American/Ukrainians Caught Arming Militants in Myanmar and the US Dirty War on China

March 20, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - India’s national media reported the arrest by Indian security services of US mercenary Matthew VanDyke and six Ukrainians for illegally crossing the border into neighboring Myanmar to provide military training to armed groups fighting Myanmar’s central government. 

Indian security services have also linked the suspects to “importing huge consignments of drones from Europe to Myanmar via India” for “ethnic armed groups,” matching the established pattern of US proxy war waged around the globe throughout the 21st century. 

The military support provided by groups like VanDyke’s “Sons of Liberty” and other US-linked organizations like former US Special Forces operator David Eubank’s “Free Burma Rangers,” together with overt US government funding and support for political opposition groups the US seeks to install into power, have fueled decades of conflict inside Southeast Asia’s nation of Myanmar. 

US-Backed Militants in Myanmar

VanDyke has gravitated toward US wars and proxy wars of aggression around the globe including the US war on Libya in 2011, against Syria also in 2011, and in Ukraine from 2022 onward according to Western sources like Newsweek.  

VanDyke’s recent operation in Myanmar involved not only training militants, but also equipping them with “huge consignments” of drones, indicating a significant source of funding. Because the funding is not disclosed by VanDyke’s “non-profit security contracting firm” it is very likely - as with all other aspects of Myanmar’s opposition - it is funded by the US government and simply laundered through fronts like VanDyke’s. 

Other similarly US-backed operations training and equipping militants in Myanmar include David Eubank’s “Free Burma Rangers” (FBR). US diplomatic cables made available by Wikileaks revealed Eubank regularly reports to US government representatives at the US consulate in neighboring Thailand (here, here, here, here, and here). 

While FBR poses as some sort of nongovernmental organization (NGO) which “assists ethnic resistance groups” with “humanitarian operations,” videos produced by Free Burma Rangers themselves and those by the militant groups they help train and equip, depict the organization providing military training (including weapons training), as well as FBR members themselves carrying weapons on patrol with local militants.

The political opposition these armed groups seek to install into power, the so-called “National Unity Government” (NUG) is itself a documented wholecloth creation of the US government.  

At the AI Race’s Finishing Line: A World of Abundance or Automated Dominance?

February 12, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance, an important but unnoticed debate is taking place within the halls of Western power and among a handful of billionaire business leaders and investors regarding the shape of the world to come as this technology permeates every aspect of modern civilization. 

Western-based optimists insist that AI will bring about a utopian world of abundance, eliminating poverty, illness, and violence and insist that the US must win an intensifying AI race with China to do so. 

Paradoxically, it is the US who has, in the past several decades - including throughout the entirety of the 21st century, perpetuated and even compounded existing poverty, illness, and violence stretching from Latin America to Central Asia and everywhere in between. The US has - in the past 26 years alone - invaded and destroyed entire nations, killing millions and displacing 10s of millions fleeing from the poverty, illness, and violence stemming from US-led war. 

Even within US borders, these same interests have ravaged the American population through predatory economic practices prioritizing profit and power over any semblance of societal or civilizational purpose. This has manifested itself as rotting infrastructure, inaccessible healthcare, unaffordable education, and the growing dearth of opportunities emerging from a society systematically exploited and neglected rather than built-up and invested in. 

For a Western-based billionaire - this reality may not be apparent because of the cocoon of luxury, comfort, and security immense wealth affords anyone, anywhere - but it is reality nonetheless. 

China, on the other hand, has already spent the last several decades lifting hundreds of millions of its own people out of poverty, improving healthcare, and eradicating violent crime within its borders long before AI became a practical reality. 

China Pursues Abundance, Cooperation, and Coexistence 

Throughout the 21st century China has not invaded a single nation nor participated in the sort of unilateral economic sanctions the US and its partners have used to target scores of nations around the globe with the explicit purpose of crushing economies and dividing and destroying populations to in turn induce “regime change.” 

Instead, China has continued to rapidly build out its own infrastructure while partnering with nations around the globe, long neglected under decades of Western domination, to build desperately needed modern infrastructure creating what China refers to as the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI). 

Nations like Laos in Southeast Asia - upon which the US dropped more bombs during the Vietnam War than the nation's total population - received its first and only modern rail route thanks to China’s BRI - a high-speed rail line that has transformed the landlocked impoverished nation into a logistics and tourism corridor between China and the rest of Southeast Asia. 

Neighboring Thailand has also greatly benefited from the rise of China in profound ways decades of “major non-NATO ally” status with the US failed to provide including expanding trade, tourism, manufacturing, infrastructure expansion, and technology transfers rapidly modernizing Thailand at a pace US-proxies in the region like the Philippines will likely never experience in the near or intermediate future. 

Consumer costs for cars, computers, smartphones, and all other types of consumer and industrial electronics and equipment have plummeted across nations in Asia trading with China - empowering individuals, small businesses and large enterprises alike to do more, more quickly, and with less resources. 

A visit to anywhere across Asia where Chinese-driven development has escaped US efforts to sabotage, stagnate, or reverse, reveals stunning progress at all levels of society, not just for a handful of billionaires. 

US Consolidates Control Over Proxies Amid War on Multipolarism

February 2, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - Behind the political theater that is the “US-European split,” exists an aggressive campaign of US consolidation over its many proxies - including and perhaps especially over Europe itself. 

Narratives floating through Western media space depict the US as challenging or threatening not only Europe over control of Denmark’s Greenland territory, but also Canada in North America. Articles are written telling tales of Europe and Canada seeking leverage against Washington and countermeasures to protect themselves and their interests up to and including preparations for “guerrilla warfare” against potentially invading American forces. 

In reality, nothing of the sort will take place. 

Already, opportunities for gaining actual leverage against the United States have been eagerly surrendered to the United States, particularly with the recent decision by the EU for a “complete ban on Russian gas imports by 2027.”

The ban means the EU will completely eliminate any alternative to its growing dependence on US LNG imports leaving the US with disproportionate leverage over the EU as a whole and its members individually regarding virtually any matter of foreign or even domestic policy. It is inconceivable that the EU’s leadership would surrender such leverage to the US amid a supposed and growing “split” with the US unless of course there was no real split to begin with. 

A Matter of Perception Management 

Instead, what is unfolding is perception management meant to shape both the American and wider Western public ahead of implementing the publicly declared “division of labor” and “burden-sharing network” announced by the Trump administration and already taking shape during the previous Biden administration. 

It was under the Biden administration that the first National Defense Industrial Strategy was published - admitting to the US’ failure to match Russian let alone Chinese military industrial production and the necessity for the United States to consolidate control over its vast network of “allies and partners,” combining their collective resources, industrial capacity, and military power to confront Russia and China’s growing power across all relevant domains. 

Under a section titled, “Engage Allies and Partners to Expand Global Defense Production and

Increase Supply Chain Resilience,” the Biden-era paper noted:

“The global activity of pacing threats increasingly requires a global approach to defense industrial relationships, concerns, and competition. International allies and partners, each with their own robust defense industries, will continue to be a cornerstone of the DoD’s concept of Integrated Deterrence. Indeed, the global system of alliances and partnerships is central to the NDS, which calls to incorporate allies and partners at every stage of defense planning. Such linkages and relationships will continue to be a cornerstone of Integrated Deterrence in resisting and, if necessary, defeating known and emerging threats.”

The paper also noted: 

“The United States has a complex web of friend-shoring-suitable alliances and partnerships around the world; a partial list includes Australia, Canada, the European Union, India, Israel, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom.”

The paper defines “friend-shoring” as, “a process that engages allies and partners in production and processing of critical and strategic materials and supplies.” 

The concept of the US exploiting its “web” of “friend-shoring” partners to compensate for the US’ own limits regarding military industrial production and to serve as an extension of America’s own military power has been continued - even accelerated - during the subsequent Trump administration. 

In a February 2025 directive US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth delivered to Europe in Brussels, he made it clear that Europe in particular would have to increase defense spending from 2% of each member nation’s GDP to 5% which all European nations have subsequently agreed to do.  

Washington’s War on Iran: The Importance of Defending Information Space

January 15, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - The US has demonstrably continued its war on Iran through the execution of long-laid plans aimed at destabilizing the nation through US-backed protests and armed terrorists targeting major cities over the course of several days.  

This follows a nearly 2 week-long war the US and its Israeli proxies launched against Iran in mid-2025 - only having been placed on pause ahead of the next round of destabilization and military aggression which appears to be unfolding now. 

Amid the US-organized unrest in January 2026, the US has openly backed the opposition calling for armed militants to continue their operations and to even seize government institutions. 

Associated Press would quote the US president as saying, “keep protesting and take over your institutions if you can,” and that, “help is on the way,” in reference to previous threats of US military strikes on Iran in support of the opposition. 

Beyond rhetorical support, evidence of direct US involvement began to surface amid Western media reports. 

The BBC in a recent article admitted - buried deep in the report - that “security forces have also been killed,” implying heavily armed elements amid the so-called “protests.”  The same article admitted that informants contacting the BBC from within Iran were using “Starlink” satellite connections - referring to US-based SpaceX’s satellite communication network. 

This comes as no surprise. As early as 2022, CNN reported that, “the White House has engaged in talks with Elon Musk about the possibility of setting up SpaceX’s satellite internet service Starlink inside Iran,” as one of several ways to “support the Iranian protest movement." 

More recently, Forbes has admitted, “tens of thousands of Starlink units are operating inside Iran,” a metric of how aggressively the Biden administration-era initiative was executed and then continued under the subsequent Trump administration. 

Beyond continuity of agenda between the supposedly “opposing” presidential administrations, plans to back violent unrest inside Iran have been laid out by US policymakers as early as 2009 in the Brookings Institution paper, “Which Path to Persia?” and seamlessly carried out by each successive administration regardless of political affiliation or campaign rhetoric.  

US War on Venezuela is a War on the Multipolar World

January 13, 2026 - (Beijing Review - Brian Berletic) - In brazen violation of international law and abandonment of even the illusion of legitimacy, the United States has launched a war of aggression against the Latin American nation of Venezuela. The operation included missile strikes and the bombing of targets across the country as well as the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by US forces who have since delivered him to New York where he is being put through a show trial.

This attack represents the culmination of a decades-long project aimed at dismantling Venezuela, reasserting Washington’s hegemony over the Western Hemisphere, all while escalating its war against emerging multipolarism worldwide.

Drugs as “Weapons of Mass Destruction” 

The justification provided by the Trump administration for military intervention centers on President Maduro as “the kingpin of a vast criminal network responsible for trafficking colossal amounts of deadly and illicit drugs into the United States.”

US President Donald Trump has gone so far as to equate drug trafficking to "weapons of mass destruction," recycling the same false pretext used to sell the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 to the American and global public.

However, Washington’s own internal documentation contradicts this narrative. The Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment in its 80-pages mentions Venezuela only six times. To put this in perspective, Mexico is mentioned 70 times, China 17 times, and even Canada - a close US ally - is mentioned seven times.

If Venezuela’s government was indeed responsible for “trafficking colossal amounts of deadly and illicit drugs into the United States,” and on a scale justifying military intervention, it would have been the centerpiece of the DEA’s report. 

Instead, the report only mentions Venezuela under a section titled, “other violent transnational criminal organizations” and describes "Tren de Aragua" (TDA) as a street-level gang whose drug activities are "small-scale" and limited to the distribution of "tusi," not the “collosal” shipments of fentanyl or cocaine Washington accused the Venezuelan state of orchestrating. In fact, the DEA report does not mention the Venezuelan government or President Maduro even once in the entire report.

The disparity between the administration’s rhetoric and the DEA’s own documented findings reveals the pretext of “drugs” flowing from Venezuela no more a reality than “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq - both deliberate lies told to sell otherwise unprovoked wars of aggression. 

Beyond Just an Oil Grab…  

The true objectives of this war were laid bare during a recent White House press conference following the military strikes. 

In a transcript of the conference, the word "drug" or "drugs" was mentioned only nine times. In contrast, the word "oil" was mentioned 27 times. President Trump’s rhetoric shifted rapidly from the supposed drug threat to the logistical details of seizing Venezuela’s natural resources.

President Trump declared the US would “run” Venezuela and that American oil companies would take over energy production in the seized nation. 

Beyond a brazen resource grab, the attack on and toppling of Venezuela’s government fits into a much larger global war the US is waging both against the concept of multipolarism and its chief proponents, namely China and Russia. 

At the same time the US declares control over Venezuela, it is fomenting deadly violence in the streets of Iran after having carried out direct military strikes on it mid-last year. 

Recent reports in the New York Times admit the US has also been carrying out strikes on Russian energy production deep inside Russian territory itself (via the CIA) as well as conducting maritime drone strikes on tankers exporting Russian energy. 

Venezuela, Iran, and Russia all share  common characteristics - they are partners of and major oil exporters to China. 

Venezuela shipped over 80% of its oil to China. In the middle of the US’ military build up and subsequent blockade of Venezuelan maritime shipping, at least one tanker bound for China was outright seized by the US. 

Zooming out of the Western Hemisphere and accounting for ongoing US war and proxy war worldwide, a larger strategy emerges. Washington is in the process of implementing a long-desired, global energy blockade on China. 

A 2018 policy paper from the US Naval War College Review titled "A Maritime Oil Blockade Against China" discussed the process of closing maritime chokepoints as part of a “distant blockade” just beyond the range of the majority of China’s military capabilities. 

It also noted that China had worked to diversify away from overdependence on these maritime chokepoints, including through the construction of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The paper proposed that BRI routes be targeted and cut. 

Using the Myanmar-China pipeline as an example, the 2018 paper noted that if Myanmar’s government refused to close the pipeline during a US-China conflict, the US could disable it “via air strikes, aerial mining, or other kinetic action.”