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Unlike the two year period that followed Hamas’ raid on Israel, Iran continues to over-perform in its war with the USA and Israel.

There are plenty of reasons for this, reasons that we can hash out at some point in the future. Suffice it to say that the Iranian military is not destroyed nor are their capabilities, especially those involving missiles, anywhere near such a state. Much of the country has been flattened thanks to US and Israeli attacks, but the regime continues to not just cling to power, but has also managed to rally and re-impose control on parts of the country where its presence was slipping. As of now, regime change seems like a distant prospect.

In fact, the upper echelon of the US military is describing the present state of affairs as a “stalemate”, which leaves egg on the face of President Donald Trump. Fresh off of their perfect decapitation of the Venezuelan regime, it seems that overconfidence set in, leading to the stalemate that the Trump Administration finds itself in today.

I want to draw your attention to two items, with the first one courtesy of the Wall Street Journal:

Now, as Trump moves to strike back after Iran’s surprise missile attack Tuesday, the president will decide how far to go. He could greenlight Cooper’s option of 10 to 14 days of intensive airstrikes intended to cripple Iran’s missile capability despite warnings that the U.S. is running low on air-defensive munitions. Or, he could opt for a more limited military strike in the hopes diplomacy could be pursued.

“Cooper” refers to Adm. Brad Cooper, head of the U.S. Central Command, who is stationed in Tampa Bay, Florida. He has put together a plan of action to break the stalemate with Iran, in the hopes that it brings Iran back to the negotiating table. There are significant problems with this approach, as we will see by way of the second item that I will share with you in just a bit. Back to the WSJ article…the “Go Big” approach:

For weeks, Trump has oscillated between stop-and-start diplomacy and expletive-laden threats to return to the sort of major combat operations that were featured at the beginning of the U.S. and Israeli war with Iran. On Wednesday, a senior administration official said that Trump “is in an escalatory mood” but was still contemplating “the depth of that response.”

The idea behind Cooper’s high-end option is to go beyond the smaller retaliatory airstrikes that have done little to deter Tehran from threatening ships in the Strait of Hormuz and lobbing missiles at American forces in the region by sharply escalating the war, according to people familiar with his thinking.

If the U.S. wants military action to be effective, Cooper has maintained, the U.S. must step up its air attacks, significantly blunting Iran’s missile threat, to try to break the stalemate. This “go big” approach, which is among a series of options he has developed, would reduce the need for the U.S. to use defensive munitions because Iran would have less capability to attack, he insists.

The risk of the Go Big approach:

Caine, who is described as more cautious, often alerts the White House to the “second and third order consequences” of military options, the people said. He has raised concerns about the U.S.’s dwindling supply of air defense interceptors, which are needed elsewhere around the world to defend U.S. bases and allies, as well as fend off Iran’s missile attacks. Caine believes that the low inventories wouldn’t preclude a resumption of major combat operations against Iran but would add to the risk, the people said.

Ukraine is panicking because it has run out of Patriot missiles to counter Russian attacks, but Trump informed Zelensky on Tuesday that he has no more to give him.

As Trump was considering launching the war in February, Cooper figured that he would need six weeks or more to complete the operation. He was given less than that.

The joint U.S. and Israeli air campaign began on Feb. 28. By the end of March, however, the president was growing impatient. Iran had declared the Strait of Hormuz closed and begun laying sea mines in the strategic waterway. Surging oil prices roiled the global economy and prompted the U.S. to eat into oil reserves to bring prices down.

On March 31, Cooper calculated that he still needed about 20 more days to finish the job, according to a person familiar with his thinking. But on April 3, a U.S. F-15E jet fighter was shot down over southwestern Iran, kicking off a high-risk rescue mission. While both airmen were retrieved, the incident contributed to Trump’s decision to clinch a ceasefire agreement just a few days later.

This was due to the fear of the oil shock finally sending prices of barrels to the moon.

For a quick chuckle:

In a press conference soon after the ceasefire was declared, Hegseth, who also attended last week’s Air Force One meeting, boasted that Iran’s missile program had been “functionally destroyed” with its launchers and missiles “depleted and decimated.”

Prioritizing air defenses:

While Caine had informed the White House of the limited number of air defense interceptors in the U.S. inventory, Cooper’s reasoning was that powerful airstrikes would greatly diminish Iran’s missile capabilities and its ability to retaliate. Under Caine’s approach, U.S. air defenses could be realigned in the region to buttress the defense of key sites.

We have already seen the USA evacuate bases in the region due to Iranian missile attacks. This has resulted in some reputational damage. The greater reputational damage has come about due to the USA’s inability to defend all of the GCC. Bahrain especially is a sitting duck. The UAE is now trying to make amends with Iran (or at least pretending to) out of fear that its energy sector and infrastructure will be blown sky high in retaliation for any future American and/or Israeli attacks on Iran.

The second item comes courtesy of a Professor at John Hopkins and explains why Iran refuses to budge, and why it launched a symbolic attack while Bibi was at the White House this week:

Iran's latest ballistic missile attacks and the continued rejection of compromise solutions on the Strait of Hormuz might seem like indications that "hardline" thinking is dominating Iran's national security strategy.

But my conversations with counterparts in Tehran suggest that something else is at play. Iranian decision making is increasingly shaped by an intense pessimism about what diplomacy with the U.S. can achieve. Most senior figures, whether pragmatists or hardliners, simply do not believe a deal is possible. This pessimism has gotten worse since the MOU was signed.

Why the pessimism?

Part of this is about the repeated experience of U.S. escalation during the course of negotiations, but the pessimism is no longer confined to the question of "does Trump want a deal?" Increasingly the belief is that "Trump can't do a deal, even if he thinks he wants one."

Policymakers in Tehran are looking at several things. At a technical level, the Trump administration was unable to execute even the most basic confidence building measures of the MOU. No assets were released and the oil waiver was never really operationalized. Iranian leaders are also looking to other contexts. Even in Venezuela, where the administration has complete political control and a full court press approach to economic reengagement, sanctions relief has floundered (eg. it took a whole month after the massive earthquake for FinCen to take proactive steps to try and provide banks comfort to support humanitarian transactions).

Was this not done on purpose? Or was it bungled?

The political level:

At a political level, the Iranians have seen the overblown reaction to the MOU from the full range of politicians in Washington. Democrats eager to score political points attacked provisions in the MOU that would be fundamental to *any* viable agreement with Iran. The Iranians are also watching the growing rift between the Rubio and Vance camps and are concluding that the administration is inherently dysfunctional. During the Biden years, the issue was whether the president could defend his deal from political rivals in Congress. Now, the rivals are within the cabinet itself.

Despite outward displays of unity, there is tremendous pressure being placed on Trump to placate the Hawks in Congress.

Erratic Trump:

At an individual level, there is also a growing sense that Trump is too erratic to stick by his own deals. Even Saudi Arabia, the country with perhaps the greatest influence in the White House after Israel, could not shield its own nuclear deal from Trump's excessive demands.

He concludes with the following:

This may be an unprecedented situation. The U.S. has started a war it does not know how to end. Meanwhile, the arguments for diplomacy in Tehran have been reduced to "this has a low chance of succeeding, but we have to still try." That's not a strong, positive case for diplomatic engagement and understandably the strategic thinking is tending towards the idea that U.S. dysfunction will continue to manifest in the form of economic pressure and kinetic action against Iran for a long time to come.

It’s clear that the USA thought that the regime would buckle under quickly. It’s also clear that Washington has no desire to send in a ground force, much less the massive one required to succeed in toppling and replacing the regime in Tehran. Proxy forces sponsored by the USA and Israel haven’t budged an inch. The USA can keep pounding Iran and squeezing its economy, but Iran’s ability to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed and to shake up the oil market is a big, big headache for Team Trump….and Midterms are not that far away either.

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Hi everyone and sorry for the serious lack of content lately. I had a lot of thinking to do, to organize, and to process. My brother and his family also stopped by to visit me for a few weeks. I also have several new pieces lined up and I’ll release them in rapid fire most likely beginning tomorrow.

To whet your palate, I want you to check out this half hour video that argues that China secretly saved the global economy from collapse due to purposely reducing its own oil imports and relying on unknown-until-now strategic reserves.

Let me know what you think.

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The Cuban regime’s days are numbered. I know it, you know it, and the leadership in Havana know it. The USA wants to clean up its hemisphere as it prepares to contain (and possibly attempt to strangle) China. The Donroe Doctrine clearly defines the Western Hemisphere as the USA’s zone of interest. To underline this point, the Americans raided Venezuela, kidnapped its President and his hausfrau, and have bent the government to its will, forcing it to do its bidding.

The “regime change with a light touch” in Caracas effectively removed a potential Chinese and/or Russian base of military/intel operations from the chessboard. Whether one likes it or not, the move made sense. The ease with which it was accomplished boosted the Trump Regime’s self-confidence, so much so that voices within it and in its periphery immediately demanded that Denmark hand Greenland over to it for safe keeping. It also coloured expectations on how its planned war against Iran would unfold. The desired regime change in Iran has not gone according to plan, to put it lightly, but we will save that discussion for another day. Instead, let’s turn to some much lower hanging fruit: Cuba.

Cuba is anachronism in that the government’s roots lie in being a Soviet client regime, yet it continues to exist in a post-Soviet era. Unlike its fellow communist regime in North Korea, Cuba was utterly reliant on the USSR during the Cold War and lacked the ability to play it off against the Chinese due to historical, and especially geographical, reasons. The North Koreans managed to somehow weather the collapse of the Soviet bloc and go on to develop their own nuclear arsenal. The best that can be said for Cuba is that it has managed to sputter on despite the US sanctions regime under which it lives, entirely thanks to foreign tourist dollars and a police state that has taken a heavy-handed approach to any domestic dissent.

The Sword of Damocles has been an eternal presence hanging above the heads of the Cuban Regime…maybe not eternally, but at least since the Fidel Castro decided to permit his island-state to serve for the USSR what Ukraine has sought to do for NATO: as a forward operating base to be used against its rival. The first few years of Castro’s rule saw the CIA try to remove him from power, whether through the half-hearted Bay of Pigs fiasco, through to the Looney Tunes-like plots against his life. None of these conspiracies succeeded, instead serving only to cement the regime in place.

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I’ve been on a bit of an Enoch Powell kick lately, and I’m not exactly sure as to why. Best known for his “Rivers of Blood” speech, in which he warned the UK about the dangers of mass migration, Powell was both an iconoclast and an eccentric, something that the British used to produce in spades.

Think about it; as a boy of the age of six, he would finish books and then collect his parents and give them a presentation on what he learned. His teen years were focused on the Classics, and translating(!) them into English. So adept was he at this that by the time he got to Trinity College at Cambridge, he entered into every Classics competition that existed at the time, and won each and every single one during his first year. When the University’s Dean and his wife invited him for a private supper, he had the temerity to politely refuse their offer, insisting that he had work to do (more translations). He became a Professor of Greek at the ripe old age of 25.

A devoted Nietzschean, Powell dreamed of becoming Viceroy of India, and he took the first opportunity to volunteer to serve his country in the war. His rise through the ranks was nothing short of incredible: Lieutenant-Colonel by 1942, and Brigadier (One-Star General) by the end of WW2. The man was the living embodiment of a 19th century German Romantic, albeit an English one at that. So thoroughly English was he that he could barely conceal his anti-Americanism, a trait that would surface from time to time over the course of decades. And yes, English, not British. Although today feted by immigration-restrictionists across the UK, his nationalism was what is known as “Little Englander”. Adding to the eccentricity, the turn away from Empire by the UK shortly after WW2 saw Powell do much the same: from golden dreams of being appointed Viceroy of India, to transforming into a Little Englander, adamant that it protect and retain all of what he felt were its best traits and characteristics, rejecting that which did not conform to this modus operandi.

It’s this overnight transformation that most piques my interest in his character because it is somewhat unique for a person of a very conservative nature to immediately accept such a dramatic shift in conditions and insist that the best must be made of it. “Empire is over. Let’s put it to bed, and let’s get on with it”, are words that are far, far beneath Powell’s level of erudition, but they do accurately describe his course correction.

Nowhere is this made more clear than in a speech that he delivered in UK Parliament in the Summer of 1959, when a debate arose in the chamber arising from a scandal in Kenya. Earlier that year, 11 Kenyan rebel remnants of what were known as the “Mau Mau” had been tortured and killed at a prison camp run by British colonial forces. The Mau Mau Rebellion against colonial rule that began in 1952 was effectively put down by British forces by 1956, but stragglers remained and continued to pose a threat to administration officials, and local rivals too. This rebellion is somewhat complex and might deserve a fuller treatment at some point in the future. Suffice it to say that certain tribes rebelled against the British Empire, which employed their own forces on the ground to put it down, and were aided by other Kenyan tribes, some of whom had rebelled against them in the past.

The Hola Massacre became a scandal, and Parliament had to address it. This camp, located in the east of the country (towards the Indian Ocean), was erected to detain and “rehabilitate” those that were considered “hardcore remnants of the Mau Mau rebels”. Rehabilitation often consisted of manual labour, but even them some of the detainees refused to participate. Almost 100 were adamant refuseniks, so the camp commandant decided to apply physical pressure to this cohort, leading to 11 of them being beaten to death on March 3rd of that same year1:

This would definitely fall under the ICC’s definition of a war crime today, but we are not here to re-try the matter. Instead, I want to focus on Wolverhampton MP Enoch Powell of the UK Conservative Party, and a question that he posed to Parliament, a critical position that he publicly took that ran counter to his own party (which was accused in engaging in a cover up of the killings), and that won him accolades from Labour Members of Parliament, including the far left Michael Foot and Anthony “Tony” Benn.

You can find his speech at this link (on a page in which all the speeches on the subject delivered by all MPs are provided). However, I will zoom in on this portion that appears at the end of Enoch’s oratory:

Finally it is argued that this is Africa, that things are different there. Of course they are. The question is whether the difference between things there and here is such that the taking of responsibility there and here should be upon different principles. We claim that it is our object—and this is something which unites both sides of the House—to leave representative institutions behind us wherever we give up our rule. I cannot imagine that it is a way to plant representative institutions to be seen to shirk the acceptance and the assignment of responsibility, which is the very essence of responsible Government.

Nor can we ourselves pick and choose where and in what parts of the world we shall use this or that kind of standard. We cannot say, “We will have African standards in Africa, Asian standards in Asia and perhaps British standards here at home.” We have not that choice to make. We must be consistent with ourselves everywhere. All Government, all influence of man upon man, rests upon opinion. What we can do in Africa, where we still govern and where we no longer govern, depends upon the opinion which is entertained of the way in which this country acts and the way in which Englishmen act. We cannot, we dare not, in Africa of all places, fall below our own highest standards in the acceptance of responsibility.

These words won him the scorn of the party leadership, as it was felt that he was grandstanding and not being a team player. This is a fair set of accusations, as not only was he engaging in both, but he always had a flair for the dramatic. He was a world-leading expert in Ancient Greece, after all.

One can also argue that Powell was speaking in defense of universal human rights by demanding only the highest standard of treatment from British officials and soldiers, and that this treatment must be consistent across the entire globe, wherever the UK was present. I, however, think that this is an error, albeit an easy one to make. When looking back on his idiosyncratic nature, I am convinced that he was arguing in favour of a noble English behaviour, one that really did not exist except in his own mind and in the minds of those that have always believed in “English fair play”. He was a romantic, after all.

A friend clued me into the existence of an interview with Enoch Powell conducted by one of the greatest interviewers of all-time, the American Dick Cavett. For those interested, check out this two excerpts:

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Note: I have an essay in which I broach the subject of Globalism and its declining returns for the USA on the go, plus I have also decided to break up the liberal democracy essay into a series of essays. However, it is Friday and it is glorious outside, so today we will keep it light -ed.

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Some of this content has been explored here in the past, so please forgive me for revisiting it.

When Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau (the father of Justin) was asked what it was like to border the USA, he replied: “like a mouse living next to an elephant”.

I am reminded of this great line whenever I see another squabble break out between generational cohorts on social media, as it perfectly describes GenX’s relationship to the notorious Boomers. After all, it could be no other way; we (GenX) are still living in the shadow of the Boomers, and that has always been our fate. The latter do get a lot of hate directed at them (much of it deserved in my opinion), and their impact has been immense, but credit must be given to them for their positively immense impact on public culture.

I have not come here to bury the Boomers, nor even praise them. I do not identify as strongly as most with my own generational cohort as others do, with some bordering on the fanatical. I have my own tribes with my ethnic group being the top of the totem pole for myself, nor do I begrudge those that do get whipped into a frenzy regarding generational politics. I find it rather silly, like I do men who are really into women’s feet; weird, but okay, I guess.

On the other hand, we are all products not just of our own genetics, but of the environment in which we were raised and in which we live. Years and years ago, I read an interesting article that made the case that one’s musical tastes are generally fully formed between the ages of 27 and 33, meaning that by the time you are as old as Jesus Christ was when He was Crucified, you are pretty much out of the hunting for new music ball game, and have settled on what you are happy to listen to for the rest of your life. There are always exceptions to this rule, but I was reminded of it recently when I was asked what my “go-to” music is on a rainy day, and I answered1 with the following four acts:

1. Pavement

2. Stereolab

3. Spiritualized

4. Mixes by Cut Chemist

(I will briefly elaborate on these choices later in this essay).

All three of this acts reached their apogee in the 90s, a decade in which I entered my 20s. I am GenX as fuck.

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I am not as harsh on Vladimir1 Zelensky as many others have been over the years. I do not view him as holding a significant amount of responsibility for the war in Ukraine when compared to others, as I am of the opinion that he is a hired gun, one who was cornered and forced to play-act the role of a “Ukrainian Churchill” by the country’s western backers. This has been my opinion since the Russians (re)crossed the border in February 2022, and I have no reason to change it.

Why do I say this?

It’s quite simple: In October of 2021, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) released a published report accusing Zelensky of benefiting from a network of offshore companies first established in 2012 and spanning the countries and territories of the British Virgin Islands, Belize and Cyprus:

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his partners in comedy production owned a network of offshore companies related to their business based in the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus, and Belize.

• Zelensky’s current chief aide, Serhiy Shefir, as well as the head of the country’s Security Service, were part of the offshore network.

• Offshore companies were used by Shefir and another business partner to buy pricey London real estate.

• Around the time of his 2019 election, Zelensky handed his shares in a key offshore company over to Shefir, but the two appear to have made an arrangement for Zelensky’s family to continue receiving money from the offshore.

The London properties bought via offshore shells linked to his associates: roughly £1.58M + £2.2M + £1.5M (totaling around $8 million USD at the time). That may not seem like much, but then there’s also the charge stemming from an unproven 2019 campaign allegation by a political opponent (Volodymyr Ariev), who claimed the offshore network received $41 million from Kolomoisky’s PrivatBank. The Pandora Papers partially corroborate the structure of the companies (10 matched the chart) but do not confirm the $41 million transfers or prove any wrongdoing.

Zelensky campaigned on a peace and and anti-corruption platform, but at the same time he was the protégé of the notorious Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoisky from Dnipro (aka Dnepropetrovsk). In the ever-shifting alliances of the Ukrainian Oligarchy, one that would not be out of place in Game of Thrones, Kolomoisky was the ultimate maverick as he refused to side with either Russia or the USA, preferring to extract as much as he could while the getting was good. In 2019, OCCRP accused him of stealing $5.5 Billion USD from Ukraine’s PrivatBank:

The former chairwoman of Ukraine’s central bank dubbed it one of the biggest financial scandals of the 21st century.

Valeria Hontareva was describing the alleged theft of US$5.5 billion from PrivatBank, once the country’s largest commercial lender. The suspected masterminds are the bank’s two oligarch owners: Ihor Kolomoisky and Hennadiy Boholiubov, who stand accused of absconding with an amount roughly equal to 5 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. According to court records, both men are said to have recently been living in Switzerland, though Kolomoisky appears to be spending time in Israel.

“Large-scale coordinated fraudulent actions of the bank shareholders and management caused a loss to the state of at least $5.5 billion,” Hontareva said in March 2018. “This is 33 percent of the population’s deposits … [and] 40 percent of our country’s monetary base.”

Now, for the first time, OCCRP has traced the mechanism that appears to have allowed Kolomoisky and Boholiubov to funnel such vast wealth out of Ukraine: The money was moved through a PrivatBank subsidiary in Cyprus.

The arrangement helped hide the fact that cash was disappearing because the National Bank of Ukraine treated the Cyprus branch of PrivatBank the same as it would domestic branches. This designation meant officials never detected that cash transferred to Cyprus was leaving Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Cypriot regulators either failed to detect that the various bank transfers totalling $5.5 billion were backed by bogus contracts, or didn’t take the necessary action to stop them.

The system allowed billions of dollars to be pumped through the PrivatBank accounts, which were held in Cyprus by offshore companies.

This account is based on a forensic audit by Kroll, the U.S.-based corporate investigation and risk consulting firm. The report, which is based on PrivatBank’s own records and was obtained exclusively by OCCRP, also reveals that there was little distinction between Kolomoisky and Boholiubov’s corporate and personal accounts.

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Growing up in Canada meant that I was exposed to media from both the USA and from the UK. In a way, it was a “best of both worlds” situation, in that the pool of news and entertainment that I could swim in was probably larger and more diverse than people elsewhere in the Anglosphere had access to. This unique situation helped shaped parts of me, the most noticeable one (at least in my opinion) is that my sense of humour is more influenced by the Brits than their American cousins.

I don’t absorb much direct media (beyond news and documentaries) from either of those countries now, and this has allowed me to reflect on that which I did in years past. One of the many observations that sticks in my head is that UK film and television was consistently of a much lower production value in terms of sets and site locations. This was simply due to budgetary constraints, much of it caused by the significant slump in the economy that the country experienced in the 1970s. This is not to say that UK film and TV was ever on par with the USA’s output, as the latter always had more resources to plow into production. However, that specific decade saw the UK almost become insolvent as the Pound crashed and Prime Minister Callaghan was forced to go “cap in hand” to the IMF for a multi-billion Pound bailout.

Prior to setting foot on Blighty, my mental impression of the country was completely coloured by the film, television, and photos that I was exposed to before actually seeing it for myself. In my mind, the UK was either very posh, working class (as represented by famous UK soap opera Coronation Street), or poverty-ridden, post-industrial hellholes.

My introduction to UK film and television was in the early 80s, so almost everything that I was exposed to was a product of the 1970s, and that was one hell of a decade in that country: massive strikes, power rationing and blackouts, Pound devaluation, the infamous “Winter of Discontent”, football hooliganism, rapidly changing sexual mores (many of which are beyond the pale now), and the birth of Punk Rock. It seemed as if the UK was careening out of control.

Labour unions became powerful and decided to flex their muscles, but this only resulted in placing immense downward pressure on the Pound and scaring off investors, both domestic and foreign. The UK became a place NOT to do business, and this was the land of Adam Smith! Voters, growing tired of declining living standards, voted in the Conservatives, and Margaret Thatcher was supposed to be the antidote to Labour’s excesses….but we will leave this for another time.

Lately, I have been listening to the UK podcast “And the Rest is History”, as they explore many subjects of interest to me in depth. Neither of the two hosts veers from mainstream views to any notable degree, but I enjoy the production quality and their banter (this is me turning into an old man). Lately, they have been covering that decade in UK history, and have been doing a ‘bang up job’ of it, in my opinion.

I don’t know enough on the economic aspects of that history, which is why this entry is not even a short essay; I just wanted to share this clip with you and see if anyone here had anything of interest to add to it.

The only real and tangible part of this story for myself personally is that my father worked in a steel mill, and almost all the tradesmen were newly-arrived Glaswegians who emigrated from the UK due to the catastrophic industrial situation in their own country. My father (who they called “Big Ivan”) learned his poorly-spoken English courtesy of listening to Glaswegians yelling in their thick brogue, over a blast furnace that would come in at around 120-130 decibels, if I recall correctly.

I did a summer in the steel mill while in university, and trust me, that thing was incredibly loud.

Anyway, here are some more photos from 1970s UK:

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And we’re back! In the Saturday Commentary and Review, I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

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Alright.

After a long hiatus, it’s time to bring back the SCR. I apologize for the break being much, much longer than I first anticipated, but I think I burnt myself out from projects that I have undertaken, and felt that I needed to pause this feature to gain some time to collect more articles worthy of sharing with you. My intention is to stick to a strict “post this on Saturday” rule, meaning that I will have to discipline myself yet again. And since it has been some time, I am somewhat rusty, so I apologize beforehand if this one is a bit shorter than usual.

One of my areas of research lately has been the mechanics of US control over Europe, and a new essay on this subject will be published any day now. I promise that it will be a super smash mega hit. It will touch upon many themes that we have explored here in the past, including that of captured elites on this side of the pond, a group that I lovingly refer to as Regional and National Branch Managers of USA Inc.

My friend Tomislav Kardum refers to them as the “domesticated elites”, and has a short essay up that goes into how this actually functions:

A standard talking point of the American MAGA right is that European nations have become free riders on U.S. taxpayers. The complaint is not baseless: since the end of the Cold War, many European states have allowed their militaries to atrophy while relying on the United States to underwrite global security. Yet this argument misses the less visible benefits of the international system America constructed. The United States benefits not only materially from NATO and other transatlantic institutions, but politically and socially: European elites have been integrated into an American-centered order that shapes their incentives, ambitions, and sense of possibility.

In other words, America’s real advantages derive from shaping the behavior of allied elites and embedding entire regions within a favorable institutional architecture. We are referring to a global order in which the ultimate horizon of vertical mobility is no longer the nation-state, but American institutions, global organizations headquartered in the United States, and American corporations. To understand this dynamic, one need only look across Europe.

Elites from post-communist EU countries vs. those in Western Europe:

For elites in the post-communist member states of the European Union, a career in European institutions represents the pinnacle of advancement. The trajectory is rather familiar: national leadership becomes a stepping stone to Brussels. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, for example, went on to serve as president of the European Council. Numerous Eastern European leaders signal their competence and virtue through their “acceptance” in European circles, and speculation about their eventual transition to EU institutions is routine. Cadres from ruling parties are steadily absorbed into the bureaucratic structures of the Union.

For Western Europeans, whose standards are considerably higher, careers in EU institutions carry less prestige. It is no accident that the current president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, rose to that position after an underwhelming tenure in German domestic politics, nor that the office has been held by figures from relatively minor states such as Luxembourg. Instead, Western European elites often proceed to what is effectively the final destination of global mobility: the United States. Politics within Western European states, even at the highest levels, increasingly functions not as a terminal destination, but as a platform for even greater transatlantic prestige.

It’s this last bit that I find the most troublesome. Being the head of state or head of your country’s government should be the capstone of one’s career. Instead, it is more and more often leading to the following:

The young Austrian political star Sebastian Kurz, after his chancellorship, quickly became a global strategist for Thiel Capital. Former British prime minister Rishi Sunak transitioned into an advisory role at Goldman Sachs, Microsoft and Anthropic. Germany’s former foreign minister Annalena Baerbock serves as president of the United Nations General Assembly, headquartered in New York. Former British prime minister Tony Blair entered into advisory roles with JPMorgan following his time in office, while former Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg served as secretary general of NATO for a decade, a position now held by former Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte, before returning to Norway as finance minister. Former Italian prime Minister Mario Draghi likewise spent part of his career at Goldman Sachs before assuming the highest offices in European governance. The specific positions may differ, but the underlying logic of elite circulation remains remarkably consistent.

There is great symbolism in this, and the message must be that these countries are far, far away from being anywhere near ‘equal partners’ with the USA. My assessment is much more harsh than that, as I view this trend as being both shameful and humiliating on a national scale.

Significance:

To the MAGA-minded observer, such developments may appear irrelevant as mere careerism with no bearing on American interests, yet this could not be further from the truth. European elites are disincentivized from confronting the United States because they are, in a very real sense, bought, not through crude corruption, but through the promise of status, influence, and post-political careers at the very center of global power under American hegemony.

It is a form of elite capture and client state control. You WILL be assimilated.

In the Habsburg Monarchy, for example, the great Hungarian magnates chose to enter the imperial service, staffing the ruler’s chancelleries, while resistance to centralization increasingly shifted to the lower nobility. The parallels to contemporary U.S.-European relations are profound. With the rise of the U.S. as the world’s uncontested superpower, European elites have been similarly “domesticated” by their incorporation into a broader imperial “court,” where participation confers status, security, and opportunity in exchange for relinquishing a large measure of autonomy.

Kardum argues that Trump could be upending this arrangement due to his bizarre open belligerence against Europe:

Where previous administrations maintained the “court” and its attendant rewards, Trump has often treated allied elites with open disdain, undermining the very mechanisms through which they were incorporated into the American-led order. In that sense, he disrupts the logic that has underpinned transatlantic relations for decades.

If access to the court is restricted, or its rewards diminished, European elites may be forced to rediscover a more traditional form of sovereignty. In doing so, they could revert to something resembling the original aristocratic condition—a class once again defined not by domestication, but by its capacity and willingness for conflict. Would this be in America’s interests? Would it be in the interests of the Europeans? Time will soon tell.

I simply do not like the idea of European leaders going to Silicon Valley to work as advisors for e-doggy diapers dot com.

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An interesting aspect of US-Israeli relations is that you will almost always get more truth and balance in reporting and analysis if you do a little bit of digging through Israeli media and NGOs than you would if you were wholly reliant on information stemming from US sources. This is not to suggest that all Israeli media and NGOs are fair and balanced, as that is far from the truth…yet you will find much more value on the east coast of the Mediterranean than you will in Washington DC, or New York City.

A few days ago, I came across this half-time analysis of the war in Iran courtesy of an Israeli think tank. I’ve read it three times now, and suffice it to say, I think that it is quite well-balanced. From the outset, it rejects the Trump Admin’s public statements that Iran is defeated or that the USA holds all the cards. Instead, it dispassionately argues that the Iranians maintain some leverage due to a successful strategy based on asymmetrical warfare. It also concludes that Israel faces a tough choice: try to see through the campaign to a victorious end, one that is not in any way guaranteed, or risk an Iranian rush to a nuclear bomb by attacking it sporadically. I’ll share some highlights:

More than two months after the outbreak of Operation “Roaring Lion,” the Islamic Republic stands with significant vulnerabilities and a new leadership, yet it also has certain achievements to its credit. These include surviving a joint American-Israeli attack and exploiting levers of pressure created during the fighting, including attacks against the Gulf states and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. While it is premature to assess the full implications of the war, the conclusion of which remains uncertain, prominent trajectories can already be identified across six key domains: the Iranian domestic arena; the nuclear program; the missile array; the regional proxy network; Iran’s standing in the regional order; and Iran’s position in the global arena. Insights in these contexts are intended to serve as a foundation for analyzing subsequent developments in the coming months, once the “dust of war” settles and its long-term implications become evident.

At present, the current status quo (“neither war nor peace”), characterized by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz alongside an American naval blockade, remains unstable. It is doubtful whether such a state can be sustained over time. For Israel, this reality implies that Iran continues to maintain its nuclear capabilities while rehabilitating its missile array. This increases the risk of a “breakout” toward nuclear weapons and the resumption of hostilities under more difficult conditions. Against this backdrop, Israel faces a fundamental question: Should it continue to strive for a resolution to the Iranian problem through a decisive victory—the achievability of which is highly questionable, particularly without active U.S. participation? Or should it adopt a policy of “conflict management” through intermittent enforcement, until a political shift occurs within Iran?

Iran “has not been defeated”:

For the time being, it is clear that the war has not resolved the Iranian challenge: Iran has been damaged, but not defeated. Moreover, its ability to survive a combined American-Israeli offensive may even bolster its sense of efficacy and its perception of victory, thereby complicating future efforts to generate effective pressure against it with the aim of decisive defeat.

Perception and “face” are both key aspects of this conflict, particularly the latter. If you can maintain face, much damage can be forgiven.

On the nuclear issue:

Regarding the nuclear issue, any potential arrangement with the United States (should one be reached) will force Israel to decide whether to acquiesce to it and how to maintain its clandestine enforcement and disruption capabilities. In relation to the missile array, and in light of Iranian reconstitution efforts, Israel must redefine whether this threat necessitates military action. It must also establish the "red lines" whose crossing by Iran would mandate such action, based on the severity of the threat in both quantitative and qualitative terms, particularly given the possibility of constraints on Israel's freedom of action imposed by the United States.

It’s the above issue where the USA and Israel are most aligned, and it is by far the issue given the highest value by each of them.

On the new Iranian leadership:

The assassination of Ali Khamenei marked Iran’s entry into a new phase, which may be defined as the “Third Islamic Republic.” (This follows the First Republic, spanning from the 1979 Islamic Revolution until the death of the revolution’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini; and the Second Republic, led by Khamenei from 1989 until his death during the opening strike of Roaring Lion on February 28, 2026). The Third Islamic Republic may be characterized by a transition—potentially gradual—toward an alternative governance model with military-authoritarian features. At the center of this model stands the pronounced dominance of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) within the upper echelons of leadership in Tehran, although the strengthening of the organization had already taken place under Khamenei the elder.

At this stage, there is no evidence to suggest that the Iranian regime is nearing collapse, despite the significant internal challenges it faces, which were severely exacerbated during the war. On the contrary, notwithstanding the blows it sustained, the regime—now under even more hardline leadership—managed to maintain its command-and-control capabilities until the ceasefire. Furthermore, there are no discernible cracks or fissures within the political elite, particularly in the apparatuses of repression and enforcement, led by the IRGC, the Basij, and the law enforcement forces. Although toppling the regime was not presented as one of the war’s objectives, the conditions that would enable the Iranian people to bring about the desired change have yet to mature.

I dispute the statement that regime change is not an objective, but it is very important to note that this outfit rejects any idea that the regime is itself tottering. In fact, the heavy-handed approach to targeted assassinations in combination with the bombing of civilian targets seems to have been counterproductive.

State and society in Iran as it stands now:

Operation Roaring Lion broke out in close proximity to the most significant wave of protests to hit Iran since the Islamic Revolution, and against the backdrop of the Islamic Republic’s ongoing decline. The regime faces a deep and persistent legitimacy crisis, stemming from a widening gap between the leadership and the public, particularly the younger generation, alongside an intensifying economic crisis and water and electricity shortages.

During the war—as was the case during the 12-day war—voices were heard in Iran expressing reservations regarding the intentions of the United States and Israel. Some even adopted the official narrative that this was a war against the Iranian state rather than against the Islamic Republic. A series of actions provoked strong reactions within Iran: continuous strikes on national infrastructure, universities, and pharmaceutical industries; and reports of efforts by Israel and the United States to encourage subversive activities among ethno-linguistic minorities, primarily the Kurds. These reports were perceived as a direct attempt to undermine Iran’s territorial integrity. Furthermore, President Trump’s threat to “return Iran to the Stone Age” served to galvanize the public. These events resonated not only among opponents or critics of the regime, but also emerged as a widespread expression of national and patriotic sentiment.

This only reinforces the point that the media campaign has also played a role in hardened the regime and boosting patriotic sentiment in Iran.

This is a somewhat longish analysis, so for those interested in reading it in its entirety, click this link.

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I have a strong aversion to types who insist that we humans can know everything that is knowable, because I feel that such a position is very hubristic. For example, I have long thought that different populations have deep-seated ways of knowing certain things that are not uniformly shared across all of humanity. Might there be something West African-based Voodoo? I certainly wouldn’t dismiss it outright, and haven’t done so especially after I learned that Bantu populations have genomes that range from 2-19% being derived from so-called Ghost Archaic Hominins. My entirely unscientific belief is that if that type of knowledge exists, it could be a remnant of one or more of those populations who contributed to the evolution of today’s Bantus.

Rational types are often very quick in dismissing notions of “Indigenous Knowledge”, but not all are, as this essay by Jonathan Salem-Wiseman shows us:

Aporia

The Case for Indigenous Ways of Knowing

Written by Jonathan Salem-Wiseman…

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4 months ago · 51 likes · 37 comments · Aporia

The reception to claims about an Indigenous “way of knowing” tends to be determined by our political tribe. On the left, the very idea of a distinct, non-Western way of knowing is accepted as an obvious truth, if not an unimpeachable piety. Indigenous peoples, it is argued, live in harmony with nature and are thus uniquely attuned to the “interconnections between all things.” On the right, such a claim is often met with derision, and is dismissed as the latest iteration of faddish, “noble savage” mysticism.

I think both these positions are wrong and misleading, and they overlook a much more interesting story. An Indigenous “way of knowing” is a real phenomenon, but it falls short of exaggerated claims about an epistemic access to the world that is just as rigorous as the natural sciences. I want to argue that an Indigenous way of knowing, properly understood, is explained by global psychological variation, manifesting as a set of differences in visual processing skills and cognitive dispositions.

The WEIRD as an historical outlier:

Most educated people have been taught that, despite cultural differences, there is a universal human psychology and, by extension, a common suite of evolved cognitive traits or dispositions.

It turns out that our assumptions about a common human nature rest upon data generated by psychological studies of a highly peculiar group: university students from Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic countries. These “WEIRD” people are not representative of humanity, and thus the conclusions we have drawn about cognition, perception, personality traits, moral intuitions and behavioural dispositions simply do not translate to the global population.

This insight is the subject matter of Joe Henrich’s remarkable book, The WEIRDest People in the World. Despite our decades-long assumptions, Henrich and his colleagues have shown that university students at elite Western universities are not the human norm, psychologically speaking, and are in fact statistical outliers. It is Western psychologies, Western cognitive dispositions, that need to be explained. My tentative hypothesis is that Indigenous “ways of knowing” should not be viewed as anomalous or even peculiar — a unique phenomenon that requires special explanation — but as the global norm that existed before the Europeans began exporting their WEIRD institutions and practices around the world.

So what event was responsible for the onset and development of WEIRDness? According to Henrich, it was the Catholic Church’s “marriage and family programme” (hereafter MFP) that began in fits and starts in the early Middle Ages, and had the effect of transforming the structure of family and inheritance practices.

What is the difference?

I will now zero in on the perceptual and cognitive dispositions that reveal the differences between Western and Indigenous minds.

First, there is some evidence that WEIRD individuals are more likely to be fooled by the Müller-Lyer illusion. Two parallel lines of equal length appear to be unequal due to the arrow-like tips on the ends of each pointing either outwards (which makes the line look longer) or inwards (which makes the line look shorter). While WEIRD people are routinely duped by this, when non-WEIRD African cultures, like the San, are presented with the same visual stimulus, individuals typically report that the lines are the same length.

Henrich speculates that the reason for this difference lies in the fact that WEIRD people live in highly “carpentered” environments and spend their days navigating through a world of dry, medium-sized objects featuring lots of straight lines and right-angles, and thus the presence of the angled lines throws off our ability to judge the lengths accurately. (Though it should be noted that the difference in perception has recently been called into question.)

WEIRD people are also distinct with respect to “focal object bias” in scene description. Fancy jargon aside, this simply means that when WEIRD people are presented with visual images of, say, a lion crouching in the middle of a detailed forest scene (as in Henri Rousseau’s jungle paintings), we are more likely to focus on the lion while ignoring the framing, contextual details.

Non-WEIRD observers, on the other hand, devote their attention across the entire picture and have an easier time picking out the interactions of the flora and fauna in the background.

This finding sheds light on the different assessments made by Indigenous observers and scientists in the fishery case-study mentioned above. While the scientists zeroed in on the measurable, physical anomalies on the fish, the Indigenous observers appealed to a broader range of seemingly peripheral, contextual cues to inform their assessment of the ecosystem’s health.

This supports the Indigenous scholars who maintain that Indigenous people are more apt to survey interconnections and inter-relationships than Westerners, even trained scientists (who are psychologically predisposed to focus on the shiny object in the middle). Several other WEIRD–non-WEIRD differences in visual perception have been documented in the literature.

Fascinating stuff. Click here to read the rest.

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If you have been a long time reader of this Substack you will be familiar with ASML, the high tech Dutch company specializing in ultraviolet lithography, making it a chokepoint for advanced chip design.

This is a wild story, so I will only share the introduction. Please click on this link to read it in full.

By betting on extreme ultraviolet lithography long before it worked, ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips.

The phones we carry around in our pockets have two million times more memory and are thousands of times faster than the room-sized computers that guided the Apollo mission to the Moon. This incredible shrinking act has been driven by our ability to make transistors smaller and smaller.

Each transistor is a microscopic switch that can alternate between a one and a zero, the basic language of all computing. Billions are packed onto tiny silicon chips called semiconductors. The more transistors that fit onto a chip, the more logic and memory circuits it holds, and the more it can do.

Advanced semiconductors are, arguably, the most important technology in the world. Over the last five years, they have even emerged as a geopolitical flashpoint between the US and China. But for all this rivalry, any country or company that hopes to manufacture semiconductors is dependent on a single firm: ASML. Dubbed ‘a relatively obscure Dutch company’ by the BBC in 2020, ASML makes the only machines in the world capable of stenciling the transistors onto chips with the precision necessary to fit billions on a 30-centimeter wafer.

These machines are roughly the size of double-decker buses. To ship one requires 40 freight containers, three cargo planes, and 20 trucks. They are the world’s most complex objects. Each contains over one hundred thousand components, all of which have to be perfectly calibrated for the machine to produce light consistently at the right wavelength.

While ASML is now the sole supplier of these machines, and will be for some time to come, it started out as a laggard in the chipmaking industry. Overtaking its competition required many things rarely associated with European companies: close collaboration with the American government, selling large stakes to foreign competitors, and a huge gamble on an unproven technology.

Let there be light

The key to ASML’s success is a technology called photolithography (sometimes just called lithography). The technique involves transferring a pattern onto a semiconductor wafer by exposing it to light. In the 1950s, the first chipmakers had tried to draw these patterns by hand, but anything that physically touches the wafer scratches it, dirties it, or warps the pattern. Scientists working independently for Bell Labs and the US military realized that they could use light to print identical patterns without making physical contact with the wafer.

To make chips, engineers start with a thin wafer of semiconductor material, usually silicon. This wafer is coated with a chemical called photoresist, which reacts when exposed to light. In photolithography, light is projected through a detailed pattern onto the photoresist-coated wafer, softening the exposed areas. The wafer is washed to remove any softened areas, revealing the silicon underneath. It is then moved to an etching machine that blasts it with charged chlorine or bromine gas, carving the desired pattern into the exposed silicon. These features are later filled with metal, such as tungsten and copper, to connect the transistor to power. These etched layers then combine into an intricate network of transistors.

Over time, the semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem has developed increasingly sophisticated etching using ever smaller wavelengths of light. Smaller wavelengths diffract less, allowing the light to travel in straighter lines and print sharper, tinier details without blurring. These allow for more precise pattern projections that, in turn, allow smaller and more densely packed transistors.

Early lithography relied on mercury vapor lamps that were similar to streetlights, while more modern machines rely on lasers created using argon and fluorine gases. By 2010, such lasers made it possible to create a 22-nanometer feature through multiple exposures using a 193-nanometer wavelength.

Recall that the Americans have been pressing ASML to limit the exports to China of certain features of their product.

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We end this weekend’s SCR with a legendary set of posts that form a travelogue compiled by a young Belgian couple who decided to drive through The Congo back in 2010. The catch? They would refuse to pay a single bribe. You gotta read this.

The border at Kasumbalesa was the usual chaotic affair. Especially the Zambian side proved to be an annoying experience. Many pushy touts and very crowded. The Congolese side on the other hand had very little touts. It was chaotic too, but much smoother then their neighbours.

We were warned about the "5$ dollar first entry" bribe at the Congolese side.

This conversation was in French ofcourse:

Customs Officer: "Hi, that'll be 5$US"
- Me: "Of course,but what is it for exactly?"
CO: "Tourist tax"
- Me: "Oh, I was not aware of the existance of a tourist tax?"
CO: "Yes, but only on the first entry"
- Me: "Aaaah, of course how could I forget. I already paid this when I entered at by boat in Kinshasa a few months ago" <-- I lied, there is no such tax and I never paid such tax. But I did have the proof of my previous entry in Congo in my passport
Co: *long silence*
Co: *hesitating* "You still have to pay..."

He lost, I won. He knew it but he would not give in of course. I sat there for another 10 minutes before I was let go without any further words. This went smoothy... very smoothly! I was starting to think that all these corruption stories about Congo were overrated. Little did I know at that time...

We actually bougt insurance at the border. Not that we believe that it would be of any use in case of an accident. But just to avoid the bribes associated with not having any insurance.

Click here to read the rest.

Thank you once again for checking out the SCR. Hit the like button at the top or the bottom of this page to like this entry, and use the share and/or res-stack buttons to share this across social media. Leave a comment below if the mood strikes you to do so. And don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t done so already.

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(Image is of Niccolo holding up all the assumptions baked into the ceasefire)

This is the second part of a 2-part series. You can find the first entry here.

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Everything that you are about to read in this entry could be rendered null and void by the time you receive this in your email inbox. This is a testament to just how fragile this ceasefire is. As I type this up, Iran has already launched strikes at Israel, the IDF continues to pound Hezbollah in Lebanon, and now it is being reported that the UAE is striking Iranian oil industry assets in the Persian Gulf. Be prepared to toss this entire analysis into the bin.

However, I still feel the need to provide one. As I wrote in a recent essay, this war is an excellent opportunity for the USA to lock down the entire Middle East, a condition that is necessary for it to move onto its main objective: containing and strangling China. Per contemporary internet parlance, this is an actual happening, and happenings have global repercussions. It deserves our full attention.

All of this could blow up in an instant. Keep this in mind the entire time that you are reading this. We are taking a conflict that is happening in real time, freezing it in amber, and trying to figure out what it all means by assuming that this ceasefire actually holds and progresses to serious negotiations beyond this set two-week time frame. We have to assume some linearity, and therein lies the rub.

How We Got To This Point

The 1979 Iranian Revolution that saw the Shah of Iran deposed and replaced by a Shi’ite Theocracy was a seminal event in the 20th century. For centuries, the Islamic world was in retreat almost everywhere, and was being pressed by The West as it surged ahead on every conceivable front, especially in terms of technology, economics, and warfare. For the first time in generations, Islam experienced a political surge that not only managed to capture one of the most important countries in the Muslim world, but it had the added effect of thoroughly embarrassing the West. Honour was restored.

Despite the sectarianism that plagues the Ummah, Sunnis took inspiration from the changes in Iran, ushering in a resurgence of political Islamism, radicalism, and extremism from Morocco all the way to Indonesia. In the Middle East, Arab secularism (especially Ba’athism) now had a new challenger to face off against, one without the baggage of military defeats that plagued Egypt, Syria, and others in the region.

This earth-shaking change did not please others as well, particularly Israel and especially Saudi Arabia. For the Saudis, not only did the new regime in Tehran present a sectarian opponent for it to face down, Iran also now eroded much of the legitimacy that was bestowed on the Saudis for being the “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques” (their control over Islam’s two holiest cities: Mecca and Medina). Making matters even worse for them was that many Sunni radicals within the Kingdom took inspiration from the Iranian Revolution and quickly moved to copy it at home by toppling the royals. This resulted in the failed Grand Mosque Seizure in the late Autumn of 1979. Saudi Arabia now had an existentialist threat in its neighbourhood.

Israel did not take too kindly to this scene change, either. Overnight, Iran became “The Great Hope” for many Palestinians, and many more Muslims worldwide, in their conflict with the Israeli state. Iran’s approach was incendiary, reflecting its revolutionary character. Israel now had a new existentialist threat in its wider neighbourhood to contend with.

However, no one was more upset than the United States of America. Not only did the Mullahs remove a loyal client in Tehran, they also threatened their key ally in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, their new protege, Israel, and most importantly, the free flow of oil through the Persian Gulf. Postwar USA was built on the solid foundation of US-Saudi relations that provided a steady, cheap, and reliable supply of Saudi oil to the US market that powered its economic dynamism. This situation could not be permitted to go unchallenged.

Fortunately for the USA, it had a junkyard dog on retainer on Iran’s western border: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Hussein, a one-time CIA asset, was happy to go to war with Iran, and a brutal conflict that lasted almost a decade broke out between the two. Neither side had much to show for it other than a tremendous loss of life, but the Iranian regime managed to survive, thwarting American ambitions. Still worse, Hussein had “gone rogue” and turned against his one time patrons, forcing the USA to enact a policy of “dual containment” that spanned both countries. This policy would last until Hussein was toppled over a decade later.

The end of Iraq’s Ba’athist regime introduced a new problem for US policy planners: in the ensuing power vacuum, pro-Iranian Shi’a militias took control of the south and much of the centre of the country. Without firing a single shot, Iran came out a winner in the War on Iraq. Thanks to those very same militias, a “Shi’ite Crescent” came into existence, one that created a land and air bridge between Iran and its client state in Damascus, and its proxy force in South Lebanon, Hezbollah. Iran was now able to easily supply these forces, with Hezbollah acting as a destabilizing agent on Israel’s northern border. This situation was intolerable for both Jerusalem and Washington.

Over this period of time, the spectre of a nuclear-armed Iran began to fill newspaper columns in Israel and the West. Despite Israel reportedly possessing its own nuclear arsenal, an Iranian nuke was beyond the pale. The efforts to dislodge the regime in Tehran continued unabated, with the 2009 Green Revolution being a notable failure in those efforts. Iran proved itself yet again to be nut too tough to crack. It was time to go back to the drawing board.

Obama’s administration engaged in a policy of quasi-detente with Iran, seeking to try to change its behaviour through engagement that would bolster reformists in that country. This led to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that worked to limit the country’s nuclear program in return for sanctions relief. This agreement upset Iran Hawks in the USA, and horrified the Israelis. Thankfully for them, Donald Trump was all to happy to rip up this agreement and place new sanctions on Iran.

A stalemate ensued until Hamas launched its disastrous attack on Israel in 2023. So disastrous was this gambit that it resulted in the decapitation and humbling of Hezbolllah, and more importantly, the long-desired overthrow of the Ba’athist Assad government in Syria. Almost overnight, 40 years of Iranian geo-strategy went up in smoke. The Shi’ite Crescent crumbled, Assad was gone, Hezbollah was humbled, and Iran’s feeble retaliation against Israel made it appear to be a paper tiger. Worse still was the fact that no one, neither Russia nor China, came to its aid. It was left to fend for itself, totally isolated. Why not finish them off once and for all?

This was the line of reasoning used by Bibi Netanyahu when he pitched a war with Iran in front of Trump and his inner circle on February 11th of this year:

In the Situation Room on Feb. 11, Mr. Netanyahu made a hard sell, suggesting that Iran was ripe for regime change and expressing the belief that a joint U.S.-Israeli mission could finally bring an end to the Islamic Republic.

At one point, the Israelis played for Mr. Trump a brief video that included a montage of potential new leaders who could take over the country if the hard-line government fell. Among those featured was Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last shah, now a Washington-based dissident who had tried to position himself as a secular leader who could shepherd Iran toward a post-theocratic government.

Mr. Netanyahu and his team outlined conditions they portrayed as pointing to near-certain victory: Iran’s ballistic missile program could be destroyed in a few weeks. The regime would be so weakened that it could not choke off the Strait of Hormuz, and the likelihood that Iran would land blows against U.S. interests in neighboring countries was assessed as minimal.

…and most importantly:

Besides, Mossad’s intelligence indicated that street protests inside Iran would begin again and — with the impetus of the Israeli spy agency helping to foment riots and rebellion — an intense bombing campaign could foster the conditions for the Iranian opposition to overthrow the regime. The Israelis also raised the prospect of Iranian Kurdish fighters crossing the border from Iraq to open a ground front in the northwest, further stretching the regime’s forces and accelerating its collapse.

Don’t let others fool you: this war has always been about regime change.

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If it were not for Hungary’s obstinance, European countries would have been forced to accept refugees on a quota basis almost a decade ago. It was this persistent stubbornness to permit Brussels to manage the demographics of its member states that won Viktor Orban and Fidesz a lot of international support. It also earned them a tremendous amount of enmity on both sides of the pond. Hungary under Fidesz has been a thorn in the side of the transatlantic elites for almost two decades now.

That may be coming to an end as Magyars head to the polls this Sunday to vote for a new parliament. Fidesz has been in power since 2010, and have won every single election in that time quite handily, even winning supermajorities that permitted it to change the country’s constitution. Yet this time around they are trailing in the polls, and the opposition leader is not a bumbling fool like previous ones were. Fidesz is in danger of going into the opposition.

Contrary to hyperventilating liberals, Fidesz is not an extremist party. It is a party in the tradition of post-war European Christian Democracy. It is a classically conservative party, far, far away from any sort of right wing radicalism. At the same time, this lack of radicalism is what makes Fidesz’s time in government little more than a rearguard action against ever-entrenching liberal democracy. As Orban himself has repeatedly stated, Hungary is too small a country to be able to single-handedly turn Europe towards a new direction. It always needed assistance from either a larger partner member state, or to be part of a bloc of states. The Visegrad 4 could have been that bloc, but the war in Ukraine got in the way, and Poland and Hungary took two opposite routes since then.

Hungary could have weathered the storm of opposition that it drew due to its stance on migration, but its refusal to play ball with Brussels and Washington over the war in Ukraine might be its undoing. The Americans want to park that war onto the EU’s plate, and Hungary has long been a spoiler in these efforts. Despite JD Vance arriving in Budapest only a few short hours ago to try and boost Fidesz’s chances this weekend, Hungary’s independent approach to the war is a nuisance to American foreign policy planners. I personally believe that many in the Trump Administration would not be upset to see Orban leave the scene, despite public appearances to the contrary.

Many Hungarian voters want to punish Fidesz for an economic downturn resulting from the war in Ukraine and exacerbated by the EU withholding funds earmarked for the country. Where Orban could previously campaign on economic successes, this time around Fidesz cannot rely on that argument. Compounding matters is the perception that the party is corrupt. There is a lot of truth to this, and corruption (in most cases) needs to be punished.

I will now say something that might be construed as controversial: a lot of that corruption has been used to create a counter-elite that is patriotic, weakening the entrenched elite that has been held over since the communist era. Russia’s Putin was able to tame most of the rapacious oligarchy by threatening them with prison (or worse) if they refused to play ball. Viktor Orban could not do something similar because it would have violated every rule on human rights in the book. This meant that Fidesz would have to be creative in creating a counter-elite. The above is a very tough pill to swallow, especially because a lot of the corruption is purely selfish. This perception is now so widespread in Hungary that the government no longer has the benefit of the doubt.

Magyars are also experiencing fatigue with Fidesz in that the media war footing that their country has been on for a very long time now could only maintain high levels of support if the economy kept growing and benefits kept being felt by the public. Regime fatigue is a constant in politics across the globe, and Fidesz should have addressed this by bringing in more new and younger faces. Instead, an perceived ossification has set in, and like all people, Hungary’s voting public is fickle.

Can Fidesz pull off a miracle and win one more time? It’s not looking good for them right now as all the stars have aligned to force them out of power after almost an entire generation in power.

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Part 1 of 2 - (Second Part out tomorrow)

I have a somewhat large social media following, and I tend to do my out loud thinking there instead of here for reasons that are entirely about one thing only: quality. On social media, I ask questions out loud and float thoughts, not only to gauge reaction (as relying on basic A/B testing would be unethical), but more to see how the words that I choose to arrange in a sentence to form the idea look to me. In a way, it’s like looking in a mirror while getting ready to step out.

On social media, I get bombarded with questions, and often the deluge is simply too much to bear. That is a price of having a large following. Sometimes, the questions are good or even very good. Sometimes they are horrible, or are based on misreadings of what I have written. The worst are those that are based on second or third-hand misunderstandings of my views. I mainly ignore those. The best ones are ones that make me think and that force me to revisit my priors.

Roughly one week into this new war, I made a comment that suggested that the next three or four days would tell us where this war was going. I had several people remind me of this when that time frame elapsed, hoping that I would provide them an answer. I did give them one…I replied: “I don’t know.”

This was the only honest answer that I could provide at the time. Thankfully, most of those who responded were appreciative of my sincerity, knowing full well that it was also unsatisfactory in terms of obtaining knowledge. I strive at all times not be a bullshit merchant, even if that line of work is much, much more lucrative than this one has been. If you ask me today where I think that this war is headed, my answer will be much the same, albeit with more of the gaps filled in since I was first asked that question.

Why is that?

There are several reasons, but the overarching one is that information on this war has been incredibly shoddy and very, very unreliable. Ever war sees the proverbial “Fog of War” descend on it, but this time it’s as thick as pea soup. Reporters on the ground in Iran are scant, while reporting from Israel and the countries that form the GCC are severely censored, if permitted to report at all. Factor into this the lack of US print media foreign-based reporting, forcing them to rely on updates from the US State Department, White House or DoD (Department of Defense).. Even the Brits and Europeans have gone AWOL when they should be covering this war.

What about the internet, the so-called “democratization of media”? I am very sorry to report that its performance has been even worse than mainstream media in terms of war coverage. During previous conflicts, news aggregator sites like Twitter were excellent resources to track wars to their most minute level. A lot of the heavy lifting is traditionally performed by OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) accounts who rely on a wide range of sources, spanning everything from satellite imagery through to local media outlets, and HUMINT (Human Intelligence). The beauty of OSINT is that trustworthiness is very easy to set ablaze as claims can be verified rather quickly…..or so it seemed (more on this in a bit).

Unfortunately, social media is now a new battleground between opposing sides, and between spectators who have chosen to pick sides. This might provide comedic relief, and it does entertain, but only to the detriment of trying to find out what is actually going on in this war. To borrow an overused term, social media has become “weaponized”. This state of affairs muddies the water, as belligerents choose to flood the zone with disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation in order to not just engage in psychological warfare against their enemy, but to also build support for their cause at home and abroad. Compounding matters is the monetization of social media that incentivizes bad actors to pump out sensationalist imagery and “takes” in order to cash in, which makes them guilty of war profiteering in a way. The rapid rise of AI-produced media makes this dishonesty all the more cheaper to create. I have had to turn back to mainstream media to try and divine the truth regarding this conflict.

If Vietnam was the “First Televised War”, and if the First Gulf War was the “First 24 Hour News War”, then this showdown can be argued to be the “First Fake News on Social Media War” (admittedly, a cumbersome title that certainly won’t stick). A lack of on-the-ground reporting from credible sources, a social media world that is both monetized to lie for clicks and drowning in partisan alt.media takes that have only a fleeting relationship with reality, and a US regime that is practicing a strategy of communications ambiguity is a perfect recipe for creating frustration. That has been a theme of these past four weeks.

Strategic Communication Ambiguity

Traditionally, countries entering into a war will provide their citizenry with a clear understanding as to why it is being undertaken. War is a matter of life and death…literally. It is also the most important decision that any leader or government will make during his/her/its time in office. Every war that is launched is a big risk, and clearly communicating the goals of such a risk is required to try to beef up support for such a tricky venture.

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If you strip away the moral aspect, remove the domestic political considerations, and look at it objectively, this was probably the best time to conclusively hit Iran. Rocked by destabilizing anti-government protests only a year or so after seeing 40 years of its regional strategy blow up in their faces in the span of two weeks, Tehran has been increasingly isolated. Add to this the recent round of joint US-Israeli strikes targeting its nuclear power infrastructure combined with its somewhat feeble retaliatory efforts, and one could satisfactorily argue that the regime has suffered a mortal wound. Why not finish it off once for all?

This is Iran, after all. This is the country whose government chants “Death to America!” like the British once used to exclaim “God Save the King!”. This is a country that took US officials hostage, thoroughly embarrassing the Americans for well over a year, helping destroy Jimmy Carter’s Presidency. This is a country that is technically not just Islamist, but also a revolutionary regime, one whose creation inspired Muslims across the Sunni-Shi’a divide to turn back to Islam and embrace radical, revolutionary politics to upend and replace secular governments that they viewed as being weak in the face of foreign powers.

Think about it: isolated and left to twist in the wind by a Russia too preoccupied with a long and bloody existential war on its footstep, effectively abandoned by a China that is playing its own long game, Iran is ripe for the plucking. Remove yourself from all biases that you carry, and all the politics that you support, and hitting Iran now makes perfect sense. Hitler is claimed to have boasted that “We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.” in reference to the USSR. It wasn’t true with respect to the Soviet Union, but can it be true about Iran?

Bashar Assad is playing video games in exile in Moscow. Saddam Hussein is long dead. The USA finished the process of the Middle East’s de-Ba’athification when Damascus surrendered to al-Qaida (under a new brand) just before Christmas of 2024. Two ex-Soviet client regimes, Iraq (opportunistic) and Syria (traditional), inherited by Russia have been removed from the chessboard of the Middle East in the span of one single generation. Gone from the equation is secular Arab nationalism that is both anti-American and anti-Israeli. Two challengers to US hegemonic ambitions in that region are no more, rendering Iran, the final prize, almost completely isolated. This is an isolation made only even more stark by the loss of an Iranian ally in Damascus, and the humbling of its Lebanese client, Hezbollah. Iran remains the only state challenger to US designs on the Middle East. If the regime can be replaced, or if the present one can be altered enough to a certain degree, the American victory in the region will be final, as the Middle East would be pacified in the larger sense.

Only Iran stands in the way of the USA being able to finally subdue the whole of the Middle East. For almost half a century now, several American governments have been bogged down in a region that holds outsized importance to the global economy, even if that importance has diminished somewhat over the past decade and a half. The story contains three key elements:

1. maintain critical supplies of oil to the USA and most of the rest of the world in order to aid in economic growth

2. gain control of oil and gas supplies in order to use as leverage against state actors not aligned with US strategic goals, yet reliant on said energy supplies

3. support the defense (and sometimes, expansion) of Israel from its regional opponents in order to satiate various pro-Israeli domestic constituents that are politically powerful

Dwight Eisenhower sent 15,000 marines and soldiers to Lebanon in 1958 to stabilize a pro-western regime in Beirut as part of Operation Blue Bat. Ronald Reagan sent the Marines to the same country in the early 1980s, but with disastrous results. It was only with Operation Desert Shield/Operation Desert Storm that the USA entrenched its forces in the Middle East, a presence that has been continuous to this day, one that has been coloured by an immense amount of resources being allocated to it, and triggering a significant amount of criticism in response.

There have been quite a lot of side quests during the era of permanent US military presence in the Middle East, but each one of them, ranging from “fighting terrorism” to “halting Iran’s nuclear ambitions”, fall within the above three elements. For example, the official narrative regarding the 9/11 attacks on the USA states that al-Qaida was responsible for it. The leader of al-Qaida at the time, Osama bin Laden, turned to terror for many reasons, but the straw the broke the camel’s back was the permanent stationing of US forces on Saudi Arabian soil. To him and his type of Sunni Muslim, this represented a severe violation of Islam, in that a non-Muslim power was occupying the “Land of the Two Holy Mosques” (Mecca and Medina). Yet the large US presence in Saudi Arabia only came about due to its confrontation with Saddam Hussein in the lead up to the First Gulf War. Saudi Arabia, the world’s only ‘swing producer’ of oil, was so critical to the increasingly-globalized world economy (led by the USA), that Washington felt it had no option but to place troops in that very conservative Islamic country in order to protect the regime from threats, both external and internal.1 This is a classic example of how one of the three key elements stated above resulted in side quests that have become themes of the history of US forces in the Middle East.

If the Iranian regime can be toppled, and if an American client can be put in its place, the USA will have accomplished the pacification of the Middle East and its successful incorporation into the US Empire. This is just how enormous the stakes are when Donald Trump threw the dice this past weekend. Sure, minor irritants would flare up from time to time, but present ones like Hezbollah and the Houthis would lose their patrons, resulting in a significant loss of their own ability to project power. Most importantly, this desired pacification would permit the USA to finalize two stated policy objectives.

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“Nothing Ever Happens” had a tremendous run, but like all good things it too had to come to an end at some point.

This specific point was reached around a month ago when Team Trump decided to kick its foreign policy ambitions into overdrive (some might say “Turbo”) by kidnapping Venezuela Jefe Nicolas Maduro and his wife, then immediately laying claim to ownership of the whole of Greenland, threatening to regime change Cuba and Colombia, and now threatening to strike Iran yet again. Things are indeed ‘happening’.

It was only a few short years ago when the mood in the USA was one of serious concern as to whether it could keep itself together as the media-driven psy-op that flooded the country (and which many of us foreigners followed closely) painted a picture of an America on the verge of civil strife, one that was in danger of falling behind China. “American decline” was the theme that was repeatedly forced down our throats.

Long-time readers of this Substack are aware that I took a contrarian view, insisting that not only was the USA not in decline on the global stage, but that it was setting itself up for a coming period where it would reassert itself in order to fend off perceived challenges from the world’s two main revisionist powers: China and Russia. Part of my thesis was that the USA would become increasingly extractive with respect to its own allies in order to maintain its dominant global position. I called this theory “Turbo America”, and I developed it over the course of roughly four essays that you can read on this site. Here is the original for those who have never read it:

Suffice it to say that my contrarian take has now been totally vindicated. My take was dismissed at the time, and was often mocked too. I will not get credit for making the best call out of anyone who writes in this sphere, nor have I ever expected that I would get any. Those are the brakes. What I was certain of was that this is how events would play out.

Description is not prescription, a concept that many people seem to have trouble grasping. Since I wrote Turbo America, I have been repeatedly accused of being pro-US Empire. Nothing could be further from the truth. At the same time, other detractors have lumped me in with types who promote BRICS or Russia’s Dugin and his “Eurasianism” worldview, and so on. Again, these types are also off-base. My core concern is my country, and by extension due to its small size, Europe.

The Liberal-Democratic Order

I do not believe that there is a “West” today. The West as a concept cannot exist with a Europe that is totally dominated by an outside force. We can speak of a desire to liberate the West, but for all intents and purposes the West is dead (unless you argue that it has moved across the Atlantic Ocean and now resides in the USA). Despite having all the trappings of national sovereignty, Europe is little more than a collection of national and regional branches of USA Inc. It is less a continent of states and more a collection of vassals. There can be no course correction without accepting this as being the actual truth.

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At the tail end of September 1995, the Croatian Army (HV) launched an offensive across the Una River from Central Croatia into Serb-held Northwestern Bosnia. This came on the heels of several major victories for the HV in that war, but Operation Una would quickly be a failure.

Danish UN Peacekeepers were stationed in the vicinity and got to see the whole show as it played out. Stuck in their bunkers (to make sure that they weren’t accidentally hit by stray shells), they watched the action and reported what they saw. One report that I read has stuck with me ever since; a Danish soldier was using thermal imaging binoculars and watched Croatian soldiers slowly bleed out until they died from their wounds. He said that the colour of their bodies went from red, orange, and yellow, and then to green, and finally to a shade of dark blue.

Charlie Kirk is currently in between the orange and green phases, as his social media omnipresence begins to dissipate, leaving only clips of what once had been. Charlie is fading out.

I, like many others, dismissed him at first and openly mocked him. How could you not? TPUSA had a gift shop that sold the most cringe items possible: hoodies emblazoned with the words “I LOVE CAPITALISM” were splashed all over the page. Combined with his early rhetoric that reflected the most milquetoast GOP talking points, no one could be blamed for seeing him as little more than another sponsored Con Inc. grifter.

While many of us wrote him off, he continued to build his organization, extend his network, and most importantly, rapidly mature in his politics. As he was being ignored by the likes of people like myself, he moved away from Chamber of Commerce Republicanism and towards #MAGA. So successful was he in this evolution that not only did he gain the ear of people like Donald Trump and JD Vance, but he also managed to turn his organization, TPUSA, into the youth wing of #MAGA. So critical was he to this movement that he became a power broker behind the scenes at the age of 30. Who knows where he would have been at 50 if he was not gunned down by Tyler Robinson three months ago?

We will never know. What we do know now is that Kirk was able to speak to rival factions within the overall Republican Party, having earned the trust of each of these groups. This may not have been visible to us at the time, but it certainly is obvious now. Charlie had a movement, leadership qualities, trust, a growing, powerful network, and most importantly, influence. His removal from the scene has left a massive, gaping hole in #MAGA, leaving its youth wing rudderless for the time being (and for the foreseeable future).

has gone as far as to argue that the Kirk assassination has “wrecked the right”:

Highly Respected

The Charlie Kirk Assassination Wrecked The Right

Charlie Kirk’s death shocked the world. Millions of Americans grieved over the loss of the Turning Point USA founder. His public memorial essentially became a state funeral, with thousands in attendance, and countless others watching it live. His death gruesomely illustrated the threat of political violence, with the White House declaring Antifa a terro…

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9 months ago · 103 likes · 63 comments · Scott Greer

All of that disappeared with his murder. There’s no one filling the massive void he left behind. There’s a desperation to find someone to fill Kirk’s shoes, but the only candidate they can suggest is JD Vance. Vance is vice president. He’s too busy to serve as conservatism’s manager and hold campus rallies all over the country.

The vacuum left by Kirk led to the Right’s ongoing civil war. Without an effective leader, there’s nothing holding these disparate sides together. Brutal mudslinging and purge attempts naturally follow.

Scott focuses on two different streams to criticize in the fallout from the killing:

1. the addiction to ridiculous conspiratorial thinking that is amplified by social media

2. unrealistic hopes from those who want to see concrete action against perceived political enemies

Explaining the first group as individuals seeking entertainment, Greer speaks to how politics has become a spectator sport. Compounding this negative trend is the fact that this cohort are glued to podcasts that thrive on sensationalism, since sensationalism drives clicks (meaning revenue). Entertainment has in many ways supplanted the seek for truth in the realm of politics, and the cacophony that it produces makes trying to get your own point across almost a Sisyphean task. No, Charlie Kirk was not assassinated in a plot involving the Mossad, Egyptians, and TPUSA turncoats.

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In lieu of a proper introduction, I will instead offer up some historical quotes about US foreign policy, for reasons that you will instinctively understand.

Egyptian President Gamel Nassar had some choice lines to describe US foreign policy too:

“The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make the rest of us wonder at the possibility that we might be missing something.”

“With the Soviet Union, you know where you stand today and where you will stand tomorrow. With the United States, you never know where you will stand tomorrow—and sometimes not even today.”

“America is like a beautiful woman who changes her mind every night. You can love her, you can fear her, but you can never be sure what she will do in the morning.”

And then there is this recent classic from Russia’s chief diplomat, Sergey Lavrov:

“The USA is agreement non-capable.”

The point of sharing these quotes is to highlight the obvious fact that US foreign policy has long been unpredictable. This wouldn’t be too much of an issue if it were a middling power. When a superpower routinely upends the table, it makes life very, very difficult for those countries that have become “states of interest” for the Americans. Creating and pursuing foreign policy strategies require a lot of time and effort, meaning that they are very rarely predicated on short-term trends. When the predictability of foreign actors is removed from the strategic equation, the foundation of any plan becomes very weak.

Earlier this month, the White House issued its 2025 National Security Strategy vision in a 33 page .pdf document available for all to see and read here. This is an action that the US Executive Branch is mandated to do, ever since the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986. The point of this exercise is to articulate the vision of the President of the United States of America regarding foreign policy, so as to effectively communicate said vision to Congress and the American people. It does not mean that it is an official foreign policy strategy, since this area of governance is the responsibility of both the executive and legislative branches of the US Government.

Because this is the Trump Administration, and because of the fever pitch that has coloured both of his terms in office, a lot of attention is being given to this iteration of this mandatory document. This document is intentionally high-level (meaning that it purposely doesn’t drill down into specifics), keeping within the tradition of previous administrations. However, attention is warranted this time, because the vision outlined by President Trump per this document indicates a significant break in both the USA’s approach to and philosophical arguments regarding how and why it conducts its foreign policy. Despite the obvious Trumpist (think: transactional) touches interspersed throughout this document, what it does represent is a stated desire to break with certain idealist practices of recent administrations in favour of a more realist approach and worldview, one that stresses respect (if we accept the document at face value) for national sovereignty, and an admission that US global hegemony is simply not possible.

So what we are left with is a document that outlines a new vision for US foreign policy, one that has determined that taking on both Russia and China simultaneously is the wrong approach to securing American national interests. This makes it very worthy of closer inspection and analysis (something that I have been thinking about deeply since it was first made available to the public a fortnight ago). Before we begin to dive into it, I am asking you all to temporarily suspend your cynicism and take the strategy outline at face value for the sake of this analysis. I will once again repeat that this is not official policy, and there is a very strong chance that it will never be adopted as that.

Two and a half years ago, I published an essay entitled Turbo America to describe how I interpreted US foreign policy. This was the culmination of several years of essays, and was received quite well. Unfortunately, a lot of people misconstrued what I said in that essay, either deliberately or through failure to grasp the concepts that I had outlined in it (while others didn’t even read it and decided to make up new definitions for a concept that I created), leading me to post a simplified version of my argument. In this simplified version, I reduced my Turbo America thesis down to four points:

Here is what Turbo-America means in concrete terms:

1. continued direct and indirect conflict with Russia, whether military (no appetite for direct here, so it’s done by proxy), economic, or diplomatic

2. boxing China in through the use of targeted economic policies/sanctions, and the beefing up of The Quad, alongside efforts to cobble together an “Asian NATO” that would do to Beijing what NATO has been doing to Moscow

3. Disciplining, streamlining, and homogenizing its own allies to align these countries with the USA politically, economically, culturally, and socially more than they already are i.e. creating unofficial new states of the United States of America via micro-management, targeted sanctioning, espionage, etc.

4. Imperial management via overseeing/managing conflicts in the US Zone of Influence, with the conflicts in Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon being the best example at present

The reason why I bring up Turbo America is that this new document can be seen as a partial repudiation of it, for reasons that we will discuss shortly. The significance in this is that, if taken at face value (once again), this strategic vision is a repudiation of the liberal interventionist approach that has dominated US foreign policy for over a generation now. This repudiation is made abundantly clear in the document:

After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country. Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.

………

They overestimated America’s ability to fund, simultaneously, a massive welfare-regulatory-administrative state alongside a massive military, diplomatic, intelligence, and foreign aid complex. They placed hugely misguided and destructive bets on globalism and so-called “free trade” that hollowed out the very middle class and industrial base on which American economic and military preeminence depend.

This does constitute a rejection of the approach up to the end of the Biden Administration. When taken in tandem with Trump tearing up international trade covenants and institutions in favour of bilateral deals, it does signal an end to globalism, both economic and political. In short: if made real, it would serve to end what is commonly referred to as the ‘rules-based order’. The Trump Administration has effectively concluded that the present economic and security architectures no longer serve the American people as well as they once did, and that a new approach is warranted to pursue US global interests and maintain American power on the world stage.

The document makes clear the administration’s hostility to globalism:

And they lashed American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty.

Distrust of international institutions such as the United Nations has always been present in Republican circles, but this time around it is much more pronounced. Yes, the Dubya Regime did pursue a unilateralist approach that did its best to eschew the multilateralism of the Clinton era, but it still did present its case regarding Iraq at the UN over and over again.

More importantly, this strategy places great emphasis on respecting the state sovereignty of other states, something that was entirely absent from earlier GOP governments. This creates significant problems for the hyper-interventionist set in DC, as they tie the right to state sovereignty to certain individual rights, often the result of recent social trends in the USA. If transgressed, these states can lose their right to sovereignty if the Eye of Sauron glares down at them. The repeated emphasis on national sovereignty concedes the point that not every country should turn into the USA, whether culturally, politically, or socially. USAID has become a notable casualty of this desired policy shift.

‘Core, vital national interests’

Since this vision is high-level, it creates wide avenues of approach for critics of this proposed set of policies. One common refrain will be that this administration seeks to ‘have its cake and eat it too’. Allow me to highlight one example where this is a fair critique:

We want to prevent an adversarial power from dominating the Middle East, its oil and gas supplies, and the chokepoints through which they pass while avoiding the “forever wars” that bogged us down in that region at great cost.

Ever since the Obama Administration, US foreign policy planners have sought to reduce the American footprint in the Middle East in order to pursue its “Pivot to East Asia”. The problem with this stated desire is that events get in the way, and nowhere more so than in the Middle East. We will discuss this region further down in this analysis, but for now I will raise the obvious question stemming from this proposal: What if regional micromanagement is the only way to prevent any perceived adversary from displacing the USA in the Middle East?

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The war in Ukraine has now lasted as long as the massive one between the USSR and Germany in WW2. This fact shocks no one today, but if you predicted in 2022 that it would have lasted this long you would have been laughed out of any room where you said this out loud.

Punditry is one of the casualties of this brutal war. Who could have predicted that Russia would launch an invasion with a relatively light touch in terms of force? Who could have envisioned the war lasting as long as it has already? Who would have thought that the Russian economy would hold on this long in the face of a very punishing sanctions regime? There’s no shame in admitting that you made bad calls, and I certainly concede that I did not see the ‘light touch’ coming.

One prediction that I made only moments after the Russians attacked on February 24, 2022 still holds up…at least in my opinion. I think the facts as they exist now support the following:

Big Winner: USA

Small Winner: Russia

Small Loser: EU

Big Loser: Ukraine

There are two wars being fought simultaneously. In the war of attrition between Russia and Ukraine, the Russians clearly have the upper hand, and the tempo of their advances is noticeably increasing month over month. In the larger war between the USA and Russia, the Americans won on the first day of the invasion because Moscow finally opted to choose one of the only two possible routes to counter US/NATO designs in Ukraine. The Russians could have not invaded and permitted NATO to set up shop in their neighbour to the southwest and accept a strategic defeat, but instead they chose to invade to forestall such an outcome and have been forced to accept a bloody war, a divorce from Europe, and sanctions package after sanctions package.

The net effect of this ongoing conflict will be the agreement as to where the new border between Russia and the Transatlantic alliance (read: US Empire) will be. What we can be certain of is that whatever remains of Ukraine will definitely be in the western orbit, meaning that Russia will lose an important piece of real estate. Compensation for this loss will be some Ukrainian territory and possibly an agreement that Kiev will never be permitted to join NATO. Barring a complete collapse of Ukraine’s defense that permits Russians to stroll into Kiev and points further west, this is about as good an outcome as Moscow could hope for. For Ukraine, it’s a disaster.

For the Americans, it’s a victory. They clearly knew that Ukraine could not win this war, as even Obama conceded that Russia has “escalation dominance” and that for Moscow this conflict is an existential matter, unlike for the USA. Russia has been bled out to a fairly significant degree, it has been separated from Europe for the time being, and Europe’s entire economy has been reoriented to service the USA. The only problem that the Americans have is how to wrap this conflict up (so that they can move their primary focus to containing and strangling a surging China) without losing face. The Ukrainians have done a remarkable job in defending their country, something that the Americans have strategically benefited from. But at what cost to Ukraine?

When I say “the Americans”, it needs to be understood that there are different factions under this name. At present, Donald Trump resides in the White House. Alongside him is Congress, and also the CIA and other various intel outfits. Add to this mix business interests that are licking their lips at exploiting a post-war Ukraine. Not all of these factions are aligned, and some are at cross-purposes. Many have spent up to three decades working on putting a US puppet in the Kremlin, and they did come close with Yeltsin in his second term…but then along came Vladimir Putin to foil that plot.

It will be very, very difficult to convince this faction to accept any peace deal with iron-clad bilateral and international agreements, because it would put an end to their regime change ops. This faction will do whatever it takes to wait Trump out, whether it means subterfuge domestically, or even abroad with willing accomplices like former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Many individuals in government and in positions of influence in the USA at present are no doubt paying lip service to Trump’s demands for a peace deal, all the while looking forward to November 2028. China hawks want to wrap this war up and head out east, but Russia hawks would see any firm peace deal as fumbling the ball on the five yard line.

Russia’s predicament is even more complex: Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has described the USA as “agreement non-capable”, but at the end of the day it too needs to end this war, and to accomplish this it must come to a deal with the Americans. Not only that, but any deal requires iron-clad guarantees that cannot be undone by a future US administration. How does one agree on such an important matter with an opposing party they perceive as 100% untrustworthy? The Kremlin looks at any peace offering from the USA with justified suspicion, a fact that makes any real peace deal all the more difficult.

All of the points mentioned above must be factored into the equation when looking at the joint US-Russian framework peace deal proposal that US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll presented to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky yesterday. This is a 28 point plan to end the war and keep it from breaking out again in the future. It merits a closer inspection not just because of its content, but especially because it is a joint draft. This means that there is buy-in from the two major belligerents (Russia, USA) even if it is not a “take it or leave it” document. This leaves us with the question: why now?

From Politico:

Driscoll, who met with Zelenksyy, told a group of European ambassadors afterward that the continent couldn’t match the Russian defense industry’s output, so Ukraine won’t be able to claw back territory. The time for a settlement had arrived, he said, according to one diplomat, a European official in the room and a person familiar with the meeting. Some of Driscoll’s conversation, including his message about industrial capacity, has not been previously reported.

“No deal is perfect, but it must be done sooner rather than later,” Driscoll said, according to the European official at the meeting. U.S. armed forces “love” Ukraine and stand by its military, Driscoll said, but “the honest U.S. military assessment is that Ukraine is in a very bad position and now is the best time for peace.”

It’s been a grinding war of attrition between the Russian and Ukrainian forces on the ground, a situation that favours the side with more resources and shorter logistical routes. This means Russia, and this rule of warfare is being proven yet again as the Russians continue to make very slow, but notable, progress on various fronts.

However, the pace of Russia’s advances are picking up in certain spots, one being Northeastern Zaporizhzhia/Southeastern Dnipro regions:

It is here where the Russians are in a position to break out as there is little standing in the way between its forces near Huliapolye and the city of Zaporizhzhia on the Dnieper River. This worrying development no doubt lends credence to Driscoll’s negative assessment of Ukraine’s present position.

It is in the interests of the USA to forestall any Russian breakthrough that could lead to a collapse of the entire front or even large parts of it. This is common sense. The question that must be asked is the following: is the American intention regarding this framework peace deal intended to halt the Russian advance so that Ukraine can regroup? Or is it actually sincere? The answer is simple: it depends on which faction of USGov you ask.

As for the Russian side, they need to engage for the sake of PR.

According to the Russian president, Moscow confirmed during the talks that it agreed with the peace proposals. However, he added that after the Alaska meeting there was a pause from the US side, which he attributed to Ukraine’s rejection of Trump’s draft. This is why the “modernized plan” containing 28 points appeared later, Putin said, adding that Moscow has the document.

“I believe it could also form the basis of a final peace settlement. But this text is not being discussed with us in substance,” Putin said.

Zelensky seems to be aware of the gravity of the situation (if this isn’t kayfabe):

“This is one of the most difficult moments in our history [...] Currently, the pressure on Ukraine is one of the hardest. Ukraine may now face a very difficult choice, either losing its dignity or the risk of losing a key partner.”

One thing that immediately leaps out is that the EU has been entirely ignored in this draft proposal. Not only was Europe not asked to contribute to the framework plan, it seems that Europe’s leaders were caught completely off-guard about the entire proposal:

European leaders are preparing an emergency call to discuss U.S. President Donald Trump’s controversial proposal to end the war in Ukraine.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz cancelled a scheduled appearance to join the discussion, which will also include Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, and French President Emmanuel Macron.

The 28‑point plan caught European capitals off guard. Leaders were not directly involved in the U.S. effort and learned the details only after the document was made public.

Sidelining Europe works to the advantage of both Russia (which sees the EU as just a collection of American poodles) and those in the USGov who actually want to conclude a deal. Those in favour of extending the conflict want Europe to meddle on their behalf, and this includes a sizable portion of those in power in the USA at present. European meddling would muddy the waters and attempt to torpedo any possibility of a deal being reached between Washington and Moscow.

More European reactions:

Multiple EU diplomats and officials said they feared the proposals, from Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff, would wreck their chances of the loan proposal being agreed by the EU’s 27 governments. European leaders had been hoping to finalize the so-called “reparations loan” deal at a crunch summit next month.

A former French official, granted anonymity like others to discuss sensitive matters, said the Witkoff idea “is, of course, scandalous.”

“The Europeans are exhausting themselves trying to find a viable solution to use the assets for the benefit of Ukrainians and Trump wants to profit from them,” the person said. “This proposal is likely to be rejected by everyone.”

………..

One senior EU official in Brussels scoffed at the idea and noted that whatever he wants, Trump has no power to unfreeze assets held in Europe. An official from an EU government resorted to colorful swearing to express their dismay, while a senior EU politician said: “Witkoff needs to see a psychiatrist.”

The EU is being treated as an afterthought.

Reuters has reported that Trump wants Kiev to sign this framework deal by Thursday of next week, and if Zelensky doesn’t then: “The United States has threatened to cut intelligence sharing and weapons supplies for Ukraine to press it into agreeing to the framework of a U.S.-brokered peace deal, two people familiar with the matter said.” This is a serious threat, assuming that it is real in the first place and not a psy-op.

28 Points For Peace in Ukraine

Let’s look at each of the 28 points in the proposal, but please do bear in mind that these are a basis for direct negotiations and not set in stone:

1. Ukraine’s sovereignty will be confirmed

This is a very generic statement that is open to all sorts of interpretation….but only up to a point. What this means is that Russia must treat Ukraine as an independent state that is permitted its own system of governance, armed forces, security, ability to negotiate and enter into international agreements, and so on. It would be a recognition that Russia has lost rump Ukraine permanently (despite it already recognizing its independence).

Winners: Ukraine, USA, EU

Loser: Russia

2. A comprehensive non-aggression agreement will be concluded between Russia, Ukraine and Europe. All ambiguities of the last 30 years will be considered settled

This is a very big deal, because it would require a new security arrangement framework that would stretch from Lisbon to Vladivostok. This is a very time intensive process, one that could be spoiled by those seeking to run out the clock on Trump. It doesn’t just include Ukraine, it also refers to the outstanding issues of South Ossetia in Georgia, and Transnistria in Moldova.

A successful conclusion of such a wide-ranging security agreement would also mean that NATO’s original purpose (i.e. to keep the Russians out) would be achieved, opening up the question as to whether that organization is still required (see below for more on this).

Winners: Ukraine, Russia, EU, US China Hawks

Losers: US Russia Hawks and regime change enthusiasts on both continents

Potential Winners: Moldova, Georgia

Unknown: South Ossetian separatist state, Transnistria separatist state

3. It is expected that Russia will not invade neighboring countries and NATO will not expand further

These are worded as promises, and later in the document we see the carrots and sticks attached to them. Suffice it to say that Russia would be very, very happy to agree to this as it views NATO’s eastward push to its borders as an existential matter.

This should give (some) peace of mind to the Balts, and effectively inform Russian minorities in those states that Moscow will not be coming to attach them to the Motherland.

It also raises the question of NATO’s continued raison d’etre. There are fears that Trump wants to pull the USA out of NATO, and such a multilateral agreement could provide fuel for the fire.

Winners: Russia, EU, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo

Losers: NATO, Serbian ultranationalists

4. A dialogue will be held between Russia and NATO, mediated by the United States, to resolve all security issues and create conditions for de-escalation in order to ensure global security and increase opportunities for cooperation and future economic development.

This is very straight forward and speaks to the two previous points.

Winners: USA, Russia, EU

Losers: Russia Hawks, NATO

5. Ukraine will receive reliable security guarantees

• Update: A separate document details the terms of the security guarantee. The U.S. and its NATO allies would treat an attack on Ukraine as an attack on the entire “transatlantic community.”

This is little more than NATO-by-stealth, something that Moscow is adamant cannot be permitted to occur. It does fulfill Ukraine’s consistent message that it requires strong western security guarantees before it agrees to any final peace deal.

What this point means is that Ukraine is indirectly absorbed into Transatlantic security structures without it formally becoming a NATO member. Expect Russia to strongly reject this point and insist on a watered-down set of security guarantees for Kiev. This will be a key sticking point, and the devil will be in the details. For example, how many European states would be willing to provide such a guarantee to go to war against Russia over Ukraine?

Winners: Ukraine, USA, NATO

Losers: Russia, EU

6. The size of the Ukrainian Armed Forces will be limited to 600,000 personnel

• Note: Ukraine’s army currently has 800,000-850,000 personnel, and had around 250,000 before the war, according to a Ukrainian official.

I am instantly reminded of Versailles and how Weimar Germany was officially limited to an army of 100,000 soldiers. That limitation didn’t work back then, and such a proposal wouldn’t work in the future in Ukraine either as it would be open to all sorts of abuse if not strictly monitored. 600,000 is also very, very large in number. It would make Ukraine’s Army twice the size of the Germany’s for example.

This is one of the many points that Russia will push back on, because it would be very difficult to not just accept this number, but also to monitor it.

Winners: Ukraine, USA, NATO, EU

Loser: Russia

7. Ukraine agrees to enshrine in its constitution that it will not join NATO, and NATO agrees to include in its statutes a provision that Ukraine will not be admitted in the future

Point 7 retroactively proves that NATO enlargement to include Ukraine is one of, if not the major reason for this war breaking out, despite protests in the western camp to the contrary. Selling this to Kiev will be incredibly difficult in terms of optics, even though Ukraine has for some time now agreed that a set of strong security guarantees from the USA (and Europe) would suffice. One problem is that Ukraine’s Constitution includes accession to NATO as a state objective. This means that the Ukrainian Constitution would have to be amended, and that is not a certainty.

Winners: Russia (overwhelmingly), EU

Losers: Ukraine (overwhelmingly), USA, NATO

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Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

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Someone on social media recently shared a video of two British talking heads discussing America, with one arguing that Americans are ‘conspiratorial by nature’.

I can’t agree with this assessment, as Americans tend to give others the benefit of the doubt more often than other people. But at the same time, there is a notable uptick in conspiratorial thinking in the USA, something that comes naturally when trust in ruling institutions rapidly erodes. The way that the government and the medical establishment fumbled COVID is testament to that, and nowhere is it more evident than in the hysteria around Jeffrey Epstein.

I’ve briefly commented on Epstein before, and my position has not changed since day one: this is not a sex scandal but a national security one. The “sex trafficking” charges (and convictions) were, in my opinion, nothing but a diversion, a smokescreen, from the real heart of the matter, one that enmeshed powerful people from all sides of the aisle. It’s a scandal that many wish would just go away, even if there are some partisans in Congress intent on using it for their own purposes.

Maybe ‘scandal’ is too strong a word? Maybe “affair” is the better latter half of the compound noun? I don’t know. What I DO know is that there is a lot more information that will come out in due time regarding Epstein and his “hobbies” that involved some of the most powerful people in the world. I am not making a moral judgment here, I’ll leave that to others. Mike Tracey has done a great job in digging in deep to reveal that pretty much the entire sex angle to the story is nonsense. The espionage side is bearing more fruit, however.

Recently, a hacker came into the possession of personal emails from former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, a close personal friend of Jeffrey Epstein. DropSiteNews received these emails and worked to verify the content. What they uncovered is very, very interesting, and is strong proof that Epstein was knee deep in the world of international backroom deals, especially involving the USA, Israel, and Russia:

Drop Site News

Jeffrey Epstein and the Mossad: How The Sex-Trafficker Helped Israel Build a Backchannel to Russia Amid Syrian Civil War

Jeffrey Epstein facilitated efforts to open a backchannel between Israel and the Kremlin during the Syrian civil war, according to leaked em…

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10 months ago · 653 likes · 7 comments · Murtaza Hussain and Ryan Grim

Jeffrey Epstein facilitated efforts to open a backchannel between Israel and the Kremlin during the Syrian civil war, according to leaked emails from former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

The trove of emails, exchanged at the height of the Syrian civil war between 2013 and 2016, reveal Epstein’s successful efforts to secure a private meeting between Barak and Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss a Russian-brokered end to the conflict, including winning Russian support for a negotiated removal of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Epstein was an invaluable resource for Israel’s former prime minister, who also served as head of intelligence and defense minister throughout his career, sharing whispers from within Russian elite circles and intel on Putin’s interlocutors in Europe and the U.S—and even advising him on how to engage with the Mossad. Barak, fresh out of his role as Israeli defense minister, built a deep portfolio of investments and business relationships around the world with Epstein’s help.

On February 21, 2014, Epstein wrote to Barak, “with civil unrest exploding in ukraine syria, somolia [sic], libya, and the desperation of those in power, isn’t this perfect for you.” Barak replied: “You’re right [in] a way. But not simple to transform it into a cash flow. A subject for Saturday.”

These efforts also provided cover for covert diplomacy on behalf of the Israeli government. Together, Barak and Epstein sought to pressure the Obama administration to either intervene directly in the Syrian war, or make concessions to the Kremlin in exchange for Assad’s graceful exit. In their exchanges, Epstein expressed his frustration at the Obama administration’s failures to contain Tehran, as the two men searched for opportunities to promote U.S. strikes on Iran.

Despite securing a sit-down with Putin in the summer of 2013, they did not succeed in convincing Russia to support Assad’s ouster, but their negotiations set the stage for U.S.-Russia cooperation on disarmament of Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal a few months later.

This is a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how back channels operate in times of conflict.

On the source of the emails:

The leaked emails come from the same archive previously reported by Drop Site—materials released by the hackers known as Handala and disseminated by Distributed Denial of Secrets. The emails include extensive, previously unpublished documents and photographs from Barak’s inner circle including non-public information verified as accurate by Drop Site. Many documents from the Handala hack were independently validated by records released by the U.S. House Oversight Committee this month.

Trying to get Russia to agree to Assad’s removal:

In the early hours of May 9, 2013, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak emailed his close friend Jeffrey Epstein with an urgent message. “R U awake? if yes, pl call,” Barak wrote Epstein, at 1 a.m. in New York. Shortly after they spoke, Barak emailed again to ask Epstein to keep their conversation private: “jeff pl don’t share the info with any of our friends.”

Epstein replied: “Of course not. I think you should let Putin know you will be in Moscow. See if he wants private time.”

Barak and Epstein built a backchannel to Putin in hopes of winning Russia’s support to remove Syrian president Bashar al-Assad from power, according to leaked emails from Barak’s inbox. Before approaching Putin, Barak and Epstein sought to use one of the major American newspapers to frame Israel’s narrative about the Syrian war, and telegraph a framework for peace talks led by the United States and Russia.

Private Citizen Ehud Barak:

Barak stepped down from his post in March 2013 after the failure of his new political party to contest Knesset elections. His retirement from formal office, he said, meant that he now would have time to “study, write, live and enjoy.” Instead, he immediately began working with Epstein to conduct covert diplomatic work in support of Israeli security interests abroad.

The key to Barak’s backchannel diplomacy with Russia was his relationship with Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian-Israeli oligarch and owner of the multinational conglomerate Renova Group. Barak offered his services as a strategic consultant to Renova, a position that would generate a lucrative salary for himself and further his ambitions in the global mining and energy sectors, while enhancing his access to powerful figures in the Russian elite.

Barak kept Epstein abreast of every update on his courtship with Vekselberg. As Barak progressed toward a formal agreement with Renova, Epstein counseled Barak on contract negotiations, writing on April 27, “I think you should propose all up front. no need for a written agreement. until later.”

Beneath the surface of mundane contract details, Epstein and Barak worked on a covert plan with the support of Israeli intelligence—regime change in Damascus.

The Israeli military strategist, often described as “emotionally handicapped,” relied on Epstein to help him craft his messaging when dealing with other political officials and business elites. Epstein, for instance, asked Barak to wait until they could speak privately before Barak notified intelligence leaders of a deal with Vekselberg: “do not go to number 1 too quickly, I understnad more now so we should speak.” The euphemism “number 1” is a moniker used to refer to the head of the Mossad, dating back to Barak’s days as director of Israeli military intelligence, when the Mossad director’s identity was kept secret.

As the Renova contract was being finalized—a $1 million advance and a $1 million quarterly retainer—Barak planned a trip to Moscow on May 12 to meet with Vekselberg.

Side note: Vekselberg is known for being in the possession of the world’s largest collection of Faberge Eggs.

A sample of the correspondence and mention of some US Intel heavy hitters:

A few hours after Barak informed Epstein of his Moscow plans, Epstein shared some intelligence about one of Putin’s interlocutors, the head of the Council of Europe: “on may 20 [thorbjorn] jagland is going to see putin in sochi, jagland asked that I make myself availble to meet with him sometine in june, to explain how russia can structure deals in order to encourage western investment, I never met him, wanted you to know.” Barak, who was working closely with Epstein to cut deals in the Eurasian energy sector, wrote back: “i know Jagland for long time. probably we have to talk about it.”

Epstein responded with a short list of past and present American national security leaders who, his response implied, could also be useful in Russia talks. He wrote, “Ok, panetta??, Alexander, Clarke?”—likely referring to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, NSA Director Keith Alexander, and Cybersecurity Czar Richard Clarke.

Upon his return from Moscow, Barak contacted George Tenet, former director of the CIA, to pitch a talk he (Barak) could give at Allen & Company’s Sun Valley event in July—a “summer camp” for billionaires and elite politicians to convene and negotiate deals. The topic? “Think of Syria, CW. (+background of Iran’s elections & nuke program, Global Terror, North Korea etc). Probably briefing for selected group.” Barak was not recorded on the guest list.

In the meantime, Epstein and Barak crafted an op-ed for Barak to publish that could shape the narrative for a Russian-led transition in Syria that secured Israel’s interests.

Iran:

Two months after the St. Petersburg conference, on August 21, 2013, opposition-controlled areas in Ghouta, Syria were struck by rockets containing sarin gas, killing and injuring thousands in the suburbs of Damascus. Ten days later, President Obama delivered a speech at the Rose Garden of the White House, announcing he’d seek congressional authorization for U.S. strikes on Syria, enforcing the “red line” he had drawn exactly one year prior.

Epstein emailed Barak as soon as news of Obama’s speech broke, on August 31, to propose publishing his shelved Syria narrative: “Time to write the wait ‘until too late’ op Ed ???” Barak responded, solemnly: “[U.S. strikes] might be launched before the op ed will be accepted by any major paper.” Epstein disagreed, suggesting any action would likely occur after the G20 summit on September 5, and Congress’s return the week after: “it will be at minmumm a week or two not before g20.” An hour later, Barak agreed: “After listening to POTUS speech, You’re probably right.”

In the same email thread, Epstein offered Barak guidance on how to ratchet the pressure on the U.S. to strike Iran: “I would use the opportunity to compare it with iran. The solutions become more compelx with time not less. i think many people would like your views on egypt. syria, etc. russias role.? i think you might point out the gassing of ‘women and children’ is an expressions from the 20th centry. women are no longer equiv to children,. civilians. vs combatants . only.”

Epstein was no bullshit artist:

Epstein was not merely a fixer for Barak, but also a friend and advisor, who collaborated with him at high-levels to promote Israeli security interests. The correspondence between Barak and Epstein, as well as publicly released information about Epstein’s travel and activities during this period, point to a significant degree of collaboration between the two men, involving numerous governments in negotiations intended to serve Israeli security interests. In a note sent by Barak to Epstein after the St. Petersburg forum in 2015, he rattled off a long list of heads of state, senior officials, and business magnates he had met, reporting “great meetings” with all.

Around the same time, Epstein was known to have conducted meetings with several Obama administration officials, including former U.S. ambassador to Russia, and later CIA chief William Burns, as well as Obama White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler. While shedding light on his efforts with Barak to secure Israeli interests in Syria, the emails leave open the question of other interactions that Epstein may have engaged in with U.S. and other government officials.

A fascinating peek behind the curtains, and only the tip of the iceberg…at least I think so.

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The horrible thing about liberal democracy is that you have to face the voters every few years or so. This mean that short-term results are rewarded, and long-term policy is punished if it doesn’t yield immediate positive results. I’ve defended the Trump admin’s quest to use tariffs to reorder and restructure the economy, even if it is being done in a clumsy and cumbersome manner. Economic globalism is no longer working for America and for Americans, and moving towards bilateral deals is the only avenue of approach permitted to the White House in the US system of governance. Lastly, one of the reasons he was voted into office was to detonate globalism in order to reshore jobs and re-industrialize the USA (very early days, admittedly).

It is also quite clear now that the tariff approach was meant to isolate China and cut it down to size. From what we know now, that has not happened. China is in a much stronger position globally than many thought, especially in light of its dominant position in rare earth minerals. This was the key leverage that Beijing held over the USA, and is what secured the agreement last week between Biden and Xi to work on an overall trade deal between these two giants. Think of it as an economic detente between two competing, yet very intertwined, superpowers.

Here’s a decent summary that focuses on the big picture of the tentative deal:

Both leaders will be happy at the outcomes from this meeting. Donald Trump is famously transactional in his approach to foreign policy, and he comes away from the meeting able to trumpet a “win” for the US.

China will be buying American soybeans, Xi has promised to help deal with the fentanyl issue and his threat to restrict China’s exports of the all-important rare earth minerals will not come into force for 12 months, at least.

However, it’s important to note that there was no agreement from China to relax restrictions it imposed in April on exports of some critical minerals. Xi will want to prevent the US from building stockpiles of some key rare earth elements.

As you might have read in the random commentary from this past Wednesday, rare earths are considered a major reason why Trump is not as publicly antagonistic towards Russia as he is towards others. They are a big deal.

Detente and a short term political win (maybe):

Restoring some trade between the two countries will also help ease the strain on US consumers. They are currently having to shoulder higher prices for everyday items, caused by the tariffs. Given that Trump pledged to bring down prices in his presidential campaign, he may be able to frame this as a political victory with American voters.

China will benefit from lower US tariffs on many of its exports and Trump will suspend plans to expand trade restrictions to companies on what is known as the “entity list.” This is something China has been pushing for as it affects many of its companies. But of course, as we know, all of this could easily change.

China has a longer-term vision, which its one-party system permits:

China’s analysis stressed that this was all at one with the country’s long-term strategy, developed “from generation to generation.” It spoke in terms of a broad sweep of development: “Our focus has always been on managing China’s own affairs well, improving ourselves and sharing development opportunities with all countries across the world.”

Tech is still a touchy area:

Tech issues will undoubtedly continue to cause tensions between Beijing and Washington. The US currently blocks Chinese access to much of the advanced tech that Beijing needs to fulfil its desire to become the world’s leader in AI.

And, despite Trump’s suggestion that he and Xi discussed China purchasing some chips from US firms, Chinese access to such advanced tech looks like it will remain heavily restricted.

Trump has said that any trade deal with China will not involve the export of Blackwell, the most advanced AI chip produced by US firm Nvidia. US lawmakers have previously raised concerns about allowing China to obtain the chip, suggesting it could bolster China’s AI industry and weaken the US’s tech edge.

Notable is what was absent from the meeting:

Taiwan doesn’t appear to have been on the agenda, from what both sides have said. Taiwan’s president, Lai Ching-te, took the opportunity of hosting delegates from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobby group this week.

He talked about nurturing “closer Taiwan-US-Israel cooperation on security, trade and beyond, promoting peace across the Taiwan Strait.” But it’s far from clear that this is at the front of Trump’s mind.

Before the trip, it was reported that Trump’s advisers had been concerned that the US president might come away from the meeting with Xi having in some way changed the language over China’s relationship with Taiwan.

There has also been talk in recent months that the US position might shift from “not supporting” Taiwanese independence to “opposing it”. However, when he was asked about this after his meeting with Xi, the US president said they hadn’t discussed it.

Human rights, on the agenda at just about every meeting between a US president and a Chinese leader for as long as anyone can remember, appears not to have featured in the two men’s discussion, either.

It wasn’t that long ago that the EU sent a trade mission to China with a strategy based around lecturing Beijing on human rights. Might this signal the end of western moralizing towards the Orient?

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One of the major themes of this Substack is that the term “liberal democracy” is never properly defined by its stewards. It is a constantly-shifting set of desired results that have long ago veered from the original intent. So far has it veered that even the concept of choice is often out-of-bounds. Almost everyone will run afoul of this very day’s definition, meaning that almost everyone is an authoritarian, fascist….or even a Nazi!

The West has for decades been governed by a liberal consensus; liberal politics and liberal (or as the kids call it, “neo-liberal”) economics. Every so often an opponent might pop up to question this consensus, but the full apparatus of the state will come down hard on them. No deviation is permitted. Sure, you have your social-democratic parties in Europe, your Republicans in the USA, etc. but they all are liberal parties in the end. The only notable differences are in the margins.

Sure, Trump may be an exception to this rule….after all, he did win in 2016 running on Pat Buchanan’s 1992 platform during the GOP nomination process. This only proves that even so-called conservatives (such as the GOP leadership mainstream) were long ago co-opted by the floating signifier known as “liberal democracy”.

It wasn’t always this way. In the olden days (30+ years ago), paleo-cons were an actual thing in the USA. They argued in favour of a nationally homogenous polity with limited government and minimal intervention in foreign conflicts. These paleo-cons were purged from the mainstream of the US right by neo-conservatives and their allies, first and foremost William F. Buckley. Trump 2016 was a long overdue rebellion to this purge.

Paul Gottfried has been writing on the subject of the transformation of American conservatism for decades now, and a collection of his essays was published recently by Passage Publishing. Here’s a very-well written review:

The central malady, the thread that runs through these four decades of essays, is the rise of what Gottfried calls, following James Burnham, the managerial state. The old bourgeois nation-state, with its defined borders, limited government, and specific cultural inheritance, has been supplanted. In its place stands a new leviathan, a regime of administrators, social scientists, media gatekeepers, and corporate partners who govern not by consent but by imagined expertise. This new type of regime is a postliberal creation, retaining the vocabulary of democracy but redefining it as a set of outcomes, including equality, diversity, health, and safety, to be engineered by a credentialed elite. Democracy is no longer self-government but indoctrination.

A regime of this nature requires a new language, or rather a corruption of the old one. Words must be unmoored from their historical meanings to serve the present. Gottfried’s most sustained analysis of this process centers on the word “fascism.” In the hands of the managerial class and its media adjuncts, “fascism” has been transformed from a specific, interwar European phenomenon of militant nationalism into a floating signifier of ultimate evil. The word has become code for the threat of genocide that forever emanates from unapproved attitudes.

This is very interesting:

The utility of such a maneuver is plain. The therapeutic state requires a perpetual patient, a society riddled with pathologies that only its expert class can cure. The ever-present, ever-expanding specter of “fascism” serves as the ultimate justification for endless intervention. Fascism has become 1984’s Goldstein for our time: an imaginary, shape-shifting threat whose supposed recurrence mobilizes the faithful and keeps whatever remains of an opposition fearful and subdued. Anyone who resists the progressive agenda, be it on immigration, gender ideology, or the centralization of power, can be branded with the scarlet F. The label’s historical incoherence is not a bug but a feature. It is a tool of power, not of analysis. That opponents of EU centralization are called Nazis, even though the actual Nazis were bent on continental conquest, is an irony lost on the accusers. The words are not meant to describe but to batter.

It’s not limited to the left, either:

This linguistic decay is not entirely a leftist phenomenon. A core contention of the paleoconservative critique, one that Gottfried makes with acid precision, is that the mainstream American right was a willing, if not always conscious, accomplice. He charts the rise of the neoconservatives in the 1970s and 1980s not as a revitalization of conservatism but as a hostile takeover. These figures, many of them ex-Trotskyists and disenchanted liberal Democrats, did not emerge from any recognizable American conservative tradition. They were merely less extreme liberals, comfortable with the New Deal welfare state and animated by a Wilsonian zeal for exporting democracy abroad.

What they created was not an opposition but a pseudo-opposition, a controlled sparring partner for the left that shared all of its foundational premises. The neoconservative-led right, Gottfried argues, became a movement of gatekeepers, policing its own ranks for any deviation from the new consensus, eagerly purging those who questioned their new orthodoxies on immigration, foreign policy, or the civil rights revolution. Neoconservatives offered a choice between a left that demanded radical change today and a conservative movement that promised to manage that same change more prudently tomorrow. They conserved almost nothing. Instead, they became a moderate wing of the managerial state that a genuine right would be expected to oppose. One begins to understand populist rage against a “uniparty” not as paranoia but as a raw, untutored recognition of the scene Gottfried has been describing for forty years.

Abdication of the old elites in a fit of self-flagellation:

Gottfried argues that the politics of guilt finds its most fertile soil in the post-Protestant mind, where the habit of intense, inward-looking moral inventory persists long after its theological framework has collapsed. The Protestant conscience, once tormented by the state of its soul before God, is now tormented by its standing before the commissars of sensitivity. It is a faith turned inward on itself, a culture of repentance without the possibility of grace.

…..

This sense is the engine that powers the therapeutic regime and explains the otherwise inexplicable spectacle of a civilization actively dismantling its own heritage. The historic WASP elite, in Gottfried’s telling, did not inadvertently lose power but rejected it in a fit of moral anxiety, becoming the loudest critic of its own ancestors. Gottfried recounts meeting Yale patricians in the 1960s engaged in “pompous self-debasement,” a ruling class that “destroyed itself.” This moral disarmament provides the justification for policies, from open borders to affirmative action, that are motivated not as prudential choices but as acts of penance.

Gottfried is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand recent US political history of the right wing.

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I am running short of time today (apologies), so I will just provide a link and one excerpt to this fascinating essay on why Pittsburgh has managed to escape post-industrial collapse, unlike nearby city of Cleveland:

In December 1979, a perfect storm of global competition, outmoded factories, and recession slammed into America’s industrial heartland. US Steel, for a century the jewel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s crown, shuttered 15 plants. Seemingly overnight, the 27,000 steel mill jobs across the city’s Monongahela Valley vanished with them. By 1980, one-in-five Pittsburghers was jobless, and they weren’t alone. In 1950, the industrial Midwest, a seven-state region stretching from Appalachia to Wisconsin, was home to 43% of all American jobs. Starting in the Seventies, steel shed 350,000 jobs, carmakers 500,000; 1.2 million blue-collar jobs disappeared, and Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, Pittsburgh lost nearly half of their populations.

The “Steel City” of the Thirties forged the Empire State Building and Golden Gate Bridge. But by the Eighties, Pittsburgh’s once-tidy working-class neighbourhoods were shooting-dens of bullets and heroin. Prostitutes walked the streets. Patrons queued outside bars at 10 in the morning. “I was watching my city die,” Peduto says again. “I mean, right before my eyes.” But family is family, and Peduto, a big man with a booming voice, saved his kin and kiln. The longtime councilman and city mayor from 2014 to 2022, he engineered America’s gold standard in urban revitalisation, with Pittsburgh now widely regarded as the country’s “most liveable city”.

Pittsburgh now teems with the creative types who drive startups and young firms. Nearly half of local Zoomers hold college degrees. Their ingenuity pushed city GDP from $79 billion in 2012 to $109 billion by 2021, a 37% jump. On a warm autumn evening, I walk the streets of downtown and can almost taste the wealth. Forty-somethings crowd the August Wilson theatre. Twenty-somethings sip cocktails in the dusk. The Steel City is now the Smart City, a centre of new tech boasting three billion-dollar AI firms. Pittsburgh’s legacy companies have come back too: the gleaming offices of Heinz, PPG and even US Steel dominate what locals call the “Golden Triangle” of the downtown, squeezed into the spit of land where the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio rivers all meet. The rivers mean bridges, 446 of them, many of which are painted black and gold: in Pittsburgh, even the infrastructure roots for hometown teams.

Through all this, Pittsburgh hasn’t become some bougie theme park. Instead, it is the most affordable city across the US, Australia, Canada, and the UK. That, of course, still leaves one more question: how did Peduto’s dead city come roaring back to life? For Ken Heineman, the answer starts with history. As far back as the 19th century, explains the author of a book on the city, Pittsburgh’s early industrialists lent a “special flavour” to the local elite. Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon, Scots-Irish Presbyterians both, practised a civic stewardship that defined the Pittsburgh’s establishment, a code that meshed with the social responsibility of the Catholic working class. Pursuit of the common good became the steel running down the city’s spine, creating social cohesion — and, if you like, a Pittsburgh family.

Click here to read the rest.

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We end this weekend’s SCR with a report on how DNA research discovered an ancient population located in Central Argentina that persisted for almost 10,000 years!

The researchers worked with archaeologists, bioanthropologists, and museum curators in Argentina to identify human remains in their collections that might yield analyzable DNA. After sequencing genetic material from 238 people who lived in the region over the past 10,000 years, researchers were surprised to find a previously unknown lineage. “This is a big part of the history of the continent that we didn’t know about,” says study co-author Javier Maravall-López, a Harvard University geneticist.

The ancient genomes, combined with archaeological evidence from the region, suggest that despite experiencing cultural upheaval, bouts of technological innovation, and severe environmental stress, the newly revealed lineage mixed with people from elsewhere in South America only at the region’s edges. It’s unclear why this group mostly kept to itself: There are no major natural features that would have prevented migrations into or out of the area from the Amazon to the north or Patagonia to the south. “It’s not like there are huge biogeographic barriers,” Barberena says. “The [area] is basically a huge plain.”

Despite its relative genetic isolation, the lineage was remarkably resilient. The geneticists found that many modern Argentinians share some ancestry with members of this population who died over the past 8500 years. A profoundly dry spell in the area between 6000 and 4000 years ago had no measurable impact on the population, either.

The pattern here differs from what researchers have found in Europe, Asia, and Africa, where shifts in lifestyle and language often happen alongside genetic change. In Europe, for example, ancient DNA studies have shown that farming arrived and spread across the continent together with an entirely new group of people.

The ancient Argentine population, however, didn’t intermingle much with other South American groups, even as archaeological evidence suggests its people started growing crops on a small scale about 1500 years ago. That continuity suggests people there stayed put while adopting new ways of life.

I love these stories. Click here to read the rest.

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‘Spectator Politics’ is bigger than ever thanks to the interactivity of the online world. For many, it has taken the place of sports or soap operas, two other forms of entertainment escapism.

Spectator Politics tends to warp the actual reality of what is being watched and tracked and discussed. For example, last night’s New York City mayoralty election saw an immigrant Muslim from a privileged background win. The fact of the matter is that NYC politics really, really do not matter in the big scheme of things….unless you live in the Tri-State Area.

There may be some symbolic value to Mamdani’s victory, but that’s about it. Rudolph Giuliani was a wildly popular mayor of the same city, and when he ran for the GOP nomination for the Presidency, he scored a measly 1% of the vote in the primaries. New York City is a self-contained entity that is important for many reasons (finance, banking, culture, media, etc.), but its reach is actually very short.

As for Mamdani, accusations that he is a ‘crypto-Islamist’ or ‘communist’ are nonsense. He is your standard fare progressive, and standard fare progressives never fare well in the Big Apple. The story for the next few years is already written: various progressive initiatives will be launched, crime will shoot up, capital flight will take place, and he will be voted out. Americans don’t do socialism and don’t take kindly when attempts are made to experiment with it. This goes triple for the most important city in their country, and possibly in the world. A measly election will not be permitted to impede the work of the globe’s financial heart.

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There are big states, and there are little states. Little states will suffer what they must, as that is the natural order. They will try to mitigate any potential suffering, and sometimes it can work (see: Switzerland), But oftentimes it doesn’t.

No foreign leader stood by Donald Trump in the dark days of 2020 than did Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Hungary went as far as to provide a safe haven for US conservatives via CPAC events and even hosting them in various think tanks. Hungary bent over backwards to show that it was a loyal friend to American conservatives, something which I warned them to not invest too much time and effort into, because they payback might never come.

Hungary has been under attack for over a decade now, and these attacks have come from multiple centres of power: the EU, western media and NGOs, and US Congress, just to name a few. Hungary has managed to weather most of these attacks, but the economic punishment that it has endured has certainly hurt it, and voters feel the pinch. There is a national election coming soon, so one would think that purported allies of Hungary’s Fidesz-led government would come to its rescue, but being a small power means that its interests can be safely overlooked by those with more weight.

The latest US sanctions targeting Russian oil and gas come into effect on November 21st, and these ones have some bite to them. Both Slovakia and Hungary are scrambling to secure exemptions from the USA, as both are heavily reliant on Russian oil imports through the Druzhba pipeline that crosses through Ukraine. Last week, Trump was asked if Hungary asked for an exemption and if they would get one. Trump replied “Yes, no”. Orban is headed to Washington DC I believe next week to make one last-ditch effort to secure an exemption. For now, great power politics regarding the war in Ukraine trump any friendly relations that Orban has cultivated with President Trump and #MAGA over the past few years.

The immediate problem for Hungary is that any other supplier is much more expensive, even if the capacity is there (which they argue isn’t always the case):

As a result, when crude prices rise, that “doesn’t have a major impact on the end product prices,” he said. What it would mean, though, is “declining profit margins” for Hungary’s main oil importer MOL, Pletser said, and fewer tax revenues for Budapest.

In reality, “the most problematic financial aspect of rejecting Russian oil is related to ... the Hungarian budget,” said Ilona Gizińska, a Hungary expert at the Centre for Eastern Studies think tank, which currently faces a yawning deficit. There’s no “political will” to quit Russian oil, she said, precisely because it is up to $30 per barrel cheaper than alternative supplies.

Fidesz might become another casualty of the war in Ukraine, as more expensive oil will be a big hit to its budget, and to the cost of living for Magyars…something that the opposition in Hungary will be happy to pounce on.

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It’s not always easy to find good analyses regarding the war in Ukraine due to the preponderance of partisanship that dominates the topic. This appears on all fronts: military, economic, and geopolitical. Sorting the wheat from the chaff is a frequent task for those of us trying to keep up with the conflict.

Ben Aris provides us with an interesting take on Kirill Dmitriev’s recent failed trip to Washington DC:

Radio Moskva

Dmitriev goes to Washington

#RadioMoskva…

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10 months ago · 3 likes · ben aris

Dmitriev is Putin’s special envoy on Ukraine, and it seems that he received more than just a cold shoulder:

He was hoping to do the rounds and persuade the White House to back off, but it ended up that almost no one would see him. Moreover, after he gave interviews to CNN and Fox News, he got roasted in public by US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who called him a “Russian propagandist” which is fair enough as that is what he is.

Ben on Trump’s constant flip-flopping regarding Russia and Ukraine:

Currently, the Trump administration is swinging back and forth on Russia like a Newton’s cradle toy. As I have argued this month, Trump is pursuing a minerals diplomacy where he is attaching minerals deals to anything foreign policy related. We have a piece on the site today covering the latest deal with Kazakhstan (which has a lot of minerals unlike Ukraine which doesn’t have any rare earth metals at all).

That is why Trump has been so soft on Russia: it has the most rare earth metals (REMs) after China. It’s the big prize and Trump has been reluctant to hit the Kremlin with sanctions as it will spoil his chances of doing business with Russia. That appears to have changed and by refusing to compromise, it could be argued that Putin has pushed Trump over a line – these sanctions are significant – the first ever since Trump took office – as they suggest that Trump has finally given up on any hope of cutting a deal with Putin.

Ben understands that Ukraine is an existential matter for Russia:

Putin doesn’t care. He would like to do a deal with Trump. He could do a deal with Trump. But he’s not going to compromise on Ukraine. He really does see it as an existential threat. Dmitriev made this point explicitly in his remarks on US TV. Putin is not going to back down. And despite signalling early on there was some limited wiggle room on territories, I assume that he hoped he could get Trump to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy into making concessions and that didn’t work.

It nearly did work. That was Trump’s “final offer” proposal in April at a London summit, where Trump pushed very hard for a deal that was basically a Putin shopping list of demands. Zelenskiy refused. The talks have gone nowhere since, despite a lot of drama.

Bottomline is Putin doesn’t care. He has already wrecked his relations with Europe forever and even if he got some sanctions relief from Trump, most of the sanctions on Russia will remain there for generations. The Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) continue to make good progress on the battlefield.

Europe can’t continue to fund Ukraine:

At the same time Europe has run out of money for Ukraine and the only hope of funding the war in 2026 is the Reparation Loans which are now stuck in committee until at least December, due to Belgium’s objectives. If Putin is betting that he could win this war, it doesn’t look like such a bad bet.

At the end of the day Trump’s threats are empty. He can’t send Ukraine Tomahawks as they have to be fired from a ship and Ukraine has no navy. The oil sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil won’t work either as between them they account for two thirds of all Russia’s oil exports, some 4.4mn barrels a day. If you really remove that much oil from the market, you will have a huge price spike and Trump won’t tolerate an oil price spike. Mid-term elections are not that far away. Oil experts say it will only take a few months for the Russians, Chinese and Indians to find some sort of workaround. They have in every case of new sanctions so far.

Ben’s concludes that Trump has thrown has hands up in the air and wants to put this entire conflict on Europe’s plate so that America can walk away from a war that it cornered Russia into launching.

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Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

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When I was a young boy, I used to really enjoy hearing things about “the old days” from older people that I knew. It allowed me to gain a better understanding of where we were (or where at least I was) at the point in time, and why certain older people were the way they were. Resistance to change is natural, but change is inevitable.

Big societal changes appear to come in subtly and gradually when you are younger, to the point of barely noticing them at all until they are hardcoded into your daily existence. When you reach a point in middle age, change appears more abruptly…if you’re paying attention. Our modern western cultures have for decades been centered around youth as the driver of changes in cultural trends. If you’re young, new things come naturally to you. When you’re in your 30s and early 40s, these same new things might appear a bit different, but not too foreign to get a quick grasp on. By the time you hit 50, you begin to look at the youth as somewhat alien…at least to you.

Online dating popped up on the scene when I was still a participant in that market, but I could never take part in it myself. It felt too cold, too commercial, too meat marketish. Where was the spark in e-dating? The subtly? The seduction? I couldn’t wrap my mind around it and never dipped a toe in that pool. I made a conscious decision to distance myself from “The New” because I was content with what was already available. Friends of mine used it regularly, but it was simply not for me. This was probably my first step into the world of being “old”. A fissure appeared where a gap is now present, one that will become a chasm as I get older.

I am Gen X, which means that a whole generation separates me from Gen Z, the youth generation of today. Gen Z grew up in a world that was networked to the hilt, where everything was already on the internet, and where the “meatspace” had already begun to lose its central role in human socialization. This is a generation that has grown up facing electronic screens, to the point where eye contact is in retreat when Gen Zers actually do encounter real humans in person. Their understanding of media, and more importantly, media consumption, is very different than mine. I like to make the joke (and it’s not really a joke as it has happened to me several times) that if you ask someone from Gen Z to explain something to you in a simple fashion, they won’t respond with a one or two line description, but will instead send you a link to a 4 hour podcast that kinda-sorta touches on the subject. Gen Z is the first truly online generation.

This also goes beyond the consumption of media, as it also floods into personal relationships. It is quite common for young people these days to have very few friends IRL (in real life), preferring those that they meet online in shared spaces. This goes wayyyy beyond e-dating. We are dealing with a generation of people for whom socialization has been almost entirely virtual, and whose friends circles are also quite often wholly online. The old rules of friendship and romance have changed, and they have changed significantly to the point where they appear very foreign to us “olds”.

One of the most dramatic changes has been young people’s relationship to sex. Sexual relations have not been a constant throughout history, as the Sexual Revolution upended much of what was in place for eons already, but unlike the newest changes, that revolution still involved actual people sharing a physical space. Now, being in the same room is no longer a prerequisite, as the massive world of online pornography has situated itself as a competitor to traditional (and newer) sexual relations. In many cases, the individual feels that he or she (and it’s almost always a “he”) no longer requires another actual human to satisfy their sexual needs. The individual consumerbot now reigns supreme.

The reason for all the nonsense that you just read is that Harper’s has published one of the best essays of the year to date: “The Goon Squad”. This is a new, online culture that is completely foreign to me, but one that makes perfect sense in light of the transformation of society thanks to rapid growth in electronic communication since the World Wide Web arrived on scene over 30 years ago. You’re going to learn a lot, and much of it is not pleasant….but this essay is very informative, making it worthy to share with you:

Gooning is a new kind of masturbation. More precisely, a new kind of masturbation at the heart of an internet-based, pornography-obsessed, Gen Z–dominated subculture every bit as defined and vibrant as the hippies or punks in their prime. The act itself resembles “edging”—repeatedly bringing oneself to the point of climax without actually climaxing. But gooning is more goal-oriented and more communal. The gooner goons to reach the “goonstate”: a supposed zone of total ego death or bliss that some liken to advanced meditation, the attainment of which compels them to masturbate for hours, or even days, at a time.

Gooners goon. I’m sorry that you had to learn this.

The gooners first came to limited public attention by way of their “gooncaves”: rooms remodeled in the service of porn consumption. You’d think a person, having just built a gooncave, would take every possible measure to conceal its existence, would bulk-purchase padlocks, price high-end CCTV systems, craft detailed alibis for every hour, every minute spent alone, and would still, after all that, bolt awake in the middle of the night, heart pounding at the fear of discovery. Instead, the gooners bragged about them. They posted photos of their gooncaves to Reddit. And these photos, which circulated through the young-to-youngish internet as early as 2021, were astonishing. One of course noticed the screens, sometimes three or four of them, sometimes upwards of a dozen, each lit up with porn, but one especially noticed the gooners’ own erect penises, foregrounded in the frame like waggish thumbs-ups. These were porn shrines. In hindsight, they were also leading indicators of some of the very serious psychological damage the lockdowns had wrought on the world. Those early-COVID images of depopulated city streets—these were their precise corollary. They showed you where the people went. Or where at least some of them did, likely the ones who were not exactly models of stability and robust mental health to begin with. Even so, it seemed beyond dispute that sixty years ago some of these gooners would have been fathers. Small-business owners. Dependable men in hats riding slow commuter trains, their mindscapes perfumed with thoughts of stocks, bonds, lawn care. Well, what could you do? Certain social systems had failed, certain historical trend lines had converged, and now we had these guys to deal with.

These are young men who have checked out of the dating pool, pairing nicely with the young men who have removed themselves permanently from employment.

Rapid technological change birthing a new culture:

But the gooners’ rise does, in retrospect, possess a certain inevitability. Anyone paying attention to online porn’s evolution over the preceding twenty years could sense, in its brain-melting variety and abundance, the blueprint for a new kind of person, a new relationship to human sexuality. In my own lifetime, I have seen incredible advances in the world of pornography. When I was a boy, there were still porn magazines; fathers hid them on high shelves. You stood on stools and gawked at them in a state of mortal terror. But by the time I started college, in the late Aughts, the foundations of our present porn environment were firmly established. Widespread broadband internet had enabled the rise of the so-called tube sites: platforms like Pornhub, which streamed untold numbers of clips free of charge. Then came the smartphones, transforming every toilet stall into a potential porn theater. The very air, suddenly, was misted with pornography.

In this earlier stage, if you wanted to watch porn, you still had to actively seek it out. That has since changed.

Vice has never been more available than it is today. Think about the rise of sports gambling, for example.

The author of this essay threw himself head first into the Goonverse:

So where were the gooners? A few seconds’ research revealed their home base: Discord, a social messaging platform not unlike Slack, offering a multiverse of chat-room servers accessible by invitation. If Instagram was where millennials went to post infographics about racial disparities in income and policing, Discord was where zoomers went to swap the screeds of lesser-known school shooters. Or to talk about gaming. Or whatever zoomers did. This was supposedly where the online youth were headed: away from their parents’ social platforms into private, self-policed spaces, little islands of affinity. I joined the first relevant server I could find: the GoonVerse, which had more than fifty thousand members. I examined the rules, which were at once surprisingly woke (no hate speech, no misgendering) and strict enough regarding the posting of child pornography as to suggest a serious and recurrent problem. Before entering, I was prompted to choose my “roles.” Age, region, and gender I could make sense of, but things grew confusing from there. Did I want to be “pinged for tournaments”? Was I a “hentai wankbattler,” or merely a “regular wankbattler”? These questions I answered at random, and then I entered the “stream room.”

Picture this: you work for a masturbation factory in hell. You log on to your scheduled workplace Zoom call. What do you see? You see what I saw in the GoonVerse. There was, inescapably, the porn itself, which occupied most of the screen, a hyperkinetic montage of tremendous penises barreling into and out of Japanese cartoon heroines, crudely rendered CGI horse-women, and actual female porn stars. Then, of course, there were the gooners, arrayed side by side in boxes at the bottom of the screen, their heads obscured—cut off by their cameras at the neck—and their hands in frantic motion. Primitive fears from childhood surfaced in an inchoate rush: a gigantic omnivorous worm I once saw in a movie on TV; the uncontrolled swarm of color that consumed the screen whenever my family’s PC crashed, suggesting something organic and harm-intending in what was supposed to be just a machine. One of the guys in the stream room was masturbating on the toilet. One of them looked like he was masturbating in jail.

He also created a questionnaire to learn about this culture:

For one thing, and crucially: most gooners do not regularly masturbate for eight to twelve hours at a stretch, as I’d initially been led to believe. They tend to do that only a few times a month, the rest of the time masturbating for—and I really did try to calculate this—an average of two or three hours a day. In other words, the goonstate, so central to the subculture’s branding and self-conception, is only rarely attained. (A sizable minority of respondents claimed never to have reached it, although none doubted its existence.) Like runner’s high, or epiphany in prayer, the goonstate is not the point of the practice, but rather its occasional and unbidden reward. You’ll never get there if you don’t put in the work. As for what “there” refers to—what the goonstate actually feels like—a sampling from the Questionnaire should get the point across:

It’s like being high while high

Intense bliss pure happiness and love

It’s so beautiful! It’s sublime. Like being washed away.

It’s like I’m in antigravity or covered in liquid. tingles all over me, brain fuzzy, skin tingling all over. No fears about cumming, because this was the real pleasure I was after, and I couldn’t cum at that point if I wanted to anyway.

What is immediately noticeable here is both the sheer amount of time spent “gooning”, and how alienated they are from real life.

What you hardly need an amateur goonthropologist to tell you—and what the Questionnaire amply bears out—is that this phenomenon in its full sweep can be traced at least partially to the fact that, in the span of about five years earlier this century, virtually every child in the developed world was granted instant, unrestricted access not merely to hardcore pornography but to some of the most extreme examples of it ever produced in human history. Many respondents have been regular porn viewers since the fourth grade; few were older than twelve when they picked up the habit. And they were watching some serious stuff. Stuff that, in earlier eras, you’d need to go out of your way to find—stuff that you could only get your hands on with the help of a middleman.

On a near-daily basis over the past decade, opinion columnists have fretted over this state of affairs, primarily over how all of this porn—a fair share of it violent and explicitly misogynist—was affecting the sexual behavior of young men in real life. What they apparently hadn’t considered was that the porn alone might be enough, that at sufficient speed and in sufficient quantity it could function as a workable substitute for life itself. This was certainly true for some before the pandemic, but the lockdowns appear to have disastrously accelerated this particular outcome in younger members of Gen Z. I’d been surprised at first to find that out of 107 respondents, 47 claimed to be sexually active in some capacity—roughly 47 more than I’d expected. But a quick crunch of the numbers set things straight. Median age of the sexually active gooner: twenty-seven. Median age of the non–sexually active gooner: twenty-three—i.e., someone in high school or college when the lockdowns began. It was this latter group that, in the Questionnaire, was likeliest to identify not merely as a gooner but also as a “pornosexual.”

This culture is even deeper than at first and second glance. Click here to read this great essay in its entirety.

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The safe assumption on February 24, 2022 was that the Russian Army would race against time to prevent an economic collapse brought on by western sanctions targeting its various industries and banking sector. Who could have predicted that the Russian economy would prove to be so resilient, and that the Russian Armed Forces would underperform?

Russia spent an entire decade building up a war chest and “sanctions-proofing” their own economy to the best of its ability in the run up to the war. Conducting very little direct trade with the USA certainly helped them in their efforts. Up to the time that this article was published (October 12th of this year), the Russian economy was slightly bruised by sanctions, but was still humming along relatively well, especially when compared to those in the neighbouring EU. Since then, a new round of sanctions have been unveiled, one that might have some actual teeth (to be determined).

Here’s a helpful analysis of the sanctions regime up until this latest round:

Since 2014, Western nations have hit Russia with a total of 26,655 sanctions (to mid-September 2025), with 23,960 coming after February 2022. The largest target group, with 13,611 sanctions, is state officials, business owners, and well-known public figures. The declared intention of sanctions was to force the Kremlin to alter its geopolitical course, i.e. to quickly withdraw from Ukraine, by causing a shock crisis in the economy and creating a backlash by prominent businesspersons and the public against the Kremlin.

The economy did suffer from disruption in 2022 (-1.2%), but growth returned in 2023 (+4.1%) and in 2024 (+4.3%). The economy also received a huge boost to income in 2022-23, as the EU was not ready for sanctions and was forced to stockpile Russian oil and other materials. The external trade and current accounts have remained comfortably in surplus since 2022.

The first miscalculation:

As mentioned, over 13,000 of the sanctions have been directed at individuals, especially Russian billionaires and business owners. The assumption being that these individuals would increase pressure on the Kremlin to withdraw from Ukraine to alleviate pressure on their businesses and to recover their wealth from sanctions orders. But here is where there is a lack of understanding about how Russia has changed since 2000. billionaires do not have political influence in Putin’s Russia and, as such, cannot be properly referred to as Oligarchs, i.e. as originally defined in ancient Greece. So, while these individuals were targeted by sanctions intended to pressure the government, they hold little to no political influence, and the measures have therefore failed to bring about any meaningful change in state policy - and nor will they.

Mikhail Fridman (one of the original 7 oligarchs and one of those who has retained his businesses and wealth) of Alfa Group had to explain the above fact to the British when prompted by the Financial Times.

Repatriated wealth of Russia’s billionaire class:

Moreover, while some assets – modest volume - belonging to the business elite have been frozen under Western sanctions, the bulk of their wealth remains in Russia or in so-called friendly jurisdictions. This is largely because, in the face of an increasingly unpredictable external environment – where sanctions were often imposed based solely on high net worth – many saw no viable option other than to redomicile their wealth and business interests to Russia or allied countries. And they had plenty of notice to do so since sanctions against Russia started quite meekly from spring 2014.

The 2025 Forbes billionaire Report showed that there are now 146 billionaires in Russia, up 21 from 2024 and with 15 new names appearing. The combined wealth of the billionaires is assessed at $625.6bn, a record high for Russia. Most of that wealth is now in Russia or in so-called friendly jurisdictions and has helped create a strong financial base in the country. This is one of the reasons why the government is now able to switch from financing the federal budget deficit from the National Welfare Fund, Russia’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, to tapping into the local debt market. With state debt at only 16% of GDP, the Finance Ministry has considerable scope to borrow and still keep Russia as a low indebted country.

Instead of staging a revolt, some of the sanctioned businesspersons have adapted to the new environment and have refocused their repatriated wealth on bolstering Russia’s domestic economy. Others have pursued investments or private activities outside the West, particularly in countries “friendly” to Russia. In essence, rather than weakening the Russian state, the sanctions inadvertently reinforced it by redirecting wealth and investment into the domestic market, while also simultaneously pushing away many of the pro-Western businesspeople who were essentially punished because of their nationality. Had policymakers heeded the advice of several prominent voices in the west to not sanction Russian billionaires but to make it easier for them to settle in the west and to bring the bulk of their wealth with them, it would probably be a different story in Russia today.

The sanctions regime alienated this class, resulting in massive injections of wealth at home.

Foreign companies (those that stayed) are still doing a brisk business in Russia:

Also, in terms of foreign businesses in Russia, while some left, many chose to stay, either directly or indirectly by selling their operations to local investors or changing their business models. Around 46% of the largest foreign companies operating in Russia in early 2022, sold their businesses to local investors, ensuring operations continued, providing goods and services, employment and taxes and bolstering overall GDP. Ironically, many foreign companies still operating in Russia are often finding themselves in a favorable position. With many Russian founded companies now sanctioned, foreign firms, or those which have evolved from a formerly foreign owned business, are emerging as key players in several sectors, often enjoying a competitive advantage. This has created another unintended consequence in that, according to a recent calculation published by the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) foreign companies are now contributing significantly to the Russian federal budget, paying taxes in excess of $20bn last year, but remain outside of Western sanctions lists.

Not bad!

What remains to be seen is if Russia’s economy can withstand this next wave of sanctions targeting its oil and gas sectors.

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The USA wants Europe to take the lead on countering Russia in Ukraine, via purchasing US weapons to send to Kiev. It also wants to dictate to Europe how to trade with the Chinese. What the USA is seeking from Europe is its total obedience to the point where the continent is reduced to little more than an American protectorate. The question becomes: what does Europe get out of it?

That is a question that has no good answer at the moment beyond 1. access to US consumer and capital markets and 2. the US defense umbrella. Is it worth sacrificing your own sovereignty for these two points? Pretty much no one is asking this question.

At the same time, the bills for this “alliance” continue to pile up, and the latest is the Chinese squeeze on rare earth minerals that Europe needs for its industry, defense, and green transition:

BRUSSELS — As Beijing further weaponizes its control over the flow of minerals that Western countries need for their green, defense and digital ambitions, Europe has to face an uncomfortable truth: It won’t escape China’s dominance anytime soon.

The Chinese government’s shock imposition earlier in October of sweeping export controls on rare-earth magnets and the raw materials needed to make them has escalated a running trade feud with the United States. The embargo threatens vast — and rapid — collateral damage on the European Union and has forced its way onto the agenda of a high-level summit on Thursday.

“A crisis in the supply of critical raw materials is no longer a distant risk. It is on our doorstep,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a pre-summit speech to European lawmakers.

Fully aware of how dependent European industry is on China, European leaders still chose to go head-first in and lecture Beijing on “human rights” and its relations with Russia. This is part of the price for that misstep.

Oops:

The EU, which imports nearly all of its rare earths and permanent magnets from the Middle Kingdom, is caught in the crossfire.

“We have no interest in escalation,” Maroš Šefčovič, the EU’s trade chief, told reporters Tuesday. “However, this situation casts a shadow over our relationship. Therefore, a prompt resolution is essential.”

China and the EU will “intensify contacts at all levels” on the issue, Šefčovič added. Wang Wentao, the Chinese trade minister, has accepted an invitation to come to Brussels in the coming days to discuss the restrictions, Šefčovič said after a two-hour call between the two.

Chinese sector dominance:

Yet, behind the talk of adequate diplomatic responses and potential retaliation there is no escaping the dominance in rare earths that China has built up over decades. For now at least.

“In the short term there’s nothing you can do, except try and negotiate with the Chinese,” said Philip Andrews-Speed, senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.

Hit where it hurts

Beijing dominates the entire supply chain of rare earths — a group of 17 minerals used in permanent magnets found in everything from electric vehicles and wind turbines, to F-35 fighter jets and naval vessels. Under its new export controls, importers will need a government license to access not only those permanent magnets, but also the refined metals and alloys that go into them.

China already weaponized its leading position in producing and refining critical raw materials — and specifically rare-earth elements like scandium, yttrium and dysprosium — in response to Trump’s first wave of punitive tariffs back in April. Eventually, the White House caved in.

Collateral damage of US-China trade relations:

This time, again, the Chinese export controls are “a tit-for-tat for U.S. policy,” said a person from the Chinese business sector, granted anonymity to speak candidly.

The EU is being hit, too: “The effects are direct and enormous, particularly for the defence sector,” Tobias Gehrke and Janka Oertel of the European Council on Foreign Relations wrote in a commentary. “The EU defence industry risks grinding to a halt as inventory shortfalls could leave it struggling to produce and deliver enough weapons for the war in Ukraine.”

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China accounts for 61 percent of rare earths extraction and 92 percent of refining, according to the International Energy Agency. It provides nearly 99 percent of the EU’s supply of the 17 rare earths, as well as about 98 percent of its rare earth permanent magnets.

Global rare earth production

Estimated mine production of rare earth elements in China and the rest of the world, in metric tons of rare-earth-oxide equivalent.

The EU is now scrambling to figure out how to fix a problem that should have never occurred in the first place.

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“Blood and Soil for me and not for thee” is the latest trend in Canada. A new movement called “indigeneous identitarianism” is all the rage, one which describes non-natives of Canada as “settlers”, and therefore below the natives on the totem pole:

Without Diminishment

Adam Zivo: Racial hierarchies are gaining traction in Canada

Adam Zivo is a Canadian journalist and columnist…

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10 months ago · 27 likes · Without Diminishment Editor and Adam Zivo

It is increasingly fashionable in some progressive circles to label non-indigenous North Americans as “settlers,” mere guests on indigenous land. Who would have thought that blood-and-soil nationalism—the odious ideology that claims that only certain races belong to certain territories—would return, wrapped in the mantle of social justice?

This movement—call it “indigenous identitarianism”— is gaining traction across North America but has been especially influential in Canada. There, it has already begun to erode democratic decision-making in favor of race-based hierarchies. The world would do well to look to the great white north to see how this path, if followed, could shape their own political and civic life.

Indigenous identitarianism generally posits that North America’s non-indigenous residents should be considered second-class citizens, either legally or symbolically. It suggests that they continually express gratitude for the “opportunity” to live on a continent “owned” by indigenous peoples.

To illustrate: Deanne LeBlanc, an award-winning academic at the University of British Columbia, wrote in a 2021 issue of the Canadian Journal of Political Science that non-indigenous Canadians should “consider themselves ‘foreigners’ in need of invitation onto Indigenous lands,” even if their families have lived on this continent for several generations. Similarly, Kaitie Jourdeuil, an academic at Queen’s University, published a 2022 article in The Conversation arguing that indigenous peoples should be given the right to make and enforce laws over 89 percent of Canadian land. That would mean some degree of disenfranchisement for millions of people.

Progressives often justify these beliefs on the basis of tradition: if indigenous peoples have lived here for millennia, then this land is always theirs. Indigenous communities also allegedly have a special “spiritual” connection to the land—their religion grants them a supernatural right.

This is Canada, so anything is possible.

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We end this weekend’s SCR with a story about how Australia has gone to war against science in the name of political correctness:

In March 2025, the Australian government quietly buried its last collection of Pleistocene human fossils in an unmarked grave. These remains were of Homo sapiens who had shared the Earth with Neanderthals. But they went into the ground with little media coverage or protest from the global scientific community, who knew better than anyone that these delicate, carefully reconstructed fossils would not last long in hostile conditions.

The significance of this loss is hard to overstate. Australia is a unique piece in the puzzle of human origins. It was colonized by modern humans before Europe, but it remained almost entirely isolated, preserving many aspects of human culture and genetics that vanished elsewhere. As Charles Darwin observed, “the Australian aborigines rank amongst the most distinct of all the races of man.”

Following the British settlement of Australia, museums and universities accumulated collections of both historical and ancient remains. Most material came from southeast Australia and Tasmania, where the once-numerous tribes had suffered enormous losses and even extinction. Today, these thousands of bones, mummies, and fossils have almost all been buried or cremated; genetic “biographies” that were burned before they were ever read.

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All:

I’d like to do an entry on the origins of Antifa. I’ve canvassed others elsewhere, and interest seems high. Several have requested that I turn this into a series.

So here’s what I’ll offer you guys: If I can get 15 new paid subscribers over the next 30 hours or so, I’ll turn it into a series. If not, I’ll write up a standalone essay on the subject.

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Regarding the FbF Book Club on the Fiume Crisis, the next entry will be about the diplomatic battle over the city instead of the “Christmas of Blood”. There will be a big focus on Woodrow Wilson, an individual who gets a bad rap these days for many reasons. This entry will be up either this evening or tomorrow. After that, we’ll do a short entry on the lay of the land, and then a much bigger one on everyone’s favourite character, Gabrielle D’Annunzio, and his time in Fiume.

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I’d like to do a series of Antifa’s origins, so if you want me to do a series, become a paid subscriber by clicking this button:

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