November 21, 2024 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - Russia’s use of its Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile in eastern Ukraine represents an unprecedented escalation in what began as a US proxy war against Russia in 2014.
The missile’s capabilities represent a serious non-nuclear means of striking targets anywhere in Europe without the collective West;s ability to sufficiently defend against it.
The possibility of the West now facing direct consequences for what has so far been a proxy war, may reintroduce rational thought across the West otherwise not required when spending the lives of others. It may, however, cause Western policymakers to double down, confident in the belief that they remain decoupled from any possible consequences despite unprecedented escalation.
Fundamentals, Not Wonder Weapons are Winning the War
The missile’s use is only the latest demonstration of Russia’s military and escalatory dominance amid the ongoing proxy war. It alone would be unable to significantly impact the fighting, but because the Russian Federation over the last two decades has invested deeply in the fundamentals of national defense, it compliments a range of other capabilities serving as a deterrence against continued Western encroachment.
Before the deployment of the Oreshnik, the progress of Russian forces along the line of contact in Ukraine had been accelerating, triggering panic across the capitals of Western nations. This was not achieved through any single “wonder weapon,” but through Russia’s post-Cold War strategy of preparing its military forces and its military industrial capacity to wage a large-scale, prolonged, and intense conflict against Western-backed forces building up along Russia’s borders.
This included the development and large-scale production of both simple and advanced weapons ranging from main battle tanks and other armored vehicles, to drones, cruise missiles, air defense systems, and electronic warfare capabilities.
Because Russia’s arms industry operates under state-owned enterprises prioritizing state needs over generating profit, the systems required in terms of both quality and quantity were made available. This was possible because surplus production capacity had been maintained across a large number of Russian arms production facilities. Excess labor and equipment that would have been slashed by private enterprise across the West to maximize profits was maintained if and when needed. Come February 2022, this excess capacity was utilized and has since been the central factor contributing to Russia’s growing success against NATO-backed forces in Ukraine.
The West, on the other hand, is suffering a growing military industrial crisis. Excess production capacity needs to be built from scratch, taking years or longer. Across the collective West, skilled labor shortages prevent assembly lines from being expanded significantly, even if the will and resources exist to do so. In all areas of production, from air defense missiles to artillery shells, the collective West is struggling to meet even the most meager production targets.
November 21, 2024 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - The incoming Trump administration is poised to pick up where the Biden administration has left off on the decades-spanning centerpiece of US foreign policy - the encirclement and containment of China. This includes through an intense US military build up across the Asia-Pacific region, provocations over the island province of Taiwan, and continued interference in nations along China’s periphery.
It also means a continuation of opposing cooperation between China and nations around the globe seeking alternatives to the debt, division, and destitution decades of US domination have imposed upon them, including across Latin America.
With the appointment of leading neo-conservative war hawks to key positions including US Secretary of State, the US Secretary of Defense, and the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, far from ending America’s wars abroad, the incoming Trump administration is poised to reprioritize and pivot toward the largest and most dangerous confrontation of all.
Target China and the Continuity of Agenda
US foreign policy since the end of World War 2 has fixated on the elimination of all peer and near-peer adversaries including China. A 1965 memorandum from then US Secretary of State Robert McNamara to then US President Lyndon B. Johnson identified China as chief among these adversaries.
The memorandum noted that ongoing US military operations in Vietnam, “make sense only if they are in support of a long-run United States policy to contain Communist China.”
It stated explicitly, “China looms as a major power threatening to undercut our importance and effectiveness in the world and, more remotely but more menacingly, to organize all of Asia against us.”
The same memorandum would identify 3 fonts along which the US sought to contain China, “(a) the Japan-Korea front; (b) the India-Pakistan front; and (c) the Southeast Asia front,” fronts along which US efforts to contain China including through the stationing of tens of thousands of US troops continues to this day - US troops closer to Chinese territory than America’s own shores.
When the Cold War ended, the US renewed its pursuit of global primacy in what is often referred to as the “Wolfowitz doctrine,” articulated in a 1992 New York Times article titled, “U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop,” stating:
In a broad new policy statement that is in its final drafting stage, the Defense Department asserts that America's political and military mission in the post-cold-war era will be to insure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territory of the former Soviet Union.
The same article noted that US foreign policy, “makes the case for a world dominated by one superpower whose position can be perpetuated by constructive behavior and sufficient military might to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy.”
And from the end of the Cold War to present day the US has fought wars of aggression cutting a swath of death and destruction from North Africa to Central Asia, spanning the presidencies of George Bush Sr., Bill Clinton, George Bush Jr., Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden, often with one administration helping set the stage for subsequent wars launched under successive administrations.
Examples of this include preparations by the Bush Jr. administration for the overthrow of the Syrian government, a policy eventually executed during the 2011 so-called “Arab Spring” under the Obama administration, and continued throughout both the subsequent Trump and Biden administrations.
The ongoing war in Ukraine likewise involved incremental steps pursued by US administrations stretching back to 2004 under President Bush Jr. where regime change was pursued, finally succeeding under the Obama administration in 2014, continuing under the Trump administration when US arms began flowing to Ukraine, and finally pulling Russia into direct conflict with Ukraine under the Biden administration.
While supporters of the incoming Trump administration have claimed President-elect Donald Trump represents a break from these special interests and their agenda of US-imposed domination around the globe, both the first Trump administration’s National Security Strategy published in 2017 and the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) connected to President-elect Trump proposed and pursued policies indistinguishable from those laid out by America’s neo-conservative establishment for decades.
The Trump administration’s 2017 National Security Strategy would claim:
The United States will respond to the growing political, economic, and military competitions we face around the world. China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity. They are determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence.
The same strategy paper would insist in regards to the projection of American power abroad that, “we will advance American influence because a world that supports American interests and reflects our values makes America more secure and prosperous.”
It is no surprise then that US political interference, proxy wars, and actual wars all continued under the Trump administration from 2016-2020 without exception.
The subsequent Biden administration’s 2022 National Security Strategy would say of China:
The PRC is the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it. Beijing has ambitions to create an enhanced sphere of influence in the Indo-Pacific and to become the world’s leading power. It is using its technological capacity and increasing influence over international institutions to create more permissive conditions for its own authoritarian model, and to mold global technology use and norms to privilege its interests and values. Beijing frequently uses its economic power to coerce countries. It benefits from the openness of the international economy while limiting access to its domestic market, and it seeks to make the world more dependent on the PRC while reducing its own dependence on the world. The PRC is also investing in a military that is rapidly modernizing, increasingly capable in the Indo-Pacific, and growing in strength and reach globally – all while seeking to erode U.S. alliances in the region and around the world.
This sentiment does not represent a separate or different strategy from that under the Trump or even Obama administration before that, or the 1992 Wolfowitz doctrine or those presented by Secretary MacNamara in 1965, but instead the evolution of a singular strategy pursued post-World War 2, continued post-Cold War, up to and including today.
AFPI’s current website under a section titled, “Hold Communist China Fully Accountable for Chronic Unfair Trade Practices, Stealing American Technologies, and Polluting our Planet’s Air and Oceans,” says:
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) and its ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) represent the premier national security threat to the United States. China’s concerning activities include chronic unfair trade practices, stealing American technologies, aggression against its neighbors, abuse of the environment, and an accelerating nuclear weapons program. Additionally, China has displayed a complete lack of transparency about the origins of COVID-19. We must hold China fully accountable for its actions.
Just as with the 1965 State Department memorandum, the 1992 US Department of Defense strategy paper, the 2017 and 2022 Trump and Biden administration National Security Strategies, AFPI insists that China’s rise is a threat to US interests abroad and that military and economic measures must be taken to contain this rise.
Beyond baseless accusations, no explanation is provided by any of these documents spanning half a century as to why the US is entitled to dictate the means by which nations beyond American borders interact including through trade and security cooperation or why China’s rise in the Asia-Pacific region and its growing influence around the globe somehow threatens the actual security of the United States within its own borders.
Instead, these documents are concerned that America’s own unwarranted influence abroad, built on political interference, as well as economic and military coercion, will be displaced by a more attractive and constructive relationship with China amid a greater balance of global power through what is often referred to as multipolarism.
Chinese Infrastructure vs. American Interference
Most recently, developments in the Latin American nation of Peru provide a showcase of China’s role in driving development, economic trade, and the construction of infrastructure with the completion of the Chancay Megaport, investments in energy infrastructure as well as the development of 5G telecommunication networks.
The Chancay port not only supercharges imports and exports from Peru itself, but because of its strategic location in South America including a shared border with Brazil, it enables the movement of goods and people from one side of the continent to the other, transforming Chancay into a regional logistics hub.
The US government has opposed Chinese investments, infrastructure projects, and growing trade around the world, including in Latin America. On US government-funded media platforms like Diálogo Americas, maintained by US Southern Command, a clear policy of opposing Chinese influence is pushed using fabricated claims of “dual-use infrastructure,” providing a “foothold for a future military presence in the region.”
November 13, 2024 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - In the weeks leading up to the 2024 US presidential election, Americans and many around the world invested hope that former-president and now President-elect Donald Trump would grind America’s wars abroad to a halt and instead invest in the United States itself.
These hopes were based on rhetoric surrounding the Trump campaign. The candidate’s son, Donald Trump Jr., remarked publicly, “we need maximum pressure to keep all neocons and war hawks out of the Trump administration,” a reflection of candidate Trump’s rhetoric on the campaign trail.
Unfortunately, just as was the case during President-elect Donald Trump’s previous term in office, this was an empty promise meant to secure the support of war-weary Americans and possibly even to throw nations abroad off balance, before filling his cabinet with the most vocal “neocons and war hawks” living and breathing in Washington D.C.
Continuity of Agenda…
During President-elect Trump’s previous administration, he lined his cabinet with hardcore neocons and war hawks like John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and Nikki Haley who all worked ceaselessly to continue all the wars President Trump inherited from the Obama administration and attempt to provoke additional wars US special interests have long-since sought including with China, Iran, and even Russia itself.
During the first Trump administration, the US initiated a trade war with China and other measures aimed at gutting China’s largest and most successful businesses including smartphone manufacturer Huawei, culminating in sales bans across the collective West, US-based Google cutting Huawei off from its Android operating system, and even the detainment of Huawei’s CFO Meng Wanzhou while traveling in Canada.
During the first Trump administration, the US also continued its military build-up across the Asia-Pacific as a means of encircling and containing China within its own borders, another policy inherited from the Obama administration.
In the Middle East, the Trump administration continued the illegal occupation of Syria which began under the Obama administration, continued carrying out strikes against the Syrian government and its allies, with President Trump bragging about pilfering Syrian oil. It was also during the first Trump administration that the US assassinated senior Iranian military leader General Qasem Soleimani while visiting Iraq on official business, an indisputable act of war against both Iran and Iraq. General Soleimani had until then been successfully fighting the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” across the region, including in Syria and Iraq.
And while President Trump was accused of being an agent of Russian interests, in reality his administration helped accelerate the US proxy war with Russia in Ukraine by beginning to arm Ukrainian forces, almost certainly the final red line crossed convincing Moscow to launch its Special Military Operation (SMO) in February 2022. It was also during the first Trump administration that the US withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, paving the way for the subsequent Biden administration to station intermediate-range missiles in Europe pointed at Russia.
As the first Trump administration egregiously violated campaign promises of ending US involvement abroad, many Trump supporters resorted to a number of excuses including President Trump’s “inexperience,” suggesting he may not have known who Pompeo, Bolton, or Haley actually were and that during a second administration his cabinet would act upon lessons learned.
Restocking the Swamp…
Fast-forward to today, the incoming Trump administration had temporarily bolstered that hope – that these lessons were indeed learned – by announcing Bolton, Pompeo and Haley would play no role in the incoming administration.
This was short-lived, however, as it was subsequently announced that the next national security adviser would likely be Mike Waltz, the ideological twin of John Bolton. Elsie Stafanik was announced as US ambassador to the UN, the ideological twin of Nikki Haley. And both Marco Rubio and Richard Grenell are being considered as the possible incoming US Secretary of State, men whose views are indistinguishable from former Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – or US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken under the Biden administration for that matter.
November 5, 2024 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - Israel’s most recent missile strikes on Iran reveal the limits to conventional Western military power in the Middle East, reflecting wider limits globally. While Israel’s air force conducted a sophisticated, large-scale operation requiring well-trained, well-coordinated personnel as well as capable air-launched long-range precision guided missiles, a combination of Iranian defensive capabilities and constraints on Western (including Israeli) military industrial production limited results.
While Israel and its US sponsors are capable of larger-scale military operations, this would be within the context of open warfare – warfare US-Israeli forces and their combined industrial power would struggle to sustain.
Doubts may exist regarding Iranian resolve and resilience and whether it and its allies could outlast and outfight US-Israeli forces short of either or both the US and Israel resorting to nuclear weapons. Even if the US and its proxies, including Israel, were to prevail over Iran in the Middle East, it may come at the cost of forfeiting Washington’s pursuit of primacy elsewhere around the globe, including in Ukraine versus Russia and the Asia-Pacific region versus China.
Escalation Toward War
Long-standing US policy seeks to use Israel to provoke war with Iran, absolving Washington of responsibility while creating a pretext for Washington itself to wade into the conflict once it begins. Despite Israel lacking the conventional military power required to fight and win a war against Iran, Israel has conducted a long list of provocations to draw Iran into conflict, nonetheless, specifically to fulfill this US foreign policy objective.
Exchanges of missile strikes between Israel and Iran began in April 2024 when Israel attacked the Iranian consulate in Damascus, killing military personnel and civilians. It triggered a chain-reaction of strikes, assassinations, and retaliations, documented in a timeline laid out by the New York Times.
Iran’s first retaliatory strike in April 2024 consisted of a barrage of drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles two weeks after its consulate was attacked and after notifying the United States days prior, giving the US and its regional partners ample time to coordinate efforts to intercept most of the incoming weapons.
October 23, 2024 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - North Korea has recently warned against the use of drones over its sovereign airspace to spread subversive propaganda.
CNN in its October 11, 2024 article, “North Korea accuses South of flying drones over Pyongyang,” reported, “North Korea accused South Korea of flying propaganda-filled drones over Pyongyang and threatened “retaliation,” state media reported.”
The same article admits that “South Korean activists and North Korean defectors have sent balloons to the North, loaded with propaganda material criticizing leader Kim Jong Un, along with USB sticks filled with K-pop songs and South Korean television shows.”
What the article omitted is that this campaign is not an organic activity carried out by independent activists, but a campaign of subversion organized and funded by the US government.
A US State Department Provocation…
As early as 2014, the Western media promoted what was called, “Thumb Drives for Democracy,” a campaign organized by the New York-based Human Rights Foundation (HRF).
The Atlantic published an article in early 2014 titled, “We Hacked North Korea With Balloons and USB Drives,” by HRF founder Thor Halvorssen, which admits its balloons carry “subversive information” meant to undermine the North Korean government. It also admits that before HRF began its campaign, “the U.S. government provided support for these groups through the National Endowment for Democracy* and the State Department’s DRL [The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Affairs] programs.”
The balloons were just one part of a much wider campaign of subversion and ultimately regime change.
HRF also organizes the annual “Oslo Freedom Forum” (OFF) funded in part by the Freedom Fund, which includes the US State Department as a “key investor.” The OFF is a continuation of US State Department-funded training programs gathering agitators from around the globe, training, funding, and equipping them to then return to their respective nations and attempt to overthrow them.
The New York Times in its 2011 article, “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings,” admits the US government prepared years ahead of the so-called “Arab Spring,” backing the core organizations that ultimately carried it out across the Middle East and North Africa. The article explicitly states:
A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington, according to interviews in recent weeks and American diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks.
Clearly, HRF serves as an intermediary continuing US government-funded sedition around the globe in a way more difficult to trace directly back to the US government itself. Its objectives nonetheless remain to undermine, divide, destabilize, and overthrow nations targeted by the US State Department for regime change, including North Korea.
More Than Just Balloons…
Considering the aftermath of the admittedly US-engineered “Arab Spring” which included the full-scale destruction of Libya, a deeply divided Egypt, and a nearly destroyed Syria, North Korea’s concerns regarding similar US government-sponsored activities being aimed at it falls far short of an overreaction.
