THE NEXT WORLD WAR
Most Apparent Enemies Of the United States
The last time Russian President Vladimir Putin met with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, the future looked very different. Putin was still denying he planned to invade Ukraine, which he did within days of attending the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing in February. Xi and Putin stood together, autocracy brothers ready to take on the West. They declared their relationship had “ no limits.”
The first time since their Beijing encounter, a time when Putin apparently expected that his forces would take Kyiv in a matter of days, dealing a painful blow not only to the Ukraine but also to the United States and its allies.
At the time, that outlook was shared by many around the world, including in the US. But the reality turned out quite differently, and now Russians are on the runin parts of Ukraine they had controlled for five months, losing more territory in a few days than they captured – at very high cost – during months of fighting.
The astonishing reversal is a tribute to the determination and bravery of Ukrainian fighters, the inspirational leadership of President Volodymyr Zelensky, skilled, determined and generous support from Washington and the solid, unexpectedly unified response from the West. It’s a formula that has worked far better than anyone expected, and one that must continue as Russia, still entrenched in large sections of Ukraine, seeks to turn the tide.
How much has everything changed? Not only is Russia humiliated, Ukraine exuberant, and the West united, but even China, which still expresses support for the Kremlin, is making statements that embarrass Russia.
The relationship between Xi and Putin was never one of equals, but now Putin is encountering Xi during one of the most disastrous moments of his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. He will likely seek more support from Xi, who has been generous with words but much less with deeds.
In February, China echoed Putin’s claim that NATO’s expansion was the issue in Ukraine. And Xi has declared Putin his “best and bosom friend.” Trade between the two countries has grown since the war started and the West imposed sanctions.
Like Xi, Putin has imposed a repressive regime centered on one man – himself. But the Russian president’s suppression of all criticism about the war has taken an expected turn. Those who opposed the “ special military operation,” have gone to prison, exile or have mostly fallen silent. But now some of the war’s most vocal supporters are fuming, enraged by the military’s poor performance. (They even call it a “ war” – a word that could not previously be uttered without some consequence.)
Also crucial for China, Russia has vast natural resources, including oil and gas. Russia is already greatly expanding its fuel supplies to China as Europe moves to end its dependence on Russia.
EDITOR COMMENT = CAUTIONARY TALE OF SLEEPING GIANTS —
Not a single word, but my commentary, best it's called a cautionary tale, a a story that gives a warning to warn its listener of a danger. There are three essential parts to a cautionary tale, though they can be introduced in a large variety of ways.
- First, a taboo or prohibition is stated: some act, location, or thing is said to be dangerous.
- Then, the narrative itself is told: someone disregarded the warning and performed the forbidden act.
- Finally, the violator comes to an unpleasant fate, which is frequently related in expansive and grisly detail.
THEY CALLED THE UNITED STATES A SLEEPING GIANT — Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor would reportedly write in his diary, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”
CHINA IS GROWIN MILITARILY AT AN ALARMING RATE — China is more like a sleeping Dragon than a giant —
- If you think our Chinese friends are sleeping or sitting on their asses, it is time to wake up — Their latest Military parade made the Macy’s Day Parade look like a kindergarten gathering.
- American voters who are naive, don’t vet politicians , use facial recognition and TV ads for their choices, show up as clones, stupid greedy, selfish, lacking compassion is the result of American Elections running for six months on a barrage of lies and corruption which take away from the real things we face—
- With stupider politicians, it works, as long as the voters are stupider than the politician.
- Example is T-RUMP - He lies on a day to day basis and those morons adore it. In that case we are doomed. It will bring our country down.
- In the past three months tons of paper commentary has come through with party vs party and lies. Scumbags seeking office —Politicians are jokes, morons and bullshitters, they’ll say anything.
- Your rights are being taken away - women will have none, they will steal every dime you thought you were entitled to with fake Tax cuts which make them millionaire and you get a twenty dollar bill.
- We need to take a strong look at fixing this, don’t worry about the Southern Border, When your kid takes a language in High School — tell him Mandarin or Common Chinese would be an advantage — Spanish and French are romance languages and romance won’t stop a missile. And they have a shitload of missiles — my Chinese sources send info stuff everyday from Chinese newspapers, they hide little, and proud of the fact their hackers helped the build them from our ideas. — ( it can be dangerous or fatal to send anything compromising China)
- We do not have functioning government, we have people on various levels of ignorance whose main sport is denigration of the other side while not doing a damn thing to make our country stronger, safer and protect the virtues and gifts of a once great democracy.
- Democrats Invent Bills = Republicans Invent obstruction and Conspiracies —
- T-RUMP saw that, so he used it and put us in a very precarious position and the Chinese and Russians saw right through him, that he is a n ignorant paper Tiger in celebration of the greatest con job ever pulled in the Western Hemisphere — It too a bunch of ignorant Evangelical voters to bring him into power based on their insignificant contributions to this country but they vote because T-RUMP held up a bible ( Upside down)
- So so he did what T-RUMP does best , he is a sick man, he does not have good in him, he is a con, no compassion, for anything other than himself and his own greatness and our enemies know that, lies which he believes are true. It is call narcissism.
- We need change in this country — People forget we live in a global world, we interact with those of different cultures and one who is broad minded and scientifically educated enough understands this. But with this co-mingling, comes the food trade and those who cheat at it, rising population, closeness, global warming and severe weather changes, poverty, food shortages, assimilation of territory usually devoted to animals, tropical forests delineated, and the list goes on and on, let me tell you a secret — people die — it was announced world wide 6.5 million people have died from COVID-19 —
- Scientifically, global warming caused by earths shift change, upper jet streams, warming due to fossil fuels and emotional change caused by poverty are the keys — and the ignition thereof and it seems the politicians, who do nothing but cause harm and many should be disposed of. I do not mean retirement.
- LOOK AT THE New World Order NATIONS — “ B.R.I.C. — BRAZIL, RUSSIA, INDIA, AND CHINA” Are the newcomers breaking into the trade of things upsetting a balance with inferior goods and services and then COVID-19 came from China. All in a way are land of sub-human treatment of people. The New World Order is a conspiracy theory which hypothesizes a secretly emerging totalitarian world government.
- The common theme in conspiracy theories about a New World Order is that a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government—which will replace sovereign nation-states—and an all-encompassing propaganda whose ideology hails the establishment of the New World Order as the culmination of history’s progress.
- It’s been tried all through history. A few people come to mind, Adolf Hitler, Vladmirir Putin, Benito Mussolini, XI-Ching, Emperor Showa Hirihito, and Donald T-RUMP —
- The newest phrase for these people is Authoritarianism
OPINION: ONE MISCALCULATION AWAY
FROM NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST
🟡 United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Gutteres is hardly a global figure given to panic, or hyperbole for that matter. But rarely has he seemed quite so afraid.
🟡 "Humanity is just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation," Gutteres said this week. The way he and a growing number of those who think deeply about nuclear issues and their consequences see it, the world is plunging headlong towards potential Armageddon, with little regard to the consequences of their actions, or inaction.
🟡 House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seems to have paid little heed to such fears as she moved blithely ahead with her visit to Taiwan in the face of dire warnings from the leadership of mainland China, whose arsenal of 350 nuclear weapons lies just across a narrow strait. And this in the context of bellicose words and actions from Russian President Vladimir Putin on Ukraine and Kim Jong Un's ongoing nuclear rhetoric and actions in nearby North Korea.
🟡 Gutteres's fears, of course, were broader and deeper than this single Asian flashpoint. He was addressing a world conference of the nations that have signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons -- a gathering delayed by two years due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
🟡 Signed on July 1, 1968, by 93 nations, and in force two years later, the treaty now has 191 adherents. Yet never has it seemed more vulnerable, if not more relevant, then today. The context, as Gutteres observed, was that this year's conference -- the 10th since its signing -- "occurs at a time of nuclear danger not seen since the height of the Cold War." Indeed, the very foundations of global security that have effectively guaranteed the peace since the explosion of the "Fat Man" plutonium device -- the last ever detonated in battle over Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 -- have been deeply eroded.
🟡 The United States was, and remains, the only nation ever to have detonated a nuclear weapon in a war. The Soviet Union tested its first device four years later. In July 1959, then-French President Charles de Gaulle sent the Count Alexandre de Marenches, the co-author of our book, "The Fourth World War" to Washington, to ask US President Dwight Eisenhower to give France the secrets that would allow the French to join the nuclear club. Ike politely but firmly declined.
🟡 Still, in less than a year, France had exploded its first nuclear device, eight years after the British. Russia was already en route to equalizing this balance. By the early 1960s, the Kremlin had deployed the first of what would be an arsenal of more than 3,000 nuclear weapons to Ukraine, where some of the first steps toward a Soviet bomb had been taken in Ukrainian institutes located in the now deeply contested cities of Kharkiv and Donetsk. More Soviet weapons then found their way to Belarus and Kazakhstan.
🟡 By the mid-1960s, on the western side of the Iron Curtain there were three nuclear powers (the US, Britain and France), on the eastern side, four ostensibily nuclear-armed states, though utterly controlled by the Kremlin. Effectively, there were just two nuclear blocs.
🟡 There are many who look back on that era as the good old days of nuclear confrontation -- and with good reason. Each side, for decades, possessed enough nuclear weapons -- as many as 41,000 for the USSR and 31,000 for the US at their respective peaks -- to have utterly obliterated the other side, not to mention all life on earth. This led to the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction(MAD).
🟡 Since then, arms control agreements have reduced the size of these arsenals dramatically -- to levels still able to incinerate the earth, but without reducing much of the tension. While arsenals have shrunk since the Cold War, the number of countries with nuclear weapons has proliferated.
🟡 How is it at all possible to have MAD when you have nuclear weapons in the hands of nine powers? (The countries in question are the US, Britain, France, Israel, Pakistan, India, Russia, China, and North Korea.) Within this group of nations, there are pockets of mutually assured destruction. Some 93% of all the world's 13,900 nuclear weapons are still controlled by Washington and Moscow.
🟡 To a degree, MAD prevails there, and indeed the prospect of mutually assured destruction comprises a good part of what has deterred Pakistan and India from launching their arsenals at each other during any of three conflicts they had or other regular confrontations across their contested borders.
🟡 A broader threat, though, has only expanded. How likely is it that given some existential challenge, Russia or even China, which arrived in the nuclear club in 1964, might not deploy a weapon of their own? Certainly, Russia has issued such a threat in Ukraine. Just weeks before its invasion of Ukraine, Russia conducted maneuvers with nuclear units, while Putin announced that his nuclear deterrent forces were being placed on a "special regime of alert."
🟡 And then there are the peripheral nuclear powers. While most of the world has been preoccupied with Ukraine, Taiwan, and terrorist leaders in Afghanistan, North Korea has continued to launch missiles and threaten new rounds of nuclear tests. On Victory Day last month, Kim Jong Un warned he was "ready to mobilize" his nuclear deterrent.
🟡 Finally, we are potentially within weeks of a new round of escalations, this time involving Iran. Though Secretary of State Antony Blinken has embraced a return to the conference table to restore the nuclear accord that was restraining Iran's headlong dash toward a nuclear weapon, there is little real evidence Iran is prepared to agree.
🟡 How is it at all possible to have MAD when you have nuclear weapons in the hands of nine powers?
David Andelman
IRAN IS PLAYING US AS FOOLS —
Indeed, on Monday the Biden administration unveiled a new round of sanctions targeting "illicit" support of the Iranian oil industry, which is already under crushing sanctions. And there are indications that the "breakout time" -- the time needed for Iran to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon -- has shrunk to near-zero.
Should Iran test or even exhibit the capacity to test a nuclear weapon, its arch enemy Saudi Arabia has already indicated it will do all within its power to deploy its own. Indeed, it has fostered close relations with the nuclear programs of Pakistan and with China, whose appetite for foreign sources of oil knows few bounds.
It is hardly surprising that the UN Secretary-General has waxed so pessimistic. The speeches that followed his opening of the non-proliferation conference seemed scarcely calculated to return the genie to its nuclear bottle.
Blinken charged in his speech at the same conference that Russia is "engaged in reckless, dangerous nuclear saber-rattling" in Ukraine, while North Korea "is preparing to conduct its 7th nuclear test." And as for Iran, it "remains on a path of nuclear escalation."
"To escape the logic of fear," Blinken concluded, should be the most immediate mission of all nations who've agreed to restrain the proliferation of nuclear arms.
Somehow, though, an even more worthwhile objective might just be for the world to find a way to turn back the clock from 2022 to 1962 or even 1982. These were terrifying years when, innocently, we practiced weekly duck-and-cover exercises under our little wooden desks in kindergarten, dug home fallout shelters in our backyards against an imminent nuclear attack.
But those very real and immediate threats led the nightly news, consumed the global dialogue, motivated every action by every world leader who understood that nuclear arms were, and should be, at the very top of priorities. They no longer are.
It is this fear that is at the heart of the Secretary-General's pessimism -- and should be at the heart of all of us.
North KOREA and KIM-JUNG - UN
CHINA and XI-JIN-PING ***
RUSSIA and VLADMIRIR PUTIN
👉🏼ANALYSIS
*** WAR IS NOT THE ONLY THREAT FROM CHINA
CHINA HAS EXPORTED GERMS& PANDEMICS