Amid the tit-for-tats along Israel’s border with Lebanon over the past few weeks, the Houthis’ shelling of Red Sea traffic and repeated assertions that the U.S. does not want to widen the Gaza crisis into a regional war, I started thinking of that twilit interim in 1939–1940 known in history as “the phony war.” Has the world entered another such passage—another war we do not want to think is a war but is a war we do not want to see?

That question seems far away now, an intellectual flinch. America, mindlessly loyal to the frothing dog known as Israel, has wandered into another war the way our president wanders away from podiums and off television news programs while the cameras are still rolling. This is a 21st century war, replete with attacks, denials, proxies and indirection, and with no formal declaration. But we may as well declare it ourselves so we understand our moment properly. America is once more at war. 

The U.S. had for weeks refrained from responding to the Houthis, who, in solidarity with the Palestinians of Gaza, have since November staged dozens of drone and missile attacks on commercial ships sailing through the Red Sea. These now include U.S. and British vessels and a U.S. warship. The Biden regime’s stated concern was that it did not want to risk sparking a conflict that would spread through the region and, in particular, provoke the Islamic Republic. The Pentagon, in the role of lumbering giant, also acknowledged that there was little U.S. forces could do to stop the Houthis’ operations.  

The weeks of restraint, so uncharacteristic of the Biden White House, ended last Thursday, when the U.S. and a handful of its clients hit more than two dozen Houthi targets—military bases, airports, weapons dumps—in Yemen. Air and naval units struck the Houthis again last Friday, and the world suddenly sat up straight. Here is part of a news analysis The New York Times published Friday evening:

With the American-led strike on nearly 30 sites in Yemen on Thursday and a smaller strike the next day, there is no longer a question of whether there will be a regional conflict. It has already begun. The biggest questions now are the conflict’s intensity and whether it can be contained.

This is exactly the outcome no one wanted, presumably including Iran.

Among the reporters bylined on this piece was David Sanger, a longtime Washington correspondent who is, to keep this polite, very close to the national- security state and faithfully reflects its perspectives. I certainly sat up straight on reading these paragraphs. They struck me as the Biden regime’s first admission, an early warning, that war was on the way. “I will not hesitate,” President Biden had said by the time Sanger et al. published, “to direct further measures to protect our people and the free flow of international commerce as necessary.” Indeed, U.S. attacks on Houthi targets are now something close to routine. On Tuesday the Pentagon announced that Navy SEAL commandos had raided an Iranian vessel bound for Yemen and seized missile components from its cargo. 

As of Monday evening (East Coast time, Tuesday morning in the Middle East), Biden and his policy people have exactly what they have insisted they do not want but which Israel probably does. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, the IRGC, launched at least 11 ballistic missiles into northern Iraq and Syria, where all sorts of U.S. proxies, including the Islamic State, are active. I do not think there is any longer any stepping back from the reality that the U.S. is now in a regional war involving Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon. 

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https://scheerpost.com/2024/01/19/patrick-lawrence-this-is-not-another-phoney-war/

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BY DECLAN HAYES

Although they say you should never judge a book by its cover, that does not apply to “Proposed Plan for Victory in Ukraine”, a policy paper the U.S. Republican Party hawks recently wrote on how NATO can prevail in Ukraine. As its cover has a picture of Russia’s Putin, together with China’s Xi and Iran’s Khamenei, with Belarus’s Lukashenko towering behind them, those Americans are in no doubt who their many enemies are, just as we, in our turn, can be confident that, in extrapolating their “analysis” far beyond Zelensky’s imploding rump Reich, we are reflecting their bird brain’s view of the world.

The plan, which should have been written with a crayon into a colouring book, divides into four or so parts, headlined as follows: The Threat, Proposed Plan for Victory, Oversight, Burden Sharing. Those sections, in a nutshell, tell us that Putin and all those others, who are not NATO doormats, are a clear and present threat to our democratic way of life; that we should blast the lot of them into the hereafter, having first used our NGOs to undermine their respective civil societies; that we need the same robust accounting and government systems Zelensky has in Ukraine (LOL); and, finally, that “our democratic partners” should cough up more cash to keep our war machine well-oiled.

Although NATO’s three major arenas of Europe, the Middle East and Southern/Eastern Asia may have different characteristics, the overall approach of sending in the marines or, better still, someone else’s marines, is the same. NATO is, militarily, a compulsive gambler that keeps doubling up, hoping its luck will turn.

With all of that in mind, let’s again briefly survey the state of play from Finland down to the Middle East and onwards to China and beyond.

Regarding Finland, Sweden and the Arctic, Russia should make those pimple states aware that, should they escalate affairs around the Kola peninsula, Russia can also escalate up to and including nuclear war against them and, that, if they really escalate, both Finland and Sweden will be nuclear wastelands for the next 100,000 years. Given their carry on, the world might be better off without these American doormats.

Ukraine, meanwhile, has worked out well. It has made Europe a pathetic American wasteland, of no great consequence in the larger picture and all with an economy of American lives.

Azerbaijan’s slaughter of the Armenians, helped at every stage by the Turks and their Muslim Brotherhood enforcers, shows the value of heavily investing in drones and missiles and other asymmetric weapons. Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthi have all driven home this same point, that, as with Ukraine, drones and missiles are the new kings of the battlefield. NATO are, as these links here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here all show, also fully aware of this and, having duked it out against Iranian drones in Ukraine, it is onwards Christian soldiers to Asia.

As India squares up to China, all sides agree that drones and missiles will both play significant roles in their respective calculi. With Mohamed Muizzuheading a Chinese puppet regime in the Maldives to the south, and Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and especially Pakistan being seduced by China to India’s north, India must calibrate its response as part of its Neighborhood First policy. If the Maldives’ “India Out” regime does not quickly see the light and abandon China, then India, together with its Israeli, American and Australian partners, might well invade that tropical paradise “to preserve democracy”. Certainly, China cannot be allowed to control the Maldives and the choke points around them and, as India cannot match China’s spending power, tough love in the form of a full scale naval invasion might be the preferred option.

On that latter point, it might be noted that India’s blue water navy, along with Japan’s, sent help to the Maldives during the 2004 Asian tsunami but China proved itself incapable of doing the same. An important point to footnote when the big guns open fire.

Although America’s only reservation with regard to India flexing its military muscles would be how to balance India’s sectarian Hindutva ideology with getting NATO’s Uyghur fifth columnists to stir the sectarian pot in China’s vast Xinjiang province, I am confident Turkey’s Erdoğan and his Qatari Muslim Brotherhood backers will be up to the challenge helped, no doubt, by the mastery Turkey and President Ilham Aliyev’s fascist Azerbaijan have both shown in drone warfare in their latest efforts to exterminate the Armenians.

Interesting times ahead then for NATO’s Chinese friends in Xinjiang, all the more so as India’s Drishti 10 Starliner drones have started to roll off Adani Defense and Aerospace’s production lines greatly helped by Israeli firm Elbit, who have used the Israeli Hermes StarLiner drone as their prototype.

Although China and Pakistan have larger drone inventories, India, helped by Israel and the United States, hopes to close that gap not only against them but also in India’s ongoing campaign against the Houthi and sundry other weathervanes currently making the news.

India has also been investing heavily in Russia’s Far East, even in Sakhalin, which is in dispute with Japan, whose diplomacy has always tended to grovel to one great power (Britain, Nazi Germany, the United States) after another, rather than to follow Japan’s own national interests.

Although India hopes to avail of Russia’s emerging Northern Sea Route (NSR), that might well become redundant when NATO puts the squeeze on China: no international trade, no need for extra trade routes or, for that matter, China, which is far more export reliant than is India, which has a much younger demographic (with two-thirds of Indians being under 35 years of age) and bullish growth prospects, some of which is as a result of multinational companies divesting themselves from revanchist China, whose mercantilist and neomercantalist adventurism is not everyone’s cup of tea.

Although China enjoys a huge balance of trade surplus with the United States, what will happen to those Chinese exports when sea lanes are disrupted and when China becomes, as many American Republicans like POTUS 2024 favourite Trump want it, public enemy number one?

And though we only recently discussed China’s South Sea and Taiwanese adventurism at length, the Yanks are building yet another air base in Okinawa and the Philippines are very concerned with the vast oil supplies the Yanks continue to stockpile in Subic Bay, where they have no right to be. Although the good people of the Philippines want the Yanks gone, because they do not want the Chinese to further encroach upon them, like Japan, Vietnam and the entire ASEAN bloc, they are forced to collude with the usual suspects to put an end to this creeping Chinese colonialism.

And then there is Malaysia. Or rather Malaysia’s Proton car company which I wrote about in Japan’s Big Bang when Mitsubishi Motors were heavily involved in it. Mitsubishi’s problem was that it had been left behind when other Japanese auto companies scooped up the rest of SouthEast Asia and so it invested in Proton, trying to make a cheaper version of its own domestic Japanese offerings that would better fit the budgets of the Malaysian and contiguous consumer markets. Leaving the cost cuttings to one side, Mitsubishi could not make it work and it is unlikely the Chinese will enjoy any greater success simply because the Malaysian GDP/cap of $12,466 does not offer sufficient upside to make Chinese style projects such as this viable.

Although that can be debated in the case of Malaysia and Proton, what cannot be debated is that China has a number of glass jaws that would give any boxer a heart attack. Disrupt sea trade, disrupt exports with sanctions, disrupt Hong Kong, Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang, the Indian border and a few other places for good measure and China will squeal.

China sees itself as the new Rome, with all roads leading to and from it. But Rome, on which the Americans model themselves, was an imperialist power, whose hour has passed. Although the Chinese have pumped billions into such projects as the Phnom Penh-Sihanoukville expressway, not all of these gimmicks have stood the test of time that Rome’s roads or, for that matter, Herr Hitler’s autobahns have. Malaysia, for example, has lost $2bn to Chinese companies who built two useless pipelines in Sabahand that is but one of many such white elephant examples.

The harsh reality is that much of China’s investment is, like that of bubble era Japan before it, shifting domestic overcapacity overseas with the same sorts of results Mitsubishi got with Proton. Although China’s state and private investment into SouthEast Asia has been impressive, outside of the Chinese hype, results have been as mixed as were those of bubble era Japan.

And that is before we look at the grimier externalities. President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos of the Philippines would like to put an end to inward Chinese racketeering and Malaysia is still trying to get over the Belt and Road criminality for which former prime minister Najib Razak got handed a 12 year jail sentence (we’ll pass over his murder of Mongolian model Shaariibuugiin Altantuyaa). Further south, the Indonesians feel their $7.3bn Whoosh high-speed train was a very expensive white elephant, one of many China has peppered the entire region with.

For many in Southeast Asia, Japan whose foreign direct investment in the region ($200 bn) lags only behind America’s ($210 bn) and is almost double that of China’s ($106 bn), might be the better bet, at least as a hedge against the two bullying hegemons of America and China. Although Chinese trade with ASEAN now far outstrips that of Japan, Japan remains the steadier bet, all the more so if Taiwan and South Korea are also put on their side of the scales.

More to the point perhaps, Japan has not only concluded defence-equipment transfer agreements with the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore and Indonesia; but, as this Japanese Defence Ministry document shows, the Japanese military have a good idea of what they have to contend with regarding China’s antics.

As the Chinese like to gamble, they might like to consider that NATO figures the odds of NATO bottling them up and torpedoing their economy are quite good. If China doesn’t want to shorten those odds even further it should, as already suggested, retain the services of Russia’s diplomatic corps to learn how to constructively play their part. If, on the other hand, they continue on this road to war and destroy all the progress they made since getting shot of Mao and his equally reactionary Gang of Four, then all bets are off and NATO’s Proposed Plan for Victory in Ukraine, Yemen, Iran, Syria & China will, sadly, have its day.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/01/19/natos-proposed-plan-for-victory-in-ukraine-yemen-iran-syria-china/

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 Jeremy Kuzmarov

A key purpose underlying the Ukraine War was made clear at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos in January when Philipp Hildebrand, vice chairman of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, announced the start of a much-touted Ukrainian Reconstruction Bank in five to six months.

The Reconstruction Bank is being put together by BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase for the Ukrainian government.

Many of its initiatives will be overseen by Penny Pritzker, a banking heiress from a family with CIA and Mafia connections and a history of white-collar crime,[1] who was appointed by the Biden administration as a special envoy for Ukrainian reconstruction.

The Reconstruction Bank has secured $500 million in pledges by foreign investors seeking to profit off of Ukraine’s reconstruction with the expectation that another $500 million will be secured in the next six months.

One of the potential investors is Robert Kraft, the billionaire paper manufacturer and owner of the New England Patriots, who has been part of JPMorgan-led discussions on rebuilding Ukraine for the past year, and is now seriously considering building paper manufacturing factories in western Ukraine.[2]

The reconstruction of Ukraine is necessitated by a war manufactured by the U.S., which turned the Ukrainians against the Russians in order to draw Russia into a devastating conflict that held the prospects of weakening Russia and enriching U.S. corporations.

The elimination of a generation of Ukrainian and Russian youth and devastation of Ukrainian cities was “collateral damage” whose only utility lay in its propaganda value as the Russians have been blamed for all the carnage.

At the World Economic Forum, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky met JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon and other senior JPMorgan executives, BlackRock’s top management, executives from Bridgewater Associates, Carlyle Group, a leading weapons contractor, Blackstone, Dell and ArcelorMittal, which all seek to grow rich in Ukraine.

Last January, Zelensky gave a speech before the Boca Raton Chamber of Commerce in which he boasted that BlackRock, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs “have already become part of our Ukrainian way.”[3]

When Dimon and other JPMorgan executives visited Kyiv in February 2023, they agreed that JPMorgan would not only help to raise private investment funds for Ukraine, but would also advise Ukraine on financial stabilization, sovereign credit ratings, and economic ties to Europe.

Dimon said the “full resources” of JPMorgan would be available to Ukraine as it “charts its post-conflict path to growth.” Earlier, Dimon had called Ukraine “an inflection point for the Western World for one hundred years.”

Such views correlated with Dimon’s self-interest; on top of the lure of reconstruction contracts funded by the Reconstruction Bank, JPMorgan held more than $2.5 billion in Raytheon stock, and over $1.3 billion worth of both Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics stock as of February 15, 2023, major weapons contractors that have made huge profits from the war with Russia.

Fittingly, during his visit to Kyiv, Dimon and other JPMorgan executives gifted Zelensky with a New England Patriots jersey with the number 91 on it for the year Ukraine gained its independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Besides opening the floodgates to foreign capital, Ukraine continues to be valued by Dimon and his associates as a battering ram whose purpose is to weaken Russia and affect regime change so a new leader can allow Wall Street to penetrate Russia’s economy and gain ownership of its rich natural resources, as it was beginning to do under Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin’s predecessor.

Ukraine would provide another good chapter in Naomi Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, published in 2007, which showed how capitalist interests have deliberately manufactured crisis after crisis so that they could profit from the wreckage.

A key case study of the book is Iraq, where Klein shows how military contractors and oil companies that profited from the Bush administration’s shock-and-awe campaign sought to capitalize on the privatization bonanza and opening of the country to Western corporations under the direction of L. Paul Bremer, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) economic czar.

Klein reported that Bremer, a former managing director at Kissinger Associates, enacted a “radical set of laws described by The Economist in glowing terms as the ‘wish-list’ that foreign investors and donor agencies dream of for developing markets.”[4] Iraq, however, was transformed under Bremer into a dystopia where the country relinquished its economic sovereignty.

Ukraine appears on the threshold of suffering the same fate.

Zelensky has already helped to establish a low-wage, low-tax economy conducive to foreign investors, while dismantling progressive labor laws, supporting land privatization and initiating attacks on unions and left-wing politicians and political parties, which have been banned.

Founder and chairman of a private investment firm, PSP Partners, and past member of the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations, Wall Street’s think tank, Penny Pritzker visited Kyiv during her tenure as Commerce Secretary following the February 2014 Maidan coup and helped deliver a $3 billion loan that was contingent on the government adopting neo-liberal reforms beneficial to foreign corporations that had been resisted by Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian leader ousted in the coup.

As a result of the “reforms” championed by Pritzker, U.S. corporations such as Cargill, DuPont (a Delaware-based company which has long supported Joe Biden’s political career) and Monsanto have been able to invest heavily in Ukrainian agriculture and, according to a report in the Australian National Review, purchased more than 17 million hectares of Ukraine’s arable land—more than all the arable land that exists in Italy.

The main shareholders in these latter companies are Wall Street investment firms—The Vanguard Group, BlackRock and Blackstone—which donate heavily to both the Democratic and Republican parties and own major weapons companies like Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin that have done brisk business contributing to the destruction of Ukraine.

An April 2021 report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) made the lifting of a moratorium on the sale of land to foreign companies a condition for the loan package that Pritzker helped to deliver.

A poll found that 81% of Ukrainians were against the sale of land to foreigners and lifting of the moratorium, while only 13% were in favor of it.

Geopolitical analyst Drago Bosnic wrote that “the Ukrainian people have not only been quite literally robbed of the lands their ancestors gave their lives for”; they are also “effectively dying in battle to make sure this theft continues unabated.”

At the World Economic Forum, Pritzker spoke about the interest of promising investors, who are ready for higher risk, which she said will have to be mitigated by donor countries (i.e., taxpayers), before wealth from pension funds managed by BlackRock can be mobilized.

About 280 projects have applied to the fund so far, with around 30 projects being considered by BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase.

Rostyslav Shurma, deputy head of Zelensky’s office, expects $1 billion commitments in “catalytic capital.” This term refers to capital-like investments, debt and guarantees in which the investor accepts higher risk for greater social impact, according to Reuters.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), of which the U.S. is the largest shareholder, wants to further “massively engage” in Ukraine.

Based in London, the EBRD was founded in 1991, to intervene with credit and projects to help former Soviet areas to “adjust” to Western ways after the Soviet Union dissolved.

For example, the EBRD worked overtime in Ukraine in the 1990s, to aid the global agricultural cartels to gain dominance in the country.

The EBRD plans to provide €7.5-15 billion in announced investments in the next five years, with special emphasis on “support for the private sector.”

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is “optimistic” that all 27 EU member states will agree to joint financial assistance for Ukraine—in 2024-2027 some €50 billion altogether.

-----

The EBRD’s important role in the new Ukraine underscores the function of Western government institutions in facilitating shameless corporate war profiteering.

How much longer Ukrainians will put up with Zelensky’s brazen fealty to Western corporate interests is an open question, as signs of disaffection in the country continue to grow.

Ukrainians at this time would do well to read the chapter in Klein’s book about Iraq and mobilize to prevent the same thing from happening to them, even if it is already far along.

1. For example, in 2011, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) discounted a balance of $144 million from a $460 million fine Pritzker had been assessed for illegal bank and loan shark operations at the failed Hinsdale, Illinois, Superior Bank while depositors, who were still owed $10.3 million, lost their savings. According to journalist Greg Palast, the depositors included “poor folk in [then] Senator [Barack] Obama’s South Side district [who] lost their homes.” Superior Bank’s failure resulted from years of sub-prime lending combined with fraudulent reporting practices and the deception of regulators.  ↑

2. New York Post reporter Charles Gasparino was told by banker sources that Zelensky convinced the investment big shots that he is rooting out corruption, a big obstacle for any significant capital raising. Inflation is also down in the country, which is considered a significant positive. ↑

3. Bradley Devlin wrote in The American Conservative that “Zelensky did not elaborate on what the ‘Ukrainian way’ is.” “Maybe,” he writes, “the ‘Ukrainian way’ is one of rampant corruption—two of the presidents before Zelensky have either been charged with or convicted of high treason and numerous government officials have been fired or forced to resign for improper use of wartime funds.” Bradley Devlin, “Ukraine Gets Another Angel Investor,” The American Conservative, February 16, 2023, https://www.theamericanconservative.com/ukraine-gets-another-angel-investor/ ↑

4. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 345. 

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/01/31/disaster-capitalists-ready-to-descend-on-ukraine/

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OBVIOUSLY, "THEY" DO NOT THINK THAT PUTIN WILL DO ANYTHING TO STOP THIS PILLAGE.....

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