There is a possibility that Russia is going to invade Ukraine and China invade Taiwan at more or less the same time, and even that the two attacks might be coordinated in order to increase their chances of success.
This is an extremely dangerous situation and not only for Taiwan and Ukraine, but for the whole world. Military action always has unforeseeable consequences, and the situation now is, if anything, even more complex than it was in 1914 when the world, more or less inadvertently, became involved in a catastrophic conflict.
In 1914, most of the world was ruled by three despots: the Kaiser in Germany, the Czar in Russia and the emperor in Austro-Hungary. This meant that just three minds were available to manage the drift toward conflict. Unfortunately, none of them were particularly good and none could foresee the consequences of their decisions. Again, in 1939, the concentration of power in a single individual, Aldolf Hitler, led to a situation in which a single human mind was making all of the critical decisions about what would become the most devastating conflict in recorded history.
By contrast, there was no direct conflict during the Cold War because Russia was managed by a committee, the Politburo, and the American president could not act without the support of his cabinet and congress. In other words, the leaders of both countries had powerful advisory bodies that they had to consult before taking any precipitate steps. The result was, while general conflict was at times threatened, it never got that far.
Now just two minds control the decisions, that of Vladimir Putin of Russia and that of Xin Jinping of China. Of course they have advisors, but in terms of making final conflict decisions, they are both alone. In the US, Joe Biden has his cabinet and the US Congress to answer to, not to mention the voters. If the country is attacked, his powers are limitless, but initiating conflict is, for him, a complex social and political act.
To make matters worse, Putin has gained extraordinary influence in the west due to his acquisition of the Jeffrey Epstein tapes. This means that he holds hidden sway over a unknown group of western leaders, some of whom might be very prominent people. I say this for two reasons: first, there have been no prosecutions since Jeffrey Epstein was exposed. Second, the reason for this is most likely that Epstein’s notorious tapes have ended up in the hands of Vladimir Putin. I say this because a man in possession of copies of these tapes, former Palm Beach Deputy Sheriff John Mark Dugan, defected to Russia in 2015 with 478 of them in his possession. He did this after meeting with Putin crony and power broker Pavel Borodin.
This means that an unknown number of powerful western political and business leaders are liable to blackmail by Putin. How this may affect the US ability to fight a war with him is unknown, but to assume that there would be no connection is naïve.
Joe Biden is not among the compromised people on those tapes, nor is anyone of influence around him. I know this because Biden openly called Putin a killer. This statement further galvanized anti-Putin forces in Russia and made it essential for Putin to kill Viktor Navalny before the October parliamentary elections, or risk losing control of parliament. This is because Navalny has a tactic of not announcing his parliamentary choices until election day, making it impossible for the Kremlin to interfere in its own electoral process. Without such interference, Putin cannot win, and this will prove to be true despite the polls that show him to be a popular leader. Would you tell a pollster something negative about the dictator of your country? Only if you were really fed up, and the fact that the polls are as close as they are means that a lot of people are just that: really fed up. Putin knows this and he also knows that an appeal to nationalism prior to the October elections might help him. Therefore, if he is going to move, he can be expected to do it toward the end of summer. This will presumably help him at the polls and compromise NATO’s ability to respond, if it can do so, by the fact that the invasion would be complete just as winter is setting in.
At present, Russian troops are massing on the Ukrainian border. If they are going to invade, it is likely to happen either soon, or somewhere in late July-August, if I am right about weather being part of the strategic equation.
Putin senses his own vulnerability not only at home but among the electorates of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. It is essential that these three countries refuse to allow NATO forces to cross their borders if he is to secure Ukraine. This is why he has worked so hard to install compliant regimes there. He needs to act while the regimes in those countries are still intact and before the October elections, which will, if Navalny does not die of neglect in prison prior to that time and he hasn’t got the Ukrainian feather in his cap, be a disaster for him.
Jinping has a different motive and ambition for taking Taiwan. He wants to do this to spur nationalism in a country that is, like Russia, quietly losing faith in the validity of his government. He has recently turned China back into a dictatorship. To consolidate his power, he needs the full backing of the military. He needs to evoke a nationalist spirit among the Chinese people, especially the urban population, which, despite appearances to the contrary, almost certainly views him with suspicion and distaste.
Russia’s solution in the Ukraine is not as challenging as China’s in Taiwan. While the Russian army consists of a brittle shell of elite divisions and paramilitaries, its rank and file soldiers are not loyal and will fight only because they must. They are badly led, ill-trained and poorly equipped. But if they can sweep across Ukraine before NATO can react, then the west will be faced with the problem of dislodging an entrenched enemy, never a welcome prospect, especially when, if he is losing, that enemy might well be tempted to use the small-scale nuclear devices with which Russia has been equipping its army for years.
Over the past four years, NATO was damaged by US policy. It has never been weaker and can only get stronger, which is yet another motive that would be driving Putin to act now.
Meanwhile, for the last six months, China has been buying unprecedented amounts of American corn and soybeans. Why? Do they expect a devastating drought to hit the US and Canadian Midwest? They might: there is a LaNina climate structure in the Pacific, which leads to drought in the Great Plains. They would also know that, if they attack Taiwan, shipments of all kinds from the US are going to be cut off. Buy buying so much stock, China is, in effect, removing the danger that food needs could be used as a weapon against it by the US.
China will have to cross to Taiwan and execute a fast and large-scale invasion in order to succeed. It will be a perilous adventure, and the presence of extraordinarily powerful American carrier groups in the region could make such a crossing impossible.
Except that the carriers are vulnerable. Their situation now is very much like what happened to the British battle fleet in the Pacific in World War II and led to the fall of Singapore. HMS Prince of Wales and Repulse were sunk by Japanese planes because the battleships had no air cover. (The aircraft carrier deployed to protect them had not arrived due to an accident enroute, but they deployed into an area accessible to Japanese torpedo bombers anyway.)
The US carrier groups are equipped with every conceivable countermeasure, including some, I would assume, that are classified and very powerful. What is not clear is that they can successfully defend themselves against the type of smart cruise missiles or ballistic weapons that will be deployed against them by China. Just as Britain’s Force Z was a dangerously vulnerable concentration of warfighting power, a huge US carrier is, by definition, vulnerable for the same reason.
The loss of a carrier group deployed in defense of Taiwan would be an irrecoverable military catastrophe for the US. Unless it extended the battle to the Chinese mainland, it would almost certainly mean that Taiwan would fall.
The Chinese military will remember very clearly that the US declined both in Korea and Vietnam to expand the war theater into China, due to fear of a nuclear war becoming inevitable. The reason that this danger is so serious is very simple: the side that fires first is going to be the winner. This has always been the Achilles heel of modern aggressive war fighting. If you threaten the enemy too much, he might just push the button. Once that level of threat is in place, you have no choice but to push the button yourself, or you are going to lose. This is why, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the US and Russia established the hotline that could link both leaders instantly.
Brinksmanship is not part of Chinese culture. Witness the Great Wall: Theirs is a defensive mentality. But witness also the invasion of Tibet and their successful preservation of influence on the Korean peninsula in the form of the absurd but potentially dangerous North Korean client state. Both of these successes relied on aggressive action, and so it can be said that the advent of Communism altered the traditional Chinese approach. And now they have violated their agreement with Britain and enveloped Hong Kong in the dictatorship. In this, they have been exactly as successful as Hitler was in taking the Sudetenland and Austria in 1938. There is a very real possibility that they have drawn the same conclusion that he did: that the democracies will always remain passive.
Still, I would not be so concerned about the threat of a Chinese invasion, except for two things: the first is that they are assembling a force capable of doing this. The second is that stockpiling of corn and soybeans. They would know that, the moment they attacked Taiwan, the US would freeze all food shipments to China. Just as the Japanese began stockpiling fuel oil (as best they could) prior to Pearl Harbor, I think that there is a real possibility that this current Chinese stockpiling may be related to planned military activity.
Whenever a single individual is given entire authority over something as complex as initiating a war, there is greater peril. Especially when they are desperate like Putin, or ambitious like Jinping, the danger is far greater than when countries are run by groups of people like Russian and China once were, and the western democracies still are.
I felt an increase in concern when I watched Joe Biden’s press conference. There is no question of his motivations. But when I saw him consulting notes and fumbling with his extemporaneous responses, I knew that the Russians, the Chinese and the Iranians saw that, too. This cannot but have encouraged anybody who wants to believe that they can win.
It’s possible that they are right and that the west will not act, but I don’t think so. I get back to Biden’s open statement that he thinks Putin is a killer. A man who isn’t ready to stand up to somebody is not going to say something like that. When I was a boy growing up in Texas, an accusation like that would have been considered fighting words—and being Texas and us being boys, a fight would have definitely followed.
Given that Biden heads a cabinet full of skilled and experienced people, and that he was so very blunt in his assessment of Putin, the Russians should probably consider him a much more dangerous adversary than they probably do. The same goes for the Chinese.
Hitler never imagined for a moment that Chamberlain would declare war after he invaded Poland. Tojo thought Roosevelt would back down. As a result of these miscalculations, both men ended up dead and took hundreds of millions of innocent people with them.
If either or both invasions take place, I can think of a number of scenarios, some of them with a high probability of developing, that would make escalation to nuclear conflict inevitable. If that happens, the age of human civilization that began with the Renaissance and has developed through the invention of free republics and expansive industrialism will be concluded.
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I’m not a foreign relations expert by any means, but couldn’t China buying more grain/soybeans from us be them just catching up from when Trump blocked or restricted their sale to China?
If the recent revolutions in the Middle East showed us anything, is that hungry people are more prone to revolt.
I also once read a comparison of our Navy and China’s and at the time the article was written a few years ago they had only a handful of aircraft carriers while he had something like 150+. Of course, they’re not all anyplace near China/Taiwan, but still.
Just thinking (writing) out loud here. Again, I’m no expert on U.S. foreign relations.
I read that Trump’s agreement with China required them to buy more. I guess it depends on where we get our information nowadays.
There is nothing in the ag trades about this and I think there would be if it was still operative. Could be wrong about that, though. It was certainly a factor and mentioned extensively when it happened.
Here’s an article from CNBC.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/22/china-failed-to-buy-agreed-amounts-of-us-goods-in-phase-one-trade-deal-data.html
But I haven’t investigated where they got their information.
I did briefly scan the Phase 1 trade agreement and Annex 14 does discuss with WRC TRQ (wheat, rice, corn trade ratio quota) , but your right, it did not mention an amount. It did direct to: https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/cases_e/ds517_e.htm
The WTO discussion about the WRC TRQ. Also vague.
It’s frustrating. I find it difficult to get reliable information.
One of my friends (50 y/o entrepreneur) says: Don’t believe anything you read or hear and only half of what you see.
I’ve got another one (80 y/o hippie) who says: I believe everything I hear all the time…it’s the only way I stay sane.
Ha!! I see the wisdom in both. I keep searching for the truth. Do you think it’s healthy to think the only truth that matters is mine? It doesn’t feel right, but I’ll bet you dimes to donuts that most of the world operates like that. Have a good day Whitley. I’ve always found your writings fascinating. In part because I think you search for the truth.
“Russia is testing a nuclear torpedo in the Arctic that has the power to trigger radioactive tsunamis off the US coast”: https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-tests-nuclear-doomsday-torpedo-in-arctic-expands-military-2021-4
“Satellite images show huge Russian military buildup in the Arctic”: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/04/05/europe/russia-arctic-nato-military-intl-cmd/index.html
Just not sure I understand China’s end game in this. We may not go all out and defend Taiwan but we won’t just show our belly either. I do think we are sitting on non nuclear devastating weapons we might be forced to unveil. Where do the visitors sit on this if it escalates rapidly?
Interesting question. They obviously resist intervention of all kinds. I wonder, though, given their demonstrated interest in nuclear weapons and what would seem to be, based on the ubiquity of the environmental warning, a desire for us to survive, if they would intervene to prevent a conflict going nuclear.
I have had a feeling for the longest time now that these countries are being set up. We know China has been stealing US technology for decades now. If us schmoes out here know about that – don’t you think the three letter agencies knew (and allowed) this from the beginning? Also, don’t you think that if a foreign power were to gain compromising intelligence on government insiders, they wouldn’t have some contingency plan for that as well?
If you wanted to take out a perceived future adversary who was weaker than you at the moment, it would be a hard sell to just pull a Hitler and waltz in and conquer the place. Better to convince them to pick up a stick and swing it at you first, then you can claim justification as they became the aggressor. Remember the April Glaspie letter to Saddam Hussein! I think the forces behind the scenes are baiting them and setting them up for war, with secret tech in the wings to roll out when the time is right that can bring them to heel. From what I can see from here, this just makes the most sense.
Remember, we rolled out the SR-71 back in the sixties! All China has likely gotten from us is 50 year old technology. Giant floating ships out on the ocean? Come on now… WW2 technology right there. Trillions have disappeared in black budget tech over the years. I’m of the opinion that we have some nasty surprises lurking in the closet of military secrecy somewhere. I’m not saying things can’t get ugly for ALL involved, but this is the only scenario that makes sense. Those who engineer things these days – all things – have to be much smarter about them now.
I don’t have faith in much of anything, however, I have hope and faith that they would intervene in the use of nukes. At least a large scale exchange. The entirety of nature shouldn’t suffer for the misdeeds of a few foolish humans!
When Mr. Trump was US President, he established a US Space Force. I don’t know if China has done anything like that yet.
Regarding Chinese purchases of US food stocks, it’s one thing to make the purchase, and another thing (during this pandemic) to actually get those goods delivered. This morning, KTLA TV station in Los Angeles (broadcast channel 5) showed video of 19 loaded supertankers that have anchored outside of Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors. This is the biggest US backup of container ship deliveries in history, they announced. Most of those containers are from China, so those containers will probably be going back to China, loaded with commodities, but that may not happen anytime soon.
Regarding Ukraine, the last I heard (a statement from the Ukranian President), Ukraine is not yet officially a member of NATO. Their current ambiguous NATO status may be why US Secretary of State Blinken made a flying visit to NATO earlier this week.
Here’s a link to the current KTLA-5 local Los Angeles TV report on the container ship backup in LA county international ports:
https://ktla.com/news/local-news/u-s-faces-supply-chain-crisis-as-container-ships-sit-anchored-off-southern-california-coast/
Gargantuan quantity of breaking news today on news websites nationally and across the world. The latest on Ukraine is that DW News (out of Germany) has a scoop on Russian troop withdrawals just now from the Ukranian border. Even The Economist magazine (with its illustration of an imprisoned Mr. Putin on the cover of its new edition of its print magazine) was caught by surprise:
https://www.dw.com/en/russia-orders-soldiers-back-from-ukraine-border-after-weeks-of-tension/a-57288083
Very close read on the horizon, but there are additional elements.
All 3 superpowers now employ “hybrid warfare” tactics. The open military confrontation is part of the public face, but like an iceberg most of the attack is subversive and impacts civilians.
There are attacks on economic processes, computer networks, supply chains, cultural inflection points, social media, and the general order. Vladislav Surkov pioneered some of these tactics on Russians before they applied them to the U.S and U.K. He created a circus-like atmosphere where no one could quite be certain of anything, including who was secretly working for the oligarchy.
Much of the UK’s intelligence establishment has been revealed to be compromised by the Russians, and it’s looking like the Germans have their own troubles with kompromat. There was cyber attack on a water treatment plant. The block in the Suez Canal was a remote attack and recently there were drone strikes on oil tankers. There’s currently a silicon shortage in the US because China and Russia are in a race to control digital banking through brute force over cryptocurrency networks. There’s a web of hidden sponsorship behind American podcasters, youtubers, and influencers driving messages dividing the nation. Anonymous message board clones of 8chan are popping up to radicalize people of the US and UK. These wars have already started on multiple fronts.
Putin and Xi are not nearly as autonomous as they project. Putin has his own game of mutually assured destruction going with the Russian Oligarchs at all times. Many of them are young and have high tech ambitions. He’s already threatened to cut off the power to the cities that host their cryptomines and they are none too pleased. Putin’s future does not look bright, there’s only so many ways to muscle and intimidate your way out of a 19th century economy as the 21st century rockets past just on the other side of your border.
Xi doesn’t get very far without the nods of the finance ministers, like every dynasty they are the shadow power that allows everything to be, but they are very old and the world is changing too fast for them to understand, that’s Xi’s advantage, he’s got some of the best intel on the planet right now and he actually understands it.
The saber rattling will probably not be as intense as the actual discord they attempt to sow within our own borders. China will use the trading partnership to frienemy their way into a takeover of Taiwan. They want to control all of the electronic exports out of Asia directly or indirectly so they can limit the US’s access to tech infrastructure and our ability to counter their growing industrial power.
The situation is very dicey, but Blinken is sharp and is very prepared.
So why should anyone in the US be so arrogant as to cast stones? That is none of our business and we have no shortage of our own problems to focus on right here at home.
Again, people in glass houses….did the US not illegally invade Panama, Grenada, Iraq, Syria, etc etc and play a role in killing elected leaders in South America, Libya, Chile, etc etc and even right here in the US with the JFK coup?
Our CIA orchestrated that coup in Ukraine to install that sell out/neo Nazi pig right on Russia’s border, once again violating a promise not to push further eastward onto Russia’s borders with our mercenary army, NATO is what is causing the troop build up on Ukraine’s borders. After all, if the US lost 30 million people to a war that still leaves Russians with deep scars, the US would be going apeshit if someone that killed 30 million of our people were threatening us at our borders. Who could blame them?
Let’s be honest here, If Russia wanted to take Ukraine, they could turn Kiev into a parking lot in 5 minutes or less. The controlled mainstream media will never report this, but most Ukrainians save the neo Nazis in the western republics have nothing against Russia and a large percentage of their half assed military defected to Russia when all this started.
The ultimate plan was to put pressure on Russia by forcing Ukraine and their satellite countries in Europe and NATO to jump on the US sanctions bandwagon. Russia is a threat to US hegemony and imperialism and refuse to play along or be a part of it. US sanctions were not enough to force our lackeys in Europe and Ukraine to get involved in sanctions which clearly go against their best interests, so the plan was to let Ukraine freeze without natural gas from Russia, their nuclear plants cannot be sustained without Russia, and will cost the US billions of dollars which it does not have to maintain and operate these aging and decaying plants.
Ukraine’s population has been steadily declining as the country collapses deeper into debt and poverty, with prostitution being one of the few job opportunities left. The plan is to depopulate Ukraine and turn all of its farmland over to US coporate agribusiness, for them to profit and exploit for free, for greed.
Is anyone actually foolish enough to believe that senile Biden or the US actually cares about Ukraine or its people and their so called ‘freedom’? Guess again, it is all about gaining control of their resources and enhancing the profits of the 1% and corporate greed. Putin has the balls to resist this and challenge US hegemony. This is what makes him the ‘bad guy’ in our controlled media, or even a ‘killer’ by puppets and senile, sell out corporate whores like Biden, a slightly less vile version of Hillary Clinton in drag.
That is the real truth about what is going on in Ukraine, don’t let anyone kid you otherwise.
Biden is sharp and very prepared? The US economy is sinking and on the brink of wholesale collapse, Biden is just the latest stooge/senile career politician/sell out/corporate whore in a long line of pigs and swine that have sold us out.
As Whitley himself pointed out in an article a few years back, the US is about to drown under the weight of its own debt, which is completely unsustainable at the ‘official’ debt figure of some 19 trillion. When medicare, social security, and veteran’s benefits are factored in, the official debt goes from 19 trillion to 220 trillion, and that doesn’t include all the desperate, wasteful, and futile attempts to keep the joyride going, to steal other nation’s resources at gun point using military violence and interventionism.
Asian countries, primarily China, were willing to take on our debt. Like any creditor, they were willing to do so as long as they saw a robust US economy. Now that they see that we do not, that we do not produce anything more and only export debt and warfare, they have recoiled and snapped their wallets shut in horror. So the US has resorted to printing trillions of worthless paper dollars out of thin air, ‘quantitative easing’, and keeping interest rates at artificially low rates. This will destroy people’s retirement savings over time, but the entire retirement system is doomed to fail (and Russia had nothing to do with it). The US continues on its path of self destruction, speeding up the debt treadmill until it gets thrown back.
It is ironic that this covid virus appeared right around the time that China stopped taking T notes as collateral for overnight business loans to the US. Right around the time the shockwave from this latest advancement of US financial collapse was beginning to be felt, this virus appears out of nowhere. Everytime they think they have turned a corner and won the covid war, a new outbreak or mutation appears. I am beginning to think this whole pandemic was enacted as a big smokescreen for the collapse of the economy. Make gullible people think or believe it was the result of some virus when in fact it was a system failure and people should be angry where it belongs. The government that sold us out and failed us, not some random act of god like a virus,
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2021/04/28/jack-posobiec-links-russian-intelligence-backed-website
wonder where we are with this?
So why should anyone in the US be so arrogant as to cast stones? That is none of our business and we have no shortage of our own problems to focus on right here at home.
Again, people in glass houses….did the US not illegally invade Panama, Grenada, Iraq, Syria, etc etc and play a role in killing elected leaders in South America, Libya, Chile, etc etc and even right here in the US with the JFK coup?
Our CIA orchestrated that coup in Ukraine to install that sell out/neo Nazi pig right on Russia’s border, once again violating a promise not to push further eastward onto Russia’s borders with our mercenary army, NATO is what is causing the troop build up on Ukraine’s borders. After all, if the US lost 30 million people to a war that still leaves Russians with deep scars, the US would be going apeshit if someone that killed 30 million of our people were threatening us at our borders. Who could blame them?
Let’s be honest here, If Russia wanted to take Ukraine, they could turn Kiev into a parking lot in 5 minutes or less. The controlled mainstream media will never report this, but most Ukrainians save the neo Nazis in the western republics have nothing against Russia and a large percentage of their half assed military defected to Russia when all this started.
The ultimate plan was to put pressure on Russia by forcing Ukraine and their satellite countries in Europe and NATO to jump on the US sanctions bandwagon. Russia is a threat to US hegemony and imperialism and refuse to play along or be a part of it. US sanctions were not enough to force our lackeys in Europe and Ukraine to get involved in sanctions which clearly go against their best interests, so the plan was to let Ukraine freeze without natural gas from Russia, their nuclear plants cannot be sustained without Russia, and will cost the US billions of dollars which it does not have to maintain and operate these aging and decaying plants.
Ukraine’s population has been steadily declining as the country collapses deeper into debt and poverty, with prostitution being one of the few job opportunities left. The plan is to depopulate Ukraine and turn all of its farmland over to US coporate agribusiness, for them to profit and exploit for free, for greed.
Is anyone actually foolish enough to believe that senile Biden or the US actually cares about Ukraine or its people and their so called ‘freedom’? Guess again, it is all about gaining control of their resources and enhancing the profits of the 1% and corporate greed. Putin has the balls to resist this and challenge US hegemony. This is what makes him the ‘bad guy’ in our controlled media, or even a ‘killer’ by puppets and senile, sell out corporate whores like Biden, a slightly less vile version of Hillary Clinton in drag.
That is the real truth about what is going on in Ukraine, don’t let anyone kid you otherwise.