It's time to call this World War III

If we don't wake up, we will lose.

Take a moment to watch this interesting interview with H.R. McMaster, broadcast recently by Germany’s Deutsche Welle. I wish I had a full transcript of the interview to share with you because I know many of you will skip right over it. Don’t, though. He makes some basic but very important points.

I’ll transcribe some of the key parts below, but take the time to watch the full interview if you can.)

He discusses the war in Ukraine, the Biden administration’s fundamental misunderstanding of Putin and power, our failure to deter the invasion, Biden’s subsequent (and related) mistakes, what Ukraine now needs to win, why Ukraine must win, why Ukraine can win, Putin’s weakness, Trump’s relationship with Putin, the stakes of the conflict, and the utterly unforced and idiotic mistakes Trump is poised to make.

McMaster, it seems, can make no more sense than I can of the things Trump and the people around him have been saying about Russia and Putin. “It seems,” he says,

like President Trump and some of those people around him are still laboring under the delusion that Putin can somehow be conciliated and that there can somehow be some kind of entente with him. The only thing that stops Putin is strength. I mean, we know that from decades of his of his authoritarian rule in Russia. [Emphases here and below are mine.]

The interviewer, Roman Goncharenko, asks: “The key question for Ukraine and its partners in Europe, including Germany, is: Will Donald Trump try to force Ukraine to negotiate with Russia now, on unfavorable terms like giving up land, or will he stop sending military aid?”

McMaster replies:

My hope is that he won’t do either one of those. I’m worried, as I’m sure many are in the United States and Europe, that he will do that. We’ve heard this kind of idea that he’ll entice Russia into negotiations by threatening to provide Ukraine with the full range of capabilities they need, on a much larger scale, and then he’ll coerce Ukraine to the negotiating table by threatening to withhold assistance. What this does is misunderstand the nature of war.

War, obtaining a favorable outcome in war, requires convincing your enemy that your enemy’s been defeated, or convincing your enemy, in this case Putin, that he cannot accomplish his objectives through the continued use of force.

[Trump] also misunderstands the way what you do militarily [should be] integrated with what you’re trying to achieve politically. There is not a single example in history that I can think of of a favorable diplomatic settlement that came out of an unfavorable situation on the ground militarily.

Goncharenko interjects: “But there are people in the United States, and also here in Europe, who say, ‘Russia can’t be beaten, so Ukraine cannot win. Russia is too big and too strong.’ You disagree?”

McMaster says:

Russia is profoundly weak. Now, it doesn’t mean they don’t have elements of strength, right? Putin can still rattle the nuclear saber. He still has some cyber capabilities. He has some long-range strike capabilities, and so forth.

But think about how fragile that regime is. Why isn’t Putin going through a round of mobilization? Because the Russian people won’t stand for it. Why is he bringing in North Koreans? Because he has a real manpower problem. Think about the Wagner attack on Moscow. This is an ex hot-dog salesman and an ex con who marches on Moscow, shoots down several aircraft, and they’re cratering the roads in front of him. So I think we take counsel of our fears. Putin is bully, a street thug, and a coward, I believe, all wrapped up into one. And he’s an operator, right? He’ll take whatever you give him. But when he meets stiff resistance from Europe and the United States, he’ll back off.

This is why, I think—I know that Germany’s going through a difficult transitional period, politically—I think we need the Europeans to step up, like the Poles and the Baltic states and the Nordic states have stood up, because they know what the threat is. It’s right there on their border. I mean, Putin has not only continued this onslaught on Ukraine, he’s annexed Belarus,¹ he’s flipped the the government in in Georgia,² in Slovakia³—look what he tried to do in Moldova to influence the referendum.⁴ Look what he’s doing in Bulgaria.⁵ He’s not going to stop until he is stopped by a concerted military, diplomatic, and economic effort.

Goncharenko then asks him about JD Vance’s claim that the United States simply doesn’t have enough weapons to send them to Ukraine. McMaster replies:

Yeah, well he has a point that it’s a risk you take, to provide these capabilities. But hey, the Ukraine war was a wakeup call in terms of the need to dramatically increase our defense industrial bases across the Free World, right? Look at what Rheinmetall⁶ and other companies are doing. So the war in Ukraine has allowed us to begin to expand our our defense industrial base, and if Ukraine stops Russia that means maybe we’ll have the time, time that we can use to increase that defense industrial base, bolster our defenses across the Free World, and NATO in particular, and prevent World War III. I think that’s what is at stake right now: World War III.

Because it’s not just Russia, it’s this axis of aggressors. You could also think about Russia’s war against Ukraine as China’s proxy war against the West. Using Russia. Because China is also helping to underwrite what Iran is doing across the greater Middle East. And what is China doing? While we have witnessed these cascading crises from Europe and across the Middle East they’ve become extremely, I mean much more aggressive in the Indo-Pacific region, laying claim to the ocean in the South China Sea.⁷ The blockades of Taiwan.⁸ The seven acts of war in one month against the Philippines, a treaty ally of the United States.⁹ The violation of Japanese airspace.¹⁰ What they’ve just done to Malaysian vessels, and Vietnamese vessels.¹¹ So China, I believe, is helping to orchestrate this axis of aggressors which includes Iran and North Korea, as well as these two revanchist powers on the Eurasian landmass.

(Note that I’ve put links to more information about the circumstances he’s describing in the footnotes. You can view these like an issue of Global Eyes. They are major stories. Some of them should have been headline news, but the media has been so transfixed by the American election—I don’t exclude myself from the criticism—that they’ve barely covered them, still less connected the dots. This isn’t coincidental; China and Russia have been exploiting American distraction and dysfunction, which was predictable.)¹²

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What baffles me is this. McMaster isn’t appealing to some arcane 15th-century theory of international relations or to super-secret, highly classified intelligence to which only he has been privy. What he’s saying should be obvious to anyone who’s paid a bit of attention to the news in this century—by which I don’t mean “any professional intelligence analyst who speaks idiomatic Russian and Mandarin and spends his days poring over communiqués from the Kremlin and the Zhongnanhai,” but “any guy who looks at a newspaper once a week, maybe on Sunday mornings.”

A growingly integrated axis of the world’s most brutal and savagely repressive states is waging a sustained, systematic attack on the liberal democratic world. This isn’t a metaphor. Russian and North Korean troops have invaded a peaceful European democracy. They’re bombing it, raping children, killing women and the elderly, threatening it with annihilation. The hordes really are at the gates. They’ve bashed right through them, in fact, and they don’t mean to stop. This is not a hybrid attack. It is war.

I cannot figure out why the immense gravity of this situation isn’t immediately obvious to policymakers and citizens alike throughout Europe and the United States—or why we don’t seem to have the instinct for self-preservation that God gave an alley cat. Americans are debating: “Should we abandon Ukraine (and all of our other allies, while we’re at it)?” I would understand if we were arguing bitterly about whether our defense spending should be doubled or quadrupled in light of this threat. But to debate that there’s a threat at all? To ask whether Russia just needs another reset?

Let’s for a moment put aside the moral disgrace and indelible shame we’re proposing to inflict upon ourselves. (Though it’s quite something to realize how many of us are prepared to live with that.) How could we be so dumb as to think that if we abandon Ukraine, it will all end there? That it will work out fine for us, and the United States will just continue on its merry way, peaceful and prosperous, just like before? The people who think this—what planet are they on?

Yet think this we do. We’ve just endured four years of an administration that stubbornly refused to understand how serious this is, stubbornly refused to act like it, stubbornly refused to explain it to Americans. And now we will have a President who thinks the solution is just to switch sides and go with the winners.

Or perhaps he’s just too stupid to grasp this. Does it matter? What matters is this: If Trump betrays Ukraine, the consequences for us will be dire. The consequences for our allies will be unthinkable. Uncontrolled nuclear proliferation is actually one of the better scenarios (assuming we get incredibly lucky and survive) because the alternative is what Noah Smith described here:

If the US abandons resistance to China and Russia, it will go very badly for America’s allies. Europe will probably fracture again, with some states (probably including Germany) falling all over themselves to appease the Russians. Russia will then become a sort of de facto hegemon in Europe. In Asia, China would probably conquer Taiwan, cutting off US semiconductor supplies and establishing Chinese hegemony in East Asia. Japan and South Korea would then be forced to choose between either becoming nuclear powers or becoming de facto satrapies of the new Chinese empire. Essentially, America’s major allies would fall to America’s enemies.

Americans—or, at least, Trump supporters—might yawn at these developments. But if Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, and America’s other allies fall, it will dramatically weaken America’s ability to defend itself. Remember that China is four times the size of America, and manufactures well over twice as much. Without its coalition of allies, the US just doesn’t have the size to stand up to China.

And even if they de facto conquered Asia and Europe, China and Russia would not simply ignore America and let it go on its merry way. The specter of a US revival would haunt them. They would therefore do everything they could to weaken America. Obvious steps would include 1) economically strangling America by cutting it off from trading routes and natural resources, and 2) sowing continued internal dissent in America in the hopes of causing it to collapse into a civil war.

Bereft of its coalition of allies, America would be far less able to resist those efforts. Americans would suffer economically even as China and Russia stoked their hatreds and divisions. The worst ideologies of Trump’s first term—alt-right fascism, leftism, radical identitarianism, and so on—would all come back with a vengeance, encouraged by diligent Chinese and Russian online propagandists. Only now they’d also have a bad economy to fuel their anger.

The election of Trump in just over two weeks could thus set in motion a rapid chain of events that results in America very rapidly becoming a much weaker, more vulnerable country. And the consequences for the rest of the free world would be even greater. [My emphasis.]

I cross-posted that whole (excellent) essay when he wrote it. Trump has since been elected. That can’t be undone. But surely we can ask our Senate to prevent him from making Tulsi Gabbard his Director of National Intelligence?

Trump must have people like McMaster in the room, people who can try, at least, to confront him with reality. If he’s surrounded by a cohort of fantasists, the danger to us—the real, imminent, physical danger—is multiplied by the number of loons.

It’s a hopeful thing that Marco Rubio and Michael Waltz will be in Situation Room with him. They might be suck-ups who’ve sacrificed their integrity for power, but neither of them is fundamentally divorced from reality. The people who surround Trump right now, however, and seem closest to his heart— Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk, Don Jr., David Sacks, RFK Jr., Vivek Ramaswamy, Tucker Carlson, Mike Flynn—are living in a malign upside-down fantasy world that Russian political technologists have designed for them. Whether they are witting assets of Russia or just dumb dupes is immaterial, because their behavior is the same either way.

It is just too dangerous for people like this to surround an already unstable, delusional president who is obviously in some way in Putin’s thrall. Trump is known for taking the advice of the last person he’s spoken to, or the one whose advice he wanted to hear, or the one who flattered him best. People like Gabbard need to be kept as far from him as possible. The Senate has a Constitutional responsibility. It has a moral responsibility. It cannot allow Trump to surround himself with people who are as fundamentally confused about reality as he is.

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Returning to McMaster, Goncharenko asks him again what Trump will do next: “People here in Europe keep guessing—what is his plan for Ukraine? Do you have maybe a better understanding? You worked for him, you are in the United States. What are your colleagues or experts saying, what do you yourself think?” McMaster replies:

With him, it’s really important to frame everything in context of US interests, and that’s what I hope some of the advisers around him can do. People like Marco Rubio, who is the nominee for the Secretary of State, who was an internationalist, right? He’s not an isolationist. Congressman Waltz, who’s going to be the national security adviser, who understands defense issues and national security issues very well. I hope that these are people who will help president Trump understand that sustained support for Ukraine is an American interest, not only because of the humanitarian aspects of it, which I think are profound in and of themselves, but because of the connection of the war to this axis of aggressors, and what I believe is the fact that if Russia is able to accomplish its objectives in Ukraine, then what you will see is a further cascading of the crisis that we’ve witnessed across the Middle East, into the Indo-Pacific region as well. And I think that we’ll see more direct threats to Europe. I mean, I think it’s important, Roman, for President Trump—for everybody—to understand: Russia is at war with us, whether we want to acknowledge it or not. Think about the shadow war in Europe, about these, you know, these “unexplained,” but we kind of know where they’re coming from, incendiary bombs on DHL aircraft.¹³ How about attacks on European infrastructure, how about assassinations and cyber attacks and cyber-enabled information warfare.¹⁴ Russia is already at war with us, and will continue to push until until the Kremlin meets stiff resistance.

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I asked myself whether any news outlet in the United States had recently offered HR McMaster—or anyone else, for that matter—a half hour in which to make this case to the American public. I looked, but it doesn’t seem they have. I suspect the Left has no use for him because he served in Trump’s administration and criticizes Biden’s record; the right has no use for him because Trump fired him and now calls him a loser and a disgruntled employee. (He was fired after he told the Munich Security Forum there was “incontrovertible” evidence Russia had interfered in the 2016 election.)

But McMaster is right about all of this. His diagnosis is lucid. He’s also right—of course he’s right—about the Biden Administration’s maddening eagerness to deter itself, and its insistence upon telling our enemies what we won’t do:

What the Biden Administration did in the run up to the massive re-invasion of Ukraine, this is really between August of 2021 and February of 2022, is they tried to reassure Putin to allay what we perceived, what the Biden Administration perceived, as his security concerns. And that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of Vladimir Putin. What drives Vladimir Putin is his aspiration to restore Russia to national greatness and his effort to reestablish the Russian Empire. All you have to do is read the long essay he supposedly authored in July or August of 2021.

So what did the Biden Administration do. They met with Putin in Geneva, laid out all of their red lines, which sounds like to Putin, “Well I have a green light for everything else.” Then we pulled our ships out of the Black Sea. We suspended lethal assistance to the Ukrainians. We listed all of the things we would not do to support the Ukrainians if they came under attack, and then we evacuated our Embassy and all of our advisers. … What’s important for all of us to recognize is what provoked Putin is the perception of weakness.

He is describing a mistake we’ve made over and over again since Putin came to power and from which we seem simply unable to learn. In Putin we are dealing with a man who cannot be placated and who does not have a legitimate gripe and who does not want what we would want in his place. Putin wants a vast, immiserated empire and he wants our destruction. This, we must not give him. The only thing that stops Putin is strength.

Goncharenko interjects. “So the next question, so you have advised Donald Trump on many issues, and you said that, in your book you describe it, ‘Always negotiate from a position of strength, right?’ So should Ukraine negotiate with Russia now? Because this is what is on the table.”

No, McMaster replies:

No. I don’t think so. I think what should happen—and I think this is a long shot that this would that happen—is to provide Ukraine with the full range of capabilities that they need, but also in in sufficient capacity, right? The greater scale of support, with all the range of systems that they need to defend themselves and to generate more of an offensive capability. It’s really important to recognize the Russians took more casualties in the last month than they had during any month of the war. I don’t think that’s sustainable. This is one of the reasons why they have North Korean troops there. So now’s the time to give Ukraine the capabilities they need. Because they’re under fiscal duress, with the sustained Russian offensive in the east, in particular, and now maybe the Kharkiv region as well. But also, they’re under psychological duress because President Trump and others who are coming into his administration have raised doubts about their willingness to sustain support for Ukraine. So I think now is a critical moment.

And of course you don’t negotiate from a position of strength [sic—he clearly meant, “You don’t negotiate from a position of weakness.] How can Ukrainians compromise after suffering so many horrors, having been victimized in the way that they have, including just mass murder of civilians, the bombing of hospitals and schools, the kidnapping of children?

Goncharenko later asks him about a passage from his memoirs, one in which he recounts saying to his wife, “I don’t understand Putin’s hold on Trump.” Goncharenko asks McMaster what this meant and how he explains this, to which he replies:

Well, it’s just really what I told you. He has this drive for a deal. Putin knows how to play foreign leaders, not just Trump, but others, right, with the prospect of some kind of entente. “Donald, wouldn’t it be great if we could work together on nuclear arms reduction,” you know? “Wouldn’t it be great if we could work together on terrorism. Wouldn’t it be great—” I mean, this is the funniest of all, “on cyber security.” So he pulls on Trump’s strings, his desire for a big deal. I think it’s flattery, plus the prospect of of this major deal with Putin, this idea that we can resurrect the diplomacy of the 1980s and 70s and separate Russia, or the former Soviet Union, from China. Hey: Xi Jinping and Putin are intertwined. Instead of trying to separate them we should glue them together, because we when we pretend that they’re separate we allow them to cover for each other.

This is important. I don’t know whether he heard Trump himself fantasizing that he could separate China and Russia by surrendering Ukraine. Perhaps he means that it’s the pet idea of that little fraud Vivek Ramaswamy. McMaster is right about this, too. It’s time for everyone to stop pretending and deal with reality.

When his interlocutor asks him if he wants to impart one major lesson to NATO from his career as a military historian and a soldier, McMaster says:

For NATO, the major lesson is that that weakness is provocative. It’s much cheaper to prevent a war than to have to fight one. If you’re concerned about the prospect of nuclear escalation, vertical escalation, of a war, then prevent the war to begin with, with capable forward position forces. Europe has relearned that lesson. … I mean, we have to stop pretending that these wars can’t escalate, horizontally and vertically, and we need to go back to the old Ronald Reagan saying of peace through strength.

Of course we do. Why is it that one president after another, in this century, has found this so hard to grasp?

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Washington, Moscow, and Kyiv are trying to change the battlefield before Trump takes office and “ends the war in 24 hours.” (Good luck, Mr. President.)

Biden finally, at last, pulled his finger out and lifted the restrictions on the use of ATACMS to strike inside of Russia. If only he’d done so sooner.

Trump, reportedly, asked Putin not to escalate the conflict. Russia responded by launching one of its biggest attacks since the war’s beginning, bombarding Ukraine’s power grid, lowering Russia’s threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, and instructing his propagandists to threaten to nuke us in ever-more lurid ways. It’s good that Trump’s getting an early indication that Putin does not care about their friendship quite so much as he imagined.

Today, Russia lobbed an expensive ICBM at Ukraine. We’re supposed to be impressed by this, I think.

Biden is surging another US$275 in weapons that will include anti-personnel mines to keep Russia from advancing in the east. They’re terrible weapons, yes, unless Russia is trying to invade you, in which case they’re things of beauty.

Ten thousand North Korean troops have now been deployed to Kursk. I feel so sorry for them. They grew up with hunger, terror, deprivation, and total isolation, with no access to or knowledge of the external world. Now they’ve been dumped in a killing field half a world away, hearing a language they can’t understand, fighting a war that makes no sense, against a people they never knew existed. I hope Ukraine finds some way to persuade them to surrender, eat three hot meals a day, and watch all the porn they want. (I don’t know what they’d do with North Korean prisoners of war: I assume you can’t give them back, because Kim would kill them—not just for surrendering, but because they would know too much about Kursk, the paradise beyond.)

Zelensky has read the memo (because every foreign leader has) that the way to manipulate Trump is with flattery. He is telling the media that Trump can bring peace because “he is much more stronger than Putin.” It’s painful that a genuinely strong man is obliged to flatter our president, the Whirling Vortex of Emotional Need, in this manner. No one who is not in the cult thinks Trump is strong at all, no less stronger than Putin. But Zelensky is right to say it: Why choice does he have?

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A strange little item. If you regularly read Russian and Chinese propaganda, you’ll have noticed that they often share themes, phrases, news reports. This story was reported everywhere in their propaganda media, nowhere in the West: The United States allows the exchange of nuclear strikes while maintaining part of the arsenal—Pentagon.

“The United States allows the exchange of nuclear strikes while maintaining part of the arsenal” This was stated by the representative of the Strategic Command (STRATCOM) of the US Department of Defense Thomas Buchanan. According to him, if necessary, an exchange of nuclear strikes is possible “on conditions most acceptable to the United States.” Among them is that America will “continue to lead the world” and retain part of its arsenal to further deter potential adversaries.

Here’s another example of this story: US military prepared for nuclear strikes—spokesman. There are many more. Below is a post from “Lord Of War,” a Russian agitprop account on Telegram:

… A certain Thomas Buchanan from the Pentagon's Strategic Command delighted the Americans and the whole world by reporting that the United States would allow an exchange of nuclear strikes, provided that part of the nuclear arsenal was retained “to further deter potential enemies of the United States.”

What can I say here? It was these idiots who in October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, encouraged President John F. Kennedy to launch a nuclear strike on the USSR, arguing that the United States had many more warheads and intercontinental missiles than the Soviets, and that “the Soviets would suffer more in a nuclear war.” And they were indignant when Kennedy turned them down. But those idiots always had and still have heirs. Buchanan is one of them.

He apparently does not understand what will happen to his country and people in the event of a “nuclear exchange.” For some reason he is convinced that this exchange will be limited. He doesn’t realize how much things will change. He is unable to realize how many Americans will die and that his “containment” will lose all meaning, since America will collapse on its own—it will not need any opponents for this. That he himself will no longer come every day in a tie and pressed uniform to his office at the Ministry of Defense to talk all sorts of nonsense and “contain” other adversaries of America. That the old life in the USA will end, if it continues at all. That the very concept of victory, if it is applicable to a nuclear war at all, will be devalued because of the gigantic, monstrous price that will have to be paid for this “victory.”

I can find no mention of Thomas Buchanan’s comments anywhere in the US media. Can you? Rear Admiral Thomas R. “TR” Buchanan does exist, but I have no idea whether he said anything of the sort, or if he did, what context he said it in.

The point of this flurry of articles, I assume, is to persuade the gullible that even though it seems that Russia is menacing all of humanity with obscene and irresponsible nuclear threats, it’s actually the Americans who are doing this. Russia is merely responding, prudently defending itself.

The Telegram account above is a good one follow if you want to check the Official Propaganda Theme of the Day—and obviously, yes, there are official themes, daily. Presumably some bureaucrat sends a list of talking points out every morning. Extremely disparate channels—in a wide range of languages, catering to very different audiences—then start pushing it, often verbatim.

Ever since Biden gave Ukraine the go-ahead for long-range strikes, they’ve been pushing “World War III,” as they do every time Biden relents after months of hesitation and gives Ukraine a desperately-needed capability that they should have had two years ago. Russia’s organs are urging people in the West to take to the streets to “protest this madness.”

What drives me insane—what makes me bonkers, almost uncontrollably furious—is seeing Americans obediently repeat the narrative of the day, utterly blind to its provenance. How can they be so gullible? Why doesn’t anyone notice that David Sacks’ Twitter feed is synced to all of the other Kremlin organs? Or that like the Kremlin, he issues hysterical warnings about the imminence of nuclear war every time Biden transfers a new weapons system?

And why do we not even try to fight back? Why haven’t we tried, for example, to make educational public service ads, the way Europe does, and run them nonstop on social media? Such ads could explain that Russian propaganda is very real and our social media is saturated with it. They could teach people how to recognize it. It’s not hard.

Why do we supinely allow a power that is at war with us to make fools of our citizens and turn them into ventriloquists for their blood-soaked regime? Is it because Trump has insisted that Russia, Russia, Russia is a hoax, hoax, hoax so many times that everyone in the US government is afraid even to try to explain this to the American people? Do they fear it will anger him and they will suffer McMaster’s fate?

Or is it because no one in our government is capable of taking any initiative? The US government uses social media to remind me that “Fire detectors save lives,” and it gives me tips on staying safe in a trench. Why would it be silent about a sustained campaign to induce Americans voluntarily to surrender to brutal authoritarians who are trying to conquer the world?

Trump’s candidate for Director of National Intelligence cannot be approved. We can give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she’s not a witting Kremlin agent, but that means (it can only mean) that this sustained disinformation campaign has seeped into every crevice of her mind, shaping every aspect of her epistemology and ontology.

We cannot let Trump surround himself with a coterie gullible fools who would seem to have Russian Kool-Aid funnels surgically stapled inside their gullets. The damage this will do to our national security is incalculable.

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Interfax Ukraine, according to the Kyiv Independent, has obtained a Russian Defense Ministry plan to carve up Ukraine:

Russia will try to convey to US leadership its plan for a new world order up to the year 2045, including a scheme to break Ukraine up into three parts … According to the plan, developed by the Russian Defense Ministry, Ukraine would be divided into thirds. The country’s western lands would be offered to neighboring countries, including Poland, Hungary, and Romania. The eastern regions, including partially and fully Russian-occupied territories,  would be annexed by Russia. The remaining territory, including Kyiv, would become a Russian-controlled puppet state. The plan envisages the effective dissolution of the independent Ukrainian state.

The Russian Defense Ministry also put forward four different scenarios of global world order development—two seen as favorable to Moscow and two disadvantageous. Two of the scenarios, labeled “Formation of a multipolar world and the division of spheres of influence by leading actors" and "Regionalization/chaotization,” involve a Russian victory over Ukraine.

The others, “Dominance of the USA and the West” and “Acquisition by China of the status of the world’s leading power,” presuppose a military defeat in Ukraine. The latest plan marks another Russian attempt to put forward suggestions for the disruption and recreation of a global world order.

The veracity of the plan has apparently been confirmed by “intelligence officials.”

The injustice and the shame of it. Ukraine is fighting Russia so NATO doesn’t have to and fighting North Korea so Japan and South Korea don’t have to. But the world can’t decide whether to keep sending Ukraine only enough weapons to survive—but not to win—or perhaps just pull the plug and let Russia and Hungary rape and dismember it.

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Here’s another interview that’s worth your time, this one with Ben Hodges:

He discusses Biden’s decision to lift restrictions on the use of our missiles:

I’m not sure why this finally happened. Obviously this is something that should have happened two years ago. I’m glad it did happen, but I’m not sure what finally caused it. Perhaps it had something to do with North Korea’s involvement. I’m not sure. I am still frustrated that it’s not a complete lifting of restrictions, that it still applies only to use against Russian and North Korean forces that are attacking the Kursk bridgehead. So it’s better than nothing, but it still falls short of what’s actually needed.

Hodges, like McMaster, is clinging to the hope Trump will have an epiphany, or that the leaders of the GOP will suddenly reach down and find their balls:

Of course, I don't know what the Trump administration is going to do. Based on everything they’ve said during the campaign, I’m not hopeful that they’re going to be supportive of Ukraine, but I am hopeful that the leadership of the Republican Party in Congress, both in the Senate and in the House, who are mostly pro-Ukraine, pro-NATO, pro-transatlantic, will be able to convey to the new administration how important it is that the United States not turn its back on Ukraine. We’ll see if they have the ability and the courage to push back against Trump’s designs to end the war in 24 hours.

And, of course, these kinds of ridiculous assertions that he can end the war in 24 hours or freeze it somehow assume that Ukraine will just go along with it, or that Eastern European countries—who are not confused about the threat that Russia—that they’ll just go along with it. I doubt that’s the case, because most of them know that they will end up paying the price if this conflict is frozen. None of them believe for a second that Putin would ever live up to any agreement.

So I think once the Trump administration is in place, and they’re faced with the reality of owning the situation and the implications, then perhaps that will moderate some of the language that comes from the incoming administration.

… Trump cannot impose a freeze on this conflict. There are no American soldiers there. Europe is providing more aid combined than the United States is. So I think the idea that somehow Trump can impose a freeze or impose a ceasefire, that’s just not what’s going to happen. He can, of course, demand it. He can, of course, stop all aid.

But I think that people with cooler heads will understand that it’s in our interest that Europe remains stable, secure, and prosperous for our own economic reasons. And China is watching to see how we handle this.

Who are these people with cooler heads? Is he reposing his hope in the GOP leaders who are now nodding thoughtfully at the proposal to make Tulsi Gabbard our DNI and Fox News Guy our Defense Secretary? What has he seen of these men and women to think “the ability and the courage to push back against Trump” might be an aspect of their nature? I pray he has insight into their characters that I lack.

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I almost changed the headline of this newsletter to avoid reinforcing Russia’s messaging. But I decided to keep it, because actually, they’re right—just not in the way they think.

My only disagreement with McMaster is his nomenclature. This is already a world war, by any rational definition. We should start saying so. When we discuss “World War III” in the future tense, it confuses Americans who want to believe these events are far away and of no significance to them. It suggests that what is in fact happening is a possibility, not a reality.

Russia is invading Europe with China’s money, Iran’s weapons, and North Korea’s troops. Chinese ships captained by Russians are destroying undersea natural gas pipelines and telecom cables in the Baltic Sea. Russian weapons used in Ukraine are built with Chinese components. Russia is causing mayhem on the streets of the UK. Their mercenaries have been raping and plundering their way through Africa and using the proceeds to finance the war in Ukraine. Iran, supported by China, has encircled Israel with its proxies and set the better part of the Middle East—and key shipping lanes—alight. Putin regularly threatens us with nuclear weapons. What could this be if not a world war? If it’s not, what’s the rule—it’s not official until the Peruvians arrive?

Perhaps McMaster means to say this path is leading us to a nuclear war. If so, he should say it: Maybe that would focus Washington’s attention.

Putin has said (yet again) that the use of missiles made by the US and the UK means Russia is at war with NATO. He’s right! Why shrink from the truth? We don’t want to be, but he is determined. He started it, but if we could only be roused from our apathy and slumber long enough to concentrate, we could finish it. You-hoo! Wakey-wakey, Sleeping Giant!

Ukraine is only asking us to give it the tools so it can finish the job. They’re not asking us to die for them. If we don’t stop this axis now, though, we will have to die. In massive numbers, too. We can end this now, before it gets completely out of hand—before it destroys us—but someone has to keep Trump from surrendering.

Is anyone listening over there in Congress? I’m begging you: No Tulsi. No RFK Jr. Maybe you can pass a law that keeps Elon, Tucker, and Vivek out of the White House. Can’t you send them to Mars?

Hey, JD—maybe you secretly understand this? Maybe you were just pretending to be an isolationist to get ahead? No one would mind, I promise, if you whipped out the 25th Amendment ahead of schedule. If it turned out you were secretly sane and smart all along, I’d wring your hands and sob in gratitude.

Congress? I do understand there’s a real emergency back in Washington, what with Nancy Mace all afeard the new Congresswoman from Delaware will whip out her junk in the powder room. That’s bound to keep you preoccupied day and night, I know. But would you please just pay attention for fifteen minutes and do me this one small favor? Would you save the world? Because we’re in World War III. And at this rate, we’ll lose it.

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Postscript: Please also read what Robert Zubrin has to say about this:

… Were Trump to cut off American arms aid to Ukraine, the following consequences would likely ensue:

Russia would conquer Ukraine. This would remove the largest land army in Europe from the West’s order of battle, greatly strengthen Russia economically and technically, eliminate a strategic weakness along Russia’s southwest border that would otherwise constrain Putin’s aggressive plans, and advance Russian armies to the borders of NATO allies Poland and Romania.

Russia would seize the Baltic states. Russian leader Vladimir Putin has stated his intention to restore the Russian empire, which included these countries, as well as Finland and much of Poland. But so long as Ukraine remains free, strong, and in the fight, swarming the Baltics would be an unattractive course of action. The West could counter such a swarming by giving the Ukrainian armed forces all the weapons they need to win. However, with Ukraine gone, NATO would have no effective counter move to a Russian seizure of the Baltics.

Putin knows that we are not going to nuclear war to save Estonia, and that NATO lacks the 500,000-man expeditionary force that would be needed to expel his troops from the Baltic states after he seizes them. So he would take them, with the fact that they are NATO members proving no deterrent whatsoever. On the contrary, their NATO membership would make them all the more enticing to take, as doing so would expose the impotence of that alliance.

Russia would carry out widespread massacres and mass deportations from Ukraine and the Baltic states. This would be done to crush resistances and effect ethnic cleansing to make those lands permanently Russian. Russia has already has done this before, removing the native Tatar population from Crimea and German population of Prussia. And it is doing this right now in Mariupol, where it is replacing Russian-speaking Ukrainians with Russians.

(Contrary to Kremlin propaganda, Russian-speaking Ukrainians are not Russians, any more than Irish are English. Whether they speak Ukrainian, Russian, or Surzhyk, a mixture of the two languages, Ukrainians have an entirely different, far more western mentality than Russians, rooted in a different history and the fact that in czarist times, Ukrainian peasants farmed their plots independently, whereas Russian serfs worked their owner’s land as village collectives.)

In addition, however, by slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Balts, Russia would also send millions of them fleeing as refugees into Western Europe, stoking the fortunes of an array of anti-immigrant parties aligned with Moscow.

With NATO humiliated, and a more accommodationist stance toward Russia becoming increasingly popular in many of its key members, the Atlantic alliance would disintegrate. Furthermore, with America discredited as an ally, smaller countries everywhere, notably including Taiwan, would feel pressure to accept domination by the China-Russia Axis. Meanwhile, medium-sized powers like South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Japan, and Germany would rush to develop their own nuclear arsenals. This will make nuclear war far more likely.

Read the whole thing.

See also:

• The West is about to sell out Ukraine in a world-historic betrayal.

• World War Three “inevitable” unless West wakes up to new threat

Note: This version differs slightly from the original mailed to subscribers. I’ve corrected typos and mistakes in transcription, and revised one or two sentences which, on re-reading, I thought awkward. I’ve also added a reference that I meant to include in footnote 11.

1. See:

• Putin is using Belarus to escalate his nuclear threats. “Belarus engaged in a bout of nuclear saber-rattling on June 30, with Chief of the Belarusian General Staff Pavel Muraveiko declaring that his country would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons if provoked. “We’ve learned how to handle these weapons. We know how to apply them confidently. And you can be sure that we will do it if the sovereignty and independence of our country is threatened,” Muraveiko stated. … Muraveiko’s recent statement illustrates how the Kremlin is using Belarus to escalate its campaign of nuclear blackmail against the West. Clearly, any Russian nuclear weapons deployed across the border in Belarus remain firmly under Moscow’s control. If Belarusian officials are now issuing nuclear threats of their own, they are doing so on behalf of Putin.”

• Belarus accuses West of plotting multi-front attack on its territory. “Belarusian state media has reported allegations of a Western-backed plan to attack four regions in the southwest of the country. According to the reports, nationalist armed groups from Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine are training to infiltrate Belarus, with NATO forces expected to provide subsequent support.”

2. See:

• Fearing war, Georgia chooses a return to Russia’s embrace. “The pro-Russian ruling party claimed victory in an election rife with violations with the message that angering Moscow risks turning Georgia into another Ukraine.”

3. See:

• Pro-Russian candidate Peter Pellegrini wins Slovakia’s presidential election. “A close ally of populist Prime Minister Robert Fico beat a pro-Western career diplomat.”

• Controversies linked to Russia piling up in Slovakia. “Slovakia has become increasingly embroiled in controversies over its relations with Russia, with the US recently extending Russia sanctions to a Slovak company, the Interior Ministry granting protection to a pro-Russian actor, and a parliament official giving an interview to Russian television and spreading pro-Kremlin narratives.”

• Slovakian and Hungarian politicians condemn move to allow use of US missiles by Ukraine in Russia.

• Slovakia gas supply boosted as Gazprom cuts Austria deliveries.

4. See:

• How Russia attempted to steal the Moldovan election referendum, and what comes next. “Moldovan authorities, the EU, and US officials, as well as independent observers, blamed an unprecedented attack on the country’s democracy from criminal networks and political groups tied to Russia.”

5. See:

• The resurgence of the Russian dilemma on the Bulgarian political scene.

• Russian consulate in Bulgaria closed for spying operates from socialists’ office. “The Consulate General of the Russian Federation in Bulgaria’s largest Black Sea city, Varna, was closed by government decision in October 2022 but continues to operate undercover in the premises of the pro-Russian Bulgarian Socialist Party office in the city. The activities of the closed consulate are supported by Russian citizens who actively spread pro-Kremlin propaganda through their Facebook accounts. In June last year, Bulgaria declared 70 diplomats and staff of Russian diplomatic missions in the country persona non grata. The list included almost everyone working at the consulate in Varna, including Consul General Vladimir Klimanov..”

6. See:

• Rheinmetall becomes flagship of German rearmament, making enemies in Russia. “Germany’s leading defense group secured a series of historic contracts and is working hard to transform the arms industry’s public image … the group’s CEO was recently targeted by a [Russian] assassination attempt.”

7. See:

• Why are there fears of war in the South China Sea? “China claims most of the strategic waterway and is trying to push out neighbors like the Philippines. Any deadly mistake could risk war.”

• A task for Trump: stop China in the South China Sea. “Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Chinese dream of global preeminence depends significantly on achieving dominance in the South China Sea and ending America’s primacy in the Indo-Pacific region, an emerging global economic and geopolitical hub. And China has not hesitated to use coercive tactics in service of these objectives.

  In recent years, boats belonging to countries whose territorial claims China disregards, such as the Philippines and Vietnam, have faced blockades, ramming, water-cannon attacks, and even bladed-weapon assaults by Chinese vessels. Offshore energy operations endure frequent harassment. Simply fishing in waters that China calls its own can expose a person to a Chinese attack with iron pipes. Such violent confrontations have heightened regional tensions and undermined stability in a crucial corridor linking the Pacific and Indian Ocean.

  One might have expected the United States to take action to rein in China’s behavior, especially given its mutual defense treaty with the Philippines. And yet, three successive presidents—Barack Obama, Trump, and Joe Biden—have failed to offer anything beyond statements of support and symbolic action. … China will not stop at the South China Sea. Under Xi’s leadership, China has used a similar combination of deception, bullying, coercion and surprise to expand its territorial control elsewhere, from the East China Sea to the Himalayas, sparing not even the tiny country of Bhutan. As with any bully, the only way to stop China is to confront it with a credible challenger. The US must be that challenger, and it should start by defending the Philippines.”

8. See:

• Why China will blockade, not invade, Taiwan. Blockade eschews win-loss invasion risk while keeping US in rules-of-engagement limbo for months or years while strangling island into submission.

• A Chinese economic blockade of Taiwan would fail or launch a war. “Last month, China launched one of the largest military exercises in recent memory, nearly completely encircling Taiwan with dozens of warships and fighter jets. … Its name suggests it could be merely the first of many such threatening exercises this year, prompting renewed concerns about the threat of a Chinese blockade to Taiwan’s de facto sovereignty. In recent months, multiple analysts have argued that the main threat facing Taiwan is not the possibility of an overwhelming seaborne invasion of the island, but that of gray zone coercion campaigns or a blockade forcing Taiwan to capitulate to Chinese aggression.”

• China’s latest drills highlight key strategy to annex Taiwan: Blockade. “China’s military is intensifying preparations to seize Taiwan, should Beijing order the use of force to subjugate the democratic island of 23 million people.

  The People’s Liberation Army is dispatching growing numbers of air force jets, naval ships, and troops in mock takeover drills, while gradually encroaching deeper into the waters and skies surrounding Taiwan.”

• Taiwan says blockade would be act of war as China holds more drills. “Taiwanese defense chief says a blockade would have far-reaching consequences for international trade.”

9. See:

• What’s behind escalating China-Philippines tensions in the South China Sea?

• Philippines says China is pushing it to cede claims in South China Sea.

• China falsely accuses Philippines of escalating tensions in South China Sea. “Philippines Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro said, on November 12, his country had become the victim of ‘Chinese aggression.’ ‘What we see is an increasing demand by Beijing for us to concede our sovereign rights in the area.”

  Frequent reports of Chinese Coast Guard ships ramming Philippines vessels, deploying water cannons and military-grade lasers against them underscore Teodoro’s allegations. Yet Beijing claims it is the Philippines, not China, who is ratcheting up tensions.”

• US signs long-sought intelligence sharing deal with the Philippines.

• US task force to back Philippines in South China Sea. “The US military is supporting Philippines operations in the South China Sea via a special task force …an initiative Manila said involves intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

  Task Force-Ayungin, named after the Philippine designation for the contested Second Thomas Shoal, was first mentioned this week by US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin during a visit to the Philippines.”

  

10. See: Japan closely watching China after plane violates its airspace. Japanese officials have previously sounded alarm over China's burgeoning military activity around Japan's southwestern waters and airspace and expressed concern over Beijing's joint military activities with Russia.

11. See: Beijing tests regional resolve in South China Sea amid Middle East conflict.

12. Unfortunately, that distraction and dysfunction will now be permanent: The media will once again be barely able to keep up with an unending stream of intrigues, scandals, and outrages from the White House, not to mention the deployment of the American military on US soil, where it will be trying haplessly to round up twelve million people and put them in concentration camps. Plus, journalists will spend so much time defending themselves from spurious lawsuits that serious media coverage of anything, no less Bulgarian domestic politics, will be attenuated. I’ll do my best to make up for the shortfall, but it’s hard work—and it does take a lot out of me—so please do subscribe. It keeps my spirits up when you do.

13. Russia’s aim is to ‘create havoc’ if it is behind DHL fires, says air freight expert. “Goal seems to be for people ‘to lose confidence in the system’, says head of industry body after devices found in Birmingham and Leipzig. … Last week, Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, warned that Russia’s GRU military intelligence appeared to be on ‘a sustained mission to generate mayhem on British and European streets’ and accused the Kremlin of being engaged in ‘dangerous actions conducted with increasing recklessness.’”(The further point of this is to remind us that it could also do this to commercial passenger planes—C.)

14. See:

• Russia’s suspected sabotage campaign steps up in Europe. “Western officials say such incidents have skyrocketed in Europe since the start of this year, with suspected Russian-paid operatives thought to be behind a range of crimes. … Crimes include break-ins and arson at factories and critical national infrastructure, physical attacks and even a reported assassination plot against the CEO of Germany’s largest arms company.”

• Is Russia behind recent arson attacks in Europe?

• Russian sabotage activities escalate amid fraught tensions. “Russia is likely ramping up its sabotage operations across Europe, targeting critical infrastructure to destabilize NATO allies and disrupt their support for Ukraine. Recent incidents, including break-ins at water treatment facilities in Finland and explosions at arms factories in Poland, highlight Russia’s use of “gray zone” tactics to undermine Western military, economic, and political capabilities without crossing the threshold of open conflict. Insikt Group’s analysis identifies a pattern of Russian hybrid warfare involving covert operatives, agent networks, and plausible deniability tactics that echo Soviet-era sabotage strategies. With these tactics, Russia aims to degrade NATO’s capacity to support Ukraine, increase internal tensions, and strain emergency resources.”

• How to interpret the Russian sabotage campaign in Europe. “This report examines the alleged Russian sabotage campaign in Europe, focusing on incidents in 2024 where there are well-founded suspicions of Russian intelligence involvement. The motivations behind this escalation of the conflict in the gray zone are analyzed, including Russia’s intention to weaken European support for Ukraine and the reconstituted capacity of its intelligence networks in Europe. It argues that these sabotage actions are synergistic with other hybrid strategies employed by Russia, such as cyberattacks and disinformation.” (Have a look at the list of known and suspected sabotage events to get a sense of the scale of the problem. This is a war.)

• How and why Russia is conducting sabotage and hybrid-war offensive. “Across Europe, we’re seeing more confirmed or suspected instances of Russian sabotage. It is part of a broader hybrid war campaign against NATO countries, aimed at eroding support for Ukraine and damaging Western cohesion. In the US, Russia is refraining from sabotage, but it’s working hard on disinformation. [My emphasis.]

  Sabotage operations are part of its larger hybrid war campaign. This is designed to cause fear and division in order to undermine support for Ukraine without going so far as provoking war. Russian hybrid warfare encompasses several tactics, most notably cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns. Another grey-zone tactic is weaponizing immigration. Russian authorities direct migrants into neighboring European countries without proper documentation, instructing them to claim asylum there. The aim is to destabilize those neighbors. European officials reported Russian plans to set up a 15,000-strong force comprising former militias in Libya to control the flow of migrants. Migration routes through Libya link to other places with Russian military or paramilitary presence, notably through Central African Republic and Sudan, as well as Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. Fostering irregular migration further supports right-wing European parties which oppose immigration and European integration and which Russia funds. These include AfD in Germany, National Rally in France and Reform UK, which all gained in recent elections and are mostly Russia-friendly and critical of support for Ukraine. So far, Russia has refrained from sabotage in the US, although European officials have warned that uncovered plots to plant incendiary devices on planes in Europe could be test runs for similar plans in the US. Russian disinformation efforts in the US have stepped up since 2022 and expanded during the presidential election campaign. Donald Trump’s and MAGA Republicans’ reluctance to support Ukraine makes Trump the clearly preferred candidate of Russia.” [My emphasis.]

• This hadn’t yet happened when McMaster was interviewed, but it is a doozy. Chinese ship, Russian captain—on NATO territory: