US Prepares Terrorist Army to Expand its Dirty War on China

June 23, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - The US media has invested in recent years in rehabilitating Uyghur Chinese extremists now based in Syria, depicting them as “freedom fighters” whose ultimate goal is to “liberate” (carve off) territory in western China, and are preparing to fight China across Eurasia - adding to an already ongoing dirty war the US has been waging against China over the 20th and 21st centuries.

  

A Familiar Pattern 

From the Cold War to present day, the United States has actively created and used the world’s worst terrorist organizations to advance US geopolitical objectives worldwide. This includes the creation and use of Al Qaeda (through local chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood) in the 1970s and 1980s in Syria and their export to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union until their withdrawal in 1989. 

It also includes the use of these same terrorists to divide and disrupt unified resistance to invading US forces in Iraq from 2003 onward, and the eventual region-wide US reordering of the Arab World spanning Libya and Egypt in North Africa to Yemen and Syria in the MIddle East beginning under the likewise US-engineered “Arab Spring” in 2011. 

From North Africa to Central Asia, the US has admittedly utilized terrorist organizations listed by the US State Department itself as such, to both target nations the US military cannot attack directly and to serve as a pretext for US invasions and occupations in nations the US seeks to attack more directly. 

Other episodes in which this US strategy has been employed include against both Russia in its southern Caucasus region and even as far as China in East Asia. 

While both Russia and China appear to have successfully neutralized this malicious method of proxy warfare utilized by Washington within their respective borders, the US continues not only arming and building up terrorist forces for future conflicts, but is also shaping public perception to depict such use of US-sponsored terrorism as somehow supporting “freedom fighters” against “authoritarian” governments. 

US Media Reintroducing Uyghur Terrorists as “Freedom Fighters” 

A troubling sign that the US continues seeking to use extremists specifically tailored for attacking China and its investments and projects across Eurasia, is a May 2026 National Public Radio (NPR) article titled, “The foreign fighters who helped topple Assad — and why China worries about them.” 

The article - only the latest of many spanning recent years - portrays the largest segment of foreign fighters involved in the US-backed overthrow of Syria in 2024 - Uyghur extremists from China’s western region of Xinjiang - as simply fleeing persecution in China and incidentally ending up aligned with and fighting alongside Al Qaeda. 

The article mentions the previously US State Department-designated foreign terrorist organization (until June 2025) Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) Uyghur fighters were recruited into as an Al Qaeda affiliate which ultimately overran Syrian forces in 2024, toppling the Syrian government.

HTS’ figurehead Abu Mohammad al-Jolani (now referred to as Ahmed al-Sharaa) has even been designated as Syria’s defacto president by the US and its proxies and has even been invited to the White House by current US President Donald Trump despite previously having a 10 million USD reward on his head by the US government itself.

The moral flexibility of the US regarding Al Qaeda based on whether the US is trying to justify direct military intervention in Syria before the government’s collapse or cement a terrorist-led proxy regime afterwards is the central hallmark of the decades-spanning use by Washington of terrorist organizations to target, undermine, topple, then politically capture targeted nations. 

Afghanistan: America’s Other Ongoing Proxy War

May 11, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - A recent article published by the US arms-industry, big-tech, banking, and other Western special interests-funded Lowy Institute’s “Interpreter,” boldly claims “Afghanistan is surrendering its mineral wealth - and its future.” 

China is accused of simply digging up and removing raw minerals from Afghanistan for processing elsewhere - a process the article claims amounts to China robbying Afghanistan of its natural resources and deliberately leaving it in a state of perpetual destitution. 

What the article deliberately omits is the presence of armed extremists attacking Chinese investments, diplomatic missions, and personnel across the country, making it physically impossible for China to invest in and enable Afghanistan - for the time being - to process this raw mineral wealth domestically and export higher-value industrial inputs for greater profits. 

China’s attempts to work with Afghanistan - providing it immediate and desperately needed income to rebuild the nation comes after 20 years of US military occupation and abuses - coupled together with the US seizure of over 9.5 billion USD in Afghan assets from 2021 onward and the use of US-backed extremists to sabotage any attempt to stabilize, rebuild, and perhaps even develop the Central Asian country.  

The US, having created the death, destruction, and poverty Afghans currently suffer under, through its propaganda organs are attempting to shift the blame onto nations like China attempting to work with Afghanistan despite the challenges deliberately created by the US to do so in the first place. 

Washington’s Long History of using Extremists to Destabilize Others

While the US wages high profile wars and proxy wars around the globe - from attacking Venezuela in Latin America, to attacking Russian energy production, storage, and export facilities and attributing it to “Ukraine” in Europe, and its ongoing war of aggression against Iran in the Middle East - the US is also waging a number of dirty wars everywhere in between. 

The US War for Energy Dominance Leads to Dominance Over Europe and Asia

May 3, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - The US war on Iran - at face value - appears to be a catastrophic tactical and strategic US failure demonstrating the limits of its military power and further exposing the limits of its military industrial capacity. 

However, just as with its still-ongoing proxy war on Russia in Ukraine, its inability to overwhelm targeted nations with outright military power distracts away from the many ways the US is still advancing its geopolitical objectives by other means. 

In Ukraine, the US has categorically failed in defeating Russian forces through its support of its Ukrainian proxies. However, it has used the war to lock Russia into an expensive, prolonged, high-intensity conflict that has demonstrably compromised Russian interests beyond Europe - especially regarding the 2024 collapse of Syria.

The war has also succeeded in cutting Europe off from cheap, reliable, and plentiful Russian energy and is placing Europe under increasing, and likely irreversible energy dependence on the United States. 

This energy dependence on the US obviously benefits US-based energy corporations financially but also enhances Washington’s strategic leverage or even outright control over Europe. This control is being used to successfully create a united front across Europe against Russia. 

In a similar manner - the US is using its war on Iran to strangle energy exports from the entire Middle East to Asia to decouple Asia from cheap, reliable, plentiful gas and oil and place it under US energy dependence, thus providing the US strategic leverage over Asia to create a similar united front against China. 

Decoupling Europe from Russian Energy Through War Was Planned 

In the 2019 RAND Corporation paper titled, “Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground,” a number of “economic” and “geopolitical” measures were laid out, designed to “extend” Russia and possibly precipitate a Soviet Union-style collapse like that which ended the Cold War.

Under “economic measures,” the paper lists “hinder petroleum exports,” “reduce natural gas exports and hinder pipeline expansions,” “impose sanctions,” and “enhance Russian brain drain.”   

The paper first argues that one of the main methods of implementing these measures is to expand US oil and gas production and its export to Europe. 

However, under a section titled, “likelihood of success," the paper explicitly admits:

“Reducing European peacetime consumption of Russian gas has a medium to low likelihood of success. Diversifying away from Russia is expensive, and projects might be difficult to accomplish.”  

It should be remembered that at the time, the US was already investing in LNG export facilities and even exporting LNG targeting markets in Europe - at a time US policymakers admitted it made no financial or economic sense to do so. 

However, the paper was far from finished. Under “geopolitical measures,” the paper lists first and foremost, “provide lethal aid to Ukraine.” 

The paper admits that: 

“Expanding U.S. assistance to Ukraine, including lethal military assistance, would likely increase the costs to Russia, in both blood and treasure, of holding the Donbass region. More Russian aid to the separatists and an additional Russian troop presence would likely be required, leading to larger expenditures, equipment losses, and Russian casualties. The latter could become quite controversial at home, as it did when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.”

In other words, by providing lethal aid to Ukraine - which the US began doing under the first Trump administration - the US would be knowingly attempting to provoke a war with Russia in Ukraine. 

Not only would the resulting war generate high costs for Russia militarily, it would also obviously transform the chief obstacle to reducing/hindering Russian oil/gas exports and expanding US LNG exports - that chief obstacle being “peacetime” - into unending wartime.

The US War on Iran is a US War on Multipolarism

April 3, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - The US war of aggression launched against Iran on February 28, 2026 is only the most recent US aggression launched to undermine and dismantle the multipolar world. The US has not only threatened the existence of Iran as a nation state as well as the security of the entire Middle East, but the death and destruction it has caused has already begun to radiate out across the world in terms of disrupted or destroyed energy exports and rapidly unraveling economic stability.

 

The US - being energy independent itself - has forced much of the world into an American energy monopoly - having placed sanctions on Russian energy exports and now either seizing, disrupting, or destroying all other potential competitors. 

This includes a US invasion of Venezuela just earlier this year, kidnapping the Venezuelan president and holding the remaining government hostage while openly seizing the nation’s natural resources - including oil - for the US itself. 

The current US war of aggression against Iran is not only targeting Iranian energy production but has resulted in regional conflict damaging or destroying energy production across the Persian Gulf altogether. . 

Because the US produces nowhere near the amount of oil and LNG required to make up for disrupted or destroyed energy production and exports from the Middle East, this will result in global energy shortages and subsequent collapses in both industry and consumer demand. 

The world which had been collectively rising above and beyond the reach of US primacy now faces the prospect of being deliberately destabilized and dragged down by the US. 

The US itself, incapable of competing within the very world order it created following the World Wars, has decided to use its remaining military, economic, financial, and political strength to demolish it in the hope of emerging from the settling debris once again “strongest.” 

Far from an obscure theory, this is an observation made even by Russia’s top diplomat, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who in a recent interview would say that, “the events in Latin America and the Middle East directly stem from the West’s attempts to preserve the remnants of its dominance,” and that, “the elites of Western countries, continue to invest whatever political and economic resources they have left in their confrontation with our country.” 

Far from a last minute plan, the US spent much of the 21st century preparing not only for the now ongoing war with Iran but also its ongoing proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, and its growing encirclement of China in the Asia-Pacific region - targeting all of multipolarism’s major pillars and many in between. 

On the Path to Persia 

To encircle and weaken Iran, the US invaded Afghanistan to its east and Iraq to its west in 2001 and 2003 respectively under the Bush Jr. administration. During that same administration, the US began preparing armies of extremists to wage proxy war against Iran and its regional allies including Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, the nation of Syria, and Ansar Allah in Yemen. 

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.  

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.  

Thai-Cambodian Conflict Threatens Asian Stability by Design

December 15, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - Major hostilities erupted once again early to mid-December in Southeast Asia along the borders of Thailand and Cambodia following a troubled “ceasefire” which included incidents and provocations for months since the last round of major fighting took place in July 2025. 

Despite any resulting ceasefire, the fundamental issues driving the conflict remain entirely unresolved, primarily because these issues stem from foreign interests using regional conflict to complicate both Asia’s rise in general, and China’s rise specifically. 

The Nature of the Fighting  

Fighting erupted after Cambodian land mines and small arms fire left Thai troops injured and dead early December 8 leading to spiraling violence involving heavy artillery, warplanes, drones, and intense small arms fire at locations all along the Thai-Cambodian border. 

Cambodia launched hundreds of BM-21 unguided multiple launch rocket system munitions into Thailand prompting the Thai military to respond with air and drone strikes targeting both the launchers themselves as well as local ammunition depots used for staging rockets. Positional fighting resulted in disputed territory changing hands day-to-day just as it had during the previous fighting in July. 

Amid the fighting, footage and Thai military statements indicated Cambodia was also using Ukrainian-style FPV (first-person-view) drones - there were also intercepted communications featuring English-speaking drone operators. 

This indicates that the US, either directly or through one of its many proxies, has aided Cambodia in a similar manner to its successful overthrow of the Syrian government late last year. It was admitted then that similar Ukraine-style FPV drones and Western operators aided militants in pushing back and eventually overrunning Russian and Iranian-backed Syrian forces. 

Adding further to suspicions of a US role in the recent violence is Cambodia’s own vocal, repeated appeals for US involvement as a mediator, versus Thailand’s repeated refusal to accept directives delivered from Washington. 

“Extending China”

The on-and-off border fighting disrupts peace and stability threatening the rapid rise of not only China, but the rest of Asia with it - including close Chinese partners like Thailand and obviously Cambodia itself. 

The conflict represents part of a strategy already documented and being applied to Russia meant to encircle and contain it through economic pressure and the creation and expansion of multiple simultaneous conflicts along its periphery.

This strategy was laid out in detail in the 2019 RAND Corporation paper titled, “Extending Russia,” and included plans to provoke a deadly proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, to continue arming “Syrian rebels” who have since overthrown the Russian-backed government in Syria, for attempted regime change in Belarus, to exploit tensions in the South Caucasus, to reduce Russian influence in Central Asia, and to challenge Russia’s presence in Transnistria. 

It should be mentioned that all of these options have either been implemented or are in the process of being implemented and that the US is pursuing an identical strategy in regards to China as well. 

Earlier in December of this year, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute hosted current US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine. In the talk he specifically mentioned the ongoing US strategy to maintain global primacy and to confront a rising China. 

During the talk he explicitly stated:

“…so when we look at the rise of the Chinese military, what our goal in the joint force is to create multiple, simultaneous dilemmas for ALL of the adversaries around the world, so that they are very cautious and concerned about doing something that would bring any sense of threat to the American people. “

While it could be argued that General Caine meant ”dilemmas” created by US military capabilities amid a hypothetical conflict with China, throughout the talk he repeatedly linked the concept of creating “dilemmas” to all domains of US geopolitical power, including the ongoing AI (artificial intelligence) race - well outside any ongoing US-China conflict - just as the US has done to Russia. 

In many ways the US is already pursuing an “extending China” policy as laid out in the RAND paper against Russia, but targeting China along its periphery.