Judith Bergman : China's New Way of War

 

China's New Way of War

by Judith Bergman
June 17, 2022 at 5:00 am

• "Chinese thinkers have clearly stated that the core operational concept of intelligentized warfare is to directly control the enemy's will. The idea is to use AI to directly control the will of the highest decision-makers, including the president, members of Congress, and combatant commanders, as well as citizens." — Colonel Koichiro Takagi, senior fellow of Training Evaluation Research and Development Command, Japan Ground Self-Defense Force, War on the Rocks, April 13, 2022.

• "War has started to shift from the pursuit of destroying bodies to paralyzing and controlling the opponent. The focus is to attack the enemy's will to resist, not physical destruction" and to cause "the brain to become the main target of offense and defense of new concept weapons... To win without fighting is no longer far-fetched." — Bill Gertz, describing a report written in 2019 by China's People's Liberation Army, in the Washington Times, December 29, 2021.

• "The PLA plans to employ all available tools to the overarching objective of reducing an enemy's will to resist." — Ben Noon, research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute and Dr. Chris Bassler, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Defense One, September 17, 2021.

• "Influencing human cognition requires a large amount of detailed personal information to identify influential individuals or to conduct influential operations according to the characteristics of subgroups of people. China has already collected a massive amount of personal information on government officials and ordinary U.S. citizens.... China has even succeeded in identifying CIA agents operating in foreign countries using such data. These activities are particularly aggressive and coercive in Taiwan and Hong Kong, which the Chinese government considers its territory. Attempts to use digital means to influence elections have also been seen in Taiwan's recent presidential election." — Colonel Koichiro Takagi, War on the Rocks, April 13, 2022.

• While cognitive warfare may sound like science fiction to most people, experts have cautioned that the US needs to take the threat seriously.

• "They should also designate the cognitive arena as a new operational arena, along with land, air, sea, space, and cyberspace, to raise awareness and invest resources. Furthermore, it is necessary to consider how to win the 'battle of narratives' to counter the manipulation of public opinion in wartime." — Colonel Koichiro Takagi, War on the Rocks, April 13, 2022.

Since 2019, China has been pursuing a new concept of war, known as "intelligentized warfare." The idea is to operationalize artificial intelligence and the use of unmanned platforms in a way that subdues the enemy, ultimately without having to resort to conventional "hot" warfare. (Image source: iStock)

Since 2019, China has been pursuing a new concept of war, known as "intelligentized warfare." The idea is to operationalize artificial intelligence (AI) and the use of unmanned platforms (such as drones) in a way that subdues the enemy, ultimately without having to resort to conventional "hot" warfare. According to the 2019 Annual Report to Congress, "Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China," written by the Office of the Secretary of Defense:

"The PLA is ... exploring next-generation operational concepts for intelligentized warfare, such as attrition warfare by intelligent swarms[1], cross-domain mobile warfare[2], AI-based space confrontation[3] and cognitive control operations[4]. The PLA considers unmanned systems to be critical intelligentized technologies, and is pursuing greater autonomy for unmanned aerial, surface, and underwater vehicles to enable manned and unmanned hybrid formations[5], swarm attacks[6], optimized logistic support[7] and disaggregated ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance] among other capabilities." [Emphasis added.]

What sets China apart in its pursuit of "intelligentized warfare" is not its focus on AI and drone swarming – the US Army, Air Force, and the Navy are all pursuing drone swarm projects and the U.S. Marine Corps is working on so-called kamikaze drone swarms - but the cognitive aspects of intelligentized warfare. According to Colonel Koichiro Takagi is a senior fellow of Training Evaluation Research and Development Command, Japan Ground Self-Defense Force:

Chinese thinkers have clearly stated that the core operational concept of intelligentized warfare is to directly control the enemy's will. The idea is to use AI to directly control the will of the highest decision-makers, including the president, members of Congress, and combatant commanders, as well as citizens. 'Intelligence dominance' or 'control of the brain' will become new areas of the struggle for control in intelligentized warfare, putting AI to a very different use than most American and allied discussions have envisioned.

According to Takagi, Chinese military theorists believe that war as we know it is about to change.

"Chinese theorists, however, are looking further ahead. They believe that the development of information technology has reached its limits, and that future wars will occur in the cognitive domain. The Ardennes Forest of future wars that the Chinese People's Liberation Army intends to exploit is a pathway of direct attack against human cognition, using AI and unmanned weapons. The French builders of the Maginot Line could not imagine the assault of German armored forces from the Ardennes Forest. Likewise, to those of us who have been accustomed to almost three decades of information-age warfare since the Gulf War, intelligentized or cognitive warfare seems a strange and unrealistic way of thinking."

Ben Noon, a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute, and Dr. Chris Bassler, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, wrote in September 2021:

"PLA theorists argue that intelligentization will center upon a 'cognitive space' that privileges complex thinking and effective decision-making. On battlefields where advanced AI technology enables better decisions, they write, the side that can better integrate human creativity and robotic calculating capacity will hold the crucial edge...

"Above all, intelligentization will aim to achieve advantages in psychological warfare. Theorists describe a 'cognitive confrontation,' in which PLA leaders will psychologically dominate opposing commanders through better and faster decisions. The PLA plans to employ all available tools to the overarching objective of reducing an enemy's will to resist."

In December 2021, the US Commerce Department imposed sanctions on 12 Chinese research institutes and 22 Chinese technology firms, chief among them China's Academy of Military Medical Sciences and its 11 research institutes. The reason for this was that they "use biotechnology processes to support Chinese military end uses and end users, to include purported brain-control weaponry," the Commerce Department said.

According to three reports written in 2019 by the People's Liberation Army and obtained by the Washington Times, China has been doing brain-control or brain warfare research for several years as part of its work on developing intelligentized warfare.

"War has started to shift from the pursuit of destroying bodies to paralyzing and controlling the opponent", one of the Chinese reports, which was published in the official military newspaper PLA Daily said, according to the Washington Times.

"The focus is to attack the enemy's will to resist, not physical destruction" and to cause "the brain to become the main target of offense and defense of new concept weapons... To win without fighting is no longer far-fetched."

The PLA reports revealed that China is also working on integrating humans and machines to create enhanced human physiological and cognitive capacities.

"Future human-machine merging will revolve around the contest for the brain," one of the PLA reports said.

"The two combatant sides will use various kinds of brain control technologies and effective designs to focus on taking over the enemy's way of thinking and his awareness, and even directly intervene in the thinking of the enemy leaders and staff, and with that produce war to control awareness and thinking."

According to the Washington Times:

"Among its various research focuses are 'brain control technologies, such as measuring neuronal activity in the brain and translating neuro-signals into computer signals, establishing uni-directional or bi-directional signal transmission between the brain and external equipment' and 'neuro-defense technology such as 'leveraging electromagnetic, biophysical, and material technologies to enhance human brain's defense towards brain-control attacks'".

Takagi has pointed out that cognitive warfare requires vast amounts of information, but that China already has access to such amounts.

"Influencing human cognition requires a large amount of detailed personal information to identify influential individuals or to conduct influential operations according to the characteristics of subgroups of people. China has already collected a massive amount of personal information on government officials and ordinary U.S. citizens, ensuring a foundation for influencing people's cognition. This includes the confidential data of 21.5 million people from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the personal information of 383 million people from a major hotel, and sensitive data on more than 100,000 U.S. Navy personnel. The Chinese government has then allowed Chinese IT giants to process this large amount of data, making it useful for intelligence activities. In this way, China has accumulated an enormous amount of data over the years, which could be weaponized in the future. China has even succeeded in identifying CIA agents operating in foreign countries using such data. These activities are particularly aggressive and coercive in Taiwan and Hong Kong, which the Chinese government considers its territory. Attempts to use digital means to influence elections have also been seen in Taiwan's recent presidential election."

While cognitive warfare may sound like science fiction to most people, experts have cautioned that the US needs to take the threat seriously.

"The United States and its allies should analyze intelligentized warfare more to avoid surprise attacks in future wars," Takagi warned.

"They should also designate the cognitive arena as a new operational arena, along with land, air, sea, space, and cyberspace, to raise awareness and invest resources. Furthermore, it is necessary to consider how to win the 'battle of narratives' to counter the manipulation of public opinion in wartime."

Takagi is not the only one to take China's research in cognitive warfare seriously. According to Noon and Bassler:

"The United States military should work to better understand Chinese conceptions of intelligentization and the PLA's efforts to integrate it into its model of future warfare. Taking advantage of some of the possible weaknesses of the PLA's approach should be a top priority and would also help the United States military to shore up some of the weaknesses in its own vision and efforts."

Among other things, Bassler and Noon suggest that the US military should not repeat past mistakes, when the US sat on its hands while China accumulated threatening capabilities, often by stealing massive amounts of whatever it could, for instance here, here , here, here and here.

"The United States military should be more public in its discussions about the PLA's intelligentization efforts," Bassler and Noon wrote.

"With other notable PLA efforts, the United States military has been content with sitting on classified awareness while losing valuable time for mobilizing a response. Several years were lost during the South China Sea island building campaign. Most recently, U.S. Strategic Command's vague and scant public details about the rapid growth of the Chinese nuclear program did little, only for open-source investigators to finally sufficiently expose the efforts several years later. In the case of intelligentization, the U.S. military should not repeat this mistake yet again. Instead, it should more clearly highlight the nature of the PLA's efforts as they continue to develop."

Judith Bergman, a columnist, lawyer and political analyst, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute.

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[1] Such as "collective behaviors that result from the local interactions of the individuals with each other and with their environment. Examples of systems studied by swarm intelligence are colonies of ants and termites, schools of fish, flocks of birds, herds..."

[2] Such as "the ability of electronic warfare (EW) devices and systems to contribute to, enhance, and work seamlessly across all six domains in which military organizations operate – air, land, space, sea (maritime), human (cyber), and the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS)".

[3] Such as target selection, satellite communication, collision avoidance.

[4] Such as "neurons [nerve cells] communicat[ing] with your brain by altering... the connections that lead from your body to your brain."]

[5] Combining AI capabilities with human ones, such as inserting a chip to learn a language.

[6] Such as using swarms of drones to overwhelm security systems.

[7] Such as planning and developing the best support for the system throughout its life-cycle.

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Václav Klaus: Mass Migration Always Has Unpleasant Consequences – Do We Know That?

 

Mass Migration Always Has Unpleasant Consequences – Do We Know That?

May 17, 2022

This editorial was published on April 28, 2022, in Czech language in the daily newspaper “Lidovénoviny”.

https://visegradpost.com/en/2022/05/17/mass-migration-always-has-unpleasant-consequences-do-we-know-that/

By Václav Klaus and Jiří Weigl.

Czechia – Ukrainians in their hundreds of thousands, or rather millions, are seeking refuge from war abroad, in huge numbers also on our territory. Our still-lasting memories of the Soviet invasion and occupation more than fifty years ago, the authentic feelings of compassion and solidarity with those suffering, but also fears of a possible escalation of the war, have given rise to an unprecedented degree of sympathy for refugees from this war-torn country. Russian aggression against Ukraine has been resolutely dismissed by a significant majority of our fellow citizens, even by those who are otherwise very sensitive to propaganda slogans and black and white perception of the world.

The war has entered its third month and more than three hundred thousand Ukrainians, mainly women and children, have arrived on our territory. Czech politics and society did not expect such a sudden migration surge. No one had anticipated that war would have actually broken out in Eastern Europe and no one could have been prepared for a mass exodus of Ukrainians. And yet, the government and the media are convinced that our country is doing well, that we can be proud of our hospitality, solidarity and kindness, which is in stark contrast to the public fears of mass migration from the Middle East a few years ago.  Commentators explain this difference by the fact that these are refugees from war, not economic migrants, and by the cultural proximity of Ukraine to the Central European milieu.

The Czech public and especially Czech politicians are positive about this Ukrainian wave of mass migration. They have positive expectations as regards its consequences and do not seem to expect any problems. We do not share these views. This short-sighted point of view is not entirely surprising among a general public that has been subjected to intense propaganda, but the government’s enthusiastic “wir schaffen das” attitude cannot be accepted.

What is particularly striking is the ill-founded notion spread by government politicians and media opinion makers that the hundreds of thousands of people coming to us from Ukraine have decided to become the new Czechs. It is implicitly assumed that the majority of these refugees will stay in our country for a long time or even settle here permanently. They see it as our task to make it possible and easier for them to fulfil their intention. The proponents of these views are already looking forward to those arriving hereto fill vacant jobs, to save our pension system with their contributions, to offset ongoing depopulation of the countryside and border areas.  Because they are Slavs, their integration will be easy – they naively claim.

These illusions are not justified and the problems that will inevitably come should be taken seriously. The inflow of three hundred thousand Ukrainian migrants – in addition to the two hundred thousand who have lived in our country in recent years, mostly to work – will be an enormous demographic change, unprecedented in the thousand-year history of the country. Even the German minority of several million, existing here in the past, did not emerge in our country so quickly. It was created gradually, over many centuries, and for the most part, evolutionary. It was an individual rather than a mass migration. Even so, Czech-German coexistence on our territory ended tragically.

Ukrainians are coming to us today not primarily because they have decided to become Czechs, but because they are fleeing the war and because they are heading to a place where – in their eyes – it was easier and better to live in the past than in their home country. Like all mass migrants, they have arrived with the expectation that they will continue their current way of life in peace and in better material conditions in the Czech Republic. We have only a very vague idea of their way of life, their traditions and characteristics. Yet, it is expected that these people will live as we do, which cannot be true. Moreover, five per cent of the population is a sufficiently large minority to influence the life of the country in their own image and to have the power to assert or even enforce their possible demands or needs.

We haven’t heard from Czech politicians that they are being prepared for the emergence of a strong, perhaps soon to be politically organized minority on our territory with the possible domestic and foreign policy implications that this will have. Until the beginning of the war, the Czech public had only very limited information about Ukraine and the local customs there. The prevalent opinion was that Ukraine was a poor and extremely corrupt country. In addition, most people did not really distinguish Ukrainians from Russians. The idea of a five per cent Russian minority on our territory would be a cause for great concern for most of our citizens, and especially politicians. In the case of Ukrainians, however, it is politically incorrect today to ask questions of this kind.

The Ukrainian society today, its traditions and way of life are very different from ours. It is there that we should look for the roots of the not very good conditions in Ukraine before the war – of chaos, corruption and criminality. With the masses of refugees today, some of this is undoubtedly coming also to us. The situation will change even further when the fighting stops – we can expect families to be reunited and thousands of men who have lived through the war and its horrors to arrive here. Do we have any idea how we are going to take care of them, how we are going to integrate people with such experience into our everyday lives?

In Western Europe, we see how mass migration brings the problems and conflicts of migrants’ distant original homes into a new, completely unprepared setting. Are we aware of the fact that, by means of our future Ukrainian fellow citizens, we will become firmly connected with the European East, its customs, traditions, historical conflicts and mistrust between peoples and ethnic groups?

All of these potential risks have not been discussed. With punishable naivety, our government is encouraging the mass resettlement of people to our country, even from parts of Ukraine where no fighting has taken place. Is there any reason for this? Politicians and public opinion leaders are competing over who will show more “courage” and willingness to make sacrifices. Last but not least, they are openly planning to “steal” from the war-torn Ukraine hundreds of thousands of their most capable citizens, the very people this country will need most after the war.

There is an overwhelming desire to integrate refugees into Czech society as quickly as possible and to settle them here permanently. Examples of this include the hasty inclusion of Ukrainian children in Czech schools,or projects to build apartments for refugees, which are not intended as temporary humanitarian aid but are planned for the long-term life of these people on our territory. All this is happening in a situation when our country is facing extraordinary, not short-term, economic difficulties after Covid and because of rising inflation.

We believe a sensible policy towards the victims of the Ukraine war should be primarily based on comprehensive short-term assistance to its victims and on creating long-term conditions for the refugees to be able to return as soon as possible and in as large a number as possible to their homeland, which will need them. Efforts to permanently settle Ukrainians en masse in our country are an irresponsible game with human destinies.

—

Translation from Czech provided by the Václav Klaus Institute.

 

IRISH SAVANT: Ruled by traitors

 

Ruled by traitors

Posted by By Savant March 2, 2022

http://www.irishsavant.net/?p=1858

That the West is ruled by traitors has been a constant refrain of mine. That’s not hyperbole, I mean ruled literally by traitors. Merriam-Webster offers two definitions of the word:

1: one who betrays another’s trust or is false to an obligation or duty

2: one who commits treason

There can be no greater betrayal of a people’s trust than that of opening the gates to the city while the citizenry sleeps. Most Western nations have been or are in the process of being destroyed by uncountable numbers (again, literally) of unassimilable and resentful if not outright hostile foreigners that entered through the gates opened by the traitors while the citizens metaphorically slept.

Watch this very short video from the always wonderful Morgoth’s Review - http://nwioqeqkdf.blogspot.com/ - on Britain’s National Census for 2021 and the scale of the treachery becomes apparent.

“For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero January 3, 106 BC – December 7, 43 BC

 

IRISH SAVANT: China puzzles

 

China puzzles

Posted by By Savant April 22, 2022

http://www.irishsavant.net/?p=1999

Do you remember (of course you do) the inauguration of Project Covid Hoax, specifically the videos from China of people collapsing and dying in the street? All caused by a deadly new killer virus they told a horrified world. What was that all about? I ask because such ‘symptoms’ did not represent those of the Deadly Covid Virus (shudder). When this fact emerged in due course the authorities tried to dismiss the scenes as fake news, claiming that the images and videos were faked and/or that the bodies on the street were not Covid victims after all but merely rough sleepers. I’ve never understood what the Chinese were playing at with this charade.

And now they’re at it again. Have you seen the chilling videos from locked-down Shanghai where the cries of desperate citizens calling out for food and medicines echo through the endless high-rises while hazmat-suited enforcers patrol the streets, like something from the bowels of hell itself? Drones fly among the apartment buildings, instructing residents to “control your soul’s desire for freedom”. (“In the far distance, a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people’s windows.” -George Orwell, 1984). Police capture screaming residents and drag them off to God knows where while COVID-positive children get ripped from mothers’ arms and taken to government detention facilities. In scenes straight from a mad scientist’s mind robotic dogs patrol the streets, menacing terrified residents marooned in their apartments. Most horrifying of all, to me at least, was seeing bags of dogs and cats deposited on the sidewalk where they were, accompanied by gut-wrenching screams of agony, beaten to death by government workers.

What in God’s name is going on here? The Chinese must know that lockdowns didn’t work the last time and in fact had disastrous outcomes in general. If they are playing up the severity of the allegedly new strain do they know something the rest of the world doesn’t know? As in this time there really is a deadly virus and they for their own reasons want to handle it this way? Is the charade down to an internal CCP power struggle? Maybe the abandonment of the Zero Covid policy would be seen as losing face for the faction that proposed it. Then again Shanghai seems to be the centre of factions not fully loyal to Chairman Xi. Or could it, crazy as it might seem, be a ploy to disrupt global supply chains with a view to further pressurising the dollar and America’s overall preeminent position? Obviously the CCP would be shooting themselves in the foot from an economic perspective but the Chinese play the long game and its people, unlike Americans, are well used to economic hardship. A final possibility is one whereby the reaction is part of a bioweapon project – we do know that both America and China, and possibly many more countries, are working in this filed.

Most of us would relish the defeat of the American-lead Globohomo NWO Evil Empire. But the goings-on in China don’t say much for the alternative. May God help us all and especially our children.

 

IRISH SAVANT: Ukraine: An utter disaster for Russia?

 

Ukraine: An utter disaster for Russia?

Posted by By Savant May 17, 2022

http://www.irishsavant.net/?p=2069

The Russian military intervention in Ukraine is turning into a strategic disaster of such monumental scale as to to bring into question the motives of Putin’s Government in launching the intervention. For a start it’s quite clear after sifting the tsunami of lies from all sides that it is indeed a disaster militarily. In fact anything other than a quick comprehensive victory involving minimal casualties and physical destruction equaled failure. Despite the claims of many experts that Ukraine’s defense infrastructure had been disabled by early precision weapon attacks the resistance not alone survives but seems to be pushing the Russians back months after hostilities began. It’s taken weeks to capture a single steel plant, for God’s sake, the defenders of which were able to see the Russian Black Sea flagship sunk in humiliating fashion a few miles off shore. Surely restive regions with non-Russian ethnic majorities (Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia) are reconsidering their chances of a new violent rebellion in the light of these events? Russian military failure and ineptitude will also embolden adjacent states such as Georgia into more adventures.

The expansion and improved cohesion of what had been a declining and fissiparous NATO must surely represent the biggest single strategic disaster for Russia. Initiatives inconceivable even a few months ago such as Sweden and Finland joining that organisation have now become established fact while its constituent members are ramping up military expenditure. Russia now faces an adversary that is bigger, more hostile, more unified, better armed and more confident than ever before. The damage done to Russian-European relations will take literally generations to repair, assuming it can be repaired. The Russian action also encourages irredentism, still a powder keg in much of Europe where so many countries have historical and/or ethnic claims to parts of neighbouring countries. Hungary with parts of Serbia and Romania, Romania with Moldova and Transnistria, Poland with Ukraine and, well, remember Germany used to stretch all the way up to the Lithuanian border and indeed beyond. Rumours persist of eagerness on the part of Poles, Hungarians and Romanians to recover parts of Ukraine in the (now increasingly unlikely) event of the that country’s dismemberment. Whatever the merits of such claims the potential geopolitical ramifications are horrific. Bear in mind that both Latvia and Lithuania have very large Russian populations, located conveniently near the Russian border. How must the authorities there feel about the events in Ukraine? And by now every country in Europe which had been dependent on Russian energy and agricultural exports must be frantically seeking out alternative long-term suppliers. And finally, the Visigrad Alliance which promised so much in the fight against globohomo has been destroyed in the fallout.

So what happens now? It appears – again, to the extent that we can believe anything emanating from official sources – that Putin expected a quick victory, the surrender of Zelenksy and the scattering of the so-called Nazis. None of these objectives were achieved and almost certainly never will be, short of a protracted meat-grinder war of attrition, if then. Such an imbroglio would suit NATO down to the ground. The most likely outcome will see Russia withdraw under cover of some face-saving form of words. Such an outcome could threaten Putin’s survival. And even were Donbas and the whole Black Sea coast to come under Russian control it’s hard to see any major advantages accruing other than greater control over access to Crimea.

Could Russia have responded in any other way to the endless NATO provocations, ongoing as they have been for decades? The military option may have been hopeless but the economic one has been very different – the full impact on Europe most certainly has not been seen yet. Yet this weapon was deployed only after active hostilities had commenced. Could it have been deployed prior to that with the clear message to NATO: “Cut off and roll back the de facto NATOisation of Ukraine or sanctions will commence”. It’s an option that could have been implemented on a gradual basis to underline Putin’s seriousness. Existing NATO facilities in Ukraine plus the biolabs could have been taken out by those advanced precision weapons we’ve been hearing so much about. Same with the artillery shelling Donbas. I don’t claim any special knowledge and could be totally wrong but it does seem to me that had such options been applied over the last year or so a military invasion would have been unnecessary. Then again maybe Russia thought that this would be another Crimea operation, that Ukraine and the West would just stand by and do nothing of any significance.

This assumes of course that Putin’s real objectives were as stated. I believe they were but what if they’re not? The scale and comprehensiveness of the disaster from a Russian perspective are so great as to suggest the possibility, I put it no stronger than that, of other motives at play. In this post a few weeks ago I wrote “Jews in the West may hate Putin and Russians generally but that country’s Jews proclaim Putin as the best Russian leader ever for their community. Many of the Jewish oligarchs are still in power with their loot intact and enjoy privileged access to the President. Many other factors give us pause for thought. Russia was all on board with the Covid hoax, the mass MRNA vaccination program and the Mark Of The Beast digital ID. Putin’s daughter plays a major role in the transhumanist CRISPR project. His association with the WEF and Schwab goes back thirty years and they refer to one another by their first names. Kissinger has been described as “a valued friend” and is accorded the almost unique distinction of dining at Putin’s private quarters when he visits Russia. Is this the guy saving us from the NWO? Seriously?”

Again, I don’t know. But Putin does seem as committed to the NWO, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the Great Reset and transhumanism as are his enemies (?) in the West. Or is he destroying Ukraine so as to reestablish the Khazarian Kingdom in time for the Moshiach’s imminent appearance? Crazy? Insane? Maybe. Probably. But ask yourself this. Had anybody predicted twenty years ago the situation we now find ourselves in would you have dismissed them as lunatics as well?

 

IRISH SAVANT: Some random reflections on the Uvalde massacre

 

Some random reflections on the Uvalde massacre

Posted by By Savant May 29, 2022

http://www.irishsavant.net/?p=2140

This post is just a series of unstructured observations on the recent mass shooting in Texas. The scandalous performance of the police is the standout issue for me. Report a racist insult emanating from a crowd of 60,000 football supporters and the police will swing into action, sirens blazing, while their colleagues back at the station analyse gigabytes of film footage to identify the culprit. During the scamdemic police relentlessly hunted down the unvaxxed and the unmasked. Or if parents ask awkward questions at a school board meeting we can be assured that the cops will drag them out into the street and probably charge them with a public order offence. But it’s a different matter when it comes to protecting the law-abiding ordinary citizen. Your house has been burgled? Sorry, we’re busy tracking down hate speech offenders. Get on to your insurers. BLM burning down your neighbourhood? Cops stand idly by.

But God Almighty, has there even been anything like what we saw here? The cops skulked outside the school for 40 minutes as a deranged shooter blazed away at teachers and students inside. But it’d be unfair to say that they did nothing. When one of the mothers, apparently armed, tried to get into the school to save her kids the cops cuffed her and flung her to the ground. Heckuva job guys. But there’s method in their madness because the cops and their masters fear most of all citizens taking responsibility for their own defense. ‘Law enforcement’ will sit around ignoring real crime but will be galvanised into action at the first hint of vigilante-style activity. Their greatest fear is an aroused and armed citizenry. (But on the other hand cops are walking on eggshells if and when the perp is a POC.) You’d almost imagine that TPTB were trying to engineer societal collapse so as to Build Back Better. Now there’s a thought!

There’s no doubt that the USA is a deeply fractured…..I hesitate to describe it as a ‘society’. But it’s completely wrong to imply that mass shootings are a uniquely American phenomenon – despite popular misconception. An unprepared Ted Cruz was made look bad by a reporter who – and I know you’ll find this hard to believe – had no grasp of the actual facts. Because out of the 97 countries where mass public shootings occurring, the United States ranks 64th in the per capita frequency of these attacks and 65th in the murder rate. Not only have these attacks been much more common outside the US, the US’s share of these attacks has declined over time. There has been a much bigger increase over time in the number and severity of mass shootings in the rest of the world compared to the US.

Naturally enough the tragedy has been seized on gleefully by the usual suspects to press their gun-grabbing agenda. But this is a total red herring. For a start criminals will always get guns. As we saw in Australia the guns seized or handed in will belong to law-abiding citizens. Second, there is no correlation between legalised gun ownership and the murder rate. In fact if anything there’s an inverse correlation. Central American countries and all the ‘liberal’ hell-hole cities in the USA experience far higher rates of mass shootings despite their highly restrictive gun laws. One of the worst school shootings in history occurred in Scotland where it’s very hard to acquire a gun legally. Meanwhile almost every family in Switzerland owns a gun yet the country has one of the world’s lowest murder rates.

Nonetheless the fault lines in American ‘society’ now run deep. There was a time when men took pride in things, in protecting family and community. But most now sense, even if dimly, the growth of evil everywhere. God has been driven from the public domain and increasingly from the private space as well, depravity of every form is celebrated, criminals are cossetted, the economy hollowed out, poverty increases while parasites add billions to their wealth every year. The White middle class, the backbone of the country, gets remorselessly harried and dispossessed, elections get stolen, the Constitution is ignored. And the guilty are never held to account. Which makes this report by an Unz Review commentator both understandable and shocking. “By the time 2014 rolled around, ALL schools in our area had been retrofitted (and new schools designed with) buzz-in systems, where you could not walk into the school without being buzzed in by the front office. Parents would literally have to give their name, the name of their student, and the reason for their visit. You would sit outside and wait a couple minutes while the administration and staff verified that your student was a real student at the school. Once inside, the only place accessible to any visitor was the front office. There was bulletproof glass and / or heavy locked doors leading to all other areas of the school, and this was at multiple schools throughout the years that my son attended. All schools were designed this way!” Guns don’t lead to this. A broken society, a country at war with itself, does. There is no longer a ‘we’ in America. And this didn’t happen organically, it was done deliberately and with great care by way of a project begun nearly a century ago. Project Diversity. And now it’s in overdrive and is in my opinion irreversible.

Of course there was the usual abundance of claims dismissing the shooting as a false flag, that there were no bodies, all were crisis actors etc. I keep an open mind but nothing I’ve seen or read indicates this to be true. Of course TPTB have a vested interest in seeing as much blood-letting as possible as it strengthens their case for the withdrawal of the 2A, i.e. to disarm law-abiding citizens. But this is a long way from saying that the whole thing was a set-up. The likeliest explanation to my mind is that an army of psychologically damaged men has been pumped up with God-knows-what psychotropic drugs (the CIA has been at this for more than fifty years) and let loose on the public. Time-bombs waiting to explode while ‘law enforcement’ looks the other way or, God help us all, trigger the event. The Uvalde shooter, despite being known to police as a serious threat to public safety (he openly boasted of his plans to shoot up the school!) was nonetheless able to buy a semi-automatic weapon without a problem. LIHOP is the likeliest explanation, as this case suggests. There’s also the issue of misinformation. Almost everything officially reported about this incident was subsequently proven to be false. Why was this? Does anyone know? And why the subsequent lack of interest from the media about the numerous conflicting reports? Speaking of which, isn’t it amazing how the Las Vegas massacre, one of the worst if not the worst mass shootings in American history, has fallen off the radar? Like as if the order went out to drop the subject, the way they used do in the USSR. Finally, why was a SWAT team not called from nearby San Antonio, about ten minutes up the road during the 40 minutes that the cops on the scene stood idly by? Incredible, isn’t it?

My final suggestion is that gun control is but one part of the agenda enabled by mass shootings. They also build up an atmosphere of fear and mutual mistrust, justify ever-increasing surveillance and repressive measures, enable circumventing the Constitution while weakening rules of evidence and the capacity to publicly question the authorities.

America will never again see a society where nobody gave a second thought when kids brought guns to school to practice sharp-shooting after classes finished. That America is long gone, never to return.

 

IRISH SAVANT: A puzzling question answered

A puzzling question answered

Posted by By Savant June 10, 2022

http://www.irishsavant.net/?p=2195

There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth at this chimpout on the NY subway whereby women were terrorised by a wildin’ jogger. Horrified commentators demanded to know why “real men” on the train didn’t come to their assistance. Even Douglas Murray took the opportunity to blast ‘demasculinised’ men for their inactivity. Now that’s a bit strange coming from Douglas, being as he is a poofter of some renown. But he was but one part of a horrified chorus asking broadly the same question.

Well as luck would have I think I can be of help here. For a start the number of real men has declined significantly, a fact supported by the collapse of male testosterone levels in America by a staggering 30% since 1980. Whether or not Serena Williams took it all is irrelevant, the fact is that today’s male is on average a much-reduced specimen in terms of, well, toxic masculinity, compared to his counterpart of forty years ago. By the way I’ve written extensively on this phenomenon in the old blog and am certain that the decline was masterminded as a byproduct of Agenda 2030.

However let us assume the presence of one ‘real man’ in the carriage. Let us further assume that this real man has his head screwed on. That being the case he’ll be well aware that rescuing the damsel in distress places him in a no-win situation. For a start, this being NY he will, as a law-abiding citizen, be unarmed. The same constraint does not apply to the guy chimping out. So by intervening he runs the serious risk of being knifed or shot. He also knows that were he to somehow disable the attacker he’d be in a heap of trouble. You see the attacker is black and the white knight will inevitably be White. You won’t get black passengers preventing a brutha’ havin’ his way with a White beetch. Can you just imagines what a black Affirmative Action DA, advised by slimy lawyers (whose names end in “stein” or “berg”) would do with that? The rescuer knows: The perp will walk while he finds himself up on a charge of “excessive force with racist overtones”. It will be classed as “White vigilantism” and nothing – nothing – scares the effete urban nation-wreckers more than that. Quite likely the perp would not alone walk but get compensation while the white knight gets fined or even jailed. And what of the victim’s gratitude? Don’t take that for granted. The unfathomable convolutions of the female mind are such that she’d likely turn on the rescuer and side with her attacker. Just ask any man who has intervened in a case of domestic violence if you doubt me.

Any would-be rescuer would also wonder why the new empowered woman would need help from a man. A White man at that. Remember the lady who claimed she needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle? We’re all equal now. You asked for equality sister and this is what it’s like. Chivalry is dead, sisters, and feminism killed it. Which in itself raises the question as to why the women in the carriage also stood by during the attack. Why didn’t the equal sisters do their sisterly duty in the face of such gross toxic masculinity? It’s a good question and the only conclusion we can draw is that strong empowered independent women want the benefits of equality but not the downsides. Which is why you see so few women working as miners or block-layers.

1950s America

In the final analysis pervasive societal decay underlies this dismal spectacle. In 1950s America that jogger would have been taken down in the blink of an eye. But that was then, this is now. In the USA and indeed in most White countries what had hitherto been socially cohesive societies are no longer socially cohesive or even societies in any meaningful sense. There is no longer a ‘we’ – instead there’s a fractious, atomised mutually-hostile collection of races and cultures with the core population driven into imminent minority status, discriminated against in terms of employment, education, law enforcement and freedom of expression while their heritage gets endlessly trashed by the political, media and academic establishments. And of course berated for their ‘White privilege’ (once known as ‘working for a living’) which when you unpack it means being held responsible for the acts of your ancestors by blacks who accept no responsibility even for the acts of their own children!

Yet they are forced to sustain a vast and rapidly-growing parasitic welfare class which gets goaded by the nation-wreckers into believing that they are in fact the victims of their unwitting benefactors. Everything is now upside-down, subject to Satanic Inversion. Men become women, women are men, depravity is celebrated, art and music become travesties of their previous forms, maths and science are ‘racist’ because blacks can’t master them. How can Whites, White men in particular, invest themselves in such an abomination? But by withdrawing they are unwittingly hastening national suicide, or more accurately national murder, the murderers being a people who have themselves never fitted in anywhere and whose only real threat comes from a cohesive resistance of blood-and-soil-bound heritage Americans.

So sorry ladies. You asked – and voted – for this. No longer our struggle.

 

 

 

Points that Putin Apologists Miss

by Amir Taheri
April 10, 2022 at 4:00 am

• The second charge related to NATO's alleged rush to included Ukraine, or what [Professor John] Mearsheimer calls "reckless expansion", provoked Putin is equally absurd.

• For almost two decades, Russia made no objection to NATO enlargement that included former members of the Warsaw Pact. Under Putin, Russia even concluded a deal for cooperation with NATO on issues of mutual security with the Helsinki Accords as historic reference. In 2002, Putin met NATO Secretary-General George (Lord) Robinson and quipped that "maybe it is time NATO invited Russia to become a member."

• In NATO's 2008 Bucharest summit, both Georgia and Ukraine expressed the desire to apply for membership but were quietly told not to submit formal applications. The undeclared reason was the persistence of irredentist problems both had with Russia. Putin interpreted that as a rebuff to Kiev and Tbilisi by NATO and invaded Georgia, snatching South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

• What would Putin do if China invaded Russia to regain control of territory that was once Chinese?

• If we accept that what once belonged to one state can never belong to another, Crimea must be handed over to Turkey as successor to the Ottoman caliphate....

What would Russian President Vladimir Putin do if China invaded Russia to regain control of territory that was once Chinese? If we accept that what once belonged to one state can never belong to another, Crimea must be handed over to Turkey as successor to the Ottoman caliphate, or, even better, the Tatar khans who ruled it before the Ottomans. Pictured: Putin (L) and Chinese President Xi Jinping meet in Beijing on February 4, 2022. (Photo by Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images)

Who do you think is to blame for the war in Ukraine?

For the Blame-America-International the answer is simple: the culprit is the United States.

At one end of the Blame-America International (BAI), we find usual suspects such as the Khomeinist mullahs, the Sudanese and Burmese jackboots, the Maoists of Eritrea, the Assad clan in Damascus and the bad boys of Belarus. These one could dismiss if only because their mercenary status is clear.

It is at the other end of the spectrum that one finds a potentially more dangerous narrative at a time that what is euphemistically referred to as the world order is facing its biggest challenge since World War II. For here we find individuals and groups that try to use, or rather abuse, such labels as "public intellectuals" and/ or "elder statesmen" to legitimize Vladimir Putin's invasion.

That narrative is peddled by people like former UK Foreign Secretary David Lord Owen, professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, French presidential candidates Marine Le Pen, Éric Zemmour and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, British columnist Peter Hitchens, and a string of lesser known figures in Europe and the United States.

They all build their narrative around three charges.

The first is that Putin and his Russia must be seen as victims of the United States' insatiable quest for global hegemony by constantly trying to downgrade Russia's status.

The second is that, by trying to include Ukraine in its ranks, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) posed a direct threat to Russia's national security, a threat that no Russian leader could ignore.

The third is that Ukrainian leaders, prompted by Washington, refused to recognize Russia's right to "reintegrate" the Crimean Peninsula, a part of Russian homeland that Nikita Khrushchev, a Ukrainian chauvinist disguised as a Bolshevik, snatched away from Mother Russia.

As for the first charge, the opposite may be nearer to the truth.

Four successive US administrations starting with George WH Bush's went out of their way not only to soften the shock caused by the collapse of the Soviet Empire but also to recognize Russia as its legitimate successor with "superpower" status.

Although post-Soviet Russia was diminished in terms of demographic, economic, diplomatic and military power, all treaties and procedural agreements concluded with the USSR remained in force. The US worked closely with Moscow to smooth the difficult transition that Europe faced as the Warsaw Pact was dissolved and the European Union enlarged.

Anxious to keep Russia "on board," the US campaigned for Russia's membership of the G7 (which became G8) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), helped open global capital markets to Russia, and encouraged American businesses to heavily invest in developing the post-Soviet economy.

It is no exaggeration to suggest that the American stamp of approval played a key role in encouraging other foreign investment, especially European, followed by the biggest transfer of technology witnessed in Russian history.

The second charge related to NATO's alleged rush to included Ukraine, or what Mearsheimer calls "reckless expansion", provoked Putin is equally absurd.

To start with, NATO never invites any state to join. It is up to other states to apply for membership and, to this day, Ukraine has not done so and, if it did, it is clear that its application would be unacceptable under NATO's rules, which exclude any country with unresolved irredentist and/or other territorial disputes with any other nation.

For almost two decades, Russia made no objection to NATO enlargement that included former members of the Warsaw Pact. Under Putin, Russia even concluded a deal for cooperation with NATO on issues of mutual security, with the Helsinki Accords as historic reference. In 2002, Putin met NATO Secretary-General George (Lord) Robinson and quipped that "maybe it is time NATO invited Russia to become a member."

Robinson wasn't sure whether that was a serious approach or Russian black humor but reminded Putin that NATO never issues invitation but would consider applications.

In NATO's 2008 Bucharest summit, both Georgia and Ukraine expressed the desire to apply for membership but were quietly told not to submit formal applications. The undeclared reason was the persistence of irredentist problems both had with Russia. Putin interpreted that as a rebuff to Kiev and Tbilisi by NATO and invaded Georgia, snatching South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

The "provocation" charge is equally nonsensical.

However, even if there was provocation shouldn't one apportion blame between the provoker and the provoked? Isn't the rapist who claims he was provoked because his victim wore provocative dress at least as much to blame as the victim?

Without saying so, the pro-Putin chorus is advocating a new concept, that of limited sovereignty for countries that were once part of the Tsarist and/or Soviet empires. That concept would apply not only to Ukraine and Georgia but also to the Baltic republics and the Eastern European members of the defunct Warsaw Pact. In his latest rhetoric, Putin has extended that concept to Central Asian republics, Serbia, Macedonia, Kosovo and Albania in the Balkans.

More importantly, perhaps, should the "threat to national security" be regarded as an excuse exclusive to Vladimir Putin?

The Montevideo Convention of 1933-34, in its Article 8, stipulated that "no state has the right to intervene in the internal and external affairs of another." Later, it became a fundamental principle of the United Nations and the world order that has shaped the global system for seven decades.

Mercifully, not even Éric Zemmour repeats Putin's absurd claim that Ukraine is governed by neo-Nazis, implying that the current war is a sequel to World War II.

However, the claim that Ukraine's refusal to accept the loss of Crimea, and presumably also of Donbas, left Putin with no choice but to invade is equally questionable. What would Putin do if China invaded Russia to regain control of territory that was once Chinese?

If we accept that what once belonged to one state can never belong to another, Crimea must be handed over to Turkey as successor to the Ottoman caliphate, or, even better, the Tatar khans who ruled it before the Ottomans. As for Donbas and chunks of southern Russia returning to "original owners", this means the revival of the Cossack state that once controlled both.

It is a pity, not to say a shame, that hatred for America has led so many otherwise sane people to endorse Putin's authorship of a great tragedy.

Amir Taheri was the executive editor-in-chief of the daily Kayhan in Iran from 1972 to 1979. He has worked at or written for innumerable publications, published eleven books, and has been a columnist for Asharq Al-Awsat since 1987.

This article was originally published by Asharq al-Awsat and is reprinted by kind permission of the author.

 

 

 

China Accelerates Nuclear Buildup, Military Modernization; Biden Speeding U.S. to Defeat

by Judith Bergman
May 9, 2022 at 5:00 am

• "The PRC likely intends to have at least 1,000 warheads by 2030, exceeding the pace and size the DoD projected in 2020." — Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China 2021, US Dept. of Defense.

• "In space, China is putting up satellites at twice the rate of the United States and "fielding operational systems at an incredible rate." — General David Thompson, the Space Force's first vice chief of space operations, quoted in The Washington Post, November 30, 2021.

• "Look at what they [CCP) have today.... We're witnessing one of the largest shifts in global geostrategic power that the world has witnessed." — General Mark Milley, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, breakingdefense.com, November 4, 2021.

• "[T]he Chinese are building up their military capabilities in space, cyberspace, and in the conventional force. It's all happening at the same time." — Timothy Heath, senior international and defense researcher at Rand Corporation, Business Insider, January 4, 2022.

• "To fully assess the China threat, it is also necessary to consider the capability of the associated delivery system, command and control, readiness, posture, doctrine and training. By these measures, China is already capable of executing any plausible nuclear employment strategy within their region and will soon be able to do so at intercontinental ranges as well." ­­ — Admiral Charles Richard, Commander of U.S. Strategic Command, Senate Committee on Armed Services, April 20, 2021.

• There is now as well the added probability of China and Russia engaging in military coordination.... a strategic partnership of "no limits" and with "no forbidden areas" in an agreement that they said was aimed at countering the influence of the United States.

• This cooperation has already seen China undermining Western sanctions on Russia and supplying Russian President Vladimir Putin with the lifeline he needs to continue his war in Ukraine.

• "The friendship between the two peoples is iron clad." — Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Associated Press, March 7, 2022.

• "For the first time in our history, the nation is on a trajectory to face two nuclear-capable, strategic peer adversaries at the same time, who must be deterred differently." ­­ — Admiral Charles Richard, Senate Committee on Armed Services, April 20, 2021.

• [T]his is NOT the time for the US to cancel the sea-launched nuclear cruise missile (SLCM-N), as President Joe Biden plans to do.

• Meanwhile, Biden's proposed defense budget risks speeding the US to defeat by insufficiently taking into account the current skyrocketing inflation, as acknowledged in early April by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Pentagon comptroller Mike McCord. "This budget assumes an inflation rate of 2.2%, which is obviously incorrect because it's almost 8%," said Milley. "Because the budget was produced quite a while ago, those calculations were made prior to the current inflation rate."

• "Nearly every dollar of increase in this budget will be eaten by inflation. Very little, if anything, will be left over to modernize and grow capability." — Representative Mike Rogers, (R-Ala.) House Armed Services Committee, Defense News, April 5, 2022.

The accelerating pace of China's nuclear buildup is concerning in itself, but even more so given that the military buildup constitutes just one, but significant, part of China's general military buildup and modernization. Pictured: DF-17 hypersonic missiles at a military parade in Beijing, China, on October 1, 2019. (Photo by Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

When the Pentagon assessed China's nuclear arsenal in its annual report to Congress on China's military power in November 2020, it projected that China's nuclear warhead stockpile, which the Pentagon then estimated to be in the low 200s, would "at least double in size" over the next decade. The Pentagon also estimated that China was "pursuing" a "nuclear triad", meaning a combination of land-, sea- and air-based nuclear capabilities.

Just one year later, in November 2021, the Pentagon found itself acknowledging that China's nuclear buildup was taking place at an astonishing speed, with the nuclear warhead stockpile now possibly quadrupling from the estimated low 200s in 2020 over the next decade:

"The accelerating pace of the PRC's nuclear expansion may enable the PRC to have up to 700 deliverable nuclear warheads by 2027. The PRC likely intends to have at least 1,000 warheads by 2030, exceeding the pace and size the DoD projected in 2020."

In addition, China is no longer merely "pursuing" a nuclear triad but appears to have already achieved the basics of it:

"The PRC has possibly already established a nascent 'nuclear triad' with the development of a nuclear-capable air-launched ballistic missile (ALBM) and improvement of its ground and sea-based nuclear capabilities."

China, according to the report, is also "constructing the infrastructure necessary to support this force expansion, including increasing its capacity to produce and separate plutonium by constructing fast breeder reactors and reprocessing facilities," while "building hundreds of new ICBM silos, and is on the cusp of a large silo-based ICBM force expansion comparable to those undertaken by other major powers."

The accelerating pace of China's nuclear buildup is concerning in itself, but even more so given that the military buildup constitutes just one, but significant, part of China's general military buildup and modernization. Last summer, for instance, China tested its first hypersonic weapon. In space, China is putting up satellites at twice the rate of the United States and "fielding operational systems at an incredible rate," according to General David Thompson, the Space Force's first vice chief of space operations. China and Russia's combined in-orbit space assets grew approximately 70% in just two years, following a more than 200% increase between 2015 and 2018 according to Kevin Ryder, Defense Intelligence Agency senior analyst for space and counterspace in the U.S.

According to General Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff:

"If you look at, again, 40 years ago, they had zero satellites...They had no ICBMs...They had no nuclear weapons... They had no fourth or fifth-generation fighters or even more advanced fighters, back then... They had no navy...They had no sub-force. Look at what they have today... So if you look at the totality, this test [of a hypersonic weapon] that occurred a couple weeks ago, is only one of a much, much broader picture of a military capability with respect to the Chinese. That is very, very significant. We're witnessing one of the largest shifts in global geostrategic power that the world has witnessed."

According to Timothy Heath, a senior international and defense researcher at the Rand Corporation think tank:

"It's important to see the modernizing nuclear arsenal as part of the bigger picture, in which the Chinese are building up their military capabilities in space, cyberspace, and in the conventional force. It's all happening at the same time."

On April 20, 2021, U.S. Strategic Command's chief Admiral Charles Richard made it clear in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee that China is no longer a lesser nuclear threat than Russia:

"While China's nuclear stockpile is currently smaller (but undergoing an unprecedented expansion) than those fielded by Russia and the United States, the size of a nation's weapons stockpile is a crude measure of its overall strategic capability. To fully assess the China threat, it is also necessary to consider the capability of the associated delivery system, command and control, readiness, posture, doctrine and training. By these measures, China is already capable of executing any plausible nuclear employment strategy within their region and will soon be able to do so at intercontinental ranges as well. They are no longer a 'lesser included case of the pacing nuclear threat, Russia." (Emphasis in original).

China's nuclear acceleration is not all, however. There is now as well the added probability of China and Russia engaging in military coordination: In February, the two powers declared that they were entering into a strategic partnership of "no limits" and with "no forbidden areas" in an agreement that they said was aimed at countering the influence of the United States.

This cooperation has already seen China undermining Western sanctions on Russia and supplying Russian President Vladimir Putin with the lifeline he needs to continue his war in Ukraine. China has not only supplied material support through a variety of deals with Russia, it has also refrained from condemning Russia's invasion and has criticized the sanctions.

In March, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi called Russia the "most important strategic partner" for China.

"No matter how perilous the international landscape, we will maintain our strategic focus and promote the development of a comprehensive China-Russia partnership in the new era... The friendship between the two peoples is iron clad."

On April 19, China reassured Russia that it will continue to increase "strategic coordination."

China-Russia cooperation is going to affect US strategic deterrence. Admiral Richard told the Senate Armed Services Committee in early March that the US needs to have plans for scenarios in which the two powers cooperate militarily, adding:

"I'm very concerned about what opportunistic aggression looks like. I'm worried about what cooperative aggression looks like... We do not know the endpoints of where either of those other two are going either in capability or capacity. We're just now starting to work out what three-party stability looks like, what three-party deterrence dynamic works out."

In his April 20, 2021 testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Richard said:

"For the first time in our history, the nation is on a trajectory to face two nuclear-capable, strategic peer adversaries at the same time, who must be deterred differently. We can no longer assume the risk of strategic deterrence failure in conflict will always remain low."

In the light of China's accelerating nuclear buildup -- and the nuclear threat that Russia poses with its thousands of tactical nuclear weapons -- this is NOT the time for the US to cancel the sea-launched nuclear cruise missile (SLCM-N), as President Joe Biden plans to do.

The missile, according to the Wall Street Journal, "is considered a 'tactical' nuclear weapon that has a lower yield than 'strategic' options and might be used on battlefield targets. The missile could be launched from submarines or destroyers" and "is needed to deter Russia and others" and, according to the article, would also be useful "in dissuading China from using a nuke on Taiwan, without the longer and fraught debate of, say, putting American nuclear weapons on Japanese soil... [and] reduce proliferation at a volatile moment."

The acceleration of China's nuclear and military modernization, and the new situation of tri-polar deterrence that the U.S. finds itself in for the first time, necessitate increases in US military research and development, acquisition and procurement. Meanwhile, Biden's proposed defense budget risks speeding the US to defeat by insufficiently taking into account the current skyrocketing inflation, as acknowledged in early April by Gen. Milley, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Pentagon comptroller Mike McCord. "This budget assumes an inflation rate of 2.2%, which is obviously incorrect because it's almost 8%," Milley noted. "Because the budget was produced quite a while ago, those calculations were made prior to the current inflation rate."

"Nearly every dollar of increase in this budget will be eaten by inflation," Representative Mike Rogers (R-Ala), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said. "Very little, if anything, will be left over to modernize and grow capability."

Judith Bergman, a columnist, lawyer and political analyst, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute.