By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 8/6/26

This is not how it was supposed to go. During the Cold War the two sides of capitalism and communism were openly threatening each other with nuclear annihilation. Yet, diplomats worked hard to prevent that by building a comprehensive security infrastructure, starting with the 1972 ABM treaty (Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty). And it worked very well.

Then post-Cold War, when the socialist experiment collapsed and the world was united under a single ideology for the first time ever, it was supposed to be the start of the golden age of international happiness and the “rules-based order” of peace and prosperity.

That didn’t happen, eh? After the chaos of the 1990s, following the collapse of the old system in the East, there was a brief decade in the noughties when the capitalists stampeded into the Emerging Markets – the peak of the “globalisation” – where it did appear that it was going to work.

But almost immediately it started to fall to pieces. While the noughties brought prosperity and growth to most EMs (which is still going on), as they added economic muscle, by the end of that decade they started to add political muscle too.

The rising Global South became increasingly dissatisfied with being the second cousin in a two-speed world, with no say, while the “Developed World” continued to dictate the terms – manifest in the Global North’s propensity to hit other countries with sanctions for their misdemeanours like anti-gay laws or weak democratic institutions, when the West was far from perfect.

Then there were the blatant self-serving biases baked into this “us and them” global order. The CIA interfered in over 70 elections during the 35 years of the Cold War, the Washington Post has reported, during the course of which it tried to topple between 15-20 democratically elected governments (historians debate the actual number) simply because they were not pro-American enough. The most famous example in my world is Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych. Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro probably counts as another. And now the US is backing Israel to the hilt despite the fact that the UN has officially condemned what it is doing in Gaza as “genocide.” That is not how the rules-based order is supposed to work. “For my friends everything. For my enemies the law.” That can now be updated to a “sniper’s bullet to the head of my baby” instead of sanctions laws. That is where we are now.

But the golden era actually began to unravel at the start of the noughties not at the end. George W Bush unilaterally withdrew from the granddaddy of security deals, the ABM treaty, in 2002. There was no need for this. The nukes were still there. The threat of Mutually Assured Destruction was still real. Yet, for no good reason, Bush nixed the treaty – largely because he could. I won’t go into an analysis of the whys, but the bottom line is this decision was massively destabilising. I remember at the time, the Russians were completely freaked out but as the country was flat on its back, there was little the Kremlin could do about it. It did, however, set the US and Russia on a collision course that ultimately culminated in the invasion of Ukraine – a Nato membership issue, is tied to the lack of the Cold War security infrastructure as Russia felt vulnerable to Nato missiles stationed in Ukraine in the same way as they had been placed in Poland and Romania thanks to the end of the ABM.

The rules-based order has broken down completely now, along with the death of that security infrastructure. Following the nixing of the ABM treaty, both sides pulled out of one after another treaty, culminating in the expiration of the START deal this year – briefly renewed by US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2021, after Biden took office. (Biden was a critic of the decision to pull out of the ABM when it came up in 2002. Putin is also keen on restarting all those Cold War-era missile agreements. And even Trump was a fan, at least during his first term in office.)

Now we live in a far more dangerous world than when I was a boy in the 1970s. Nuclear sabre rattling has become part of the muzak. Putin got a lot of flak for tinkering with Russia’s nuclear weapons concept, watering down the restrictions on a first strike to a mere “existential threat” to Russia’s sovereignty – without defining what that means. So it could mean anything. He also pulled out of the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty in 2023, which clears the way for a European war.

It’s Hiroshima Day today; I used to live a couple of years in Japan, and this was always a very solemn occasion for good reason. Yet, the US has chosen this week to update its nuclear policy for potential regional conflicts with Russia or China that explicitly weighs the use of shorter-range tactical nuclear weapons. This is the new black for nuclear stand-offs: the potential use of a “tactical” nuke. That means a small one that has less blast power than the largest conventional bombs like the MOABs the US has, so that you can use it but avoid a nuclear exchange – or so runs the theory. Analysts have speculated that the Kremlin might drop a very small nuke and flatten half of Kyiv to bring the war to an end, banking on the fact that the US would not respond in kind.

But both sides are slowly drifting via a series of baby steps towards a new nuclear arms race. The new nuclear policy comes on top of Trump’s abandoning the rules-based order ideas and adoption of his mercantile transactional thinking that is a throwback to the nineteenth century. He then codified that in December with the new National Security Strategy (NSS) that is also a regression to the Monroe Doctrine, or as wags have dubbed the new version, the “Donnie Doctrine.”

And this escalation is not limited to just the classic Russia-America pair, which have about 3,000 war heads each. One of the really big lessons from the Ukrainian war is: “If you have nukes, then the Global North will never attack you.”

At the start of the Ukraine war Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in the first weeks that Nato would support Ukraine fully, but the “first priority is to avoid WWIII.” That led directly to the “some, but not enough” weapons supply policy that will probably end with Ukraine’s defeat at Russia’s hands this winter.

The same logic applies to the Iranian war, where the US openly flew F-16s alongside its Israeli colleagues to bring down the swarm of missiles and drones in the hot phase of the war. The US would never dare to fly one of its F-16 over Russian airspace in support of a Ukrainian military operation for fear of sparking WWIII. It’s no wonder that Iran wants to build a nuclear bomb and why Israel and the US are so fixated on stopping it.

It also explains the massive destruction from the invasion and war with North Korea.

Ah. There hasn’t been a North Korean war, has there? And if there was ever a country that deserved military action to impose the rules-based order, then North Korea is it. But Kim Jong Un reportedly has 50 nuclear warheads. You get the point.

Unnoticed, the new nuclear arms race has actually already begun. China got its first Bomb in 1964, almost two decades after the Manhattan Project, and is now up to 600, with planes to get to 1,000 by 2030. It is also rapidly developing a whole new class of hypersonic missiles and its navy is already bigger than America’s.

And you can be sure that there are plenty of countries in the Global South now who are at least actively studying the issue. Amazingly, Germany is also toying with the idea of moving in under the French nuclear umbrella.

Moreover, the proxy war being fought between the Global North and the Global South on the territory of Ukraine – because that is what it is – has already pushed the three non-aligned nuclear powers of Russia, China and North Korea into the rapidly militarizing CRINK alliance (China, Russia, Iran and North Korea) as we have reported. That should be very worrying indeed – between them they have half of the world’s men under arms. Last week, China reportedly sent 16 giant cargo plans to Tehran packed with hypersonic missiles and other military goodies ahead of the mooted US invasion. This is no longer passive support.

On this day, of all days, we should be focused on the unbearable cost of nuclear war. The answer is not just to put all the Cold War security infrastructure back in place (although that would be a good start) but to erect a new post-Cold War global security deal. Nato is obsolete and falling apart anyway thanks to Trump. As we reported, the Russians already suggested a new pan-European security deal in 2008, but it was immediately binned by the EU.

The end of the Ukraine conflict would be a golden opportunity to do this. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy refused the Kremlin-backed 27-point peace plan (27PPP) deal last December because he cannot give up territory in Donbas without a real security deal for Ukraine. That deal will still be necessary in a post-war scenario; and I highlight that the Kremlin is asking for the same thing for the same reasons – Putin wants to avoid the possibility that a new Democrat administration simply starts funding a new Ukrainian effort to expel Russia from its occupied territories in a few years’ time. I’m pretty sure that most of the Global South would happily sign up too. It should be a no-brainer, but we will all have to persuade the Americans. And that remains the only country ever to have dropped a nuclear weapon on another country. Ask the Japanese.

***

House passes requirement to build more than 200 plutonium nuclear warhead cores annually by 2050

By Los Alamos Study Group, 7/23/26

Contact: Greg Mello: 505-577-8563
Permalink * Prior press releases and backgrounders

Albuquerque, NM — Plutonium warhead cores (“pits”) are the primary fissile components of all U.S. nuclear weapons. 

Since pit production ceased at the Rocky Flats Plant near Denver in 1989, the U.S. has not had a factory to make these components. A $60 billion effort is underway to provide for not just one but two such factories, one at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and another to follow at the Savannah River Site (SRS) (“Plutonium “pit” production now a $60 billion program — $20 billion down, $40 billion to go,” Jun 8, 2026). 

On June 15, the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) reported out its proposed fiscal year (FY) 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA, H.R. 8800), which contained, at Section 3111 (p. 1478), this pit production requirement: 

“Consistent with the requirements of the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Energy shall ensure that, by not later than 2050, the nuclear security enterprise has the capability to reliably produce no fewer than 180 war reserve plutonium pits annually.’’

Yesterday, (Wednesday July 22), the House passed H.R. 8800 with amendments. While the final (“engrossed”) version of the bill as passed is not available at congress.gov as of this writing, there were no floor amendments offered to change the pit production capacity requirements that were written into the HASC version. 

The corresponding Senate version of the FY27 NDAA (reported from Committee on 6/15, not yet debated or passed in the Senate) is silent on pit production requirements. 

Current statutory pit production requirements top out at 80 pits per year (ppy) by 2030. There are no statutory production requirements beyond that year. 

The statutory pit production requirement to make 10 pits was not met in FY24; one pit was made. The number of pits made in FY25 and so far in FY26 are classified. 

The FY26 NDAA, at Section 3112, requires that LANL acquire the capability to produce at least 30 pits per year (ppy), and SRS acquire the capability to produce at least 50 ppy. 

The word “capability,” as used in the FY26 NDAA and in the proposed FY27 NDAA, is not the same as actual production, and is open to some interpretation. For its part, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the semi-autonomous subset of the Department of Energy (DOE) that designs and builds nuclear warheads, recently wrote that the requirement to have the “capability” to produce 30 ppy at LANL could be satisfied by the actual production of as few as 10 ppy (see p. S-12, Draft Plutonium Pit Production Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement). 

In addition to statutory requirements, there are also executive branch requirements. The latter have recently more than doubled for near-term production (that is, production at LANL) (“Responsive Today, Dominant Tomorrow: Enhancing American Nuclear Dominance:” Nuclear agency outlines ambitious near-term goals for nuclear warheads, labs, factories, and operations; Pit production at Los Alamos to be at least doubled if not tripled; other NNSA sites to help Los Alamos do so, details TBD, Feb 23, 2026). At SRS, production is slated to occur no earlier than 2035. 

In the HASC, the new pit production requirement first appeared in the “Chairman’s Mark,” which anonymizes behind-the-scenes authorship. No amendments were offered in committee to change it. Representative Garamendi offered an amendment to compare the estimated cost of the new requirement with the cost of current requirements, but this was voted down 25-31, possibly because it is impractical to estimate the cost of anything so vague and distant in time. 

Conversations we held on Capitol Hill in late June did not shed light on the origins or rationale for this proposed requirement. 

Last year, the Senate attempted to write expanded pit production requirements into law while also loosening near-term requirements (that LANL was unlikely to meet in any case) (“Senate bill would relax near-term production deadlines for nuclear warhead cores at Los Alamos, double outyear production requirements for Los Alamos, and cement Savannah River’s production role,” Aug 15, 2025). 

The House did not concur and pit production requirements remained the same, apart from the new requirement previously mentioned in Section 3112, which in effect created for the first time a statutory requirement to complete the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPPF), the facility at SRS where pits are to be made. 

In order to “reliably produce no fewer than 180 war reserve plutonium pits annually,” the average production level will need to be significantly higher than 180 ppy. NNSA has quantified this average on more than one occasion, as explained here. A minimum production rate of 180 ppy would certainly lead to an average production rate in excess of 200 ppy, mostly likely well in excess of that figure if two sites are producing, as Dr. Verdon of NNSA once explained. 

Study Group director Greg Mello:

“We do not yet know the views of key senators regarding this dramatic proposed increase in nuclear weapons manufacturing capacity — including the senators from New Mexico and South Carolina. The geopolitical, fiscal, and environmental implications of this proposal are very great. Not just the senators but the representatives from the sites involved should be questioned and their views be made known.

“In New Mexico, journalists tend to treat our senators like kings. Nobody puts them on the spot about so-called national security proposals such as this. This topic is apparently too “hot” to handle. We aren’t sure if the news media fears some kind of retribution beyond social shunning, which is to be expected and comes with journalism territory. 

“The ‘2050’ date is as curious as the enormous proposed production capacity. That is a long time from now. It would allow time for a brand-new pit factory to be built at LANL, should it be decided to do so and assuming such a thing were even possible, which, after our own extensive analysis, we doubt. There is also considerable grassroots opposition to pit production in New Mexico. 

“Even to propose such a production ramp-up damages U.S. security and its international reputation. Nuclear peers will wonder what in the world the U.S. is up to, and countries without nuclear weapons will wonder whether the U.S. is even remotely interested in keeping its nonproliferation pledge.

“Thirty years ago this month, the International Court of Justice concluded that ‘[t]here exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.’ That legal obligation derives from Article VI of the NPT, a U.S. law since 1970. The House is proposing a lawless law. 

“This particular section of the proposed NDAA is hardly the worst part. But it is important. It is an attempt to frame and constrain U.S. nuclear weapons policy for the next quarter-century, while literally concretizing today’s nuclear militarism for our children’s children to deal with. 

“In the final analysis, this section proposes a nuclear arms race — as do other sections of both the House and the Senate versions of the FY27 NDAA. It’s all about the contractors, all about pork-barrel spending, and all about trying to “dominate” Russia and China. The overall nuclear weapons policies proposed in these bills, and this section in the House bill in particular, are expressions of a Congress that is in the process of losing its mind. Who or what will rein in this madness?” 

By Uriel Araujo, InfoBrics, 7/22/26

The US Pentagon is broken. That assessment, blunt as it is, comes not from external critics but from insiders who have been observing America’s defense apparatus struggle.

As a matter of fact, despite annual spending that now tops one trillion dollars, the US military faces deep fiscal troubles, procurement delays, and systemic issues that have left it lagging in key areas against rivals like China, for instance. Representative Ro Khanna laid this out clearly in a recent Foreign Affairs piece titled “America’s Trillion-Dollar Failure”. In it, the California Democrat argues that the Pentagon’s acquisition system remains stubbornly slow and wildly over budget.

Khanna points to a defense industry consolidated into what he calls an oligopoly. After the 1990s “Last Supper” dinner that encouraged mergers, the sector shrank dramatically. Today, the Big Five (Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman), albeit facing some challenges, still dominate.

The problem is that programs like the F-35 and Ford-class carriers run chronically over budget and behind schedule. China, meanwhile, builds ships at a pace the US can barely match. As reported back in May 2025, China’s shipbuilding capacity actually exceeds that of the US by a factor of over 200, according to the US Office of Naval Intelligence. This gap is striking enough and signals a broader industrial decline that Washington has yet to reverse.

These issues are in fact not new, but they have become increasingly apparent. The crises the US military faces include naval overextension and industrial shortcomings. Back in 2023, Jerry Hendrix (a retired Navy captain, and a senior fellow with the Sagamore Institute) warned in an Atlantic piece that the age of American naval dominance was ending, with the US burdened by debt and land wars, while simultaneously trying to maintain sea power – a geopolitical contradiction between a supposed seapower vocation and “land-based actions”.

These structural weaknesses have tangible consequences today: nowhere is this more evident than in the ongoing conflict with Iran. The Pentagon has put the cost of operations thus far at $37.5 billion, and is running out of cash, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seeking billions more from Congress amid a cash crisis.

At the same time, reports indicate almost 100 troops injured in recent weeks amid Iranian reprisals, including attacks on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. The IRGC claims American losses in places like Jordan are underreported. This is a war that has exposed very real American vulnerabilities.

On this topic, different analysts have reached similar conclusions: realist scholar John Mearsheimer has argued that Washington cannot win, as Iran holds escalation dominance through the Strait of Hormuz, missile forces, and the advantages of its size and terrain. He further contends that the US has been forced into concessions because Tehran could impose enormous costs, making regime change or unconditional surrender unrealistic.

Even former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, no realist himself, has told the Financial Times that bombing alone will not force Iran to change course and risks depleting munitions needed for other priorities like China. Thus, the war has accelerated a cash crisis at the Pentagon. Moreover, inventories of precision weapons and interceptors are critically depleted, not only from Iran operations but also from backfilling aid to Ukraine – replenishment will take years.

In addition, there are F-35B radar matters threatening air dominance in the Indo-Pacific. Furthermore, Trump’s high-profile firings are creating leadership instability, as retired admirals have warned. It is an ongoing military crisis.

Fiscal waste worsens the situation: the Department of Defense as a matter of fact has failed no less than seven consecutive audits, with roughly $10.8 billion in confirmed fraud from 2017 to 2024: hundreds of billions disappear into overpriced contracts and legacy systems. The “revolving door” between Pentagon officials and contractors fuels what has been called the military-industrial complex, complete with Deep State connections and shady procurements.

So much for an efficient fighting force; the US has become a warfare state where spending is artificially inflated by benefits, oligopoly pricing, and endemic corruption.

Recruitment adds another layer here: as I commented back in 2023, the all-volunteer force faces serious challenges, with only 23 percent of young Americans aged 17-24 eligible without waivers due to health, weight, and drug issues. Just 9 percent show serious interest in serving. While recent reports note some recovery in numbers under the current administration, the broader societal crisis (involving opioids, a mental health crisis, and deindustrialization) makes sustained manpower uncertain.

America thus relies more on proxies and technology that it struggles to produce at scale.

Khanna and others call for fixes like breaking up oligopolies, divesting legacy programs, and speeding innovation. Yet the deeper issue remains: The US is overextended, deindustrializing, and losing ground in a key conflict, all while its defense apparatus is plagued by inefficiency.

The hard truth is that these challenges represent a structural problem for maintaining superpower status in the long run. Washington’s trillion-dollar machine delivers fewer results than advertised against resilient adversaries. As the Iran war drags on, with tremendous military and economic costs, and Great-Power competition intensifies, America’s appetite for military intervention does not seem to match its actual capacity.

By Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Substack, 8/6/26

Big Trouble in Ukraine

The Disappearance of Air Defense

I mentioned in a recent post that Ben Aris of IntelliNews, who has generally shown himself sympathetic to the political West’s war on Russia via Ukraine, seems to be increasingly disillusioned with its prospects. His reasons largely align with developments that I have captured over recent weeks.

First of all is the crisis of diminishing US weapons stockpiles, which has severely reduced the supply of weapons to Ukraine. The absence of air defense missiles means that few, if any, Russian missiles fired at Ukraine, are being brought down.

“The skies are open and Russia now has free rein to destroy anything it wants with its vast and growing arsenal of cruise and ballistic missiles. We are moving into the end game as Ukraine is increasingly defenseless against the escalating Russian onslaught. And winter is coming. That will be harsher than last year’s already punishing campaign that left residents living in apartments where temperatures dropped to -10°C or less.”

In a separate article today, Aris (IntelliNews) records that Russia fired 24 ballistic missiles, four Zircon or Onyx cruise missiles and 115 drones at Kyiv and the surrounding region overnight on August 5, killing 17 people and injuring 44. Ukrainian forces shot down 98 of the drones but intercepted none of the missiles.

“The attack tore through the logistics backbone of Ukraine’s consumer economy, destroying or damaging distribution centers run by Rozetka, Epicentr, Fozzy Group, NOVUS, Intertop and several other major retailers, part of a wider pattern of strikes on Ukraine’s civilian economy that Kyiv itself has mirrored against Russian retail with its own Operation Wildberries.”

The Duran (Duran) comments that Russia can now combine ballistic missiles, drones, cruise missiles and electronic warfare in layered attacks designed to exhaust interceptors and overwhelm defensive systems while, at the front, Russian Su-34 aircraft are delivering large numbers of precision-guided FAB glide bombs against fortified positions, reportedly dropping more than 8,000 during July.

“Missiles and drones attack the network behind the front. Glide bombs dismantle defensive positions closer to it.”

An attack on power facilities in Dnipropetrovska oblast left 126,000 households without electricity. Several towns have water problems, with one without running water for four days.

Ukraine’s Strategic Response

Ukraine says that its response to the shortage of missiles will be to focus on Russia’s missile launchers. But in the case of Iskander-M launchers, these are in constant motion and launch from 140-150 km behind the front line – beyond HIMARS range. Production of these launchers occurs deep underground. The Iskander is largely immune to sanctions because it is built almost entirely from Russian-made components and electronics. These problems could be assuaged by satellite-guided targeting over Russian territory itself, if Starlink agreed to cooperate, but Elon Musk has not granted permission for it to be used to strike inside Russia.

Were Musk to do so, by the way, it is highly likely that Russia would employ its new Russvat satellite system to interfere with Starlink signals.

Aris cites Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk as saying that the next 100 days could decide the outcome of this war, and the chances are 50/50, and that much depends on decisions taken by US President Donald Trump and by Musk over Starlink.

Ukraine’s drone and missile manufacturer, Fire Point, is already building ground-attack missiles designed to reach Moscow and which are due for first combat use in the fall. Fire Point is also the industrial lead on Freyja, a European-backed anti-ballistic missile system which is meant to combine Ukrainian-built interceptors with European sensors and infrastructure, with a target of the system’s first successful ballistic-missile interception by mid-2027. This is intended to be a much cheaper substitute for the Patriot system.

These developments will count for little if Russian missiles in the meantime are able to find their targets in Ukraine without any resistance and if Aris is right that Putin is looking to a Russian coup de grâce this winter.

And even if Ukraine does manage to get its new generation of missiles ready in time for them to be operational, reciprocity with Russian capability does not produce equilibrium. Rather, as the Duran notes today, it exposes the difference in scale and, on that score, it is clear that Russia has the decisive advantage.

And bear in mind the maxim that no system of air defense from the ground is likely to achieve a hit rate higher than .21%.

The Humanitarian Context

Even some influential sources inside Ukraine like Iuliia Mendel, Zelenskiy’s former press secretary, are calling for an end to what Mendel believes is an unwinnable war on the basis of the human suffering alone. She reports a mass exodus of Ukrainians for Europe although one must presume that this will be difficult if not impossible for anyone of military age.

There are worries that, in addition to continuing to target energy facilities (80% of Ukraine’s power generating capacity has been destroyed) Russia will turn its attention to the water system.

Ukraine has a chronic manpower shortage creating kilometer-long holes in the AFU’s defensive lines. In the Donbass, Russian soldiers are walking through the holes and then taking up position behind the defenders.

For the Duran, Alexander Christoforou today (Duran) reports on signs that Russia is preparing a major offensive toward Chernigov and even Kiev itself, as Ukraine’s front lines buckle under desperate new conscription targets and a total Black Sea port blockade. Even Ukraine’s most reliable resource, the drone, is now under threat from moves by China to cut off the drone components that fuel Ukraine’s offensive.

System Corruption

Aris has separately reported (IntelliNews) on the most recent instances of political corruption in Ukraine. Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) have charged Olha Stefanishyna, until recently Ukraine’s ambassador to the US, in a new illicit-enrichment case tied to the purchase of a Kyiv apartment, two days after she resigned her post.

Stefanishyna previously worked closely with former presidential chief of staff Andriy Yermak. Stefanishyna denies wrongdoing. In another scandal (the Energoatom kickback), Tymur Mindich – once one of Zelenskiy’s closest associates – is accused of siphoning off $100mn from the utility that left Ukraine’s nuclear power sector defenseless against Russian missile attacks. Former deputy prime minister Oleksiy Chernyshov was also charged with illicit enrichment and placed in pre-trial detention. A familiar pattern in these cases involves officials accused of buying property at a fraction of its market value rather than taking a straightforward bribe. Ukrainian media have suggested that Zelenskiy exploited the Stefanishyna scandal to conduct a government reshuffle that would distance him from a tainted inner circle.

Wilkerson and Diesen: Concepts for Understanding the World ((Diesen))

This conversation yesterday covered a number of conceptual aids for an understanding of the present global crisis.

What is this crisis? Well, for the past couple of years, I have articulated it mainly in terms of an increasingly desperate attempt by the US to protect itself from the growing strength of the Global South (now the Global Majority in population terms and perhaps in terms of overall wealth in purchasing power terms), seeking to restore its “unipolar moment” (achieved in the brief period between the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1989-1991 and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 which precipitated China’s economic growth into the stratosphere).

The US economic counteroffensive, as it were, has taken the form, primarily, of seeking to incite the fragmentation of the Russian Federation by means of a proxy war centering on Ukraine; destabilizing Chinese trade advantages by seeking to re-assert Western primacy with the assistance of Israel over West Asian oil and commodity trade routes involving Iran; and preparing for a broader war with China that would center on the use of Taiwan as proxy, in alliance with US-coopted regimes throughout southeast Asia including, most notably Japan, the Philippines, and Thailand as well as older imperial allies in Australia and New Zealand.

From these three central nodes of the US war against multipolarity we find numerous sub-branches: these involve conflicts – as examples only – from Moldova and Transnistria, Serbia, Kazakhstan, and Georgia so far as Ukraine is concerned, or Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iraqi Kurdistan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan so far as Iran is concerned, and conflicts over islands in the China Sea or terrorist movements in Myanmar and Pakistan so far as China is concerned.

The following notes are somewhat disjointed, I have not had time to cover more than the first half of this discussion, and they may not altogether make sense, but I find them useful and some readers may do so too:

I continue to support the above formulation, but note the interesting application by Wilkerson and Diesen of the terms “maritime” and “continental” powers to describe a long-arc movement from the triumph of maritime powers like the United Kingdom over the global order from the 1600s to the triumph of continental powers like Russia and China in the 2000’s.

Central to the strategies of the maritime powers, and the power of the US during the Cold War, were tactics of divide and rule, splitting alliances, fomenting discord, as well as technological dominance.

For the United States, like the UK before it, this has led to considerable “imperial overstretch.” Wilkerson somewhat qualifies this by noting that nobody had really expected a phenomenon such as Trump and how this might impact on narratives about “what normally happens” in the cycles of imperial rise and fall.

Equally novel, perhaps, is the form of predatory capitalism that characterizes the late imperial stage of US power. This has brought into being a supreme form of something that a few decades ago we used to discern in the Soviet Union namely, a system of “state capitalism,” which now takes on gigantic dimensions as when Exxon-Mobile becomes the principal supplier to the Pentagon (likewise the top defense contractors). This system of predatory state capitalism is now being (even further) abused and misused by – to use Wilkerson’s sophisticated, scientific term – an “idiot” who is definitely not in control of the global dynamics.

The appropriate symbol for the end of the era of maritime powers, Wilkerson suggests, would be the destruction by a country like Iran of a US aircraft carrier, entirely forseeable given the reluctance of the US to put these monster vessels anywhere close to Iranian fire power.

Continental powers of today, and they include Russia, China and Iran, are not only vast but they stretch around the world. Amongst the maritime powers there is really only one strong member, even if it is bleeding wealth each day, and that is the USA. This is currently dismantling itself from within – illustrated in the obeisance of the political system to somebody whom Wilkerson clearly considers incompetent, malignant, if not demented.

That “somebody” is leading the US in its apocalyptic struggle with the forces of multipolarity, at a time when the US has punished so many people and countries, has destroyed so many civilizations, that it has become an object of hate and ridicule. The US cannot hope to exit this with even a sliver of the “dignity” which allowed the UK to slide back into mediocrity after World War 2.

That Trump is not in jail at this point is a consequence of the feebleness and atrophy of the US political structure. US founding fathers like Adams saw this coming two hundred and fifty years ago. Countervailing measure they recommended, such as education, have failed us (or we have failed to provide real education).

US globe-spanning power is over, and the only question that remains is how we will deal with this. Wilkerson reminds us of the US population at around 340 million, a modest fraction of the 1.5 billion people of China and the 1.5 billion people of India combined.

We have to accommodate ourselves to being a much less powerful entity. When Trump stood for his second period in office he sounded as though he wanted to scale back US empire, its forever wars and 800 military bases strewn across the planet but has ended up (fecklessly) trying to extend it.

The West had expected that it could sustain a two-legged hegemony (US plus Europe) but it is now all falling apart and we don’t know how to behave. Labelling our political systems as “liberal democracies,” we go about killing people on the high seas without due process, talking of our intended use of “military terror” to destroy a civilization like Iran and in other ways making a mockery of everything we said in the past that we stood for.

“We are the worst example of a great power going down, in history, in terms of the way we are doing it, and in terms of the damage we are doing to the good – and there was some good – that we did post-World War 2” offers Wilkerson, who can see no historical parallel, even the Roman.

We had a chance at the very beginning of the unipolar moment to convert that, husband that, into multipolarity, starting with a recognition of the new Russia as one of the “poles.” But we sacrificed that amazing opportunity for money – for backing NATO as a revenue-generating machinery for the benefit of US private defense contractors (thank you Bill Clinton).

So, we killed multipolarity in its cradle and ultimately, we will see multipolarity replaced by the triumph of the continental powers.

In the second part of this interview, Wilkerson considers the 20-30% chance, as he sees it, of a civil war in the US. But I shall have to leave that for another day.

By Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News, 7/23/26

It didn’t have to come to this, but you knew it would.

You just knew those doing Joe Biden’s thinking for him were eventually going to explain away how it was the Biden regime actively participated in Israel’s campaign of genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza. There are memoirs to be written, the historians await with beckoning fingers and… and we meant well. 

The indiscriminate daily bombing, the systematic starvation, the sniper killings of small children, the murder of aid workers and journalists: There were reasons for all of it if only people would understand. And now we are to understand.

“How Biden Enabled Israel’s Aggression in Gaza —and Iran” lays out the regime’s case, the grand apologia — the obscene apologia, as I may as well say straightaway — in the July 27 edition of The New Yorker. The digital version of this lengthy, revealing piece appeared Monday and is here.

Let’s have a takeaway, just as the big boys in corporate media have them — five takeaways, seven takeaways, four takeaways. Here is mine, just one: The Biden White House and the Blinken State Department could quickly have stopped the Zionist terror machine within two days of the events of Oct. 7, 2023, but they never had the guts or the integrity to face up to this responsibility.

They spent the remainder of Biden’s time in office dissembling in public, counting the weapons shipments and the casualty counts while professing their powerlessness to stop the Israelis’ Nazieqsue campaign to erase an entire population.  

I wrote “two days” just above with good reason. It was on Oct. 9, 2023, that Yoav Gallant, defense minister in the Netanyahu cabinet at the time, ordered “a complete siege” in Gaza. You may remember the savagery in Gallant’s imperative. “No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel—everything will be closed,” he asserted very publicly. “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”

All the crossings into Gaza were shut down by then — an open breach of the laws of armed conflict. The Israelis had already blocked the Red Cross from entry into Gaza — another breach of the Geneva Conventions. 

Antony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state and a key figure in the United States’ sustained complicity in Israel’s incessant crimes, flew to Israel a few days after Gallant spoke to confer with him and Bibi Netanyahu.

He got nowhere with either of them, and there is no surprise here: This was Blinken’s “I come as a Jew” journey, as readers may recall. Netanyahu more or less ignored him when he threatened to cancel a visit President Biden had in the works if the Israeli military did not moderate, at least cosmetically. 

There was no moderation and Biden made the visit. “As he left,” according to The New Yorker’s account, “Netanyahu bragged publicly that he’d defied the president. He declared that Israel ‘will not allow humanitarian assistance’ from ‘our territory into the Gaza Strip.’”

This is how it went for the duration of Biden’s term in office — Bibi’s defiance, his calculated insults, his constant blindsiding, more chutzpah than Alan Dershowitz ever dreamed of, and all along the Biden people took it supinely while keeping the weapons flow going smoothly.

“White House officials described themselves to me as almost powerless in the face of Israel’s emotional response to October 7th,” David Kirkpatrick reports. You read this again and again, indeed. “The administration gradually came to believe that it could not persuade Israel to alter its approach in Gaza,” Kirkpatrick reports later in his piece. 

Extravagant Self-Deceptions

You read this, and then you read that the Biden regime authorized $20 billion in arms sales after Oct. 7 and that, all in, the United States supplies 70 percent of Israel’s war matériel and almost all of its military aircraft, bombs and missiles.

And then you stop to marvel at the extravagant self-deceptions in which this regime indulged to dodge its duty to the Palestinians, to humanity altogether, to law — international and domestic. 

Kirkpatrick, for whom I have a certain amount of time, is very good at capturing this pitiful story in considerable granularity.

Parenthetically, it was as The New York Times’ bureau chief in Cairo during the Arab Spring that Kirkpatrick (and he alone) reported the telephone call during which Susan Rice, President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, authorized the July 2013 coup against Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s freely elected president. Blinken was Rice’s deputy at the time.

There were endless debates and daily handwringing within the Biden regime’s counsels as to what to do as the Israelis prosecuted their campaign of terror, and Kirkpatrick gets deeper into these than anyone else I’ve read on the topic.

Nobody in the administration could quite believe what they were seeing. Here is an impressively “inside” passage in Kirkpatrick’s piece:

“Alarms about potential war crimes began ringing inside the Biden Administration soon after Israel began its counterattack on Gaza. … Israeli jets were conducting as many as eight hundred strikes a day on northern Gaza, and Administration officials who were closely tracking the war told me that Israeli military planners could not possibly have preselected or so quickly identified that many legitimate military targets, such as tunnel entrances, rocket launchers, and Hamas leaders.

Nor could the Israelis have carefully weighed whether the risk to civilian lives and infrastructure was proportionate to the military value of each target. Startlingly, the strikes appeared to move in a geographical line from the northeast to the southwest, flattening whole neighborhoods in a way that suggested little differentiation between civilian and military structures. 

Biden’s Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, anxiously asked his staff how Israel could justify this scale of destruction. A senior State Department official told me, ‘We were all shocked at how aggressive and deadly it was, and asking, “What the fuck are they doing?” ‘ “

It is a good question, of course. As I have argued severally in this space and elsewhere, Bibi Netanyahu and his cabinet of Zionist freaks are by a sound definition clinically psychotic.

But it is when we turn the “what the fuck” question around that it is still more revealing. “Whether and how to use America’s military support as leverage to restrain the Israeli operation was debated for months inside the White House,” Kirkpatrick reports.

And believe it or not, this is the argument that won out: We must continue to supply the Zionist regime with weapons as they prosecute their genocide against Palestinians because that way we can force them to stop their genocide against Palestinians.

What the fuck are they doing? is precisely the question. This is sheer schizophrenia.

Regrets, Remorse, Etc.

As the months went by the Biden people descended into “grudging acceptance” of Israeli conduct, and “credulous capitulation.”

These are Kirkpatrick’s phrases — good but not strong enough, given he also reports Biden was up on Capitol Hill whenever needed to sell Congress on this or that new package of weaponry.

As to the White House’s repeated threats to insist on restraint, Kirkpatrick gives us this neat summation: “Biden’s bluster toward Israel, it turned out, was less fierce than it seemed.”

And so to the regrets, the remorse, the self-justifications and self-defenses that are to put the minds of liberals at ease and the historians are supposed to read:

From Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser:

“When you look back at it in the cold light of day, the trap in that kind of thinking is easier to recognize. I will say straightforwardly — we should have put more pressure on Israel to take a different approach.”

From Amos Hochstein, a Biden adviser (with dual American–Israeli citizenship): 

“We tried, but we had no chance of success, in retrospect, because Netanyahu wasn’t talking to us — he was talking to his own public.”

A few more takeaways, if I may.

I cannot get over the ineptitude on display in Kirkpatrick’s account of the Biden regime’s gross mismanagement of the Gaza criss from the day it began until Biden left office.

There is the shallowness of these people’s minds and understanding. No word seems ever to have been spoken of the true nature of Hamas, the various role it plays in Palestinian society, its intentions beyond the ridiculous propaganda casting it as “a terrorist organization.”

Nothing. Hamas, like all Palestinians, is a gathering of stick figures. 

What comes first, the policy paralysis or the cowardice? Both together help account for the Biden regime’s refusal to make that single phone call to Bibi Netanyahu so many have mentioned — the phone call that would have ended the savagery in a day.

Such a phone call would have required, if we think about it, courage, imagination, a willingness to strike new directions in policy. Not on, not remotely.

Given the hand of the Zionist lobbies, and all the money Biden took from them, prevarication was the best they could do.

Again, did the decades-long sclerosis among the policy cliques come first, or was it the gutlessness, the absence of any serious commitment to integrity? 

Legal Loopholes & Talking Points

Once the capitulation and grudging acceptance set in, Biden’s people turned to lawyers to parse the legal loopholes through which they could slither. How many civilian casualties could be counted “proportionate” to justify a given attack?

How genuinely did the Israelis distinguish between military and civilian targets? “That line could be blurry,” Kirkpatrick writes. And blur was the point, of course. 

Craven. Kirkpatrick’s piece confirms my judgment here, either way: If the Nuremberg principles applied, these people would be tried and, based on the available evidence, hung.

What damage the Biden regime did with all its equivocation and weakness and its “pretzels of logic,” as Kirkpatrick terms its incessant flinching.

Israel is now fully licensed to proceed on its rampage — indiscriminate bombing of civilians, etc. — elsewhere in West Asia; West Bank settlements and settler violence have escalated to sickening levels.

On the other side of the ledger (so far as I am concerned, in any case) Hamas’ credibility — and I read most of its fighting force — has survived; sympathy for Israel across the world is understood as sympathy for the devil.

The taker of the cake here is what the lawyers did after Biden was out of power and Kamala Harris defeated at the polls. 

Here is Kirkpatrick’s account of these roaring mice:

“A working group of Administration lawyers disseminated a forceful new set of talking points for U.S. officials to raise with their Israeli counterparts. Many of the points could have been written any time since the spring of 2024:

‘In light of the extensive destruction and damage in Gaza, as well as our understanding that Hamas has been devastated as an operational force . . . we in the U.S. Government do not see a clear military imperative for continued operations.’

Under the heading ‘Forced Displacement,’ the lawyers noted that ‘the displacement seems increasingly both clear and purposeful.’

Under ‘Starvation of Civilians,’ they wrote that ‘the facts on the ground’ raised ‘grave concerns’ about ‘intentional starvation of civilians to drive them from the area,’ and that aid restrictions by Israel were harming Palestinian civilians ‘well in excess of any further anticipated military advantage.’ ” 

Etc.

As Kirkpatrick nicely concludes,

“The talking points called for follow-up, within ‘days not weeks,’ about ‘plans for improvement.’ But by then surely nobody was listening. Trump was on his way back to the White House.”

By Ted Galen Carpenter, Antiwar.com, 7/24/26

U.S. and NATO leaders have waged a multi-year propaganda campaign to convince Western publics that Ukraine is a splendid democracy and that President Volodymyr Zelensky is an extremely popular elected leader who epitomizes those values.  Multiple aspects of that carefully crafted image are untrue.  Ukraine is a corrupt, autocratic state that maintains strict censorship and brutally represses political opponents.  When Zelensky’s term ended in 2024, he and his obedient followers in parliament simply postponed elections indefinitely.  Even absent adverse election result, though, there are ample signs that NATO’s much-lauded hero has alienated Ukraine’s public.

The systematic campaign to present Zelensky as a hero is crucial to NATO’s overall portrayal of the ongoing Ukraine-Russia war as nothing less than an existential struggle between freedom and dictatorship – a conflict with truly global implications.  New York Times columnist David French contends that “for the first time in my adult life, the moral and strategic heart of the defense of liberal democracy doesn’t beat in Washington.  It doesn’t beat in London or Paris or Berlin or Ottawa, either.  It’s in Kyiv, where a courageous leader and a courageous people have picked up the torch America has dropped.”

Western leaders have redoubled their propaganda initiatives efforts in recent months to sell the proposition that underdog Ukraine is beginning to win the military contest against Russia.  Despite a few flashy Ukrainian military successes, however, the overall picture of an eventual Russian victory in a war of attrition remains essentially the same.

Domestic developments in Ukraine even more strongly suggest that Zelensky may be closer to the precipice of disaster than to the summit of victory.  Indeed, his position bears an eerie resemblance to that of an earlier U.S. client and political darling, South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem.  U.S. officials gradually soured on Diem, however, and in 1963 they quietly encouraged South Vietnamese military leaders to oust him.  Those generals did so on November 2, killing Diem as well as his brother and chief adviser, Ngo Dinh Nhu.

The Diem episode highlights a broader theme.  U.S. foreign clients who become inconvenient to Washington have not fared well over the decades.  Given the recent adverse domestic developments with respect to Zelensky, he has ample reason to worry about his long-term survival prospects.

Major political fractures have occurred in Ukraine over the past year, and they are intensifying in both frequency and severity.  Zelensky’s actions even alienated some of his most reliable supporters and apologists in the West.  For example, the decision by Zelensky and his parliamentary allies in 2025 to curb the independence of anti-corruption agencies proved to be extremely unpopular.  Several rounds of anti-government demonstrations erupted in Kiev and several other cities.  Zelensky’s reputation throughout the West of being a noble leader dedicated to democracy and honest government was always unwarranted, but this time a good portion of Ukrainian public opinion became disillusioned as well.

Several new incidents indicate mounting political turmoil. General Oleksandr Syrskiy was once considered a national hero. During the early days following Russia’s expanded invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he masterminded the successful defense of Kiev against a much larger Russian force surging toward Ukraine’s capital.  He then planned the counteroffensive that helped his country regain some conquered territory in the east.  Zelensky made him commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces two years later.

By the summer of 2026, though, most Ukrainians no longer viewed Syrskiy as a heroic figure whom they wished to follow.  Moreover, Zelensky himself came under intense political fire and confronted waves of street protests throughout the country after siding with the 60-year-old general to fire the country’s charismatic young defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, in mid-July.  For only the second time since February 2022, thousands of people joined mass anti-government demonstrations. The goal was to pressure Zelensky to change course and reaffirm Fedorov’s vision of technology-driven warfare increasingly relying on drones and robots. (The first large protests, in the summer of 2025, denounced Zelensky’s purge of government anti-corruption agencies.)

Syrskiy also had faced criticism for the heavy loss of life incurred in the Battle of Bakhmut, which drew comparisons with trench warfare in World War I as Ukrainian troops fought for months to defend a town that many analysts considered to have little strategic value.

New York Times correspondents Marc Santora, Liubov Sholudko, and Stanislav Kozliuk conclude that “The current public anger threatens the national unity that has sustained Ukraine through nearly four and a half years of fighting.” They note that “after he was fired, Fedorov issued a scathing public indictment of the military high command.”  Other respected Western analysts note the growing bureaucratic turmoil in Ukraine’s government and Zelensky’s ever more perilous political position.

The emergence of such bitter divisions within the top ranks of any country’s military hierarchy is especially destabilizing and ominous.  However, the turmoil in Ukraine’s government continues to deepen, not recede.  On July 21, 2026, Zelensky capitulated to the demonstrators and fired Syrskiy, replacing him with Major General Mykhailo Drapatyi.  Santora asserts that “Drapatyi represents a newer generation of post-Soviet military leadership in Ukraine that has embraced more modern approaches to warfighting.”

An especially crucial question is how the Trump administration views the developments in Kiev.  How worried are U.S. policymakers about Ukraine’s continuing viability as a U.S./NATO security client and Zelensky’s status as Ukraine’s leader going forward?

Washington never likes turmoil in any of its client states.  Loyal political figures in those countries typically are courted only as long as they advance Washington’s international policy goals.  However, even clients who have outlived their usefulness to the United States but depart quietly tend to be treated well and enjoy a cozy retirement.  Conversely, clients who become uncooperative or attempt to remain in power beyond their “use by” date fare decidedly less well.  One need only consult the ghosts of Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, and Ngo Dinh Diem for confirmation of the latter point.

The recent political instability in Ukraine suggests that the time may have arrived when the Trump administration will “ask” Zelensky to step aside and enable a new, more popular and capable figure to take the helm.  If such a “request” is made, the Ukrainian leader would be wise to heed it.