Washington needs to urgently update and expand both its nuclear arsenal and the conventional military in order to face the combined might of Moscow and Beijing, the congressional Strategic Posture Commission argued in its final report published on Thursday.

“The United States and its allies must be ready to deter and defeat both adversaries simultaneously,” the commission said. “The US-led international order and the values it upholds are at risk from the Chinese and Russian authoritarian regimes.”

While the commission has not identified any specific evidence of Russia and China working together, “we worry... there may be ultimate coordination between them in some way, which gets us to this two-war construct,” a senior official involved in the report told Reuters on condition of anonymity. The current US national security strategy calls for defeating one major adversary while deterring another.

The commission argued that the combined threat from China and Russia will become acute as early as 2027, so “decisions need to be made now in order for the nation to be prepared.” The 131 findings and 81 recommendations in the report amount to the need for massive expansion of both the conventional armed forces and the Nuclear Triad.

The report demands more of the B-21 stealth bombers and Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines. The B-21 is still in development and is expected to enter service by 2027 at the earliest. The first two Columbia-class subs are under construction and are expected in 2030. The US Navy has planned to order 12, to replace the 18 Ohio-class boats currently in service.

“Amid all of the Commission’s recommendations to increase the number of strategic and tactical nuclear systems, there is almost no mention of cost in the entire report,” which “does not seem to acknowledge any limits to defense spending,” the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) said in response.

At a press event announcing the report, the commission’s vice chair, retired Republican Senator Jon Kyl, argued that higher military spending is a small price to “hopefully preclude” a possible nuclear war, and that President Joe Biden and Congress need to “take the case to the American people” to spend more money.

According to the FAS, however, the commission’s recommendations are “likely to exacerbate the arms race, further constrict the window for engaging with Russia and China on arms control, and redirect funding away from more proximate priorities.”

The only reason the commission did not argue for an immediate expansion of the US nuclear stockpile “is that the weapons production complex currently does not have the capacity to do so,” the FAS noted, adding that there is no need for a nuclear arms race so long as the US has enough submarines to present a credible deterrent to a first strike by an adversary.

 

https://www.rt.com/news/584791-us-war-china-russia/

 

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BY MATTHEW PETTI

 

Israeli hardliners often argue that, instead of an independent state, Palestinians should accept Jordan as their homeland. (After all, Jordan used to rule over the West Bank, and many Jordanians have Palestinian roots.) The most moderate version of this plan involves putting parts of the West Bank that Israel doesn’t want back under Jordanian rule. The most extreme version involves physically expelling Palestinians to Jordan.

Despite the lack of Jordanian or Palestinian consent, the idea of Jordan as a Palestinian homeland continues to float around in Israeli nationalist circles. And it’s gaining traction in unexpected corners of Washington, too. Last month, the liberal-leaning publication Just Security published a “creative, outside-the-box proposal” along those lines by Jonathan Panikoff, director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the centrist Atlantic Council.

“Some [Israeli] settlements [in the West Bank] and the land they’re on are inevitably going to be retained by Israel in any agreement. And the number Israel will insist on retaining increases every year,” Panikoff wrote. Without those lands, Palestine cannot be a viable, independent state. Panikoff’s solution is to replace the land lost to settlements by giving Palestine some Jordanian territory. 

In return, Jordan would get some Saudi territory as well as economic concessions. To seal the deal, the Jordanian monarchy would be asked to share its most prized heirloom — custodianship over Jerusalem’s holy sites — with Saudi royals.

The proposal is worse than asking Jordan to sell its birthright for a mess of pottage. It demands Jordanians to risk the violent collapse of their country. The last attempt to build a Palestinian state within Jordan, the Black September uprising of 1970, ended in a bitter (but mercifully short-lived) civil war. And, the land that Panikoff has in mind, the Jordan River Valley, is the nation’s breadbasket. Jordan is already a water-poor country; without the river and the fertile land around it, the nation would face an environmental apocalypse. Just a few miles to the east, Jordan’s landscape becomes a black desert unsuitable for large populations.

Panikoff’s proposal is the symptom of a myopia in Washington about the Middle East. American policymakers often see Israeli interests as existential issues that must be treated with the utmost care. Meanwhile, Arab states, even U.S.-friendly ones, are rarely viewed in the same light. Their vital interests are often treated as goodies that can be traded away. No think-tanker would ask Israel to give up Tel Aviv for Jordan’s sake, but Panikoff can casually propose the dismantling of Jordan for Israel’s sake.

Washington has gotten used to forcing the rest of the Middle East to accommodate Israeli interests. For ideological reasons, American politicians believe that they have a responsibility to protect Israel, which they see as a tiny, vulnerable nation surrounded by powerful Arab enemies. That image is decades out of date. Many regional states, and their citizens, are much more vulnerable to Israeli attack than the other way around.

For example, Israeli leaders often say that they need the settlements to maintain “defensible borders.” Otherwise, Israeli cities like Tel Aviv would sit under a Damocles sword, less than 20 miles away from Arab territory. But Jordan is similarly vulnerable. The Israeli army is perched just 20 miles away from Amman, the Jordanian capital, and Irbid, the second-largest city. The country’s only port, Aqaba, is a 10-mile strip of coastline squeezed between the Israeli and Saudi borders. Just a few miles to the east of the border, Jordan’s land becomes a black desert unsuitable for large populations.

So when Israeli politicians float the possibility of expelling Palestinians en massetowards Jordan, or stand in front of a map showing Jordan as part of “Greater Israel,” Jordanians have every reason to understand it as a threat with potential life-and-death consequences. After all, the West Bank has been part of Jordan when Israeli forces invaded and conquered it in 1967. But no one suggests chopping up Israeli territory so Jordanians can feel safer.

Jordan is not the only Israeli neighbor living under this kind of menace. Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon have all had territory invaded and occupied by Israeli forces. Although the United States in the past has tried to restrain both sides, U.S. policy today focuses entirely on ensuring Israeli dominance over Arab states. While Israeli officials threaten to take Lebanon “back to the Stone Age,” and Israeli warplanes loudly penetrate Lebanese airspace, Washington debates how to disempower the Lebanese militia Hezbollah and foster a Lebanese militarythat does not threaten Israel.

Jordan and Egypt are unique because the United States considers them “major non-NATO allies.” The U.S. government has showered special praise on Jordan for its commitment to “shared strategic goals,” and in theory considers the stability of Jordan an American interest. For that matter, Jordan has done a lot to seek peace with Israel on the terms that Washington prefers. The Jordanian government signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, gave up its claims to the West Bank, and absorbed Palestinian refugees into Jordanian society. Thirty years later, Israeli nationalists and their American backers seem willing to punish Jordan for its cooperation.

Ironically, Jordan accepted the 1994 treaty to avoid bearing the costs of the Palestinian issue. As former Jordanian foreign minister Marwan Muasher explained in a recent interview, the kingdom gave up its claims to the West Bank in order to establish a permanent border and put to rest the notion that Jordan would be an “alternative [Palestinian] homeland.” With Amman out of the picture, Israelis and Palestinians were supposed to resolve their problems within the confines of Israel and Palestine.

Panikoff warns that continued Israeli rule over the West Bank “would risk the end of Israel’s identity as a majority Jewish state.” But the Israeli settlements are not the immovable object that Panikoff portrays them as. Of course, leaving thousands of Israeli citizens under Palestinian rule — or evacuating them before handing the territory over — would be politically painful for Israel. That is an Israeli, not a Jordanian, problem.

If Israel really wants to disengage from the West Bank and avoid sharing a state with Palestinians, it will find a way to do so. There is no moral or practical case for making Jordan bear the costs. Panikoff’s proposal is really ideological, based on the American belief that Israeli discomfort matters more than Arab suffering.

At least threatening Israel’s Syrian and Lebanese opponents follows some strategic logic, since they are also U.S. opponents. To play games with the stability of Jordan, a friendly state, makes no sense at all. To do so for the sake of Israeli settlements is just blind fanaticism.

 

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/jordan-israel-palestine/

 

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Fascism in the West to Enable Genocide in Palestine

BY Craig Murray

 

The UK and the US are both sending military assistance to Israel to commit a calculated and deliberate act of genocide, which is already underway. 

Over 500 children have been killed in Gaza in the last week and over 2,000 maimed, many with life changing injuries. Nobody can claim they do not know what is already happening or what is about to unfold. The cutting off of food and water to Gaza is a major international crime, which the western proponents of the "rules based order" universally refuse to condemn. 

In both the UK and the US there can be no more stark illustration of the lack of any kind of meaningful democracy, than the fact that there is no major political party that opposes the genocide - despite massive public opposition. 

The bought and paid for media and political class in the west are extremely nervous, throughout the western world. Now they have come to the final genocide for which zionism has always aimed, they face a good deal of popular resistance. 

Throughout Europe there is a massive gap between the zionist unanimity of the politicians and the much greater understanding of the Palestinian situation among the general public. Tellingly the response by the zionist political class has been a wave of outright fascist suppression. 

In France, Macron has made all pro-Palestinian demonstrations illegal, but as so often the French people are not standing for that kind of authoritarianism. 

In the UK, the police have adopted the cowardly tactic of arresting a couple of individuals, one in Brighton and one in Manchester, for pro-Palestinian demonstration. Under Tony Blair's notorious draconian "anti-terror" legislation, they could face up to 14 years in prison. 

The young man in Manchester was arrested on the precise site of the famous "Peterloo massacre", which generations of British people were taught at school was a terrible crime in breach of the rights to freedom of speech and assembly. Let the irony of that set in. 

You can go out in the streets of the UK with an Israeli flag and yell that you want every Palestinian to be cleansed from Gaza. That is not illegal. If you say the Palestinians have a right to resist their genocide, that is illegal. 

That appears to be a genuine analysis of the law in the UK, France and many other western countries. 

That is intended to terrify all of us. It will not work. 

The European Commission has been ferociously zionist and gung-ho for this Palestinian genocide. It displayed the Israeli flag on its Berlaymont headquarters. It has taken a side in the most ferocious way. 

It is therefore deeply sinister that the European Commission is actively working to shut down pro-Palestinian information and comment on social media. The European Commission has written to all major social media organisations and is able to threaten them with massive fines if they do not remove information of which the European Union disapproves. 

The notion is plainly nonsense that through the fog of war the European Commission - which is 100% parti pris - is qualified to say what information is true and what information is false, and what comment is legitimate. 

Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner in charge of this operation, is a former chief executive of electronic companies - and defence contractors - Atos and Thomson. He has no genuine interest in freedom of speech, and is engaged in a process of silencing dissent for military aims, which is quite simply fascist. 

We are witnessing almost all western governments deliberately facilitating massacre, ethnic cleansing and genocide. We are witnessing almost all western governments turning on their own people to crush dissent at that complicity in genocide. 

This feels not so much like the week that western democracy died, as the week it was impossible any longer to deny that western democracy died some time ago. 

 

Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and Rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010. 

Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing. 

Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers - many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate. 

https://www.sott.net/article/485098-Fascism-in-the-West-to-Enable-Genocide-in-Palestine

 

 

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Nikki Strangelove: ‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.’

    by Bob Bishop

 

The movie “Dr. Strangelove,” a Cold War comedy satire, warns about the potential of a thermonuclear war. The film is still pertinent today with the renewed Cold War and political hacks lacking geopolitical understanding and strategic thinking.

One of the most reckless presidential candidates who lacks geopolitical awareness is Nikki Haley. A career politician, Halley is the 4th Estate’s (AKA MSM) pick for the Republican presidential candidate. She checks all the neocon boxes. The Wall Street Journal, in a fawning editorial, stated Haley stood out on her foreign policy in the third Republican presidential debate. Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Technologies agree. Haley’s obsession with the Middle East affairs causes her to overlook the elephant herd in the room: exploding trillion-dollar deficits, crushing high inflation, fentanyl drug epidemic, urban violence, homeliness, and millions of potentially violent military-aged males poring over Biden’s open border—America First’s top concerns.

Her full-throated campaign rhetoric is about US military intervention abroad is necessary for humanitarian causes. There isn’t a corner of the world that she doesn’t want to get involved. She recently stated, “A strong America doesn’t start wars,” and “A strong America prevents wars.” Timeout for a reality check. The American invasions of both Iraq and Afghanistan under pretenses were colossal military failures, depleting the treasury of over $2 trillion and millions of civilians displaced or killed. How antihumanitarian of us. The intervention also destroyed Libya, flooding Europe with young Sub-Saharan males that will destabilize Europe.

Haley’s jingoistic policy of supporting Ukraine is in US national interest, she said in Orwellian speak: “This is a war about freedom, and it’s one we have to win.” Never mind, Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s kleptocracy has destroyed freedom by shutting down opposing parties, suspending national elections, banning the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and silencing opposition journalists. 

Haley called Israel the “frontline of defense for America.” She stoked the Hamas conflict by calling on Netanyahu to “finish them.” Followed up with, “It is not that Israel needs America. America needs Israel.” Nikki Haley is an Israel First candidate and should be running for Prime Minister of Israel in 2024 instead. The reality is if America doesn’t come first, there is no Israel.

Haley continues, “We need to be very clear-eyed to know there would be no Hamas without Iran.” Ron Paul, in a congressional address, said Hamas was an Israel creation to counter The Palestinian Authority to weaken it, which resulted in Hamas being voted into power. Haley’s lack of intellectual insight is political myopia.

Haley threatens Iran, “We need to go and take out their infrastructure that they are using to make those strikes with so they can never do it again.” Warmongering can only escalate the crisis and produce a Middle East regional war. God forbid a thermonuclear war. If that wasn’t enough, “Communist China is an enemy,” Haley said in June. “It is the most dangerous foreign threat we’ve faced since the Second World War.” Haley should heed Congressman Ron Paul’s powerful “What if” speech about war is a racket serving special interests and has nothing to do with freedom. 

https://ronpaulinstitute.org/nikki-strangelove-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-bomb/

 

 

 

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Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley served as Donald Trump’s ambassador to the UN from 2017-2018, but has had a falling out with the former president since then, blaming him for the January 6 riot at the Capitol, taking a softer line on Trump’s domestic political opponents, and a much harder, neoconservative line on foreign policy matters.

JPMorgan Chase boss Jamie Dimon has urged Democrats to help Nikki Haley in her campaign for the Republican nomination, saying doing so might land them a better choice in the general election next November.

  

“Even if you’re a very liberal Democrat, I urge you, help Nikki Haley too,” Dimon said at an event hosted by the New York Times on Wednesday. “Get a choice on the Republican side that might be better than Trump,” he urged.

 

The comments follow reports in US business media indicating that major donors representing America’s business elite including Dimon were lining up to support Haley, convinced that she could somehow unseat Trump in the GOP primary race.

 

https://sputnikglobe.com/20231129/all-hail-the-uniparty-hedge-fund-shark-dimon-asks-dems-to-help-haley-beat-trump-1115290023.html

 

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMsu9lvUoMU

CAMPAIGN OVER: Nikki Haley Exposed as Neocon Fraud & Corporatist Shill

 

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I KNOW SOME REASONABLE "DEMOCRATS" WHO ARE PREPARED TO SUPPORT "NASTI NIKKI" IN ORDER TO STOP TRUMP!

NIKKI IS A WARMONGER — PAID BY WARMONGERS. TRUMP IS A CLOWN SELLING BIG SHOES AND RED CAPS.... WHICH ONE IS THE MOST DANGEROUS?...

 

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