Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Author: Nat Wilson Turner Page 1 of 2

Interregnum of Unreality 2008-???

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On September 16, 2025

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By Nat Wilson Turner

I would like to propose that the United States and associated English language information sphere remain in what I call The Interregnum of Unreality, which I posit kicked off in 2008.

It’s tempting to declare us in a new regime, given Trump’s re-election and seeming consolidation of power, which has seen him bring the Silicon Valley companies and much of the MSM onside.

But I think it’s more useful to think of Trump’s second term as merely a change in management for the pre-existing apparatus of control, which seeks total information dominance via traditional and social media.

Until the pillars of American power (the dollar as reserve currency and the perception of American military primacy) fall, the Interegnum continues.

Symptoms include this and this.

And monsters flourish in interregnums. It was the interregnum between the Russian defeats of 1904 and the final fall of Nicolas II in 1917 that produced Rasputin after all.

Until or unless the United States openly goes through the financial crash, market crash, and admits we are back in recession (or Depression), The Interregnum of Unreality will continue.

The Interregnum of Unreality kicked off when Obama’s administration and Bernanke’s Fed elected to keep the markets and economy going via massive Quantitative Easing rather than structural reform of the markets that failed under Bush and Obama.

It was paired with a change in geostrategic tactics. No new boots on the ground invasions, although the Iraq and Afghanistan occupancies were maintained as long as possible.

Instead, Obama preferred no-fingerprints regime changes (Egypt, Tunisia, Ukraine, etc) or proxy wars  (Syria, Ukraine). He also happily accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for essentially not being GW Bush, even while continuing and expanding on many of Bush’s worst policies (surveillance, drones, etc).

A new era will also require the undeniable end of the United States’ pretense to be the global military hyperpower, capable of facing China, Russia, and Iran simultaneously while brutally dominating the Western Hemisphere.

Obama inaugurated a style of total information dominance completely removed from actual policies or outcomes. He built on the media strategies pioneered for John F. Kennedy: slick TV and print media packages with Obama as the inspiring figurehead.

They initially ran wild with social media, unleashing it on the Arab world in 2011 and rapidly realizing more control was required.

After Trump’s election win in 2016, Obama and the Democrats moved to set up a Silicon Valley censorship regime, sending RussiaGate ringleader Mark Warner to Twitter and other companies to let them know that if Adam Schiff wanted an account removed it would be removed.

The “Resistance” to Trump in his first term included much genuine grassroots opposition but was headed by resistance from the Deep State, the MSM, and the online monopolies.

Biden attempted to expand on the total information control, but since he was as charisma-challenged as Obama was blessed and the wheels came off of so many of his policies mid-term, the Democrats lost control of the machine along with their credibility.

Biden was Benedict to Obama’s John Paul 2.

The MSM and Silicon Valley have moved into Trump’s camp (or been bought and destroyed by Trump’s backers like CBS News).

I suspect one of the reasons for our Interregnum of Unreality is caution on the part of America’s major ops who don’t want to provoke a suicidal attack from the dying eagle.

The Interregnum of Unreality (2008-?) is one in which The Empire can suffer enormous, humiliating defeats in what is basically the WW3 preseason, but it cannot be openly, undeniably revealed to the populace of the US that we are no longer the world’s dominant military power.

It’s why pausing the 12 Day War was so critical. It was essential for everyone to temporarily de-escalate things before someone got nuked.

Now Bibi’s Qatar attack is another instance of possibly self-destructive overreach. Poor Ukraine is losing out on the narrative control as it’s slowly strangled by the Russian python, which has little interest in conquering territory and every interest in drawing the UAF into bloody battles that are slowly but surely demilitarizing Ukraine, their stated goal in the SMO.

In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, we’re seeing the Trump administration moving to expand its power ala the post 9/11 frenzy which produced the Patriot Act, mass surveillance, the Afghan and Iraq wars.

But because someone like Kash Patel has nothing like the control of the apparatus of state power that say, John Ashcroft enjoyed in 2002, we’re seeing a kind of keystone cops clampdown so far.

ICE is similarly limited to self-defeating debacles despite the much more capable Stephen Miller essentially having the funding to rebuild it from the ground up.

I argued at NakedCapitalism that this clampdown might not go according to plan, but I expect things to blunder along until one or both bubbles (economic or military) pop.

Explaining Ukraine To Your Uncle: The Causes of the War

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On November 26, 2024

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Now that even the Council on Foreign Relations is admitting Ukraine can’t and won’t win its war against Russia, there might be some serious cognitive dissonance for people who’ve not been paying much attention and bought into the official narrative on the war.

If you find yourself faced with the proverbial ignorant uncle at Thanksgiving this year and want to appear fact-based rather than conspiratorial, maybe the following round up of links and sources about the beginnings of the war will help.

It’s bad enough that hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in a losing and pointless effort, but it’s important to rebut the narrative that Russia was the aggressor and not NATO and the US.

The work of researcher Ivan Katchanovski is definitive and completely debunks the official US narrative on the Maidan Revolution:

His work was vindicated in a Ukrainian court in 2024.

Uncle Ignorance should also familiarize himself with the names Stephan Bandera & Yaroslav Hunka. Bandera has been regarded as the “Father of Ukraine” since 2014. Hunka is a Ukrainian SS veteran who received a standing ovation at a session of the Canadian Parliament last year.

That’s not to even get into the consensus reality that NATO expansion backed Putin into a corner and that US foreign policy legend George Kennan called it “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”

The Brookings Institute 1999 history of the post-Cold War efforts to enlarge NATO will read like “Russian propaganda” to anyone whose knowledge of the war came from MSNBC starting from a blank slate in 2022.

Also, your Uncle will want to be beaten about the head and shoulder with this 2008 confidential cable from current head of the CIA and then US ambassador to Russia, William Burns who strongly opposed Bush & Cheney’s offer to invite Ukraine into NATO (revealed by Wikileaks.)

Also the story of the Ukrainian Civil War from 2014 to 2022 has been systematically mistold.

Key graphic which shows how Ukraine dramatically upped their shelling of civilians in the independent republics just prior to Russia’s invasion — forcing Putin’s hand.

Graph of explosions per month in Ukraine from 2014 to 2022.

Source:The Special Monitoring Mission of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE SMM)

Uncle “Ukraine Is Heroically Resisting Aggression” will also want to learn all about the horrific mass murder of anti-Maidan counter-protestors in Odessa in 2014 that is VERY well known in Russia and Ukraine and almost completely unknown in the US.

Norwegian Professor Glenn Dieson has a fine piece explaining “How the Strategy of Fighting to the Last Ukrainian Was Sold to the Public as Morally Righteous..”

Here’s a sample quote from his piece:

For almost three years, NATO countries have boycotted diplomatic contacts with Russia, even as hundreds of thousands of men have died on the battlefield. The decision by diplomats to reject diplomacy is morally repugnant as diplomacy could have reduced the excess of violence, prevented escalation, and even resulted in a path to peace. However, the political-media elites skilfully sold the rejection of diplomacy to the public as evidence of their moral righteousness.

This article will first outline how NATO planned for a long war to exhaust Russia and knock it out from the ranks of great powers. Second, this article will demonstrate how the political-media elites communicated that diplomacy is treasonous and war is virtuous.

This is just scratching the surface but essentially for those who been exclusively following US & UK media, everything they know about Ukraine is wrong.

Enjoy those awkward conversations around the table!

Democrats will not adapt to this defeat

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On November 6, 2024

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There won’t be any introspection.

Empires, like fortunes, are lost slowly and then all at once.

I’m afraid what is coming is going to fall on every American fairly equally like the snow on the graveyard at the end of James Joyce’s “The Dead”

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Democrats who have themselves not yet fallen into precarity or the economic abyss can not and will not accept that our system is completely rotten and we need to change course and leadership.
It took the GOP from 2008 to 2016 to admit that the Reagan/Bush playbook and leadership class was bankrupt and had to go.
It will likely take multiple election cycles before some figure or movement arises that can win a Democratic primary. And given that the Democrats have a long and proud history of sabotaging the most popular and most likely to win the general election candidates it might require a whole new party emerging.
Democrats had their chance at a new direction and likely multiple administrations and an even longer dominance of the Congress with Bernie Sanders but rejected the clear will of the overwhelming majority of the young voters of their party.
Those young voters are drifting away in multiple directions.
Of my comfortably retired upper-middle classic acquaintances none are even willing to admit publicly (some will in private) that the Democrats make poor tactical choices, much less admit that the whole party and every individual needs to really re-evaluate their approach and even core beliefs.
Trump is at least a wild card which presents some chance of positive change, but the odds of radically negative change are much higher.
Regardless, the status-quo has been thoroughly rejected by the majority of the American public.
That is a fact people need to accept in order to try and steer that majority in the least self-destructive direction possible.
It’s unfortunate that the members of professional-managerial class (and those of us who have pretensions to it) have never truly accepted the idea of majority rule.
We’re going to lose a war in humiliating fashion — with an outside chance that it will be over quickly — which will trigger economic collapse (and that’s if we don’t start nuking people).
Then and only then will our ruling elites turn on each other in something that will be like a post-modern parody of the first American Civil War.
Hopefully it’ll be over in 5-7 years and some of us will be alive to adjust to the new normal and enjoy a few decades of relative peace as we adjust to penury, plagues, and rapidly worsening climate change.
Jonathan Cook had some good observations:

Kamala Harris didn’t lose because she’s a woman or because she’s black.

She lost because, if your political and media system – rigged by donors – limits the choice to two hardline neoliberal candidates, with anything else denounced as “communism”, the most hardline, neoliberal candidate has an edge.

Over time, the system keeps moving further to the hardline, neoliberal right. You can’t stop that relentless shift by voting for one of the two symptoms of your diseased political system.

You have to rise up against the diseased system itself.

As did Freddie de Boer:

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Jill Stein.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Putin and the Russians.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Bernie Sanders and his supporters.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Joe Rogan.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Glenn Greenwald and The Young Turks.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on the decision to run with Tim Walz.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on the New York Times and its occasional Democrat-skeptical opinion pieces.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Joe Biden for getting out of the race too late.

You can’t pull all the usual Democrat tricks. You have to actually figure out what’s wrong with your party, root and branch. Because you called the guy a fascist, again, and he walked right through that insult to the Oval Office, again. And the eternal question presents itself: what are you going to do about it?

Postliberalism, Liberal Apogee, Routine Elite Failure and Then?

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On October 23, 2024

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I was alerted to Nathan Pinkoski’s “Actually Existing Postliberalism,” by N.S. Lyons’ response “The Post-Cold War Apotheosis of Liberal Managerialism,” and enjoyed both tremendously.

Pinkosi’s piece is an excellent short history of the public-private partnership currently aiming for absolute global cultural control via the weaponization of finance that he calls postliberalism.

I thought it would be fun to excerpt all the times Antony Blinken’s name appears in the piece.

First mention:

When Bill Clinton took office, he continued the pursuit of openness. In 1993, he ratified NAFTA and relaxed the ban on homosexuals in the military. However, he made it clear that the old liberalism was not enough. Eager to extend the reach of democracy and confront foreign enemies who stood in its way, his administration developed new tools to advance America’s global power. In September, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake outlined a new paradigm. His speech, “From Containment to Enlargement,” bespeaks a political revolution. It provided the blueprint not only for the foreign policy agenda of nearly every U.S. president since then, but for the convictions of every right-thinking person. Lake’s speechwriter was Anthony (sic) Blinken.

Second mention:

After Biden was sworn in as president, his administration shelved a plan to overhaul sanctions policy. A consensus held that if the kinks of the past could be worked out, then the Americans and Europeans had all the weapons in place to launch a devastating financial first strike against their preferred targets. Planning began in the first year of the new administration, with Secretary Blinken’s State Department taking the lead. So by February 2022, just as the Russian invasion of Ukraine faltered, the arrangements were already in place. The strategic possibilities seemed limitless. Russia could be brought to its knees; Putin would follow in the ignominious footsteps of ­Milosevic and Gaddafi.

The execution of the strike was dazzling. The scale, especially the involvement of SWIFT and the targeting of Russia’s central bank, caught the Kremlin by surprise. It was ­Barbarossa for the twenty-­first century. Yet the first strike did not yield the promised results. Nor did the second, third, or fourth. Putin’s approval ratings soared, Russia’s industrial output increased, and its military continues to grind away at the Ukrainian army. Despite implementing nearly 6,000 sanctions in two-plus years, the euphoria of spring 2022 (let alone that of the holiday parties of 2011) is long gone. Although American policymakers have said again and again that they have mobilized a global coalition against Russia that has left the country isolated, that is not the case. The map of the countries that have imposed sanctions on Russia closely resembles the map of the countries that have legalized same-sex marriage. Economic warfare against Russia has exposed the limits of the global American empire.

Lyons applauds Pinkoski’s essay but rejects the notion that this is a revolution against liberalism — instead, it is its apogee.

Sadly, he doesn’t mention Blinken, but he does elaborate on the frightening ambition of this movement:

The managerial ideal is the perfect frictionless mass of totally liberated (that is, totally deracinated and atomized) individuals, totally contained within the loving arms of the singular unity of the managerial state. To achieve its utopia of perfect liberty and equality, liberalism requires perfect control.

This ideal is, of course, the very essence of totalitarianism. Yet if we wonder why the distinction between public and private has everywhere collapsed into “the fusion of state and society, politics and economics,” this is the most fundamental reason why. Perhaps, for that matter, this is also why the U.S. and EU now habitually sponsor LGBT groups in Hungary or India, and finance human-trafficking “human rights” NGOs in Central America and the Mediterranean: because managerialism’s blind crusade to crush any competing spheres of social power has gone global.

In response, a comforting tonic from The Archdruid, John Michael Greer at Ecosophia, whose reader “Dave” asks him:

I’ve noticed a growing and extremely worrying trend of the “elites” of politics and entertainment pursuing reckless and (to me) clearly wrong courses of actions that blow up in their faces, and then instead of honestly looking at the situation they’ve had a large hand in creating and doing a mea culpa, either doubling down and getting mad at regular people when they’re less keen to do what the elites tell them, or trying something else without ever really honestly accounting for their mistakes. The actions remind me of signs of elite collapse that this blog has talked about for years now and it’s very surreal and worrying to see happening in real time. What is going on and why can’t the “elites”, the people with access to more data and resources and advisers than anyone else, seem to realize what’s going wrong? Do they not care or are their actions part of a larger plan, not to sound conspiratorial?

Greer’s response was just what I needed to hear:

Dave, I don’t think that it’s any kind of plan. Quite the contrary, this is normal elite failure, the thing that comes right before an elite replacement crisis. Just as the capitalist elite of the 1920s crashed and burned, and was replaced by a managerial elite in the 1930s and 1940s, the managerial elite of the 2010s is crashing and burning, and will be replaced by an entrepreneurial elite in the 2020s and 2030s. The entitled cluelessness of a class that has remained in power too long is a familiar thing; comparisons to French aristocrats just before the French Revolution also come to mind.

Although, honestly if this means that Elon Musk and company are going to win what Chris Hedges calls “The Choice Between Corporate and Oligarchic Power”…eek!

Kamala Harris, anointed by the richest Democratic Party donors without receiving a single primary vote, is the face of corporate power. Donald Trump is the buffoonish mascot for the oligarchs. This is the split within the ruling class. It is a civil war within capitalism played out on the political stage. The public is little more than a prop in an election where neither party will advance their interests or protect their rights.

And what do the oligarchs want?

Warlord capitalism seeks the total eradication of all impediments to the accumulation of profits including regulations, laws and taxes. It makes its money by charging rent, by erecting toll booths to every service we need to survive and collecting exorbitant fees.

Trump’s cohort of Silicon Valley backers, led by Elon Musk, were what The New York Times writes, “finished with Democrats, regulators, stability, all of it. They were opting instead for the freewheeling, fortune-generating chaos that they knew from the startup world.” They planned to “plant devices in people’s brains, replace national currencies with unregulated digital tokens, [and] replace generals with artificial intelligence systems.”

As much as I eagerly anticipate the long-overdue fall of our current elite, I truly dread what’s coming up in their wake.

Germany Honors Biden For Destroying Nordstream & Their Economy

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On October 19, 2024

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I cannot believe this is happening:

Germany honored U.S. President Joe Biden for his contribution to trans-Atlantic relations on Friday, ahead of his meetings with European allies on Russia’s war in Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East.

TIME Magazine: Germany Honors Biden for His Contribution to Trans-Atlantic Ties as the U.S. Election Looms

Germany Honors Biden for His Contribution to Trans-Atlantic Ties as the U.S. Election Looms

The sheer delight the pathetic “Traffic Light” coalition government takes in abasing itself before the US hegemon is pornographic in its shameless indecency. Especially the same week that the Danes reported this:

Just days before the Nord Stream gas pipeline attack in September 2022, warships belonging to the U.S. Navy were on the scene and ordered nearby officials to keep away.

That is according to John Anker Nielsen, who is harbour master at Christiansø, the easternmost part of Denmark in the Baltic Sea, northeast of the island of Bornholm and close to the sites of the Nord Stream explosions.

Map showing the route of Nord Stream 1 and 2 in the southern Baltic Sea and location of the leaks. AWZ=Exclusive Economic Zone
Map: AFP / Nadine EHRENBERG, adapted

Nielsen late last month told a reporter at Politiken, a major Danish daily, that he went out with a rescue team four or five days before the blast to check on nearby ships with switched-off radios, suspecting there might have been an accident, only to find U.S. warships, whose staff ordered the team to turn back immediately.

Never forget Biden threatened Nordstream:

Biden: If Russia invades uh that means tanks or troops crossing the uh the border of Ukraine again then uh there will be uh we there will be no longer a Nordstream 2. We will bring an end to it.
Reporter: What? How would you how will you do that exactly since the project and control of the project is within Germany’s control?

Biden: We will. I promise you we’ll be able to do it.

and Nuland did it too. This video is still up on the State Department’s official Facebook page because they’re proud of it:

“If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”

And Never forget what Nuland said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on January 26, 2023:

“I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you [Ted Cruz] like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”

Blinken celebrated it as an economic opportunity:

“…ultimately this is also a tremendous opportunity.  It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs.  That’s very significant and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come…”

And then there was this from Anne “It’s Time to Prepare for a Ukrainian Victory” Applebaum’s husband who’s a Polish official:

Former Polish FM thanks US for damaging Nord Stream pipeline

The consequences of this have been the deindustrialization of Germany:

German industry increasingly struggles to compete on the world stage. Particularly hard hit are its mighty chemical and heavy industry sectors, which are now in rapid decline. One of the main drivers is policies that have made energy costs skyrocket, and there Germany serves as a canary in the coal mine for other leading industrial nations.

It’s kind of grimly amusing that Forbes’ use of the euphemism “policies that have made energy costs skyrocket” rather than say “self-defeating sanctions on cheap Russian gas combined with the biggest act of industrial sabotage in modern history” and it also doesn’t mention that it’s been America’s policies that have deindustrialized Germany.

It’s also so humiliating as an American that the neo-conservative cabal of psychopathic nitwits has been in sole control of US foreign policy since the Clinton administration and now they have a lock on US corporate media as well.

The above mentioned Anne Applebaum provided the perfect example of their delusion and idiocy with her September, 2022 prediction that Ukrainian victories in Kharkov would bring down Putin.

But that brings me back to Germany’s pathetic ruling coalition. This is how well they’ve done in recent state elections:

In the eastern states of Saxony and Thuringia, the far-right AfD received more than double as many votes as the three parties which make up the federal coalition government — the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), environmentalist Greens and neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP) — combined. These parties’ results are each in the single digits. The Greens in Thuringia and the FDP in both states even failed to meet the 5% threshold to be represented in the state parliaments.

And on the left:

A newly established populist party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), managed to score votes in the two-digit range in their very first election.

The German people are chomping at the bit to vote out the gang of traitors who have allowed the US to annihilate their economy.

Although in fairness, they also gave the last US President who walloped the Germany economy the same award:

“Biden received the highest class of Germany’s Order of Merit, which was also bestowed on former U.S. President George H.W. Bush for his support of German reunification.”

Kind of fitting that the era of American unipolarity is framed this way. Bush at the beginning. Biden at the end. The Germans footing the bill for American foreign policy.

 

 

 

The Senders stumble into the Terror Dome

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On October 1, 2024

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Soundtrack for this post.

William S. Burroughs postulated four political parties in his 1959 novel Naked Lunch: Liquefactionists, Senders, Divisionists, and Factualists.

Per Wiki:

The city is contested by four rival political parties: Liquefactionists, who want to merge everyone into one protoplasmic entity; Senders, who want to control everyone else through telepathy; Divisionists, who subdivide into replicas of themselves; and Factualists, who oppose the other three.

The Senders are a metaphor for mass media propaganda as practiced by Edward Bernays, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Goebbels, and American political consultants.

The Democrats and their allied Never Trumper Republicans are the heirs to this legacy.

The rise of the Internet, then the World Wide Web, and finally social media initially threw them for a loop and played a role in Trump taking over the G.O.P.

Their reaction was to impose a surveillance and censorship regime using the tech monopolies as bottlenecks:

Essentially the Biden administration’s communications policy has been to relentlessly and flagrantly spin, distort, lie

Unfortunately, combining surveillance and censorship with slick media campaigns using the power of celebrity to encourage supporters to form parasocial bonds with politicians is way too much power for anyone to handle.

Because there’s no way not to get high on your own supply.

As YouTuber History Legends said of the Ukrainian war effort:

The propaganda was too strong and too effective.

We have an entire army of NAFO trolls (on) Reddit and Twitter. People that believed 100% everything that was being said by Ukraine.

The Ukrainians will only show their successes to their population as if the Ukrainians are constantly winning.

At the same time we have a million Ukrainian men abroad. We have countless Ukrainian soldiers and enlisted personnel that are not at the front.

We have people in Kiev partying as if there’s no war happening.

The problem for Ukraine is that they haven’t managed to create (a) national feeling of it’s now or never. They always try to portray the war as ‘oh we’re winning. It’s fine.’

So everybody kind of kept their life going because everything is going well at the front but it’s not true and now it’s too late.

The disorientation goes to the top, as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s new piece for Foreign Policy illustrates.

The Biden administration’s strategy has put the United States in a much stronger geopolitical position today than it was four years ago. [Really??] But our work is unfinished. The United States must sustain its fortitude across administrations to shake the revisionists’ assumptions. It must be prepared for the revisionist states to deepen cooperation with one another to try to make up the difference. It must maintain its commitments to and the trust of its friends. And it must continue to earn the American people’s confidence in the power, purpose, and value of disciplined American leadership in the world.

Meanwhile, air alerts over Israel:

All of Israel is covered by air alerts

Eyeless in Gaza, indeed.

Ryan Grim tweets:

This is either a complete and total failure to contain the conflict by the Biden administration -- or this is what the White House wanted and it's the most egregious lie told to the public since WMD. Either incompetence or duplicity--no 3rd option. Malevolent in either case.

Incompetence or duplicity? What do we think?

Jared Kushner declares victory

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On September 29, 2024

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Sharing Kushner’s tweet in full because it has to be seen in toto to be believed and it’s important to remember he will no doubt once again be the architect of Trump’s ME policy should Trump retake office.

And also because of this observation from Mohammad Alsaafin of AJ+:

It’s darkly funny that every stupid thing Kushner is saying here reflects the actual strategy and position of the Biden administration.

Ok, here’s Kushner’s victory lap:

Jared Kushner@jaredkushner
September 27th is the most important day in the Middle East since the Abraham Accords breakthrough.
I have spent countless hours studying Hezbollah and there is not an expert on earth who thought that what Israel has done to decapitate and degrade them was possible.
This is significant because Iran is now fully exposed. The reason why their nuclear facilities have not been destroyed, despite weak air defense systems, is because Hezbollah has been a loaded gun pointed at Israel.
Iran spent the last forty years building this capability as its deterrent. President Trump would often say, “Iran has never won a war but never lost a negotiation.”
The Islamic Republic’s regime is much tougher when risking Hamas, Hezbollah, Syrian and Houthi lives than when risking their own. Their foolish efforts to assassinate President Trump and hack his campaign reek of desperation and are hardening a large coalition against them.
Iranian leadership is stuck in the old Middle East, while their neighbors in the GCC are sprinting toward the future by investing in their populations and infrastructure. They are becoming dynamic magnets for talent and investment while Iran falls further behind.
As the Iranian proxies and threats dissipate, regional security and prosperity will rise for Christians, Muslims and Jews alike. Israel now finds itself with the threat from Gaza mostly neutralized and the opportunity to neutralize Hezbollah in the north.
It’s unfortunate how we got here but maybe there can be a silver lining in the end.
Anyone who has been calling for a ceasefire in the North is wrong.
There is no going back for Israel.
They cannot afford now to not finish the job and completely dismantle the arsenal that has been aimed at them. They will never get another chance. After the brilliant, rapid-fire tactical successes of the pagers, radios, and targeting of leadership, Hezbollah’s massive weapon cache is unguarded and unmanned.
Most of Hezbollah fighters are hiding in their tunnels. Anyone still around was not important enough to carry a pager or be invited to a leadership meeting. Iran is reeling, as well, insecure and unsure how deeply its own intelligence has been penetrated.
Failing to take full advantage of this opportunity to neutralize the threat is irresponsible.
I have been hearing some amazing stories about how Israel has been collecting intelligence over the past 10 months with some brilliant technology and crowdsourcing initiatives.
But today, with the confirmed killing of Nasrallah and at least 16 top commanders eliminated in just nine days, was the first day I started thinking about a Middle East without Iran’s fully loaded arsenal aimed at Israel. So many more positive outcomes are possible.
This is a moment to stand behind the peace-seeking nation of Israel and the large portion of the Lebanese who have been plagued by Hezbollah and who want to return to the times when their country was thriving, and Beirut a cosmopolitan city.
The main issue between Lebanon and Israel is Iran; otherwise there is a lot of benefit for the people of both countries from working together. The right move now for America would be to tell Israel to finish the job.
It’s long overdue. And it’s not only Israel’s fight. More than 40 years ago, Hezbollah killed 241 US military personnel, including 220 Marines. That remains the single deadliest day for the U.S. Marine Corps since the Battle of Iwo Jima.
Later that same day, Hezbollah killed 58 French paratroopers. And now, over the past six weeks or so, Israel has eliminated as many terrorists on the US list of wanted terrorists as the US has done in the last 20 years. Including Ibrahim Aqil, the leader of Hezbollah’s Islamic Jihad Organization who masterminded the 1983 killing of those Marines.
There’s nothing less reassuring than bipartisan neocon war mongers declaring victory in the immediate aftermath of their latest atrocity.

The cold comfort of a military coup

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On September 18, 2024

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This is from Col Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief-of-staff to the Secretary of State, on Judge Napolitano’s show:

I’ve been told by fairly reliable sources that (Sec of State Anthony) Blinkin and (National Security Advisor Jake) Sullivan… Blinkin primarily but Sullivan too, have been sidetracked.

What’s happened is the Pentagon has taken over diplomacy as well as any action militarily speaking with regard to both theaters of war and so they’re now in charge.

I have to change my evaluation of (Defence Secretary Lloyd) Austin if that’s the case because it means he listened finally to the people in the bowels of the Pentagon who know the truth. He’s reacting to that.

He’s told the President that and to Biden’s credit even though he was furious he finally took that advice (not to allow Ukraine to fire long-range missiles into Russia or to back Israel against Hezbollah and/or Iran if Israel starts the war).

I’m generally not the type to root for a military takeover of deciding diplomatic and military matters. But the level of callow brinksmanship paired with epic cluelessness that has characterized Team Biden’s foreign policy has me greatly relieved by this Pentagon takeover (if true).

The best part was Bibi Netanyahoo being told that if he invades Lebanon he’s on his own.

The fact that UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer was publicly humiliated by Biden was just a sweetener on top.

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