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First let me explain the meaning of the X message and photo that appears above… the cancellation of the training exercise is a key indicator that the Pentagon is going to deploy the some, if not all, of the 82nd Airborne Division to the Persian Gulf. 

Final destination unknown. You may recall an article I wrote on February 18 when I reported that a CENTCOM exercise scripting conference, which was scheduled to begin on Sunday, 22 February 2026, had been abruptly cancelled. Six days later the war started.

The imminent deployment of the 82nd does not mean they are going into battle in the next couple of days. I expect it will be at least two weeks before they reach their base camp. However, this does mean that Trump and Hegseth were not just making an idle comment when they mentioned putting boots on the ground.

Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to downplay US casualties after seven days of war in the Persian Gulf, clues are appearing on the internet that indicate the US has suffered more combat losses than reported. The first clue is this Xhitter (pronounced SHITTER) from Stars and Stripes.

K-Town refers to Kaiserslautern, a US Army base in Germany, which is located 13 miles east of the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. So what? Well, on March 4, 2026 the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center (LRMC) in Germany—the largest US Department of Defense hospital outside the United States and the primary overseas trauma/evacuation hub for injured service members from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa—sent out a memo announcing the temporary suspension of its labor and delivery services “until further notice.” The memo did not explicitly define the “primary objective,” but LRMC’s core role is treating combat- and training-related injuries. It also is the main medical evacuation point for wounded troops from ongoing operations.

A knowledgeable friend who supervised DOD’s Wounded Warrior Program during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and worked with personnel at the LRMC, learned today that there is a flood of casualties arriving at the hospital. The numbers are so large that the hospital could no longer continue to spend resources on birthing babies.

Then this picture popped up on Telegram a little bit ago:

It is not a stretch to conclude that Iran’s attacks on the US bases in the Persian Gulf produced more than a few casualties. DOD/DOW is working hard to keep this information from the public. Most Americans do not support the unprovoked war… This is likely to fuel more opposition.

Original article:  ronpaulinstitute.org

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Journey to the center of the world of American leaders’ madness and ruin, writes Dennis Kucinich, to see desperate Iranian parents picking through rubble, searching for any signs of their little girls.

The Trump Administration, at the behest of the decrepit Netanyahu government, was instrumental in the bombing of a girls’ elementary school in Iran on Saturday, killing 57 children.

Let that sink in.

Journey to the center of the world of American leaders’ madness and ruin to see desperate Iranian parents picking through rubble, searching for any signs of their little girls. [Iran’s Tasnim News Agency cited the Judiciary of Minab as saying that the death toll had risen to 85.]

Now tell those parents, as we are being told, that America has done this so the Iranian people can be free. It’s the Empire’s new equation, Freedom = Death.

This murderous approach that the Trump Administration has wantonly indulged is identical to the policy of the Netanyahu government to bomb schools in Gaza and to murder innocent children as a (psychopathic) determination of heading off retribution in the future. The murder of children has become a state sacrament.

This is, in fact, an extension of the Epstein saga, the destruction of innocence through child rape, murder and cannibalism by powerful people whose thirst for blood will never be slaked in this cartwheeling carnival of human sacrifice called war.

Peter Berger, in [his 1974  book] Pyramids of Sacrifice drew the equation between the Aztec civilization’s cult of human sacrifice and the collapse of its empire, writing:

“Thus the great pyramid of Cholula provides a metaphorical paradigm for the relations among theory, power and the victims of both – the intellectuals who define reality, the power wielders who shape the world to conform to the definitions and the others who are called upon to suffer in consequence of both enterprises.”

Consider the wider context in which these events occur:

• The rise of predatory Zionism, with its execution of a strategy of annihilation, ethnic cleansing, mass murder and genocide and with ambitions for an Empire from the Euphrates to the Nile;
• the attempt to stifle dissent on U.S. college campuses, threats to university funding; changes in First Amendment law at state levels to punish critics of Israel; the domination of both political parties in U.S. politics by AIPAC and affiliated groups;
• the domination of the media by those more dedicated to the shameful cause of the Likud Government of Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben Gvir than they are to the United States Constitution.

Front Row Seat on Western Civilization Decline

We have a front row seat at the steady decline of Western “civilization,” led by the U.S. government, recently precipitating the Iraq-Iran War, the war in Afghanistan, the War in Iraq, the War against Lebanon, the War against Syria, the War against Gaza and the West Bank, the War against Yemen and now presenting the (second) U.S. war against Iran.

Renaming the Department of Defense to the Department of War is splendid Truth in Advertising.

Simultaneously, the collapse of the American economy is in the offing, mired in debt, yet preparing to appropriate $1.5 trillion dollars a year for war, most of next year’s discretionary spending which would otherwise be used for the health, education and general welfare of the American people.

Today the U.S., the “most powerful military in the world” has been reduced to being an arm of the Israeli government, in service of greater Israel.

That we have made Netanyahu’s long-desired war upon Iran our own, is a sign that Lincoln’s Prayer of a “Government of the People, by the People and For the People, Shall not Perish,” is no longer part of our national invocation. Nor are George Washington’s admonitions about foreign entanglements regarded, nor President Eisenhower’s warning about the military industrial complex.

No today, America’s leaders cast aside centuries of accumulated wisdom of governance and descend into a circle of Hell, lower than Dante imagined in the Inferno, a place reserved for those who sacrifice their nations for personal wealth and power and for whom nothing is immoral, there is no spiritual code and no divine being other than themselves.

The modern punishments of Impeachment and trial by the Hague are insufficient to deal with such beings.

Original article:  consortiumnews.com

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Trump has the option of going to war with Iran and receiving much-needed campaign funds from Israel for the midterms – or opting to defy Bibi and facing certain defeat by losing both houses and facing certain impeachment. Can the Iranians save him?

Is Trump serious about going to war with Iran? To understand this, it’s important to examine his relationship with Netanyahu and to see who has the advantage when it comes to dragging the U.S. into a war, and whether Israel can actually be a greater threat to the U.S. than Tehran can ever be.

The trap that Trump is falling into is one where he has little or no wiggle room at all to control the Iran crisis, whereby Israel can threaten him with isolation while it goes ahead with its strike.

There are two dynamics at play here which are struggling to find a compromise. Trump wants a deal with Iran which takes away their nuclear capability, while Israel wants a war which overthrows the Iranian regime and installs a Mossad/CIA puppet. The problem, though, is that Israel is not an honest broker and keeps shifting the goalposts. The latest demand now is that removing Iran’s ballistic missiles should be at the heart of any deal that Trump pulls off.

Trump is ensnared and is aware of how Bibi is manipulating him. He may, on occasion, swear at journalists and pretend he is his own boss and his own president and that Israel is a client state of Washington which has to toe the line, but in reality, it is clear that Israel is calling the shots.

In recent days, we have heard that the one aircraft carrier the U.S. had in the region, the USS Abraham Lincoln, is to be joined by a second called the USS Gerald Ford. U.S. media report that the Lincoln is in the “Arabian Sea,” which is a comical way of saying that it’s keeping its distance from Iran’s shores and Houthi missiles off the coast of Yemen. But other reports are suggesting that the reason why Trump claims he has sent a second carrier – to beef up the “flotilla” in case of a war breaking out with Iran – is untrue. Some insiders are briefing journalists that the Lincoln has technical problems which will render it useless in a combat situation and so needs to be replaced with the more advanced Ford.

However, even this might be a false narrative offered by Pentagon insiders who are not supporters of Trump. A second explanation about the carriers is that it buys Trump time. He has even told reporters that it will take about a month for the Ford to get there, which he believes should be ample time for a deal to be struck with Iran, or at least will give him four more weeks to work out a way of dealing with the threat – that’s the threat from Israel, not Iran.

Israel threatened Trump before when he went ahead with his bunker buster bombs in June of last year by saying simply, “If you don’t do it, we’ll nuke Iran.” It worked. This time around, the threat is, “If you don’t join us, then we’ll strike Iran alone and you will have to deal with the consequences of being the first U.S. president to have to explain to the Jewish lobby why Iran is wiping Israel off the face of the map.” This second threat is multi-layered and also might work with Trump, given that the midterm elections, which are approaching, will cost twice what the elections cost which got him into office. It will be Jewish money which bankrolls him this time around, with the intention of saving him from losing both houses and facing inevitable impeachment.

And so, in many ways, Trump is closer to and more dependent on the regime in Tehran to help him out. A deal which limits the enrichment of uranium and can guarantee no nuclear bomb can be made might be something he can present to the American people as a great victory. The irony is that the deal might be more or less a carbon copy of Obama’s, which he, Trump, rejected while in his first term in office, a rejection which has created the present crisis.

The trouble with any deal now about enrichment is that it is unlikely to satisfy the Israelis, who have become more aware in recent weeks about the capability of Iran’s latest generation of ballistic missiles both in terms of defence and attack. Moreover, the U.S. attack on Iran last year for 12 days has now raised the stakes to a fever pitch, making the Iranians clearer and more focused about any kind of attack happening against them: all-out war.

According to some credible reports, Trump was recently asking Pentagon chiefs if the U.S. could carry out a single in-and-out strike operation which could be used to warn Iran while satisfying Israel at the same time about the U.S. threat, and he was told no such options are feasible. This is due to Iran being much more prepared now for such attacks, both militarily and intelligence-wise, while the Mossad operation of creating civil strife on the ground failed spectacularly. The U.S. is in a very tight corner right now, as its forces and its allies in the region are in the crosshairs of Iran the moment the first bomb is dropped, and so Trump’s options to go to war are very limited. It would be suicidal for Trump to strike Iran, as the losses to U.S. forces and the disruption to oil distribution via the Straits of Hormuz would be too great, not to mention the destruction of infrastructure in Israel itself.

But there is also another factor which is putting all the pressure on Trump to get a deal with Iran. Since last June’s attack and more recently Trump’s betrayal of cordial relations with Putin conjured up at Alaska, along with the Venezuela coup, both Russia and China have upped their support for Iran. This is a critical factor now preventing Trump from hitting Iran with anything. China recently gave Iran its latest state-of-the-art new radar system which can identify U.S. stealth bombers at a range of 700km. Game changer. If you consider Iran, Israel, and the U.S. as three poker players at the table, it is now clear that Iran now has the best hand with the most options. It can maximize its role now and exploit Trump’s vulnerability by going for a deal which involves sanctions being relieved, or it could hold out and play a long game way beyond Trump’s one-month breathing space and really turn up the heat on him leading up to the midterms in November. Iran always plays for time and is good at this strategy. And given that even the kindest analysis of America’s strike capability in Iran is two weeks before depletion of all missile stocks is reached, any hawks close to Trump who are pushing for a strike must have the destruction of the U.S. in their strategy as well, as Iran cannot be pounded into a state of submission in such a short space of time. Surely that can’t be the aim of Bibi. Surely not!

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This dramatic escalation in military spending is a recipe for more waste, fraud, and abuse

After promising on the campaign trail that he would drive the war profiteers out of Washington, and appointing Elon Musk to trim the size of government across the board, some will be surprised at President Trump’s social media post on Wednesday that the U.S. should raise the Pentagon budget to $1.5 trillion. That would mean an unprecedented increase in military spending, aside from the buildup for World War II.

The proposal is absurd on the face of it, and it’s extremely unlikely that it is the product of a careful assessment of U.S. defense needs going forward. The plan would also add $5.8 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Budget.

This would fly in the face of the purported savings of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). In fact, a $500 billion increase in Pentagon spending would be more than double all of the alleged budget cuts wrought by DOGE, even according to DOGE’s own exaggerated figures. The $500 billion increase in Pentagon spending would also be more than the entire military budget of any country in the world, and more than China, Russia, and Iran spend on their militaries combined.

And, the Pentagon budget is already enormous, at $1 trillion per year, with more than half of that going to Pentagon contractors, and untold more lost to waste, fraud, and abuse. Exactly how much of our tax dollars devoted to propping up the Pentagon are wasted is unclear, because the Pentagon has never passed an audit.

We do know that spending on dysfunctional, unnecessary or unworkable systems like the F-35, highly vulnerable $13 billion aircraft carriers, the impossible dream of a leak proof Golden Dome missile defense system, and an unnecessary across-the-board scheme to spend up to $2 trillion on new nuclear weapons over the next two decades will waste tens of billions of dollars every year for a long time to come.

Add to this the Pentagon’s moves to weaken its independent weapons testing office and reduce oversight of bloated weapons contractors, and we have a perfect recipe for increasing waste, fraud, and abuse on the part of the Pentagon and its contractors. And, as always, the bedrock of overspending on the Pentagon is America’s hyper-militarized, “cover the globe” military strategy, an approach that seeks to maintain the ability to intervene anywhere in the world on short notice.

The president also claimed that his $1.5 trillion Pentagon spending proposal, if implemented, will fund our “dream military.” More likely, it will initiate a period of blatant waste and underwrite misguided and dangerous military adventures like the occupation of Venezuela.

Even with a Congress that has been giving the Pentagon a blank check for years, the $1.5 trillion figure is unlikely to pass muster. If we want a safer nation, we should be going in the other direction, towards a lower Pentagon budget, driven by a more intelligent and restrained strategy, and a more rigorous approach to devising, developing, and producing weapons.

Original article:  responsiblestatecraft.org

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From the Forever Wars to the Cataclysmic Wars

In the military realm, Donald Trump will most likely be remembered for his insistence on ending America’s involvement in its twenty-first-century “forever wars”.

In the military realm, Donald Trump will most likely be remembered for his insistence on ending America’s involvement in its twenty-first-century “forever wars” — the fruitless, relentless, mind-crushing military campaigns undertaken by Presidents Bush and Obama in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Somalia. After all, as a candidate, Trump pledged to bring U.S. troops home from those dreaded war zones and, in his last days in office, he’s been promising to get at least most of the way to that objective. The president’s fixation on this issue (and the opposition of his own generals and other officials on the subject) has generated a fair amount of media coverage and endeared him to his isolationist supporters. Yet, however newsworthy it may be, this focus on Trump’s belated troop withdrawals obscures a far more significant aspect of his military legacy: the conversion of the U.S. military from a global counterterror force into one designed to fight an all-out, cataclysmic, potentially nuclear war with China and/or Russia.

People seldom notice that Trump’s approach to military policy has always been two-faced. Even as he repeatedly denounced the failure of his predecessors to abandon those endless counterinsurgency wars, he bemoaned their alleged neglect of America’s regular armed forces and promised to spend whatever it took to “restore” their fighting strength. “In a Trump administration,” he declared in a September 2016 campaign speech on national security, America’s military priorities would be reversed, with a withdrawal from the “endless wars we are caught in now” and the restoration of “our unquestioned military strength.”

Once in office, he acted to implement that very agenda, instructing his surrogates — a succession of national security advisers and secretaries of defense — to commence U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan (though he agreed for a time to increase troop levels in Afghanistan), while submitting ever-mounting defense budgets. The Pentagon’s annual spending authority climbed every year between 2016 and 2020, rising from $580 billion at the start of his administration to $713 at the end, with much of that increment directed to the procurement of advanced weaponry. Additional billions were incorporated into the Department of Energy budget for the acquisition of new nuclear weapons and the full-scale “modernization” of the country’s nuclear arsenal.

Far more important than that increase in arms spending, however, was the shift in strategy that went with it. The military posture President Trump inherited from the Obama administration was focused on fighting the Global War on Terror (GWOT), a grueling, never-ending struggle to identify, track, and destroy anti-Western zealots in far-flung areas of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The posture he’s bequeathing to Joe Biden is almost entirely focused on defeating China and Russia in future “high-end” conflicts waged directly against those two countries — fighting that would undoubtedly involve high-tech conventional weapons on a staggering scale and could easily trigger nuclear war.

From the GWOT to the GPC

It’s impossible to overstate the significance of the Pentagon’s shift from a strategy aimed at fighting relatively small bands of militants to one aimed at fighting the military forces of China and Russia on the peripheries of Eurasia. The first entailed the deployment of scattered bands of infantry and Special Operations Forces units backed by patrolling aircraft and missile-armed drones; the other envisions the commitment of multiple aircraft carriers, fighter squadrons, nuclear-capable bombers, and brigade-strength armored divisions. Similarly, in the GWOT years, it was generally assumed that U.S. troops would face adversaries largely armed with light infantry weapons and homemade bombs, not, as in any future war with China or Russia, an enemy equipped with advanced tanks, planes, missiles, ships, and a full range of nuclear munitions.

This shift in outlook from counterterrorism to what, in these years, has come to be known in Washington as “great power competition,” or GPC, was first officially articulated in the Pentagon’s National Security Strategy of February 2018. “The central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security,” it insisted, “is the reemergence of long-term, strategic competition by what the National Security Strategy classifies as revisionist powers,” a catchphrase for China and Russia. (It used those rare italics to emphasize just how significant this was.)

For the Department of Defense and the military services, this meant only one thing: from that moment on, so much of what they did would be aimed at preparing to fight and defeat China and/or Russia in high-intensity conflict. As Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis put it to the Senate Armed Services Committee that April, “The 2018 National Defense Strategy provides clear strategic direction for America’s military to reclaim an era of strategic purpose… Although the Department continues to prosecute the campaign against terrorists, long-term strategic competition — not terrorism — is now the primary focus of U.S. national security.”

This being the case, Mattis added, America’s armed forces would have to be completely re-equipped with new weaponry intended for high-intensity combat against well-armed adversaries. “Our military remains capable, but our competitive edge has eroded in every domain of warfare,” he noted. “The combination of rapidly changing technology [and] the negative impact on military readiness resulting from the longest continuous period of combat in our nation’s history [has] created an overstretched and under-resourced military.” In response, we must “accelerate modernization programs in a sustained effort to solidify our competitive advantage.”

In that same testimony, Mattis laid out the procurement priorities that have since governed planning as the military seeks to “solidify” its competitive advantage. First comes the “modernization” of the nation’s nuclear weapons capabilities, including its nuclear command-control-and-communications systems; then, the expansion of the Navy through the acquisition of startling numbers of additional surface ships and submarines, along with the modernization of the Air Force, through the accelerated procurement of advanced combat planes; finally, to ensure the country’s military superiority for decades to come, vastly increased investment in emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, hypersonics, and cyber warfare.

These priorities have by now been hard-wired into the military budget and govern Pentagon planning. Last February, when submitting its proposed budget for fiscal year (FY) 2021, for example, the Department of Defense asserted, “The FY 2021 budget supports the irreversible implementation of the National Defense Strategy (NDS), which drives the Department’s decision-making in reprioritizing resources and shifting investments to prepare for a potential future, high-end fight.” This nightmarish vision, in other words, is the military future President Trump will leave to the Biden administration.

The Navy in the Lead

From the very beginning, Donald Trump has emphasized the expansion of the Navy as an overriding objective. “When Ronald Reagan left office, our Navy had 592 ships… Today, the Navy has just 276 ships,” he lamented in that 2016 campaign speech. One of his first priorities as president, he asserted, would be to restore its strength. “We will build a Navy of 350 surface ships and submarines,” he promised. Once in office, the “350-ship Navy” (later increased to 355 ships) became a mantra.

In emphasizing a big Navy, Trump was influenced to some degree by the sheer spectacle of large modern warships, especially aircraft carriers with their scores of combat planes. “Our carriers are the centerpiece of American military might overseas,” he insisted while visiting the nearly completed carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, in March 2017. “We are standing here today on four-and-a-half acres of combat power and sovereign U.S. territory, the likes of which there is nothing… there is no competition to this ship.”

Not surprisingly, top Pentagon officials embraced the president’s big-Navy vision with undisguised enthusiasm. The reason: they view China as their number one adversary and believe that any future conflict with that country will largely be fought from the Pacific Ocean and nearby seas — that being the only practical way to concentrate U.S. firepower against China’s increasingly built-up coastal defenses.

Then-Secretary of Defense Mark T. Esper expressed this outlook well when, in September, he deemed Beijing the Pentagon’s “top strategic competitor” and the Indo-Pacific region its “priority theater” in planning for future wars. The waters of that region, he suggested, represent “the epicenter of great power competition with China” and so were witnessing increasingly provocative behavior by Chinese air and naval units. In the face of such destabilizing activity, “the United States must be ready to deter conflict and, if necessary, fight and win at sea.”

In that address, Esper made it clear that the U.S. Navy remains vastly superior to its Chinese counterpart. Nonetheless, he asserted, “We must stay ahead; we must retain our overmatch; and we will keep building modern ships to ensure we remain the world’s greatest Navy.”

Although Trump fired Esper on November 9th for, among other things, resisting White House demands to speed up the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, the former defense secretary’s focus on fighting China from the Pacific and adjacent seas remains deeply embedded in Pentagon strategic thinking and will be a legacy of the Trump years. In support of such a policy, billions of dollars have already been committed to the construction of new surface ships and submarines, ensuring that such a legacy will persist for years, if not decades to come.

Do Like Patton: Strike Deep, Strike Hard

Trump said little about what should be done for U.S. ground forces during the 2016 campaign, except to indicate that he wanted them even bigger and better equipped. What he did do, however, was speak of his admiration for World War II Army generals known for their aggressive battle tactics. “I was a fan of Douglas MacArthur. I was a fan of George Patton,” he told Maggie Haberman and David Sanger of the New York Times that March. “If we had Douglas MacArthur today or if we had George Patton today and if we had a president that would let them do their thing you wouldn’t have ISIS, okay?”

Trump’s reverence for General Patton has proven especially suggestive in a new era of great-power competition, as U.S. and NATO forces again prepare to face well-equipped land armies on the continent of Europe, much as they did during World War II. Back then, it was the tank corps of Nazi Germany that Patton’s own tanks confronted on the Western Front. Today, U.S. and NATO forces face Russia’s best-equipped armies in Eastern Europe along a line stretching from the Baltic republics and Poland in the north to Romania in the south. If a war with Russia were to break out, much of the fighting would likely occur along this line, with main-force units from both sides engaged in head-on, high-intensity combat.

Since the Cold War ended in 1991 with the implosion of the Soviet Union, American strategists had devoted little serious thought to high-intensity ground combat against a well-equipped adversary in Europe. Now, with East-West tensions rising and U.S. forces again facing well-armed potential foes in what increasingly looks like a military-driven version of the Cold War, that problem is receiving far more attention.

This time around, however, U.S. forces face a very different combat environment. In the Cold War years, Western strategists generally imagined a contest of brute strength in which our tanks and artillery would battle theirs along hundreds of miles of front lines until one side or the other was thoroughly depleted and had no choice but to sue for peace (or ignite a global nuclear catastrophe). Today’s strategists, however, imagine far more multidimensional (or “multi-domain”) warfare extending to the air and well into rear areas, as well as into space and cyberspace. In such an environment, they’ve come to believe that the victor will have to act swiftly, delivering paralyzing blows to what they call the enemy’s C3I capabilities (critical command, control, communications, and intelligence) in a matter of days, or even hours. Only then would powerful armored units be able to strike deep into enemy territory and, in true Patton fashion, ensure a Russian defeat.

The U.S. military has labeled such a strategy “all-domain warfare” and assumes that the U.S. will indeed dominate space, cyberspace, airspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum. In a future confrontation with Russian forces in Europe, as the doctrine lays it out, U.S. air power would seek control of the airspace above the battlefield, while using guided missiles to knock out Russian radar systems, missile batteries, and their C3I facilities. The Army would conduct similar strikes using a new generation of long-range artillery systems and ballistic missiles. Only when Russia’s defensive capabilities were thoroughly degraded would that Army follow up with a ground assault, Patton-style.

Be Prepared to Fight with Nukes

As imagined by senior Pentagon strategists, any future conflict with China or Russia is likely to entail intense, all-out combat on the ground, at sea, and in the air aimed at destroying an enemy’s critical military infrastructure in the first hours or, at most, days of battle, opening the way for a swift U.S. invasion of enemy territory. This sounds like a winning strategy — but only if you possess all the advantages in weaponry and technology. If not, what then? This is the quandary faced by Chinese and Russian strategists whose forces don’t quite match up to the power of the American ones. While their own war planning remains, to date, a mystery, it’s hard not to imagine that the Chinese and Russian equivalents of the Pentagon high command are pondering the possibility of a nuclear response to any all-out American assault on their militaries and territories.

The examination of available Russian military literature has led some Western analysts to conclude that the Russians are indeed increasing their reliance on “tactical” nuclear weapons to obliterate superior U.S./NATO forces before an invasion of their country could be mounted (much as, in the previous century, U.S. forces relied on just such weaponry to avert a possible Soviet invasion of Western Europe). Russian military analysts have indeed published articles exploring just such an option — sometimes described by the phrase “escalate to de-escalate” (a misnomer if ever there was one) — although Russian military officials have never openly discussed such tactics. Still, the Trump administration has cited that unofficial literature as evidence of Russian plans to employ tactical nukes in a future East-West confrontation and used it to justify the acquisition of new U.S. weapons of just this sort.

“Russian strategy and doctrine… mistakenly assesses that the threat of nuclear escalation or actual first use of nuclear weapons would serve to ‘de-escalate’ a conflict on terms favorable to Russia,” the administration’s Nuclear Posture Review of 2018 asserts. “To correct any Russian misperceptions of advantage… the president must have a range of limited and graduated [nuclear] options, including a variety of delivery systems and explosive yields.” In furtherance of such a policy, that review called for the introduction of two new types of nuclear munitions: a “low-yield” warhead (meaning it could, say, pulverize Lower Manhattan without destroying all of New York City) for a Trident submarine-launched ballistic missile and a new nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile.

As in so many of the developments described above, this Trump initiative will prove difficult to reverse in the Biden years. After all, the first W76-2 low-yield warheads have already rolled off the assembly lines, been installed on missiles, and are now deployed on Trident submarines at sea. These could presumably be removed from service and decommissioned, but this has rarely occurred in recent military history and, to do so, a new president would have to go against his own military high command. Even more difficult would be to negate the strategic rationale behind their deployment. During the Trump years, the notion that nuclear arms could be used as ordinary weapons of war in future great-power conflicts took deep root in Pentagon thinking and erasing it will prove to be no easy feat.

Amid arguments over the withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Somalia, amid the firings and sudden replacements of civilian leaders at the Pentagon, Donald Trump’s most significant legacy — the one that could lead not to yet more forever wars but to a forever disaster — has passed almost unnoticed in the media and in political circles in Washington.

Supporters of the new administration and even members of Biden’s immediate circle (though not his actual appointees to national security posts) have advanced some stirring ideas about transforming American military policy, including reducing the role military force plays in America’s foreign relations and redeploying some military funds to other purposes like fighting Covid-19. Such ideas are to be welcomed, but President Biden’s top priority in the military area should be to focus on the true Trump military legacy — the one that has set us on a war course in relation to China and Russia — and do everything in his power to steer us in a safer, more prudent direction. Otherwise, the phrase “forever war” could gain a new, far grimmer meaning.

Original article:  tomdispatch.com

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The Pentagon has deployed special operations aircraft, troops and equipment to the Caribbean region near Venezuela, The Wall Street Journal and other media reported on December 23. A significant force amassed in Puerto Rico, which has traditionally served as critical hub for refuelling, resupply and surveillance operations.

The 27th Special Operations Wing and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment deployed in the Caribbean specialise in supporting high-risk infiltration and extraction missions and providing close air support while the Army Rangers are tasked with seizing airfields and protecting special operations units such as Delta Force during precision kill or capture missions.

A satellite photo released this week by the Chinese private aerospace intelligence firm Mizar Vision showed the US Air Force F-35 fleet. The roughly 20 combat jets include a mix of F-35As and US Marine Corps F-35Bs. The deployments suggest forces are being pre-positioned for potential action.

The Trump administration is disregarding the vehemence of world opinion against any violation of Venezuela’s sovereignty, which was truly reflected in the UN Security Council meeting last week to discuss the increased US military presence in the Caribbean Sea and the enforcement of a de facto maritime blockade of Venezuela.

The Trump administration has read the tea leaves that neither Russia nor China will offer Venezuela anything beyond rhetoric to counter any US aggression. The Russian foreign ministry spokesperson  Maria Zakharova at a press briefing on Thursday sought to show restraint to “prevent the events from sliding towards a destructive scenario,” while voicing support for Caracas. 

As for China, despite being South America’s top trading partner and although a regime change in Caracas would certainly hurt China’s vital interests, Beijing is wary of falling into a geopolitical trap.

Both Moscow and Beijing keep the larger context of US global power projection in view. For Russia, the US role in the coming year or two becomes very crucial for reaching a durable settlement in Ukraine. As for China, the matrix is more complicated.

In December, Beijing issued yet another Policy Paper on Latin America and the Carribean, third in a series, projecting an affirmative agenda for an institutionalised, expanded, and elevated relationship with LAC countries, reflecting China’s growing engagement with the Western Hemisphere and its increasingly comprehensive approach affirming China’s intent to continue building an alternative world order. This needs explaining. 

The recent National Security Strategy document issued by the White House does not designate China as the greatest threat to the US, but it nonetheless states that the US government will maintain a military capable of deterring Chinese ambitions on Taiwan by military means. Put differently, it sent mixed signals to China.

On the one hand, the US appears to downgrade competition with China but on the other hand, the Trump administration has not made any significant steps to indicate disengagement in Asia.

Again, on the one hand, there is a colossal recklessness in Trump’s China policy by imposing tariffs on China which has a powerful economy that is capable of harsh retaliation; he has also approved a huge arms sale worth around $11 billion to Taiwan, which includes advanced rocket launchers, self-propelled howitzers and a variety of missiles — a deal that, according to Taiwan’s defence ministry, helps the island in “rapidly building robust deterrence capabilities”.

On the other hand, there is also a stupefying obsequiousness on the part of President Trump, as the bragging of a ‘G2’, exports of advanced chips to China and a permissiveness to allow Tik-Tok to stay open on favourable terms, etc. would signify.  

Beijing fears that Washington might be trying to lure it into a false sense of security with its rhetoric and an ostensible geopolitical shift, so it remains cautious.

However, Beijing cannot but factor in the ‘big picture’ as well, which is that Trump is pushing the Americas toward a zero-sum geo-economic order in which the US expects the world to recognise what is being tested here — a blatantly coercive attempt to reorder the region’s resources and financial alignment.

The region’s heavyweights – Brazil and Mexico – stand in open opposition. President Lula da Silva of Brazil warned that an armed intervention would be a “humanitarian catastrophe” and a “dangerous precedent for the world.” Similarly, Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum has offered to mediate, seeking to prevent a return to the era of “gunboat diplomacy.”

This tension threatens to transform the South American continent into a theatre of the New Cold War. Specifically, Venezuela possesses the world’s largest proven oil reserves, and it has utilised them to build a financial fortress in partnership with Beijing. Under the “Loans-for-Oil” model, China injected over $60 billion into Venezuela while the latter paid this debt not in dollars, but in physical barrels of crude.

Through a naval blockade, the US is attempting to dismantle this deal and the non-dollar payment system built around it. It is another story that Washington may also be trying to pressure global prices and squeeze petro-rivals like Russia and Iran.

What is often overlooked is that the US’ current conflict with Venezuela — like Ukraine or Taiwan problems — did not come out of nowhere. To understand the current conflict, we need to go beyond the geopolitics of oil or libertarian political philosophy or drug trafficking. 

Things began changing when an anti-American shift began to be noticed in Caracas during Barack Obama’s presidency when most Republicans with a strong political base among Venezuelan migrants and their descendants in Florida — an important political constituency for Trump, by the way — began sensing that Venezuela was on a path to become a strongly anti-American country and a centre of influence for China, among others, in the region. 

Nicolas Maduro’s rise to power only reinforced this belief. Suffice to say, neither drug trafficking nor migration can explain the current deterioration in US’ attitude. Only 10-20% of illegal substances smuggled into the US actually come from Venezuela; main migration routes do not even run through Venezuela. 

The threat perception is primarily about Maduro’s anti-American stance, as well as his growing cooperation with Iran, Russia, and China. Things have come to a point that the only option left to Washington is to use military force — somewhat like the Kremlin’s 22nd February moment in 2022. 

What emboldens the Trump administration is a clear shift in the Western Hemisphere, a continent that had been painted in red in political maps for much of the past two decades. Left-wing forces have not won a single presidential election in Latin America this year. Conservative ideas and policy priorities are gaining ground. Trump has encouraged this trend and in turn feels elated that one after another, those who admire, flatter and even emulate him are being elected. 

Another factor is the collapse of Venezuela. The paradox is that traditional definitions of left and right are becoming outdated. If Venezuela is far from socialism, El Salvador is far from pure capitalism. In both cases, the state is operating under a form of kleptocratic, rent-seeking authoritarianism.      

That said, while the overthrow of Maduro government is Trump’s stated goal, he is also apprehensive — and, rightly so — that a military confrontation may spiral out of control and that failure may stick to him just as the withdrawal from Afghanistan stuck to Joe Biden. Trump’s best hope was that Maduro would simply roll over. 

But Maduro isn’t obliging. And Venezuela is 2.75 times bigger than Vietnam,  and more than half of its landmass is covered by forests. Suffice to say, the Kremlin’s advice was empathetic when it made an extraordinary personal appeal to Trump:

“Russia expects the President of the United States Donald Trump to demonstrate his signature sense of pragmatism and reason for finding mutually acceptable solutions in keeping with the international law and norms.”

But then, geopolitics is hard ball and at times it becomes necessary to unleash the dogs of war. Which was what the Kremlin did in Ukraine, after all.   

Original article: indianpunchline.com

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A company with deep ties to Israeli intelligence oversees cyber security across more than seventy US government agencies, including the Department of Defense and Homeland Security.

Axonius was founded by former spies in Israel’s Unit 8200 and its software, which allows an operator ‘visibility and control over all types and number of devices,’ collects and analyses the digital data of millions of US federal employees.

The stated aim of the Axonius platform is to centralise IT tools to identity and fix security breaches. As a product of Israeli intelligence, however, the scale of Axonius’s use across the US government raises serious questions.

Axonius was founded and is currently run by Israelis Dean Sysman, Ofri Shur and Avidor Bartov, who met in the 2010s while working on the same team within Israel’s Unit 8200 spy service. On his LinkedIn profile, Sysman offers few details of their work for the IDF, describing it simply as having ‘far-reaching implications.’

Sysman left the IDF in 2014 after five years and set up a cyber hacking outfit, while Shur and Bartov stayed on until 2017, a period which encompassed Israel’s 2014 war of aggression against Gaza, during which the IDF murdered more than two thousand Palestinian civilians.

Axonius was established with curious speed. After leaving the IDF in 2017, Shur and Bartov teamed back up with Sysman and immediately received $4 million in seed funding from Yoav Leitersdorf, a San Francisco-based Israeli-American and fellow Unit 8200 veteran, to start Axonius. Leitersdorf, the managing partner at US-Israeli venture capital firm YL Ventures, is a prolific early-stage investor in Unit 8200 cyber start-ups.

The same year Sysman, Shur and Bartov also received millions in seed financing from Israeli firm Vertex Ventures which is run by veterans of Israel’s spy units. Tami Bronner, a partner at Vertex, spent four years in Israeli military intelligence.

Following this early financing from investors close to Israel’s intelligence establishment, the company went on to receive hundreds of millions in investment from a network of US venture capital firms with intelligence links to Israel.

These include Palo Alto-based Accel Partners, which has invested in more than thirty Israeli tech companies, including another Unit 8200 cyber spin-out, Oasis. Nir Blumberger, an Israeli who served in the IDF, was recruited by Accel from Facebook to open its Tel Aviv office in 2016.

Other Axonius backers include San Francisco-headquartered Bessemer Venture Partners which employs former Israeli intelligence operatives in a Tel Aviv office led by Adam Fisher. An American who emigrated to Israel in 1998, Fisher has acted as an intermediary between Zionists in Silicon Valley and the IDF, and during the genocide gave a presentation on how Israel can win the online war. Israeli Amit Karp, a partner at Bessemer Ventures and another former Israeli intelligence officer, sits on the Axonius board.

Menlo Park-based Lightspeed Venture Partners, which has backed Axonius with around $200 million over numerous funding rounds, also has significant ties to Israeli spy units. Yonit Wiseman, a partner at Lightspeed, spent six years in Israeli military intelligence, leaving in 2018. Her colleague, Tal Morgenstern, was a special forces commander in the IDF.

Given the evidence that Axonius is an Israeli intelligence cut-out, the scale of its penetration within the US federal government structure is extraordinary.

The company says its platform is ‘deployed in more than 70 federal organizations’ and is used by four of the five major US Department of Defense service agencies. The US federal government contract award website shows Axonius awards for the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps, which in itself means millions of personnel and their devices.

In November 2024, the company was selected by the Department of Homeland Security to modernise its cybersecurity abilities by centralising ‘data coming from hundreds of separate data sources residing across dozens of federal, civilian, and executive branch agencies.’ Just a month later, in December 2024, the company was contracted by the Department of Defense to upgrade its system of 24/7 surveillance which oversees all on-site and off-site DoD computers and IT networks, a capability known as ‘continuous monitoring and risk scoring.’ And in April this year Axonius obtained authorisation for any US federal agency to use its cloud-based cyber surveillance system.

Other federal departments integrating Axonius software include energy, transportation, the US Treasury and many others. Data from the US spending awards site shows the US Defence Logistics Agency, responsible for managing America’s global weapons supply chain, is the single largest Axonius customer, spending $4.3 million in 2023 alone. The Department of Agriculture has paid nearly $2 million for Axonius tools and the Department of Health and Human Services has spent $1.3 million since 2021.

Axonius is commonly described as an American company. While its headquarters and administrative functions are in New York, its founders, senior executives, and its primary financiers are all Israeli, and, critically, its software and engineering functions are based in Tel Aviv. Axonius has more than eight-hundred employees, and a search of LinkedIn profiles confirms that a majority of Axonius’s engineers in Tel Aviv have a background in Israeli military intelligence.

The pitch for the Axonius system is that it centralises data from all the security and IT tools an organisation uses into one place for easier analysis, control and fixes. And that place is Tel Aviv, where the hundreds of former Israeli spies working as engineers for Axonius have unprecedented access and visibility into the habits and movements of millions of US federal government employees.

With this visibility an Axonius operator can connect individual devices with individual IDs as well as seeing all login/logoff data and website usage. An operator can also order an account to be disabled, a device to be quarantined, or a user to be removed from a group.

In addition to this, Axonius has a separate R&D division within the company known as AxoniusX, a skunkworks unit focused on developing new cyber tools, run by another Unit 8200 spook, Amit Ofer.

Perhaps none of this matters, and Axonius is simply indicative of the sleazy, symbiotic nature of the relationship between the US and its colonial outpost.

This would be a fair argument if it wasn’t for Israel’s long history of espionage in the United States. From recruiting Hollywood producers who ran front companies that stole nuclear technologies, to selling bugged software to foreign governments, spying (especially cyber spying), has been central to Israel’s foreign policy. Robert Maxwell, the father of Ghislaine Maxwell, was a spy for Israel, and a significant amount of circumstantial evidence suggests Jeffrey Epstein was also an Israeli military intelligence asset. More recently, during Trump’s first term, Israel planted miniature spying devices around the White House and other US government buildings in Washington DC to monitor US officials.

US authorities, then, have allowed former spies from a country with a known history of espionage within the United States to establish a framework of cyber intelligence access across almost the entire federal government apparatus.

To put it another way, the US has effectively subcontracted its federal-level cyber security infrastructure to Israeli intelligence.

Whether Axonius has used, or has any intent to use its unprecedented access maliciously, is impossible to know. For anyone with knowledge of Israel’s history of spying, however, the embedding of cyber software made by former Israeli spies within the US federal computer system network should raise serious alarms.

More broadly, Axonius shows how a militarised Israeli state takes billions in American funding every year to build its digital architecture of apartheid and genocide, and then sells these capabilities back to the US. American taxpayers, then, effectively pay Israel twice. And when the US buys back the technologies their taxpayers funded in the first place, they are inviting in trojan horse capabilities and making Israeli war criminals rich in the process.

The good news is that millions of ordinary Americans are wising up to the reality that Israel is not the great deal for the US that political leaders have, for so long, sold it as.

The Axonius story confirms, once again, just how bad this deal is.

Original article:  www.donotpanic.news

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Last week the Pentagon, under “War Secretary” Pete Hegseth, carried out yet another military attack on a boat in the high seas that the Administration claims is smuggling drugs. That makes 23 boats blown up by the US military in the waters off Latin America – most near Venezuela – and nearly 100 persons killed.

To date the US government has provided no evidence to back up its claim that these boats are smuggling fentanyl and other dangerous drugs into the United States. The US Drug Enforcement Administration has reported that Venezuela neither manufactures nor transports fentanyl to the US. In fact, the DEA still concludes that Venezuela is barely a minor player in the drug game.

Is this really about drugs? Or is it about “regime change” for Venezuela?

When Adm. Alvin Holsey, the commander of US Southern Command, raised concerns about the legality of bombing boats on the high seas and extrajudicial killing, he was pushed out by Hegseth. His concerns were ignored.

When lawyers at the National Security Council, Pentagon, and Justice Department raised objections to the boat attacks they were reassigned or fired, according to press reports. Finally, President Trump’s own appointed lawyers at the Justice Department came up with a justification for killings. But it’s classified.

Last week the media reported on an incident from September where two survivors of the US strike were left clinging to the wreckage of their boat when the orders came to kill them too. It was clearly an illegal order, even according to the Pentagon’s own Laws of War manual.

Many Americans will not want to hear this, but this entire operation is illegal and immoral – from blowing up survivors to blowing up the boats in the first place. There is no legal justification to use military force against boats on the high sea that pose no imminent military threat to the United States.

Many supporters of this policy argue that the killings are “self-defense” because “narco-terrorists” are using narcotics as weapons against the American people. That is certainly what the Administration is claiming, having invented “narco-terrorist” as a new term to justify the killings.

Sadly, this shows how effective government war propaganda still is. It was used when both Republican and Democratic Administrations wanted to launch wars against Saddam Hussein, against Gaddafi, against Assad, and so on. New slogans are invented and a good deal of the public happily adopts them as their own. Anyone who challenges the new slogans is deemed unpatriotic or weak. When the war goes badly they pretend they were never fooled by government lies. Then it happens again and they repeat the new war slogans.

The “war on drugs” was launched by President Nixon a half century ago. It is obviously another failed government policy. Raising the stakes in a failed war is foolish and counterproductive. The solution to smuggling during alcohol prohibition was not to start bombing the bootleggers. It was to come to terms with basic economics: you cannot kill demand by killing supply.

More Americans die each year from alcohol use than from fentanyl use. Will strikes soon be launched against “alco-terrorists” who are killing Americans? Of course not…we hope. That is the danger of throwing away the laws of war: anything can happen next.

Congress has the authority to stop Secretary Hegseth from killing people on the high seas. It should do so without delay.

Original article:  ronpaulinstitute.org

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Nei giorni scorsi, oltre 800 alti ufficiali delle forze armate statunitensi – compresi quelli operanti in teatri di guerra attivi – convocati dal segretario alla Guerra Pete Hegseth sono confluiti a Quantico per presenziare al cosiddetto “Liberation Day dell’esercito”. L’evento è stato introdotto dal presidente Trump, il quale ha posto l’accento sulla necessità di risvegliare lo “spirito guerriero” dell’esercito, e di temprarlo all’interno dei confini nazionali. «È giunto il momento – ha affermato Trump – di distogliere l’attenzione da Kenya o Somalia, perché c’è un nemico più insidioso fra di noi […], da combattere prima che diventi incontrollabile». Un nemico incistato nelle città degli Stati Uniti indicate apertamente da Trump  come «terreno di addestramento per l’esercito».

Le direttive impartite dal presidente risultano pienamente coerenti con le linee guida condensate all’interno della bozza della National Defense Strategy, che, come anticipato da «Politico», antepone alla gestione della “minaccia cinese” la tutela degli interessi statunitensi nell’emisfero occidentale. Territorio nazionale compreso. Lo si evince dal contenuto dell’ordine esecutivo, firmato da Trump il giorno stesso dell’insediamento alla Casa Bianca, in cui si incarica il Northern Command di contribuire a «sigillare i confini e mantenere la sovranità, l’integrità territoriale e la sicurezza degli Stati Uniti respingendo forme di invasione, tra cui l’immigrazione illegale di massa, il traffico di stupefacenti, il contrabbando, la tratta di esseri umani e altre attività criminali». Secondo un anonimo funzionario raggiunto da «Military Times», «proteggere il confine rappresenta la massima priorità per la base elettorale, e forse anche per i moderati. Quindi il mutamento [descritto nella National Defense Strategy, nda] è in linea con gli impegni assunti».

Nel corso dei mesi successivi, molte delle iniziative assunte dall’amministrazione Trump si orientavano nella medesima direzione: dalle rivendicazioni su Groenlandia e Panama alle ambizioni annessioniste nei confronti del Canada; dalla mobilitazione della Guardia Nazionale a sostegno delle forze dell’ordine a Washington e Los Angeles all’impiego dell’Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Oregon; dalla militarizzazione del confine con il Messico allo schieramento di navi da guerra e caccia F-35 nei Caraibi e al largo delle coste venezuelane con lo scopo ufficiale di combattere il narcotraffico. Secondo quanto riportato dal «Washington Post» la National Defense Strategy in via di definizione investirebbe il Pentagono del mandato di «assegnare la priorità agli sforzi volti a sigillare i nostri confini, respingere le forme di invasione tra cui la migrazione di massa illegale, il traffico di stupefacenti, il contrabbando, la tratta di esseri umani e altre attività criminali, e deportare gli stranieri illegali in coordinamento con il Dipartimento della Sicurezza Interna».

Come preannunciato dai licenziamenti del vecchio presidente del Joint Chiefs of Staffs, generale Charles Q. Brown Jr., e del capo delle operazioni navali, ammiraglio Lisa Franchetti, e confermato da Hegseth dinnanzi alla platea di Quantico una volta concluso l’intervento di Trump, il “nuovo corso” contempla anche una riduzione del 10% del numero di generali e ammiragli, con un picco del 20% per quanto riguarda gli ufficiali a quattro stelle, oltre alla ridefinizione delle linee dei comandi combattenti degli Stati Uniti. I tagli verterebbero sull’eliminazione delle strutture “superflue”, e si inseriscono in un radicale cambio di registro rispetto al passato. «È quasi impossibile – ha dichiarato Hegseth – modificare alla radice una cultura con le stesse persone che hanno contribuito a crearla o ne hanno addirittura tratto beneficio. A un’intera generazione di generali e ammiragli è stato ordinato di ripetere a pappagallo la folle fallacia che “la nostra diversità è la nostra forza”». Si va dunque verso l’eradicazione della “cultura woke” impostasi sotto l’amministrazione Biden, da promuovere anche mediante epurazioni selettive – il segretario alla Guerra ha apertamente invitato gli ufficiali dissenzienti a rassegnare le dimissioni – e la destrutturazione sistematica dei meccanismi premiali intesi a promuovere l’inclusione e al raggiungimento di quote razziali e di genere. Nonché attraverso la revoca dei programmi dedicati alla diffusione di “distrazioni ideologiche” quali il cambiamento climatico.

Il merito, ha sottolineato Hegseth, va recuperato come criterio supremo di selezione del personale militare, il quale sarà chiamato d’ora in poi ad adeguarsi a severi regimi in materia di dieta e allenamento, a conformare il proprio aspetto a precisi canoni estetici (niente barbe, capelli lunghi, ecc.) e a sottoporsi a regolari controlli di altezza e peso. «È del tutto inaccettabile vedere generali e ammiragli grassi aggirarsi nelle sale del Pentagono e guidare i comandi in tutto il mondo», ha tuonato il segretario alla Guerra.

Quella che l’amministrazione Trump ha battezzato “giornata di liberazione per l’esercito”, ha suscitato non poche perplessità e critiche. Anzitutto perché l’innalzamento strutturale degli standard atletici stride pesantemente con il progressivo deterioramento qualitativo dei cittadini statunitensi in età arruolabile, tale da aver indotto il Pentagono ad abbassare i requisiti minimi pur di conseguire gli obiettivi di reclutamento prefissati. Allo stesso tempo, la svolta annunciata da Hegseth richiede un netto cambiamento di abitudini ormai consolidate in seno alle forze armate.

Le obiezioni di maggiore rilevanza attengono tuttavia agli aspetti dottrinali. Come evidenzia il «Washington Post», un certo livello di dissenso «durante il processo di stesura [della National Defense Strategy, nda] è normale, ma il numero di funzionari preoccupati per il documento, così come la profondità delle loro critiche, è insolito». Il nuovo presidente del Joint Chief of Staffs Dan Caine, in particolare, avrebbe «condiviso le sue impressioni negative con i vertici del Pentagono nelle ultime settimane […], cercando di mantenere la National Defense Strategy ancorata alla preparazione dell’esercito per scoraggiare e, se necessario, sconfiggere la Cina».