Department of War Heralds the Wilting of US Hegemony
In an article I posted in War Links yesterday, Ben Aris of IntelliNews cites Politico to the effect that the United States is scaling back on its strategic focus on Asia, marking a potential end to over a decade of military and political efforts to counterbalance China’s rise in the region. This is apparently the drift of a draft of the Pentagon’s latest National Defence Strategy. At dramatic variance with established policy, the new draft suggests abandoning the China effort and withdrawing from engaging there as well. Instead, the draft recommends focusing on the US homeland and the Western hemisphere.
IntelliNews commentator Arnaud Bertrand sees this as a full-on strategic US retreat on all fronts. This will reinforce Trump’s growing reluctance to supply Ukraine with either money or weapons, handing this responsibility to an economically impoverished, militarily under-equipped, and incompetent but big-mouthed European political class. A political break between the US and Europe was further signalled at the most recent meeting (last week) of the Coalition of the Brain Dead when Trump asked the European leaders why, if they were so anxious to see the US impose further sanctions and tariffs on Russia and Russia’s energy clients (principally China and India), they did not themselves buy less Russian oil (that is, the expensive oil and gas they buy in the form of LNG directly from Europe and the Russian oil they buy from Indian sources), and why they did not pressure China to do the same.
Aris notes that the new draft has been championed by Eldridge Colby, assistant secretary at the Pentagon, who was the one behind Hegseth's order in July to halt all weapons supplies to Ukraine arguing the US stockpile had fallen below critical levels needed to ensure US security. (Trump reversed the order a week later following an international outcry).
Australian military strategist Hugh White has suggested that the US had already started stepping back from the region. He described the move as “only a matter of time before it would be made official, which is what the Pentagon is apparently now doing.” The shift, says Bertrand, reflects an overdue recognition that the US cannot dominate regions “in the backyard of nations that increasingly surpass you in all the metrics that matter.”
While many in Washington may frame the new strategy as a necessary recalibration, Bertrand concluded, “Trump undoubtedly won’t be remembered for making ‘America great again’ but he may be remembered for making America realistic again.”
News of the new draft comes as many Western analysts take shocked note of the confidence and power that was projected by China at its impressive military parade in Beijing last week to celebrate China’s victory over Japan in World War Two and the impressive military parade staged by Russia earlier this summer in Moscow to celebrate Russia’s contribution to victory over Germany. Released in time to accompany these events many Westerners will have been exposed to articles relating the staggering scale of Russian and Chinese sacrifices, dwarfing those of Western armies and civilian populations.
An appropriate time, therefore, for Chinese President Xi Jinping to promote the Chinese concept of Tianxia (everything under heaven), that includes a focus on expanding ties and relations with Eurasia that is also part of the latest Five-Year Plan.
Tianxia envisions a world order where China is the paramount "civilization power," radiating influence to ensure global peace and prosperity in a “Community with a Shared Future for Mankind”, which he first articulated in 2013.
I would note by way of conclusion that this is so far only a “draft” plan that has yet to be finalized, approved and adopted. Further, I don’t know why we would want to take anything seriously from this Administration, particularly in view of the extent to which Trump has surrounded himself with NeoCons. The purpose of the draft plan or even of a final plan that results may well be deception. There is very little to suggest that this Congress is about to give up on NeoCon goals of reasserting US global hegemony, which is the current foreign policy and, one way or another, has been since the early nineteenth century. Colby himself has just recently talked about how the US must “sequence” its conflicts, which gives no grounds at all for trust in a genunine intent by the US to give up its power and merely reinforces the suspicion that the US intends only to turn its attention to China while Europe takes responsibility for winning (that is: losing) the war with Russia over proxy Ukraine at least for long enough beforfe the US must redirect its focus to Russia (presumably on the carcass of a humbled China.
Much of the former MIC-governed alternative commentariate in the US is keen to detect signs that Trump is disillusioned with his junior NeoCon officers in the Administration, that he understands Putin’s position, that he wants to abandon Ukraine to Europe, and would like to reset relations with Russia, that he is really, despite appearances and Epstein, an all-round cuddly sort of guy, and that he can see that Putin feels the same, since Putin so frequently says so.
There are a number of problems with this pipedream. First, as my friend Ray McGovern correctly pointed out yesterday, Trump is mentally ill (yes, let’s talk frankly, Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren), and there are few serious thinkers who fail to acknowledge that Trump’s mercuriality, if we can say it so politely, is toxic for international trust and steadiness in international relations.
Second, there is no serious sign that the US remotely intends to give up on its goal of maintaining US hegemony by defeating all sources of competition, be they global or regional. Without a dramatic and transparent indication of a change of such enormous magnitude there is no reason to trust the US which, surely, simply wants to more effectively distribute the focus of its resources by buying time.
Third, Putin is anything but simple minded. He is one of the most astute diplomats of this or any other century. He knows he can play along with the US for a while to give himself the time and leisure he needs for the defeat of Ukraine, without having to heed those previously insistent demands from the US, from Europe and even (for a time, last year but now no longer) from the BRICS, for a ceasefire that would merely buy Ukraine the time it needs to rearm at NATO’s expensve. And both he and Russia doubtless could benefit from some joint economic deals with the US (these would never come anywhere close to the magnitude and scope of the deals that are being hammered out between Russia and China, beginning with Power of Siberia 2 pipeline that will bring the cheap Russian oil and gas that once went to Europe, to China across Mongolia), especially following the defeat of Ukraine when it would be surely be exceedingly clever diplomacy for Russia to offer the US some benefit from Russia’s new territorial and mineral acquisitions, and to drive further the wedge between Washington and its now servuile appendage, Europe.
BRICS Consolidated
As is so frequently noted, with a heavy dose of irony, the only grounds on which Trump can reasonably expect to be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize are his unflinching efforts to push Russia, China, Brazil and the other members of the SCO and of the BRICS together, inspiring them to accelerate still further their construction of mechanisms for trade in one another’s currencies and side-stepping the US dollar which will be correspondingly weakened.
An emergency meeting this week, called by Lulu, will advance their considerations of how best to turn Trump’s punitive and over-the-top tariffs to their advantage. India, which has been much more severely chastized by Trump’s tariffs than China, has simply ignored the threat, confirming that it will continue to buy Russian oil and gas, safe in the knowledge that Indian exports to the US are hardly of existential importance. China has shown a similar defiance, not simply continuing to buy Russian energy but greatly increasing the scale of its purchases (as through the Power of Siberia), in the safe knowledge that it can and will screw the US over by denying access to raw earths when it needs to do so and that by this time next year it will have trippled its production of high-end computer chips.
Jinping, Putin and Modi showed the way in Tianjin; with Lulu this week they will present a defiant stand to Washington threats and bluff. Modi and Putin will further consolidate their relationship in New Delhi in December. Trump meantime can compensate for his new emasculation by murdering people in small boats and displaying braggodochio in the Rio Negro of Venezuela and pushing the continent further into China’s warm embrace.
Poor Europe, meantime, is saddled with pressure from both the US and the unelected EU dictator Ursula Vondermentally Lying to cut off even imports of Russian LNG in favor of much more expensive US LNG, while borrowing more and more money at higher and higher rates to spend on weapons from US manufacturers (like the ERAM intermediate distance missiles, of which perhaps 10 will arrive this year) that Europe can send to Ukraine.
All this is beginning to sound like male emasculation porn on a scale even greater than that enacted by the US Deep State to emasculate Trump over RussiaGate. In embarrassment, even the German foreign minister, Johann Wadefuhl, threatened to fiund some way to reinvigorate the corpse of Germany’s enquiry into the destruction of Nord Stream 2. This he calls an act of terror, by the way, one which is still politely framed in official circles with reference to the CIA fairy story about a bunch of Ukrainian guys and a gal on a yacht in NATO waters in the Baltic, when everyone remembers that Biden promised, in the presence of then German Chancellor Sholz, that he would destroy Nord Stream - something which the world’s mainstream media suddenly forgot in 2022, while they were busily looking in the other direction from Seymor Hersh’s disclosure as to how the US did it. (Yet another illustration of the amazing way in which the Western media establishment has committed collective credibility suicide).
The signs are clearer by the day that the economies of both Britain and of France are on a knife-edge and their respective Starmer and Macron administrations will be swept into the dustbins of history, probably to be replaced by more Russia-Realist political forces. We will see the results this week in France when the prime minister presents a budget that proposes a major increase in military spending at the expense of social programs. Ultimely we will also see the new Chancellor Merz meet a comparable fate at the hands of AfD.
Merz’s bid to rearm and mobilize (even conscripting) Germany by borrowing money from the Americans, at the expense of social programs, in order to go to war with Russia over Ukraine, with American weapons, is literally insane. Yes does have something in the order of 150 Taurus missiles - the ones in operation but whose production line has already stopped, but is perhaps to be revived - that Merz says he will send or have perhaps already arrived in Ukraine. These are hardly likely to change the balance of power on the battlefield; nor will the much-heralded ERAMs which are shorter-range, and air-launched - so easier to Russia to shoot down - and only a modest number of which, 840 out of an eventual total planned of 3500, will have arrived only by October next year.
European members Hungary and Slovakia, by the way, have been unable to persuade Zelenskiy to undertake not to keep endangering their Russian supplies of Russisan energy over Ukraine and so for the time being must continue to draw supplies from the nexus of pipelines that Turk Stream brings from Russia and Azerbaijan and which doubtless benefits other EU and NATO members as well, Turkey not the least of them.
In the meantime, while taking hits from Ukrainian drone attacks on numerous Russian oil facilities, Russia has severely crippled a Ukrainian oil refinery that is of great significance for its continuing ability to supply energy to the front lines. This happened in the same week as Russia struck one of the major bridges over the Dnieper, at Kryukovsky Bridge in the city of Kremenchug, Poltava region, in what may be the first sign of a reversal of Russian policy not to attack these major transport facilities that Ukraine uses to supply the front lines (and would like to use to retreat over).
This provides further evidence of what several analysts today are predicting is a major new Russian offensive designed in part to take over all the remaining parts of the four oblasts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zapporizhzhia that Russia does not yet fully control, as well as indicating a willingness to significantly escalate attacks to hurt both the assets of the Ukraine government and the assets of European and US interests in Ukraine.
In Brief, What Have We Learned
The cluster of former Western imperial nations are led by obnoxious idiots whose odious combination of poverty of judgement and imagination with entitlement and cruelty (witness Gaza and the panoply of other, ongoing Zionist war-crimes - in the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon - against which hardly any Westeren nation dares scream - are within hearing of their own death-rattles.
From Anchorage we understsand that Trump and his enablers know that having squashed Europe economically they can now require it to take over the US-provoked proxy war over Ukraine against Russia, with only minimal resources and without hope of winning, and, assuredly, with no meaningful promise of a US back-up for any or all of the hare-brained schemes that Europe and Zelenskiy can come up with for a peace-keeping/war-instigating NATO force on Ukrainian soil that in Europe’s feverish fantasy, would follow a peace agreement and ceasefire that cannot possibly happen because Russia wants none of this utter, childish nonsense.
We know that the BRICS will not be squashed by the US; they are already making a fool of the US and of the Western World and that the West has no leaders who have not been thoroughly brainwashed by NeoCon ideology and have the intellectual muscle to help the West accommodate the emerging new multi-modal world order or to contribute helpfully to the absolutely necessary overhaul and restructuring of the UN, as far away from New York as possible, that will still enshrine the UN Charter as the basic starting point for constructuing a livable future for ourselves and our children’s future.
There will be no direct meeting between Putin and Zelensky short of a quick visit by Zelenskiy to Moscow to capitulate - but even then Zelenskiy’s illegitimate Presidency will be insufficient credential for Russia to accept as valid anything that Zelenskiy himself can sign - they will need to go instead to the Speaker of the Ukrainian legislature.