterrence.
What’s even more telling are the conclusions reached by US policymakers themselves amid the pages of papers and reports published over the years used to guide US decision making regarding Iran itself and the wider Middle East, including the possibility of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons and the certainty they would be used defensively, not offensively - threatening only the continuation of US interference and that of its proxies in the region.
February 4, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - Despite the temporary window of false hope some perceived the recent US presidential election as, US foreign policy has once again continued onward toward the pursuit of primacy.
While a recent interview with the newly confirmed US Secretary of State Marco Rubio began with promising slogans, it quickly unraveled into threats of overt aggression, including outright calls to seize the Panama Canal and annex Greenland from Denmark under an implicit threat of military force.
While the change in presidential administration is purely superficial, the intense urgency it pursues continuity of agenda with is not. It reflects the rapid rise of China, Russian resilience in the face of US proxy war in Ukraine, and an expanding multipolar world overwriting the US-led unipolar world order at ever increasing speeds.
Secretary Rubio: Seizing Panama and Annexing Greenland All Aimed at China
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a recent interview with Megyn Kelly, the transcript of which was published on the US State Department’s official website, began with a discussion about the end of the “unipolar world” and US foreign policy moving forward.
Secretary Rubio would first note:
…it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was not – that was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. We face that now with China and to some extent Russia, and then you have rogue states like Iran and North Korea you have to deal with.
So now more than ever we need to remember that foreign policy should always be about furthering the national interest of the United States and doing so, to the extent possible, avoiding war and armed conflict, which we have seen two times in the last century be very costly.
At face value, this first appears to be a sober, rational, and even welcomed approach to US foreign policy - the realization that the pursuit of US primacy is unsustainable and that the US must accept a multipolar world. Moreover, it appears to suggest that the US’ pursuit of a place within this emerging multipolar world should be done “avoiding war and armed conflict.”
The problem, of course, is upon closer inspection of Secretary Rubio’s words throughout the rest of the interview, it becomes clear that the avoidance of war is predicated not on compromises the US is willing to make to find a constructive place for itself within this multipolar world, but instead on the compromises the US expects nations like Russia and China to make for the US to avoid any sort of compromise or concession at all.
January 22, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - With the conflict in Ukraine exposing how unprepared the United States’ military industrial base is for a peer or near-peer conflict, continued efforts are being made to either match Russian and Chinese military industrial output or otherwise compensate for it.
Many attempts to do so, including ongoing efforts by the US Army to expand 155mm artillery shell production, have shown progress but have fallen far short of matching let alone exceeding the output of just Russian shell production alone.
China, whose industrial base overall dwarfs that of the US, Europe, Japan, and South Korea combined, has demonstrated not only an ability to surpass the US in quantity, but now also in quality.
China has already established one of the largest and most capable missile forces on Earth. It also possesses one of the largest, most advanced integrated air defense systems which includes battle-proven Russia-built S-400 air defense systems. In recent years it has expanded the production of its Chengdu J-20 5th generation warplane to match the numbers of the US’ F-22 fighter jet and is on track to match the annual production rate of the US’ other 5th generation warplane, the F-35.
Last year, China unveiled its own additional 5th generation warplane, the J-35 and will likely expand production to match or exceed that of the J-20.
The US Department of Defense admits that many of the munitions these Chinese warplanes carry are as capable or are more capable than those carried by US warplanes including air-to-air missiles with longer ranges than their US counterparts.
In terms of shipbuilding, China has surpassed the United States so profoundly US policymakers admit closing the gap is unrealistic and instead seek to compensate through the development and manufacturing of large numbers of smaller vessels and aircraft including a variety of autonomous systems.
It should seem obvious that if China is capable of matching or exceeding the US in terms of missile, aircraft, and ship production, possessing the largest most prolific commercial drone company on Earth (DJI), China will be easily able to match or exceed both the quantities and quality of US-made autonomous systems.
Anduril and “Rebuilding the Arsenal of Democracy”
This conclusion appears lost on Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus VR - a virtual reality headset manufacturer - and now founder of arms manufacturer Anduril. Luckey believes that Anduril will be able to “hyperscale” production of autonomous aircraft, maritime vessels, and munitions to “rebuild the arsenal of democracy,” and lend victory to the US in a future great-power conflict with China.
Anduril drones have already been used over the battlefield in Ukraine, a peer-conflict the US is waging against Russia by proxy. Those drones have failed to grant Ukraine any advantage as its forces face a total collapse of fighting capacity, losing heavily defended territory to advancing Russian forces at an accelerated rate across the entire line of contact.
Much of Ukraine’s failure on the battlefield is owed to the limits of its Western sponsors and their ability to field practical, low-cost, and numerous enough weapons and systems to match those Russia is deploying.
It could be argued that Anduril’s technology hasn’t been fully matured and the advantage of “hyperscaling” not yet been fully realized, but a much more likely explanation is a fundamental flaw in Anduril’s approach based on an equally flawed understanding of geopolitics and national security, coupled with self-serving short-sighted priorities including profit-over-purpose.
In a January 17, 2025 interview with Bloomberg Technology, Luckey described the building of “Arsenal 1,” Anduril’s first “hyperscale” production facility. Based in Ohio, Luckey claims it will provide up to 4,000 jobs over the course of the next 10 years and produce 1,000s of Anduril “defense products” including cruise missiles and autonomous warplanes.
Luckey sells “Arsenal 1” as a vision of not only revolutionizing US-based military manufacturing, but as a means of compensating for China’s vast industrial base and growing military might. To fully achieve this vision, however, Luckey insists on the US “leveraging the whole of the nation,” to face and overcome the threat he claims China poses.
Selling Overpriced, Under-Performing or So-Far Non-Existent Weapons
Forbes, in its own recent article about the construction of the facility, claims:
The plant is designed to produce tens of thousands of drones per year. Initially these are likely to be Anduril’s current product range , the Fury an autonomous jet fighter which work alongside crewed platforms, the Roadrunner, a one-way interceptor and attack drone and Barracuda, a family of long-range attack drones or cruise missiles with ranges of 100-500 miles.
However, based on publicly available information, neither the Fury nor the Barracuda have been built even as prototypes let alone finished products. Instead, Luckey often poses in front of what are most likely 1:1 scale models of the proposed weapon systems which will face years of further development before they end up mass produced and sold to the US government or exported abroad.
