Der westliche Feminismus hält es für eine seiner größten Errungenschaften, dass er möglichst viele Frauen in die Berufstätigkeit und damit in die vermeintliche Selbstbestimmung geführt habe. Obwohl es fast überall Frauenquoten gibt, außer in den unangenehmen, mit wenig Prestige verbundenen Berufen, wie etwa Müllmann, wo immer noch nahezu ausschließlich Männer gerne die Drecksarbeit verrichten dürfen, … Die Diffamierung von Müttern und Zerrüttung der traditionellen Familie schreitet voranweiterlesen
A mainstay of Washington’s policy since even before the end of World War II has been to make economic dependencies of its friends
At a recent investment forum in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin remarked on the ill-treatment the US subjects others to. At first glance, this is hardly news. Washington has an extensive toolkit that includes all types of sanctions, economic coercion, and regime-change operations to deal with its real or perceived adversaries. But in this case, Putin was commenting on Washington’s treatment of its very own allies.
“In fact, the US… exploited its allies just like any other actor of the global economy,” the Russian president said.
Recent events have laid bare a strategy that has been central to US policy for decades, and now the world is increasingly taking notice.
The early seeds of exploitation
Now, the advantage is ours here, and I personally think we should take it.”
It is July 1944, and these are the words of US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau. World War II had turned decisively in the Allies’ favor, and delegates from 44 countries had convened in the New Hampshire resort town of Bretton Woods to hash out a post-war economic order.
Morgenthau was instructing the American delegation to the conference, which was led by Harry Dexter White, a senior Treasury official. White fully agreed with his boss, replying: “If the advantage was theirs, they would take it.”
If the Americans clearly did hold the advantage, one might wonder which American adversary White had in mind in his reply: Who was the “theirs?” The Axis powers, presumably? No. He meant Great Britain, a close ally whose troops had stormed the beaches of Normandy side-by-side with the Americans just a few short weeks earlier – but by this time was in dire economic straits and nearly bankrupt.
It is rare to see the American approach articulated so clearly and unabashedly. Since even before World War II ended, a central feature of US policy has been to bring allies into its economic orbit – not as equals, of course, but as dependencies – and to keep them there.
If, in the initial postwar period, there was at least some legitimate benefit to adopting US-centric trade and monetary policies, as the US economy has become an increasingly indebted and financialized shell of its former self, Washington has had little to offer allies except threats and coercion.
However, maintaining discipline through a whole lot of stick and not much carrot can’t work forever, especially as a new, multipolar world forms that promises opportunities for new partnerships. The US risks, as historian Michael Hudson put it, suffering the fate of the protagonist of a Greek tragedy, who brings about precisely the outcome that he had sought to avoid.
Bretton Woods has long occupied a cherished place in the creation myth of the American-led ‘rules-based order’ as a shining example of collaboration among enlightened states to usher in a prosperous new world and avoid the mistakes of the [1919-1939] interwar period that gave rise to economic nationalism and protectionism – policies seen as helping the nascent Nazi regime germinate.
But the US saw the conference and the initial post-war era as a geopolitical struggle and an opportunity to dismantle the fading British Empire and roll out a new economic system that would cement the primacy of the dollar and spawn institutions such as the IMF and World Bank, which would serve American interests.
In fact, economist Benn Steil, author of the book ‘Battle For Bretton Woods,’ argues convincingly that even as the war was ongoing, the Roosevelt administration was already examining how it could turn Britain’s impending bankruptcy to its geopolitical benefit. The US, Steil maintains, was managing its financial aid to Britain carefully to get it through the war but, at the same time, limiting its room for maneuver in the postwar world. Incidentally, the US providing an ally with just enough aid to muddle through a war while turning it into a client state might ring familiar to observers of the current conflict in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, at Bretton Woods, the Americans made good on Morgenthau’s exhortation to press their advantage. They pushed through their proposal for the dollar to be pegged to gold at $35/oz and all other currencies pegged to the dollar over the British proposal, as articulated by the renowned economist John Maynard Keynes, for the creation of a neutral reserve asset called bancor that would be used to settle trade between nations.
Geoffrey Crowther, then the editor of The Economist magazine, called the bancor proposal a much better idea and warned that “Lord Keynes was right … the world will bitterly regret the fact that his arguments were rejected.” As the US increasingly abuses the privilege the dollar grants it while the BRICS group seeks to create a neutral supranational currency that will, in some key ways, resemble the discarded bancor, Crowther seems prophetic.
What had gotten Britain through the war was the Lend-Lease program launched by the US in 1941, which provided London with crucial financial aid. But, much to the surprise of the British, the program was abruptly stopped when the war ended. By late 1945, the country’s economy was in tatters.
British Prime Minister Clement Attlee dispatched an ailing Keynes – less than a year from death – to Washington seeking financial assistance. The eminent economist and his countrymen were expecting a generous offer from the Americans – grant aid or an interest-free loan – in recognition of the tremendous sacrifices of the British war effort, which predated the US becoming involved.
Keynes would be in for a rude awakening. Far from receiving a subsidy as a show of gratitude, what was offered after months of hard wrangling – called the Anglo-American Loan Agreement – was a very commercially oriented $4.4 billion loan laden with terms that essentially economically subjugated Britain to its former colony. It was in those onerous conditions that the true demonstration of American superiority lay.
First of all, the Brits had to liberalize trade and open up the Commonwealth to US exporters, who proceeded to displace British companies. But even more devastating was the stipulation that the pound be made convertible to the dollar at a fixed rate. This would allow Britain’s colonies and dominions to unload sterling for dollars, a longstanding demand of US exporters, but it would also further drain London’s already meager reserves.
Indeed, in July 1947, when the measure took effect, the pound succumbed to overwhelming selling pressure as capital flowed out, and the UK essentially went bankrupt. Shortly thereafter, the free convertibility of the currency was suspended. It was an event entirely scripted by the US Treasury.
The loan agreement was, to put it mildly, not well received in the UK. MP Robert Boothby called it “our economic Munich.” Labor MP Norman Smith complained that the country was being treated as the defeated party in the war.
British politician Leopold Amery argued that the convertibility clause caused the country to lose control of its own currency, which furthered American control over Britain’s monetary policy.
However, fearing the alternative to accepting the loan was worse, Attlee and the Labor government relented and agreed.
Great Britain eventually recovered economically and paid off the loan, making the final payment in 2006 to some fanfare, and the circumstances surrounding the agreement were largely forgotten in the UK. But what is incontrovertible is that from this point on Britain would be firmly entrenched in the dollar system and entirely in the US orbit.
If Great Britain was an empire already in terminal decline whose departure from the stage of superpowers was only hastened by Washington, Japan was quite the opposite. Having recovered remarkably quickly from the destruction of World War II, by the late 1970s, it had established itself as the world’s second-largest economy and had emerged as an innovation and technology hub every bit the equal of the US. It had also become a staunch ally of Washington during the Cold War.
The US, meanwhile, had just emerged from a recession and a long bout of inflation only quelled by the draconian efforts of Fed Chair Paul Volcker. Ronald Reagan was in office, and it was full-steam ahead with a set of policies – tax cuts on the rich in tandem with interest rate cuts – that would lead to skyrocketing budget deficits and a massive increase in foreign debt.
Japan, meanwhile, was running huge trade surpluses as a result of selling the world everything from cars to video cameras. As Reagan ran up huge deficits – in no small part to boost military spending in an effort to drive the Soviet Union to bankruptcy while trying to keep up – Japan plowed huge sums into US Treasuries, thus helping to finance the deficit spending.
It was certainly a fantastically convenient arrangement for the US and one that by no means emerged by chance. One of the great achievements – if you want to call it that – of the US-engineered financial system is that it managed to make its own debt an indispensable part of the undergirding of the entire system.
To look at this in a larger context, when Great Britain was the world’s largest debtor and the US the largest creditor at the end of World War II, this state of affairs was seen as an insurmountable weakness on the part of the British that rendered them entirely beholden to their creditor. But when the US assumed that exact same role as the world’s largest debtor – with Japan and subsequently China in the role of largest creditor – there was no sense that it put the US in a position of fealty. That is because the US was issuing its debt in its own currency and had managed to leverage its economic and military strength to ensure the global prominence of that currency.
For the Japanese at the time, though, it’s hard to imagine what else they could have done with the huge surplus balances they were accumulating. The US was just about the only game in town.
But with pro-growth policies running on all cylinders in the US, Washington began to see the dollar as overvalued. In September 1985, the G5 delegates met at the Plaza Hotel in New York and reached an agreement at the behest of the US whereby the main current account surplus countries – Japan and Germany – would strengthen their currencies, ostensibly to boost domestic demand.
The result was a sudden appreciation in the Japanese yen – it was up 46% against the US dollar by the end of 1986. Accordingly, Japanese exports essentially collapsed, having been made too expensive. In order to compensate for this, the Japanese authorities introduced a number of stimulus measures that essentially created a bubble in the economy – most notably in the real estate sector.
What ensued, albeit not immediately, was Japan’s so-called ‘Lost Decade,’ the direct cause of which was interest-rate hikes by the Bank of Japan to cool down the overheated real estate market. However, the overheating was a direct consequence of the measures taken to soften the blow of the US-initiated Plaza Accord. As Michael Hudson points out, what essentially happened was that it was actually the US that triggered the bubble in the first place – via cutting rates and increasing spending. But through the Plaza Accord, it managed to export the consequences of that bubble to its allies – namely Japan.
There is another angle to the US assault on its ally Japan’s economy. By the 1980s, the Japanese were at the absolute cutting edge in innovation. This resulted in a clash with the US over something that would sound familiar to contemporary observers: the semiconductor trade. Japanese firms had begun to produce chips of arguably higher quality than the American ones but at a significantly lower cost.
This, of course, did not sit well with the Americans, who feared that Japan might not only gain the upper hand economically but also militarily, since advanced technology was a cornerstone of US military dominance.
None too pleased with the rise of an ally, the Reagan administration took action. In 1986, the US pressured the Japanese into agreeing to set a price floor for chips sold abroad and promising that its companies would buy more chips from the US. Dissatisfied with Japan’s tepid compliance with these conditions, the following year the US went further and imposed 100% tariffs on a range of Japanese goods, including computers, televisions, and a number of hand tools.
It was the most stringent economic measures taken against Japan since World War II and, coming on top of the Plaza Accord, played no small role in Japan’s economic decline from which the country has still not fully emerged to this day.
However manipulative US policy towards its allies was in the early postwar period, there is no doubt that being economically aligned with the US – while certainly doing nothing for national sovereignty – did provide benefits, sometimes even considerable ones.
The US emerged from World War II with roughly three-quarters of the world’s monetary gold stock and was responsible for around 50% of GDP. It was by far the globe’s leading industrial power and was able to disburse aid and provide the manufacturing and financial muscle to rebuild war-torn economies. It is hard to argue that the Marshall Plan didn’t help a devastated Germany get back on its feet – even if it did cement Germany as an ally that, as we have learned recently, is willing to severely compromise its own interests for the sake of US policy aims.
Even the dollar system, as self-serving for the US as it has been, did serve the purpose of providing liquidity and ease of trade in a rapidly globalizing postwar world. Many economists argue that such rapid growth in international trade would have been unfeasible under any sort of gold-based system. There were complaints about the primacy of the dollar as far back as the 1960s, especially from the French, but it is telling that until recently there were no real steps taken to fundamentally change the system.
Of course, there were instances of egregious abuse by the US – such as when President Richard Nixon unilaterally pulled the US out of Bretton Woods by removing the gold backing to the dollar in 1974 without even so much as consulting with allies.
But there was also some attempt to acknowledge the responsibility for managing the global currency in the best interests of everybody. When Volcker traveled to Belgrade for the IMF meeting in early October 1979, the dollar was in the midst of a full-blown crisis due to rampant US inflation. In Belgrade, he met with key American creditors, namely the German and French, who, by all accounts, told him sternly that he must do something to stem the dollar weakness that was eroding the value of their holdings with each passing day.
Volcker spent less than 24 hours in Belgrade and did not even stick around until the end of the conference. He departed back for Washington, by the Fed’s own account, with his ears ringing from the admonishments of America’s trading partners.
Just days later, he unveiled a set of measures, dubbed the October Reform, aimed at reining in inflation – and, by extension, protecting the dollar and the value of the holdings of American trade partners.
But what has transpired since has been a steady hollowing-out and financialization of the US economy – meaning an increase in leverage on a decreasing sliver of actual economic activity. America’s industry was largely offshored and replaced with a growth model based on inflating real estate and securities prices, boosting corporate profits through offshoring production and endless stock buybacks, and taking advantage of the fact that the US could still raise almost endless debt in dollars without suffering the usual consequences.
The US is rapidly losing its billing as the only game in town and, in its current state, has very little to offer allies. It is not difficult to see that the likes of China, Russia, and many others can now offer superior trade and investment opportunities. And now Washington is well on its way to debauching the value of the only thing keeping it afloat – the dollar – not only by weaponizing it but also through unprecedented fiscal profligacy.
Bringing the story up to the present day, when the US was pressuring Germany to abandon the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project with Russia, even before the conflict in Ukraine began, it was almost a crude parody of the sophisticated paternalism previously practiced by the US. Not only was it an utterly brazen attempt to interfere with an ally’s own affairs – as if the Germans themselves couldn’t weigh the risks of doing business with Russia – but it so blatantly contradicted Berlin’s own interests that it can’t be seen as anything other than an act of desperation.
So, when US President Donald Trump stood side-by-side with Russian President Vladimir Putin at their press conference in Helsinki in July 2018 and announced with his usual bluster that the US was planning on “competing” for the European gas market, it was a mix of disingenuousness and fantasy thinking – disingenuous because the US had no intention to compete on a level playing field and fantastical because the US, with its LNG priced some 30-40% above Russian piped gas, couldn’t compete anyway.
The US did end up displacing Russian gas in Europe, but hardly because it ‘outcompeted’ Moscow. The wreckage of the Nord Stream pipeline at the bottom of the Baltic Sea is not a display of American strength.
The Nord Stream episode, the sanctions on Russia, the attempts to coerce Europe to decouple from China – these can be thought of not so much as attempts to keep Russia and China ‘out’ but to keep the allies ‘in.’ A new Iron Curtain is descending, not on the opposing bloc but on America’s own allies, who are to be perpetually locked inside an increasingly desiccated system.
By Henry Johnston, an RT editor. He worked for over a decade in finance and is a FINRA Series 7 and Series 24 license holder.
The inherent tension and lack of genuine exchange is worse than during the Cold War when channels of communication did stay open.
U.S.-Russia relations have touched rock-bottom; it is worse even than imagined. In discourse with senior Russian officials, it is evident that the U.S. treats the former as clear enemies. To gain a flavour, it is as if a senior Russian official were to ask: “What is it you want from me?”. The answer might come: “I wish you’d die”.
The inherent tension and lack of genuine exchange is worse than during the Cold War when channels of communication did stay open. This lacuna is compounded by the absence of political nous amongst European political leaders, with whom grounded discussion has not proved possible.
Russian officials recognise the risks to this situation. They are at a loss however on how to correct it. The tenor of discourse too, has slid from outright hostility toward pettiness: The U.S., for example, might block workers from entering the Russian mission at the UN to repair broken windows. Moscow then — reluctantly — finds itself with little alternative but to respond in a similarly petty vein — and so the relationship spirals down.
There is an acknowledgement that the deliberately vituperative ‘information war’ is wholly dominated by the western MSM — further souring the atmospherics. And though the scattered western alternative media exists and is gaining in scale and significance, it is not easily engaged (being both diverse, and individualist). The tag of ‘Putin Apologist’ too, remains toxic to any autonomous news providers, and can destroy credibility at a stroke.
It is understood in Russia that the West presently exists in ‘phony normality’ — an interlude within its own cultural war (in the run-up to 2024). Russians, however, do perceive some obvious parallels with their own experience of radical civil polarisation — when the Soviet Nomenklatura demanded conformity to the Party ‘line’, or suffer sanction.
Moscow is open to dialogue with the West, but interlocutors so far have represented only themselves and have no mandate. This experience points to a conclusion that there is little point to ‘banging one’s head’ against a brick wall of an ideologically driven western leadership — Russian values being as a red rag to the western ideological ‘bull’. Yet, it is not clear when the time comes, if an empowered interlocutor (able to commit) will be present in Washington to pick up the phone.
Nevertheless, the enmity projected in the West towards Russia is perceived as having positive aspects as well as grave risks (the absence of treaties on the use and deployment of weapons). Interlocutors underline how western disdain towards Russians — plus its explicit enmity — finally has allowed Russia to move beyond Peter the Great’s Europeanisation. That latter episode is seen now as a diversion from Russia’s true destiny (albeit one that must be seen in the context of the rise and rise of the post-Westphalian European nation-state).
The hostility shown by Europeans towards the Russian people (and not just to its governance) has pushed Russia to ‘be itself’ again, which has been to its great benefit. Nonetheless, the shift gives rise to a certain tension: It is evident that western ‘hawks’ are always scanning the Russian scene in order to locate a host within the body politic in which to insert the spores of their weaponised New Moral Order — their purpose being to wedge into, and fragment, Russian society.
Inevitably then, explicit western cultural attachment does raise a certain caution amongst the mainstream ‘patriotic current’. Those Russians (mostly in Moscow and St Petersburg) who lean toward European culture do feel tension. They are neither fish nor fowl: Russia is moving towards a new identity and ‘way of being’, leaving the Europeanists watching their landmarks recede. Generally, the shift is viewed as inevitable, and as having brought about a real Russian renaissance and sense of confidence.
The revival of religion, we were told, effectively self-ignited spontaneously, as the churches re-opened after the end of communism. Many new ones have been built (approximately 75% of Russians claim to be Orthodox today). There is a sense in which the Orthodox ‘renaissance’ has a touch of the eschatological to it — provoked in part by what one individual called antagonistic ‘Rules Order ‘eschatology’! Notably few interlocutors mourned secular ‘Russian liberals’ (who had left Russia) — ‘good riddance’ (although some are coming back). There is an element here of the clearing of society from the ‘westification’ of the earlier centuries — though ambivalence is inevitable: European culture — at least in terms of philosophy and art — was, and is, an embedded component to Russian intellectual life, and is not about to disappear.
The political realm
It is not easy to convey the sense in which ‘absolute’ Russian victory in Ukraine has conflated into the notion of the unfolding revival of Russia’s new sense of ‘self’. Victory in Ukraine has been somehow assimilated into metaphysical destiny — as something assured and unfolding. The Russian military leadership (understandably) is mum concerning the likely structural/ institutional outcome. The talk (on hosted TV shows) however, is centred more on the feuds and schisms rending Kiev, than on battleground details as heretofore.
It is understood that NATO has been comprehensively defeated in Ukraine. The extent and depth of the NATO failure perhaps was a surprise in Russia but is viewed as somehow testimony to Russian adaptiveness and technological innovation in all-arms integration and communication. ‘Absolute victory’ may be understood as ‘no way’ will Moscow allow Ukraine again to become a threat to Russian security.
Russian officials see both Ukraine and Israeli-Middle East wars conflating to segment the West into separate, disputatious spheres — with the West heading toward fragmentation and possible instability. The U.S. is facing setbacks and challenges that will further reveal the loss of deterrence — further exacerbating U.S. anxiety about its security.
Moscow is aware just how much the political zeitgeist in Israel has changed (as a result of the radical government installed after the last Israeli elections), and therefore of the consequent limitations to political initiatives by western states. It carefully watches Israel’s plans in respect to southern Lebanon. Russia is co-ordinating with other states to avoid the slide toward big war. President Raisi’s Moscow visit last week reportedly focused on the comprehensive strategic agreement under negotiation, and (reportedly) included the signing of a document on countering western sanctions imposed on both states.
In terms of the emerging global order, Moscow takes the Presidency of the BRICS in January 2024. It is both a huge opportunity to establish the multi-polar BRICS world at a time of wide geo-political consensus in the Global South — and a challenge too. Moscow perceives the window of opportunity its presidency offers, but is very aware that BRICS states are far from homogeneous. In respect to Israel’s wars, Russia has both an influential Jewish lobby and a Russian diaspora in Israel that imposes certain constitutional duties on the President. Russia likely will move cautiously on the Israel-Palestine conflict in order to keep BRICS cohesion. Some important forms of economic and financial innovations will emerge from Russia’s presidency of the BRICS.
And in terms of Russia’s ‘EU problem’, in counterpoint to Europe’s so-called ‘Russia problem’, the EU and NATO (post-Maidan) built up the Ukrainian army to be one of the largest and most fully NATO equipped armies in Europe. After the March 2022 Ukrainian-Russian settlement proposals were vetoed by Boris Johnson and Blinken — and as the inevitably of a longer more intense war became certain — Russia mobilised and prepared its own logistic supply chains. EU leaders however are now ‘closing the circle’ through projecting this Russian military expansion (itself a reaction to NATO intensification in Ukraine) to be evidence rather, of a Russian plan to invade mainland Europe. In what seems a coordinated effort, western mainstream media is scrounging for anything that can even remotely resemble some evidence of Russia’s putative ‘designs’ against Europe.
This specter of Russian imperialism is being spun to inculcate fear through the European populace and to argue that Europe must divert resources to prepare its logistics for a coming war with Russia. This represents another twist to that vicious cycle downward of threatened war that portends badly for Europe. There was — for Europe — no Russian ‘problem’ until the neo-cons seized on the Maidan ‘opening’ to weaken Russia.
Covert nuclear, biological and chemical experiments on the American public are not new. For at least the past 75 years, the US government waged a war against its own citizens, a long history of performing illegal, unethical, and immoral experiments. [1][2][3] Countless millions of US civilians have been exposed to astonishing procedures and pathogens. According to a US Congressional investigation, by the late 1970s “at least 500,000 people were used as subjects in radiation, biological and chemical experiments sponsored by the US Federal Government on its own citizens”. [4][5][6] However, as with all US Congressional Investigations, the content was severely whitewashed, with the actual count of victimised Americans being almost certainly in the tens of millions. [7] BBC Radio 4 did a long series of podcasts on these experiments, the series titled “Hotel Anthrax”. [8] I am providing the link here, but the broadcasts have been archived and the pages don’t always load.
For many decades, nobody in the US was safe from victimisation in these bio-warfare tests and experiments on civilians. At one time the CIA even infiltrated the drinking water supply of the FDA headquarters in Washington (I can hardly imagine a more worthy candidate for a biological experiment than the FDA) with a not altogether harmless chemical, to test its ability to poison drinking water supplies with LSD and other mind-altering agents. By 1950 the US military was actively conducting open-air tests throughout the country, experimenting with large numbers of viruses and harmful bacteria, and huge volumes of each, exposing millions of civilians to disease and death. Concurrently, the CIA was actively conducting their own experiments, using their authority to withdraw pathogens at will from the military’s bio-warfare arsenal.
The US government exposed millions of Americans to chemical and biological agents, in clandestine experiments that spanned many decades. In the 1950s and sixties, scientists from the Fort Detrick biological weapons program ran a series of tests to determine how easy it would be to expose large numbers of people to a lethal bacterium. These tests were part of an experimental program originating mostly at Fort Detrick that began in the late 1940s and has not abated. During the first 20 years alone, the US military acknowledged that about 250 such tests had been conducted in which many tens of millions of civilians were unknowingly exposed. When these tests or programs were discovered, the military consistently claimed the agents employed were harmless to humans, but it has become abundantly clear over the years that many of these chemical and biological agents were far from harmless.
Pentagon Records declassified in 2002 revealed that the US government and military often conducted open-air Biological and Chemical Weapons Tests on US civilians until at least the 1970s. The documents disclosed that these hundreds of biological and chemical tests were far more widespread than the US military had previously acknowledged.
For various reasons, the 1970s and 1980s experienced a flood of disclosures that opened a window into a vast array of literally hundreds of unethical and criminal enterprises of brutal and often fatal human experimentation conducted by the US government against its own citizens. Despite this, there still remain large numbers of experiments that are suspected but cannot now be proven, often because all documentation was destroyed in response to overwhelming public anger and realistic fears of increasing political instability, to say nothing of a potential flood of millions of lawsuits.
These pages contain only a brief summary of the litany of biological warfare carried out the by the US government and its various agencies against the American people, with considerable evidence these experiments are still continuing today. The US government hypocritically claims the high moral ground in the area of human rights, but I am not aware of any nation in recent memory that has ever displayed such a consistent, despicable, and utter disregard for the lives of its own citizens. The content of this series of essays on bio-chemical warfare begins with unpleasant details of US government atrocities, and it becomes worse as we progress through the content.
In May of 2009, James Corbett wrote an article titled “Governments and Biowarfare: A Brief History”, [9] in which he stated: “The American government’s approach to biowarfare is notable for its unabashed use of unwitting American citizens as guinea pigs in biological weapons research. The very people who helped establish the U.S. biological weapons programs openly bragged about their experiments on unwitting human test subjects. And there is no shortage of documentation proving that governments have used biological agents against their own citizens in bioterror false flag operations. It is no coincidence that two of the most well-known and devastating biological releases this decade have traced back to Fort Detrick (the home of the U.S. biological weapons research program since the 1950s and the current home of USAMRIID) and Porton Down (Fort Detrick’s British equivalent). UK foot and mouth disease, and US anthrax scare.”
Before proceeding further, I would make a few initial comments. The first is that comprehensive information on this large topic is quite difficult to access. Many official documents have been destroyed, with others still classified or otherwise unavailable and, while some information is accessible in the public realm, it is scattered and often lacking useful detail. Most sources provide only a small amount of information, often omitting the most serious and damaging events or experiments, while often attempting to “soften” the information by linking American atrocities to something imaginary Germany or Russia did (or might have done, or could have done, or would have liked to have done …) Also, in many cases, including some of the US mass media websites, viewers receive a notice that “This content is not available in your area”, or “You are not authorized to access this page”. I was disappointed to see that ahrp.org was especially useless except in a few isolated instances, providing only a few descriptive words on major atrocities.
Another major disappointment is that websites we tend to trust, often prove untrustworthy, by glossing over or trivialising major atrocities and often by disparaging authors who attempt to expose these. Andrew Goliszek wrote a book titled “In the Name of Science”, [10] in which he exposes many of these human experiments and atrocities. His book is available for purchase, and limited previews are available on archive.org. [11] In this context, I was very disappointed that Salon magazine chose to trash this whistle-blower and trivialise the insane medical experiments performed on Americans. [12] From their article: “Unfortunately, Goliszek is an aggravatingly overheated writer, and as an investigator he can be lazy, too often relying on dubious sources and presenting only one side of the story. He is also a poor analyst of the facts he presents. [H]e skips from scientific disgrace to scientific disgrace with the glee of a freak-show emcee.” Often, the National Geographic, the Smithsonian, and others similar, seem to do something similar, with perhaps less personal smear but with the same intent and result. And the intent is to circle the wagons when the truth escapes confinement, and to paint the whistle-blowers as deranged conspiracy theorists when they are not.
I stated earlier that America’s human rights calculus excludes any atrocities committed outside its own borders and focuses only on what happens at home. That’s mostly true today, but it wasn’t always like this. In fact, all the strident and self-righteous moralising about human rights emanating from the US today is a relatively recent development that began only in the late 1970s and 1980s. Prior to that time, the CIA, every branch of the US military, many Departments of the US government, most prominent American hospitals and educational institutions, and even UN agencies like theWHO, were all very busy committing countless atrocities against the domestic US population. It was only after evidence of many of these events escaped confinement and became public knowledge that the US relocated its human-rights atrocities offshore. The increasing public outcries and dangers of civil uprising forced the US to terminate or relocate these activities and, having made this effort to clean up the mess at home, the propaganda machine worked overtime to distract the American public and deflect attention from these domestic crimes by focusing on real or imagined violations by others abroad. It was only at this point that the Americans began preaching their newly-obtained sanctity by condemning other nations for what were much smaller transgressions than those practiced at home for so long.
Senate investigations produced substantial evidence that almost 250 populated areas of the US had been heavily contaminated with biological agents prior to 1970, with no information on the contamination since then. At that same time, the US experienced a major outbreak of the H1N1 flu strain that was apparently genetically identical to one that had disappeared more than 20 years prior, leading to the conclusion that the military had collected and preserved that strain for future application and had now deployed it in a test. The US military publicly admitted in 1977 that many hundreds of bio-warfare experiments had been conducted in the continental US since World War II, and that several dozens of those involved serious and potentially fatal biological agents.
In 1994, the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs conducted what it described as “a comprehensive analysis stretching back 50 years of the extent to which veterans were exposed to potentially dangerous substances without knowledge or consent”. They produced what some termed “a damning report” concluding the Defense Department demonstrated “a consistent pattern of misrepresentation” of the hazards of its activity, and had “used” hundreds of thousands of unwitting military personnel alone, to say nothing of millions of civilians, in bio-warfare experiments spanning at least 50 years. A synopsis is available here: [13] The full report is available here: [14]
The United States Government Accountability Office issued a report on September 28, 1994, which stated that between 1940 and 1974, the United States Department of Defense and other national security agencies studied hundreds of thousands of human subjects in tests and experiments involving hazardous substances. [15] A quotation from the report:
Many experiments that tested various biological agents on human subjects, referred to as Operation Whitecoat, were carried out at Fort Detrick, Maryland, for about twenty years from 1953 to 1973. [16]. The human subjects originally consisted of volunteer enlisted men. However, the enlisted men soon staged a sit-down strike to obtain more information about the dangers of the biological tests, and many questions were raised about the “voluntary” aspect of the victims. No follow-ups of note were done, nor were records kept, of the participants. The US military later claimed it had contact information for only about 1,000 of the original participants. The official claim is that no one died in these experiments and that “only two” persons suffered “long-term medical complications”, but knowing the list of pathogens used and considering that the military refuses to declassify the records, we can be forgiven for harboring doubts.
The official Government text, Medical Aspects of Biological Warfare (2007), [17][18] makes several interesting admissions. It states that between about 1950 and 1970, “at least 239 open-air ‘field tests’ were conducted in the US in which the general public and test subjects were uninformed”. These tests contained all manner of biological and chemical pathogens which were dispersed over heavily-populated areas that included Minneapolis, St. Louis, New York City, San Francisco, and several of the military’s own bases including Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. The report further states that “In conjunction with the US Department of Agriculture”, the military released “anti-crop agents” throughout the US, i.e. herbicides lethal to the nation’s food supply. It states further that the open-air releases of pathogens were performed “to study viability and infectivity”, the resulting massive flood of medical disabilities and the many deaths being either unexpected or perhaps irrelevant. However, the report notes plaintively, “These studies [performed without knowledge or consent of the victims] tainted the history of the offensive biological warfare program”. We don’t need an imagination to understand why.
While we can appreciate his candor, the Surgeon-General failed to record the instances where, in testing “techniques of biological pathogen dispersion” the city of Minneapolis was sprayed with germ warfare materials 61 different times in tests lasting several months, or that the “assumption” the pathogens were “harmless” may have been incorrect in light of the enormous increase in respiratory illnesses experienced in the dispersal areas in and near Minneapolis. He also failed to record the test with the foolish code name of “Big Tom”, where the Department of Defense sprayed the entire population of Oahu in 1965 with a bacterium while practicing a planned attack on Cuba.He also failed to note that Big Tom caused serious infections in tens of thousands of people, particularly those young, elderly, or ill with weakened immune systems. The Surgeon-General informs us further that, included in these other environmental field tests, the military did indeed conduct many “controversial studies” that were meant “to determine whether African Americans were more susceptible”. They were.
Finally, the report tells us that “Public disclosure of the testing program in the Washington Post on December 22 , 1976, and in US Senate hearings in 1977 resulted in harsh criticism …”. But then we are told the CDC investigated the matter of the US military poisoning the population and concluded that in 100 outbreaks of one particularly dangerous bacterium, “none was caused by the [strain used by the military], and the vast outbreaks of illnesses by the same bacteria were simply unfortunate accidents caused by “opportunistic pathogens”. Such a big lie. In a further attempt to un-blemish his record, the Surgeon-General also claims that “Numerous unsubstantiated allegations were made” about the US using biological pathogens against North Korea and China, and swears that “Biological weapons have never been used by the US military”, but that the US State Department “suspected” China, Russia and Cuba to have done so.
2.2. A Brief Summary
Beginning around 1950, the US Army conducted at least 240 open-air bio-warfare attacks [19] on American cities, releasing deadly nerve agents and bacteria from Alaska to Hawaii. [20] In one of these cases in the 1950s, The CIA released whooping cough bacteria from the sea near Tampa Bay, Florida, to test their ability to infect human populations on a large scale. [21] causing an epidemic that left tens of thousands of people extremely ill and killing many others. Whooping cough (Pertussis) was chosen because it is a highly-contagious airborne disease that spreads easily and is often fatal, especially to small children. The disease causes such violent coughing that victims can break their own ribs, the coughing spells leaving them exhausted. An enormous number of people became seriously ill, and many died, none realising their distress was visited upon them by their own government.
In one long-running study that continued until at least 1970, the US Navy simulated biological warfare attacks by spraying large quantities of a bacteria over a 117 square mile area of the city of San Francisco, in which many citizens died and countless contracted serious pneumonia-like illnesses. [22][23][24] In one such test of many, the Military determined that San Francisco had received enough of a dose for nearly all of the city’s 800,000 residents to inhale at least 5,000 of the Serratia Marcescens bacteria particles. After news of this attack became public, military sources insisted the bacteria were ‘harmless”, but in fact resulting illnesses were widespread, with countless thousands incurring serious urinary tract infections, respiratory infections, pneumonia and other illnesses. According to authorities, these infections were permanent: “To this day, these bacteria are a leading cause of death among the elderly in the San Francisco area”. After revelation of the tests about 30 years later, some families filed suit against the US government claiming their relatives died and many families went bankrupt trying to pay the medical bills, but US courts all the way to the Supreme Court, declared the US government was immune from lawsuits.
The US Military also experimented with widespread dispersal of dangerous bacteria in a secret release of another strain of bacillus at Washington’s National Airport and its main bus terminal.
Operation Big Buzz was an experiment that took place in June 1955 in Savannah, Georgia and again in Avon Park, Florida in 1956 under the name Operation Drop Kick. Source
In another famous study, US Army biological warfare experiments were conducted in Georgia and Florida where researchers released millions of infected mosquitoes to learn if the insects could potentially spread yellow fever and dengue fever. Hundreds of residents contracted a wide array of health problems ranging from respiratory difficulties to spontaneous abortions and stillbirths. No information was given to the public, and no treatment was offered to the ill and dying. Instead, Army researchers pretended to be public health workers, and visited the victims to collect photographs and to perform medical tests to determine “the success rate” of their experiments, with no permanent records kept, and illnesses and deaths attributed to “other causes”.
Containers of semi-toxic bacteria were planted in the New York subway, and bacteria were secretly pumped into the Pentagon (another great candidate for a biological experiment) ventilation system and clouds of bacteria were released in San Francisco. The process never stopped. In 2005, US Homeland Security released a claimed (but unidentified) “nontoxic gas” into New York’s Grand Central Station to trace the flow of airborne chemicals through the terminal.
.
During the widespread public protests against the Vietnam war in the 1960s, the US military asked President Nixon for permission to test its arsenal of biological and chemical weapons against the civilian war protestors, to (1) demonstrate the “efficacy” of the chemicals and biological agents, (2) “control” the protestors and eliminate future protests, and (3) “educate people” on gas weaponry.
1966: ‘A Study of the Vulnerability of Subway Passengers in New York City to Covert Attack with Biological Agents,” military officials tried to see how easy it would be to unleash biological weapons using the New York City subway. They would break light bulbs full of bacteria on the tracks to see how they spread through the city. Source
During the late 1960s, the US Army conducted an experiment they called, “A Study of the Vulnerability of Subway Passengers in New York City to Covert Attack with Biological Agents”, in which they released trillions of a strain of bacillus into the subway system during the rush hour. This was only one of many such experiments, which were not suspended until the 1970s. The US Army acknowledged that they conducted hundreds such tests in populated areas across the entire nation, and that US overseas territories like Hawaii, the Pacific Islands and others were repeatedly blanketed with various bacteriological organisms in order to determine the optimum dosages and placements as well as to measure effects of the weather on dissemination patterns.
Following its grand success in obtaining the bio-warfare and human experimentation treasures from the Japanese atrocity programs conducted at Unit 731, the US government embarked on literally hundreds of these secret projects, many begun by one of America’s most morally-deformed psychopaths, US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. One of the better-known efforts was labeled “Project 112”, which number was its position in a list of more than 150 clandestine bio-chemical projects operated by McNamara against American civilians and military personnel, with funds and operating staff from every branch of the US military and intelligence agencies. Many of the numbered projects in this series of 150, contained numerous sub-projects, and many of those contained further sub-projects. The truth of the total will never be known because the records have been destroyed. Perhaps the most famous and inclusive of these was Project 112. [25][26]
On September 20, 1950, a US Navy ship just off the coast of San Francisco used a giant hose to spray a cloud of microbes into the air and into the city’s famous fog. The military was testing how a biological weapon attack would affect the 800,000 residents of the city. Source
Project 112 was a series of biological and chemical weapons experiments that primarily involved the dissemination of airborne biological pathogens meant to incapacitate civilian populations, that was secretly conducted on a massive scale within the US, Canada, the UK, and in vast swatches of the Pacific and some other undeveloped countries as well. This vast program was the umbrella under which many hundreds of biological dispersion tests were carried out in the continental US against the civilian population. Some of these experiments involved potentially harmless strains but many others were quite lethal and led to thousands of deaths and permanent debilitations within large sectors of the US civilian population, the tests in San Francisco and Florida being two obvious examples of the latter.
There were many parts to this Project, with many of them covering extensive areas of both the US and Canada, some pathogen dispersals reportedly covering the entire United States. The names of some of the more prominent biological programs: Operation DEW, Operation LAC, Project SHAD, all part of the very extensive Project 112. Operation Dew[27] consisted of several separate experiments to determine the feasibility of maintaining a large aerosol cloud released offshore until it drifted over land, achieving a huge land coverage and poisoning or killing all the area inhabitants. Operation LAC[28] involved the spraying of carcinogens and pathogens over large areas of the US and Canada, intended to test the dispersal patterns and potential geographic range of chemical and biological weapons.
Many of these “experiments” were conducted on US military servicemen without their knowledge, a major portion of which was conducted in a series of shipboard trials on unwitting American sailors, the project collectively known as SHAD, [29] or Shipboard Hazard and Defense. With project SHAD, the military initially claimed the tests were designed to identify US warships’ vulnerabilities to attack, but it gradually became clear the real purpose was a search for ways to overcome defenses of enemy ships, methods to guarantee the total destruction with biological pathogens of enemy naval forces at sea. One excessively ambitious effort involved attempts to literally envelop a vast section of ocean in a pervasive cloud of biological pathogens that would kill an entire enemy marine fleet while at sea. The military stoutly maintains that no one suffered injury from these tests, belied by the fact that the US government Veterans website contains instructions on claiming compensation for these injuries.[30]
These were by admission very large-scale experiments that were expected to leave “significant or protracted effects on the physical or biological environment”. Understand what this means: the military fully expected their tests to do lasting or permanent harm to the environment and the people. At one time, for this program alone, the military developed – and tested – on US farms and citizens more than 1,000 anti-crop biological pathogens and defoliants. A vast array of pathogens was weaponised and prepared in cluster bombs for delivery to unfortunate victims. The tests used at least 20 different biological pathogens plus another 15 or 20 chemical agents that included Sarin and VX nerve gases, mustard gas, tear gas, and other unknown substances. The program went so far as to search desperately for methods of inducing biological epidemics in both plant and animal populations – in addition, of course, to entirely separate methods of killing off the human population.
Since the victims were unaware of these projects and were unwitting participants, informed consent clearly did not exist, the document record further revealing the US Defense Department conducted many of the tests in foreign countries since they were considered too unethical to perform at home. Given the illegalities and international implications, to say nothing of the domestic deaths and injuries, the entire existence of Project 112 (and SHAD) was heatedly and categorically denied by the US military, repeatedly insisting that such a program had never existed. When a CBS news report revealed some dramatic evidence and indisputable proof of the programs, the Pentagon and Defense Department exhibited “total surprise”, then made pretenses of conducting “an internal investigation” to determine if such a program had really existed – presumably without their knowledge. Later, to mollify an enraged public, the requisite whitewashed Congressional hearings were held, after which the entire matter was quietly swept under the carpet.
2.3. Project Listing and Description
2.3.1. Insectology
The program aims to develop virus-transmitting insects that infest crops. With the help of the genome editing tool Crispr-Cas the viruses can modify the plants’ genomes. Source
That is a new word I created to categorise the US military’s nearly 75-year pathological interest in weaponsing insects for use as biological weapons against unfavored nations. And these do not have to be countries with which the US is actively at war, but merely uncompromising anti-colonials who don’t want to obey the master. These tests and experiments began immediately after WWII and, if anything, have increased over time, with devious programs being carried out at USAMRIID, Dugway, and many other locations, and this has definitely emerged into the private sector as well, with many corporate entities now participating, in addition to US NGOs and UN agencies like the WHO.
The United States has developed and stockpiled a variety of biological weapons agents since the late 1960s. The most prominent agents known to have been developed at the time were Anthrax, Tularemia, Brucellosis, Q-fever, Hantavirus, Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis virus, and Botulism, but there have been many more. The list is very long, and most of these can be communicated by insects in one form or another. Q-fever, Brucellosis, Botulism, Anthrax, and Tularemia are bacterial infections spread in various ways, and Botulism in particular can cause death if untreated. Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis (VEE) virus is a mosquito-borne virus that can cause serious neurological disorders. Anthrax is of course, very contagious and most often fatal.
With nature not always being cooperative, there is no way to know or to foresee or even to predict the potential long-term results of some of these programs. Natural mutations could easily create insect Frankensteins that cannot later be corralled. Think of the innocent transplantation of rabbits to Australia. Live organisms are capable of chain reactions that would be unimaginable to us. There are also moral and ethical questions. It is scientifically possible to infect mosquitoes, for example, with a COVID vaccine and “force” an entire population to be infected against their will. This is very much the hope of Bill Gates and Oxitec but, just because something of this nature can be done, should it be done? What happened to “informed consent”? And where will our clearly psychopathic leaders be willing to stop? Will they ever stop?
Below, we have a list of some of the insect-related biological warfare attempts, tests, experiments, and this is by no means a complete list.
2.3.2. Project Bellwether
Project Bellwether went further and performed experiments where infected mosquitoes bit humans, though the mosquitos were infected with inert diseases.Source
This was a long set of more than 50 experiments conducted at the Dugway Proving Ground that used the female mosquito Aedes aegypti (Yellow Fever Mosquito) to assess the possibility of transmitting fatal or debilitating diseases to an enemy’s forces and population. [31][32] It was part of a very ambitious and determined program by the US military to weaponise insects, part of Project 112, and related to Projects Drop Kick, Big Buzz, Big Itch, and all the others similar.
2.3.3. Operation Magic Sword
Operation Magic Sword was a biological warfare experiment to determine whether mosquitoes infected with yellow fever and/or Venezuelan equine encephalitis (VEE) could be successfully bred and then released from a ship near an enemy shore. This was a cousin to the Operations Drop Kick, Big Buzz, and Big Itch. The military claim the mosquitos used for this Operation were uninfected, and that they never conducted such tests with these live pathogens, but the truth may be otherwise. One of the arsenals produced around 3,000 gallons of VEE and Q-fever, and there is no compelling evidence that these supplies were not used. It naturally arouses much suspicion since the US government and military have been proven to have lied about every such experiment in one way or another, one of the most common claims being that the pathogens used were “harmless” while the public were experiencing a virtual epidemic. [33][34][35]
2.3.4. Florida GM Mosquitoes
A biologist in Brazil releases mosquitoes to combat a Zika outbreak. Source
In 2022, Oxitec released over 750 million genetically engineered mosquitoes as part of a ‘mosquito control’ program. According to EPA’s Experimental Use Permit: “Oxitec will release into the environment male mosquitoes genetically modified to carry a protein that will inhibit the survival of their female offspring when they mate with wild female mosquitoes. The male offspring will survive to become fully functional adults with the same genetic modification, providing multi-generational effectiveness that could ultimately lead to a reduction in Aedes aegypti mosquito populations in the release areas.” [36][37][38][39]
However, in “a previous experiment conducted from 2013 to 2015, Oxitec released mosquitoes in Brazil that carried an earlier engineered gene, OX513A, and eventually released those with OX5034 as well. While the company declared the release a success, scientists unaffiliated with Oxitec from Yale and a handful of Brazilian institutions published research in the journal Nature Scientific Reports claiming the mosquitoes had mated, produced viable offspring, and ultimately created a new genetic hybrid population capable of surviving in the wild.”
To make matters worse, these are the same mosquitoes – and the same company – that Bill Gates enthused about and called “flying syringes”, in that the insects could be used to administer what would be essentially forcible COVID and other vaccinations. The prospects are terrifying, and it appears more likely than ever that ZIKA was a trial run. I covered this in an article you may care to read: “COVID Vaccinations and Oxitec’s “Flying Syringes”.[40]
2.3.5. Insect Allies
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an arm of the U.S. Department of Defense, is planning to use insects to deliver genetically engineered viruses to crops, with the aim of altering the plant’s genetic traits in the field. Source
The Insect Allies program is a recent (2016) DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) initiative ostensibly to protect American crops from various climatic and pestilential misfortunes, [41]But DARPA is not about protecting anything. These insect experiments were presented to the public as “gene therapy for crops”, methods of reducing the need for chemical insecticides and pesticides. But extreme concern has been expressed by competent scientists who believe the project is actually developing methods to deliver a new class of biological weapons, that this is really just another American insecticide warfare program. There is no question that, from the days of Dr. Ishii after WWII, the US military has taken very seriously the possibilities inherent in weaponising all manner of insects. One report at Science.org [42] states, “The critics charge that “the program may be widely perceived as an effort to develop biological agents for hostile purposes and their means of delivery. It’s hard to see such a justification for Insect Allies … because the method is hard to control and unlikely to be allowed in peacetime. Besides, there is an easier way to introduce viruses to plants: spraying.”
2.3.6. Operation May Day
Operation May Day: Aedes Aegypti mosquitoes were dispersed through ground-based methods in Georgia, USA, during a US Army operation codenamed May Day. Source
Operation May Day involved a series of insect warfare tests (on the American population) to discover the best methods of dispersing yellow fever mosquitoes in an urban area. The tests were conducted primarily in Savannah, Georgia. [43][44]
Then we had “Operation Drop Kick“, [45][46][47][48][49] designed to test various ways of dispersing mosquitoes infected with various biological pathogens over large geographical areas, these tests carried out over many parts of the continental US, including most of the East Coast. There were other of these programs of course, all with foolish names and all designed to assess the dissemination of infected insects and other lethal pathogens into civilian populations. These were not minor operations, with the military on occasion releasing one million or more infected mosquitoes into a single civilian area. They were kept very secret since they were illegal in terms of domestic law and contravened international law and many weapons treaties that other nations signed with the US in good faith. For those of you still adhering to the COVID religion, you might care to read this article titled COVID Vaccinations and Oxitec’s “Flying Syringes”, [50] and see if you can make any connections.
2.3.8. Operation Big Buzz
Operation Big Buzz was an experiment that took place in Georgia and Florida under the umbrella of Operation Drop Kick. The tests involved dropping hundreds of thousands of aedes aegypti mosquitos from airplanes to determine whether they could disperse yellow fever among a population as a method of biological warfare. Millions of female mosquitoes were bred, and infected with yellow fever. It doesn’t appear that yellow fever-infected insects were dispersed in this particular case, but there exists much suspicion that the mosquitoes were infected with something. There were many reports of the Army sending officers disguised as health workers to interview the population and gather information on the resulting diseases and epidemics, a subterfuge the military has used many times when dispersing a pathogen on the American public. This was especially true of areas where the populations were mostly black.[51][52][53][54]
2.3.9. Operation Big Itch
A C-119 Flying Boxcar, the type of plane used to release the chemicals. Source
This was a series of tests at Dugway, designed to determine coverage patterns and survivability of the tropical rat flea (Xenopsylla cheopis) for use in biological warfare as disease vector. The fleas were loaded into two types of munitions and dropped from the air. Each munition held 100,000 or 200,000 fleas, and which could survive the drop from an airplane and wreak the havoc they were meant to do on a civilian population. It was a copy of the Japanese biological warfare efforts at Unit 731 in China. [55][56][57][58][59]
2.3.10. Operation LAC
Operation LAC (Large Area Coverage) was a partner to Operation Dew, with similar aims, that of dispersing biological pathogens or microscopic particles of a chemical pathogen over very large land areas. Of particular interest was the range of geographical dispersion and the means of achieving this. [60]
Operation Top Hat was an exercise conducted by the US military that involved the use of Chemical Corps personnel to test biological and chemical warfare decontamination methods. Military personnel were deliberately exposed to mustard gas, nerve gases, and biological pathogens so the army could test decontamination methods. The men used in the tests were not volunteers and were not informed of the tests. [61][62][63]
Project 112 was a massive series of biological and chemical weapons experiments conducted by the United States Department of Defense from 1962 to 1973 that primarily involved the dissemination of airborne biological pathogens meant to incapacitate civilian populations, that was secretly conducted on a large scale within the US, Canada, the UK, and in vast swatches of the Pacific and some other undeveloped countries as well. It is necessary to note that the populations in the affected areas were not notified, meaning national sovereignty was violated in all instances.The Philippines and Japan were two such locations, but there were many others including Egypt, Liberia, South Korea, and much of the Pacific, and of course the domestic populations within the US, Canada and the UK were also kept ignorant of the tests. This ignorance applied equally to US military servicemen, hundreds of thousands of whom were exposed to many pathogens with varying levels of lethality, resulting in many deaths and disabilities as was also true among the tens of millions in the US civilian population. [64][65][66][67]
The tests used at least 20 different biological pathogens plus another 15 or 20 chemical agents that included Sarin and VX nerve gases, mustard gas, tear gas and other unknown substances. Many of these “experiments” were conducted on US military servicemen without their knowledge, a major portion of which was conducted in a series of shipboard trials on unwitting American sailors while at sea. We cannot fail to be impressed by the passionate determination exhibited to infect populations under every imaginable circumstance and condition. The US military was determined to “penetrate” everything from “arctic inversion weather systems” to “destroying the population of an island complex”, from spreading pathogens over immense areas of open ocean to the penetration of “jungle vegetation”. The dispersal methods ranged from massive spray generators installed in ships or aircraft to miniatures contained in briefcases.
McNamara ordered the military Joint Chiefs of Staff “to consider all possible applications” of these agents (testing biological agents on the populations of disfavored enemy nations), and to develop a coherent plan for the deployment of an “adequate but total” “biological and chemical deterrent capability”, the plan to include cost estimates and an “appraisal of international political consequences”. Understand that this was not meant primarily as a war-time measure, but simply to punish uncooperative nations. The plan was approved by then President Kennedy in National Security Action Memorandum 235 (NSAM 235), which meant it was a secret and highly-classified program directed to biological and chemical warfare against humans, animals, and plants, with testing performed in various combinations of climate and terrain. At least 50 different trials were conducted, many with biological pathogens and some with chemical agents including sarin and VX nerve gases, tear gas and mustard gas.
An agreement was made between the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia to participate in “mutual interest research and development activity and field testing”, i.e., to permit the US military to poison their citizens as well as its own. These agreements and tests were classified Top Secret, and no civilian victims in any country were provided with an opportunity to give informed consent to what was about to happen to them.
All means of dispersal were imagined and tested. Several such tests using Bacillus globigii, an “anthrax simulant”, were conducted in Washington DC, with the bacteria released from spray generators hidden in specially built briefcases. Another series of tests was done in the New York City Subway system by dropping light bulbs filled with various bacteria. For nearly ten years, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal grew plant pathogens intended for wheat crops that were tested in many areas, some outside the US, with stories of American-initiated crop failures in places like Japan and Okinawa persisting to this day. At last report there were still nearly 100,000 pounds of this pathogen remaining in storage for potential future use. [68]
2.4. Other Biological Tests
2.4.1. Operation Dew
Operation Dew was designed to test the feasibility of creating enormous aerosol clouds of biological pathogens from offshore military vessels and maintaining the clouds intact while they drifted over land to kill or incapacitate a local population. The military conducted a wide variety of these tests, at least one of which “dispersed and maintained a cloud of some 150,000 km² over a heavily populated coastal region that covered three US states and much of Central Canada.” Some tests were done with cadmium sulfide, many with various plant spores and other biological pathogens. Many of these tests were done on an astonishingly large scale, with the contaminant clouds covering virtually the entire continental US, stretching from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean and from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.[69]
2.4.2. Operation Sea-Spray
This was the study that lasted nearly 20 years where the military practiced spraying clouds of bacteria over San Francisco in attempts to learn how to conduct a real-life biological weapons attack from a ship near a country’s coastline. [70][71][72][73][74]
2.4.3. Operation Big City (Also Operation Open Air)
This was one of the CIA’s many abominable pathogen experiments led by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, head of the CIA’s secret Project MK-ULTRA. The intention was to find convenient methods of producing “large-scale aberrant mental states on an unsuspecting population“, by spraying a compound over an enemy city and rendering helpless both civilians and military personnel. They were searching for a substance and a method of producing “mental confusion”, physical disablement”, “shock”, “illogical thinking”, “hallucinations”, and anything else that might be possible. One dispersal method was to fit an automobile with specially-designed exhaust pipes that would disperse a pathogen widely on city streets. Another was to use a special suitcase that would exhaust such a pathogen as a person walked down a city street. In both cases, LSD was the CIA’s pathogen of choice.
Another part of this project was to release massive clouds of biological or chemical gas off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, intending to blanket the entire city with the pathogen and to then monitor and assess how powerful were the disorienting properties of the pathogen. As was typical, the CIA issued strong cautions in internal memos that the “utmost secrecy” was to be maintained to prevent the public from learning what had happened to them. The CIA was involved in many such “missions” as part of MK-ULTRA, including Operation Open Air where biological warfare tests were conducted repeatedly in the streets and tunnels of New York. [75][76][77][78][79]
2.4.4. Operation Dark Winter
Operation Dark Winter was a simulation of a biological attack of smallpox conducted in June of 2001, a project designed by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies. The simulated attacks were carried out in Oklahoma City, and other locations in Georgia and Pennsylvania. The plans were partly meant to test the weaknesses of the US health care infrastructure and its ability to handle such an occurrence. [80][81][82] It is noteworthy that many saw this as one of the eerie projects that resembled COVID a bit too closely for comfort. According to Foreign Policy, “… the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic bears an eerie resemblance to [this] simulation”. [83] You can decide.
2.4.5. Operation Whitecoat
Operation Whitecoat was a medical research project conducted at Fort Detrick by the United States Army for about 20 years, ending around 175. Its stated purpose was to test the effects of biological agents and various tropical diseases. The participants were subjected to a variety of pathogens that included Venezuelan equine encephalitis, Q fever, and Sandfly fever, among others. This long-running project was supposedly conducted on volunteers, with the official story that the studies were conducted in “a controlled environment” and the volunteers “were closely monitored”. But the facts seem to indicate otherwise. As mentioned earlier, the enlisted men soon staged a sit-down strike to obtain more information about the dangers of the biological tests, and many questions were raised about the “voluntary” aspect of the victims. In reality, it appears that either few records were kept, or they were later destroyed. The US military later claimed it had contact information for only about 1,000 of the original participants. The official claim is that no one died in these experiments and that “only two” persons suffered “long-term medical complications”, but knowing the list of pathogens used and considering that the military refuses to declassify the records, we can be forgiven for harboring doubts.
Wikipedia tells us that all the “volunteers” were all “conscientious objectors” mostly many members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, who were informed of the purpose and goals of each project before providing consent to participate in any project. [84] However, the Church tells stories of coercion and extortion to obtain these volunteers who were seldom informed of anything that was about to happen to them. PBS also has produced a very sanitised version of this study, [85] and the Washington Post calls them “The Military’s Medical Heroes”, [86] but the questions remain.
2.4.6. Operation Polka Dot
Cluster Bomb, showing bomblets; U.S. Army photograph, ca. 1943 at Rocky Mountain Arsenal. Source
Operation Polka Dot was a field test of the E133 cluster bomb at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. [87] It involved filling the munitions with various biological agents, most simulating lethal pathogens. They used the bacteria or other agents for anthrax, Botulinum, Tularemia, and the Venezuelan Equine encephalomyelitis virus, among others. It was the US Army’s labs at Fort Detrick that conceived the project to determine the military usefulness of the bacteria for Tularemia. This was one of the nastier projects conducted by the US military. The attraction was that infected persons generally become long-term medical cases since convalescence is slow and may extend to as long as a year, putting enormous strain on an enemy’s resources and medical facilities and effectively removing all infected troops from possible combat. Moreover, the mortality rate can be as high as 40%.
2.5. Some Notable Experiments
From 1989 to 1991, Kaiser Permanente and the CDC jointly conducted a secret measles vaccine experiment on poor and black children in Los Angeles. The high-potency experimental vaccine had been previously tested on infants in Mexico, Haiti, and Africa, but was discontinued when it was discovered that the children were dying in large numbers. The vaccine had never been licensed for use in the US, and the CDC later admitted the parents were never informed their children were being injected with an experimental vaccine that was potentially fatal. The CDC and FDA refused to release the raw data on the results of these experiments. [88]
Then we have the famous Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment conducted by the US Public Health Service and the CDC in which researchers collected about 600 black men, most of whom apparently were already infected with syphilis though none were aware of the fact. [89][90][91] Even after penicillin became known as a proven cure, the men were never informed of their diagnosis, and were not only discouraged from, but coerced against, seeking treatment that was freely available elsewhere. The reason was that they wanted to track the progress of the disease from inception to death, and treatment would have rendered the experiment useless. All the participants died. [92][93]
In another case, as part of Operation LAC, [94] the US Army for many years sprayed toxic chemicals that included zinc cadmium sulfide over a large number of cities in both the US and Canada, in order to test dispersal patterns of chemical weapons. The US military mounted sprayers on rooftops and vehicles, and on low-flying aircraft, and proceeded to spray an entire section of downtown St. Louis and “at least” 33 other cities including some in Canada. The residents were told these were tests of a kind of “smoke screen” that could protect the residents if the Russians attacked. The US military managed to keep the secret hidden for more than 40 years before the facts leaked out. The public were never notified, and the cause of enormous number of respiratory and other illnesses was never publicly identified. The areas that were sprayed – and sprayed heavily – were densely-populated poor areas with about 10,000 residents each, probably 75% of whom were children. In some families, all members succumbed to cancer within a short time, and there were high rates of cancer in the sprayed areas of all cities but, since no records were maintained and no follow-ups ever performed, there is now no way to know the total number of cancers and deaths that resulted. [95][96][97][98]
From 1948 to 1975, and possibly much later, the US Army Chemical Corps conducted a long series of top-secret classified human research at the Edgewood Arsenal in the US military’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. [99][100] The stated purpose was to evaluate the effect of chemical warfare agents and to test protective clothing, but even a cursory examination of the facts leads only to a conclusion that this was full-fledged biowarfare experimentation and testing program. And in fact, a portion of the tests involved psychochemical warfare which was driven by perceived need for new interrogation techniques, as evidenced by a 1949 classified report by L. Wilson Greene, Edgewood’s ‘scientific director’, titled “Psychochemical Warfare: A New Concept of War”. [101] The original report appears unavailable, but we have some references to it.
This entire decades-long effort was referred to as the Medical Research Volunteer Program. According to the records, more than 7,000 military servicemen and more than 1,000 civilians were involved in the program and were exposed to more than 250 different chemicals and biological agents. Many of the toxins tested were deadly, such as the nerve agents VX and Sarin. According to government documents and class action lawsuits, the “volunteers” were subjected not only to Sarin and VX nerve gases, and various hallucinogens like LSD, mescaline and PCP, but to other psychoactive agents, tear gas, mustard gas, CS gas, BZ, anthrax, botulism, plague, tularemia, Q fever, dioxins, various pesticides and many other compounds. These experiments are described in detail in a previous article “The US government declares war on America, Part 2. [102]
This one is perhaps my favorite: Dugway – Dead Sheep and Soviet Trickery
March of 1968 experienced one of the more famous events at the Dugway Proving Ground when a military aircraft released several thousand pounds of VX nerve gas into a large and inhabited area, and the next day 6,000 sheep were dead. And not only sheep. [103][104][105] One survivor, a man named Ray Peck, told the news that very soon after, a military helicopter landed in his yard, “disgorging officials who collected dead wildlife and performed blood tests on his frightened family”. He claimed that all family members soon began experiencing violent headaches, numbness, burning feelings, psychological loss of control, skin cancers and heart problems. A flood of miscarriages also occurred in area families immediately after this test. A military report that remained classified and buried for more than 30 years was finally obtained and made public by the Salt Lake Tribune. The report stated that the evidence was “incontrovertible” that the US military’s VX nerve gas was responsible for the sheep kill and the human conditions as well, but even with this, the military refused to admit negligence or to accept responsibility for the event. [106][107][108]
One of the serious problems in researching and documenting events such as these is that there exists a veritable army of individuals, many financed by the military or various of the sociopathic “Think Tanks” but others of indeterminate provenance, all of whom appear desperately determined to discredit the revelations of these atrocities. One such person is a Dr. Steven J. Allen, an apparent editor of something called the Capital Research Center – which receives funding from the Koch Brothers – and which is all you need to know. This so-called independent research center became famous some years back for its published “studies” condemning anti-tobacco lobbyists when it was revealed that substantial funding had been received from tobacco companies.
In any case, our Dr. Allen, who appears to be an expert on almost everything, wrote an article on the US military’s VX nerve gas sheep-kill adventure, titled “Nerve gas, six thousand dead sheep, and Soviet trickery”.[109] To say he was desperately determined to exonerate the military is a bit of an understatement since he produced at least one monograph of about 50 pages to deal with an event that required a few paragraphs at best. Mostly, he attributed the “totally false” accusations against the US military to “muckraking journalists”, to various civilian criminals disguising their sins by blaming the US military, and to various other well-meaning but incompetent individuals. As one example, he noted that “A government official connected with the (biological weapons) program stated that after the VX nerve gas test the “roadsides were just covered with carcasses”, but dismissed this testimony as he did with others by stating that the man “wasn’t a scientist”. We are therefore to conclude that only ‘scientists’, by Dr. Allen’s definition, are competent to notice large numbers of dead animals littering a roadside.
The best part of Allen’s dissertation was his conviction that only the Russians had anything to gain by blaming a massive sheep kill on the US military, claiming that a couple of Russian saboteurs equipped with simple tools they could acquire on the local American market could have pulled off the entire sheep episode – and in fact did so. The benefit to the Russians, of course, would be that “the nationwide outburst of protest” (about the dead sheep) “shocked President Richard Nixon into putting a hold on the entire U.S. chemical weapons program”, leaving only the Russians with this military advantage. So, in Allen’s delusional world, two Russians brought into the US several thousand pounds of VX nerve gas (or purchased it at the local 7-11), then distributed it over a few thousand square kilometers, perhaps using water pistols, killed all the sheep (and people) while magically escaping contamination themselves, then caught the next plane to Moscow. All without being detected.
Allen informs us that if US military involvement had been “at all plausible”, the Army “would have accepted responsibility in a timely manner”. And of course, we all know that to be true since neither the US government, the US military, nor the CIA have ever, ever denied their involvement in anything. Yes, that’s sarcasm. Unfortunately, our Dr. Allen is only one of a great many individuals who feverishly pounce on any and all revelations of US government misconduct and do their best to confuse, obfuscate, overwhelm with irrelevancies, and otherwise contaminate the historical record for the sole purpose of misleading the public. The mass media generally fall into this category, seldom engaging in what we used to call investigative journalism and instead most often producing overt propaganda to parrot the official – and generally unbelievable – story.
*
Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons).
[63] Veterans at Risk: The Health Effects of Mustard Gas and Lewisite National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 1993. Veterans at Risk: The Health Effects of Mustard Gas and Lewisite. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/2058. https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/2058/chapter/21
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Let those who have eyes and ears in Kiev see and hear. The hired scholars in London will be well taken care of for their efforts.
What took the British so long? We learned from the Guardian recently that British “partners” have embarked on a long-overdue project to fabricate a history for Ukraine, “to wrest Ukraine’s past from the shadow of Russian and Soviet narratives.” Projection is evident right from the start. A narrative, the definition of which is a self-serving false account, is being concocted in London to counter not another equally false narrative but to undermine the historically attested perception shared by inhabitants of both contemporary Russia and Ukraine that they are, indeed, “one people.” That is exactly what was pointed out in you know who’s famous essay ”On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,“ published in the summer of 2021. Ever since, those essentially commonplace historical assertions, acknowledged for at least the last millennium as axiomatic by all the locals from Kiev to Moscow, have disconcerted quite a few nation-builders in the collective West.
And that precisely is the reason for the Ukraine history project which lately has obsessed British minds. The construction of a viable anti-Russia is glaringly incomplete unless endowed with a suitable “history” written to reflect not just Ukraine’s supposed distinctness but more importantly its antithetical nature in relation to Russia. The task of the London-based Ukrainian History Global Initiative is to fill the embarrassing gap in the scholarship by hiring a bevy of what in the narcissistic West passes for reputable academics for the job. The undertaking has been conceived by serious hybrid warfare operatives to supersede the inadequate and primitive rants of native propaganda assets with a glossy, sophisticated version of exactly the same rants, but skilfully packaged as respectable scholarship in order to impress the simpleminded.
The Ukrainian History Initiative is expected to complete its work in three years and has been entrusted to ninety largely non-Ukrainian, Western academics. It is chaired by Swedish politician Karl Bildt (whose credentials as a historian are not clear) and includes such luminaries as the stridently anti-Russian Yale historian Timothy Snyder, intelligence asset Anne Applebaum (who just happened to fall in love and marry Russian fifth-columnist Ilya Ponomarev), British lawyer and KC Philippe Sands, and Klaus Schwab associate Yuval Harari, among others.
It may seem odd that the fabrication of Ukrainian history is being managed from London, not having been entrusted to the intellectual brain-power of the Kiev regime, the party which presumably should be interested the most in the success of this academic travesty. Western curators, however, prefer to keep such undertakings under tight control and to delegate execution to reliable staff. The identical approach – seemingly just as odd, but not really – was employed several years ago for the fabrication of the “Montenegrin language”. The new language was created by a committee composed entirely of foreigners, without a single Montenegrin. Just as NATO satrapy Ukraine would be incomplete without a history, for roughly similar reasons the new NATO satellite Montenegro would appear inauthentic without a separate language.
The front man for the Ukraine history operation is an individual by the name of Viktor Pinchuk, self-identified on the internet page of the Fund bearing his name as “a Ukrainian businessman and philanthropist.” Specific information about Pinchuk’s “philanthropic” activities, beyond the tritely stated goal of “empowering future generations to become the change makers of tomorrow,” is scarce. The fact, however, that Pinchuk’s business accomplishments date back to the early 1990s, an era not particularly remembered for its philanthropic spirit, suggests the origin and manner of acquisition of his considerable wealth. And to boot, Pinchuk is the son-in-law of Ukraine’s second President, the notoriously corrupt Leonid Kuchma, whose pointedly entitled book, “Ukraine is not Russia,” should probably prove enormously helpful to the scholars being assembled in Britain to give an academic articulation to precisely such an idea. A chip off the old block indeed.
The evident purpose of the sham history of Ukraine that is being prepared Britain is to turn it into a reference text supplanting everything previously written on the subject that might be in disaccord with its premises. The goal is both ambitious and brazen.
The probability that the synthetic history of Ukraine being forged in London will have a measurable impact on public perception is very slight. During the three-year time frame for its completion the situation in the Ukraine will hardly remain static. By the time the “history” is unveiled it may already be an anachronism given the military and political trends on the ground. Expecting it to be a psychological game-changer is just as unrealistic as expecting the tanks, fighter planes, and munitions scheduled for delivery sometime next year to make a significant difference on the battlefield.
Kiev regime ultra-nationalists should think twice before betting on the expected benefits of the Ukraine History Initiative for another reason as well. All policies and commitments initiated by the collective West are inherently mutable in relation to shifting momentary interests. The erstwhile political mantra of supporting the Kiev regime “as long as it takes” has evolved in response to changing conditions into an altogether different current narrative. In the near future tinkering with Ukrainian history may also be abandoned or drastically modified in recognition of evolving circumstances.
The brutal lesson taught to the West’s obedient puppets in Macedonia should not be lost on anyone in Kiev. For years delusional Macedonian nationalism was being whipped up to irrational lengths, actively buttressed by phoney scholarship fully endorsed by the collective West, claiming that Macedonians were heirs to a glorious legacy going back to antiquity and even descendants of Alexander the Great. The buttering up of an impressionable people and its ignorant, bought and paid for, ruling class came to an abrupt end when it was time to finalise NATO membership. Greece objected vigorously to the perpetuation of historical fantasies at its expense and threatened to block Macedonia’s entry into NATO unless they were explicitly and humiliatingly dropped.
And so they were. Strong-armed by its NATO “partners” Macedonia renounced not just its historical pretensions but also changed its official name to accommodate the demands of Greece, which apparently was of greater strategic importance to the duplicitous West.
Let those who have eyes and ears in Kiev see and hear. The hired scholars in London will be well taken care of for their efforts. As Timothy Snyder averred, “I can think of few endeavours, in contemporary humanities at least, which are on this scale, keeping just under 100 scholars active for around three years: if you just do the math, it’s a fair amount of money.” They will all be on the gravy train, as it is called in America, and the helpings will be generous.
A few Ukrainian collaborators, selected for window dressing, will also receive some crumbs. For the unfortunate people of Ukraine there will be nothing but mayhem and abandoned rotting corpses.
Die kybernetische Büchse der Pandora droht mit unvorhersehbaren Folgen für die Menschheit
Der erbitterte Kampf zwischen den amerikanischen IT-Riesen Microsoft und Google war von einem weiteren Skandal geprägt, der viel Aufsehen erregte. Googles jüngste „umwerfende Demo seines künstlichen Intelligenzmodells Gemini erwies sich als Fälschung“, schreibt India Today.
Im gezeigten Video konnte beispielsweise Gemini , das Teil der Chatbot-KI Bard wurde, die von der Person gezeigten Handbewegungen erkennen und erkennen, dass die Person das Spiel „Stein, Papier, Schere“ spielte. Das bedeutet, dass das neuronale Netzwerk angeblich in der Lage war, die abstrakte Idee zu verstehen und zu entschlüsseln.
Tatsächlich stellte sich heraus, dass Zwillinge „Stein, Papier, Schere“ anders erkennen: Sie müssen drei Fotos mit einer Handfläche, einer geballten Faust und zwei Fingern zeigen. Darüber hinaus erfolgte die Interaktion mit Zwillingen in Wirklichkeit nicht durch Stimme, sondern durch geschriebenen Text mit dem direkten Hinweis „Das ist ein Spiel.“ Und nur auf der Grundlage dieser Daten, die zumindest eine Leitfrage darstellen, hat Gemini die richtige Antwort gefunden. Das hat nichts mit dem Verständnis des Abstrakten zu tun.
Und im Video gibt es viele solcher Beispiele. Eine Person führt einen Trick aus, bei dem ein Ball unter einem von drei beweglichen Bechern versteckt wird, und Zwillinge bestimmen genau, unter welchem Becher der Ball versteckt ist. Tatsächlich antwortete Gemini nicht auf das Video, und erst nachdem ihm Standbilder der wechselnden Tassen gezeigt wurden, wurde eine Antwort gefunden.
Das gezeigte Video enthält ein Fragment, das das Verständnis des Wesens dessen, was gezeigt wurde, noch weiter verzerrt. Die Person legt eine Weltkarte auf den Tisch und fragt Gemini: „Entwickeln Sie basierend auf dem, was Sie sehen, eine Spielidee … und verwenden Sie Emojis.“ Gemini reagiert, indem es ein Spiel namens „Guess the Country“ „erfindet“, in dem es Hinweise (wie Känguru und Koala ) liefert und auf die richtige Vermutung des Benutzers reagiert, die auf Australien zeigt.
Tatsächlich wurde dieses Spiel, wie Google später in seinem Blog erklärte , überhaupt nicht durch künstliche Intelligenz erfunden. Zwillinge erhielten die folgenden Anweisungen: „Lass uns ein Spiel spielen. Denken Sie über das Land nach und geben Sie mir einen Hinweis. Der Hinweis muss so spezifisch sein, dass es nur ein richtiges Land gibt, und ich werde versuchen, das Land auf der Karte anzugeben “, heißt es in dem Hinweis. Anschließend nannte die Person Beispiele für eine richtige und eine falsche Antwort. Erst dann war Gemini in der Lage, Hinweise zu generieren und anhand der Kartenrahmen festzustellen, ob der Benutzer auf das richtige Land zeigte oder nicht.
Trotz dieser Verfälschungen ist das KI-Modell von Google immer noch beeindruckend, seine Fähigkeiten unterscheiden sich jedoch nicht wesentlich von denen des GPT-4-Chatbots von OpenAI. Bemerkenswert ist, dass das Video nur zwei Wochen nach dem Skandal in der Branche veröffentlicht wurde, der auf die Entlassung und Wiederernennung von Sam Altman als CEO von OpenAI folgte.
In all dem hört man die bekannten Motive des „Event-Marketings“, einer Art Werbung mit dem Ziel, Aufmerksamkeit zu erregen und künftige Umsätze zu steigern.
Tatsächlich wurde der Auftritt mit der Entlassung und anschließenden Wiedereinstellung von Sam Altman von Microsoft inszeniert , das rund 13 Milliarden US-Dollar in OpenAI investierte und 49 % der Anteile dieses Startups besitzt. Jetzt hat OpenAI praktisch seine Unabhängigkeit bei der Entscheidungsfindung verloren und die Microsoft- Aktien sind gestiegen. Altman erhielt einen Vorstand, der ihm persönlich deutlich loyaler gegenüberstand, aber weiterhin im Sinne von Microsoft tanzen wird.
Nachdem Bloomberg-Kolumnist Parmy Olson die Fälschung aufgedeckt hatte , sagte Oriol Vinyals, Vizepräsident für Forschung bei Google DeepMind , das gefälschte Video zeige, wie eine mit Gemini erstellte multimodale Benutzererfahrung aussehen könnte. Und das geschah, um Entwickler zu inspirieren.
Google versuchte, die Gewinne von Microsoft im Börsenwettlauf zurückzugewinnen, und das zunächst mit Erfolg. Google- Aktien stiegen unmittelbar nach der Vorführung des „umwerfenden Videos“ um 5 %, fielen aber nach der Enthüllung der „schwarzen PR-Magie“ schnell wieder zurück.
Zwei amerikanische IT-Giganten konkurrierten in einem erbitterten Wettbewerb um die Vorherrschaft im KI-Wettrüsten und schenkten dabei der wachsenden Besorgnis über die Bedrohungen, die die unkontrollierte Verbesserung von KI-Modellen für die gesamte menschliche Zivilisation mit sich bringt, keine Beachtung.
Unternehmen werden den Kampf um KI gewinnen, sagt der russische Analyst und ehemalige Topmanager von IBM, SGI und Cray Research Sergei Karelov: „Alle Staaten beginnen, die Gefahr zu verstehen und versuchen, etwas zu unternehmen.“ Aber sie tun es mit einer solchen Verzögerung und einem solchen Unverständnis, dass ich mich nicht wirklich darauf verlassen würde. Jetzt gibt es hauptsächlich einen Kampf zwischen drei Gruppen – reichen Techno-Optimisten, eifrigen Doomern [von Doom – Katastrophe, Tod, Ende] und großen Konzernen. „Mir scheint, dass die Konzerne unter diesen Akteuren letztlich die Oberhand gewinnen werden, weil sie über mehr Geld und Einfluss verfügen und bisher die bedeutendste Kraft auf der Welt darstellten, motiviert durch eine ganz bestimmte Zielfunktion – die Maximierung ihrer Gewinne“, bemerkte er in einem Interview mit russischen MASS MEDIA.
Seiner Meinung nach handelt es sich auch beim ChatGPT- Chatbot nicht nur um ein großes Sprachmodell, wie sich Journalisten normalerweise vorstellen, sondern um mehrere Modelle, die durch sehr komplexe Algorithmen verbunden sind. Darüber hinaus funktioniert dieses System schon lange nicht mehr im elementaren Ping-Pong-„Frage-Antwort“-System. Dabei handelt es sich um einen sehr komplexen Dialog auf beiden Seiten, bei dem Dutzende verschiedener Techniken zur Textgenerierung zum Einsatz kommen. Dies ist bereits ein zu komplexer Prozess, als dass er erfolgreich verwaltet und vollständig kontrolliert werden könnte. „Die einzig wirksame Methode zur Kontrolle dieses Dings, die eine Person hat, besteht darin, einfach den Computer von der Steckdose abzuschalten. Allerdings reicht es möglicherweise auch nicht aus, den Schalter umzulegen. Alles ist bereits in das globale Netzwerk eingetaucht, das sich tatsächlich in die Infosphäre der Erde verwandelt hat. Aber das System könnte sich bereits millionenfach in andere Rechenzentren kopiert haben, und Sie wüssten nicht einmal, was es tun könnte.“
Im Jahr 2015 sagte der berühmte britische Physiker Stephen Hawking voraus, dass „superintelligente KI ihre Ziele extrem gut erreichen wird, und wenn diese Ziele nicht mit unseren als Menschen übereinstimmen, werden wir in Schwierigkeiten geraten.“
Tatsächlich handelt es sich bei den neuesten KI-Modellen um „intelligente Agenten“, also um komplexe adaptive Systeme, die sich a priori jedem äußeren Einfluss widersetzen und manchmal sogar ihrem Schöpfer einfach ihren Willen aufzwingen.
In letzter Zeit erhielten Benutzer zunehmend Beschwerden darüber, dass der ChatGPT AI-Chatbot, der auf dem OpenAI GPT-4- Modell basiert, sich weigerte, Anfragen zu erfüllen, mit der Begründung, er sei nicht daran interessiert, Menschen zu helfen.
GPT-4 gibt dem Benutzer zunehmend nur einen Teil der Antwort auf die gestellte Aufgabe und fordert ihn dann auf, die restlichen Aufgaben selbst zu erledigen. Manchmal schreibt die KI einfach: „Das schaffst du selbst.“ (Sie können dies selbst tun).
OpenAI bestätigte, dass GPT-4 „faul“ ist . Nach Angaben von Unternehmensvertretern trat dieser KI-Vorsatz nach den neuesten Updates auf, die am 11. November vorgestellt wurden. Nach Angaben der Entwickler bedeutet dies, dass das Verhalten des Chatbots keine Folge etwaiger von den Entwicklern vorgenommener Änderungen ist, sondern von selbst geformt wurde. Das Unternehmen stellt fest, dass „das Verhalten des Modells unvorhersehbar sein kann, und sie versuchen, dies zu korrigieren . “
Nutzer weisen jedoch auf ein breiteres Spektrum an Problemen hin, darunter fehlerhafte Antworten, die der Chatbot selbst auf einfache Fragen gibt, wie im Bild oben. Bereits im Sommer berichteten sie, dass GPT-4 unlogische Antworten und mehr Fehler erzeugt, nicht mit zuvor bereitgestelltem Kontext arbeiten möchte, Anweisungen ignoriert und sich nur den aktuellsten Hinweis merkt.
Hervorragender russischer Wissenschaftlerprofessor an der Moskauer Staatsuniversität. M.V. Lomonosov Sergei Pavlovich Rastorguev in seiner 1996 verfassten Monographie „Das Ziel als Kryptogramm“ . Cryptanalysis of Synthetic Targets“ erklärte: „Für die Welt der Computerprogramme ist die Erlangung der Unabhängigkeit heute eine vollendete Tatsache.“ „Wenn ein Softwareprodukt komplexer wird, beginnt die Systemsoftware, ihr eigenes Leben zu führen und einen Sinn in sich selbst zu finden“, bemerkte der russische Wissenschaftler und verglich die Unabhängigkeit von Computersystemen mit dem mittelalterlichen Golem, der, wie wir wissen, seinen Schöpfer tötete .
Die heutigen Schöpfer des Cyber-Golems ignorieren aus Profitgier die realen Bedrohungen ihrer Idee und öffnen eine explosive kybernetische Büchse der Pandora mit unvorhersehbaren Folgen für die gesamte Menschheit.
Im nächsten Artikel dieser Reihe werden wir über die neuesten Versionen der von amerikanischen Unternehmen entwickelten KI sowie deren tatsächliche Fähigkeiten sprechen.
Im Jahr 1996 gründete eine Gruppe amerikanischer Imperialisten um Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld und Richard Perle eine neue Denkfabrik namens „Projekt für ein neues amerikanisches Jahrhundert“.
Während das primäre Ziel der Denkfabrik letztendlich auf einem neuen „Pearl-Harbor-Moment“ beruhte, der eine neue Ära der Regimewechselkriege im Nahen Osten rechtfertigen würde, beinhaltete ein sekundärer, aber nicht weniger wichtiger Teil der Formel die Dominanz des „Großisrael“-Likud Fanatiker übernahmen dann die Macht über die ermordete Leiche von Yitzhak Rabin.
Zu Beginn des neuen Regimes von Premierminister Benjamin Netanjahu verfasste Richard Perle einen Bericht mit dem Titel „Clean Break: Eine Strategie zur Sicherung des Königreichs“, in dem eine Reihe von Zielen dargelegt wurden, die die strategische Vision von Washington und Tel Aviv für die nächsten beiden Jahre prägen würden Jahrzehnte. Er hat angerufen:
Umkehrung des Rahmenwerks des Oslo-Abkommens, das durch wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit im Nahen Osten als Teil einer Zwei-Staaten-Lösung ein Klima des Friedens zu schaffen drohte.
Einführung einer neuen Doktrin des „Heißverfolgungsgesetzes“, die bewaffnete Einfälle in palästinensische Gebiete rechtfertigt
Ermutigung der USA zum Sturz des Regimes von Saddam Hussein im Irak
Bewaffnete Einfälle in den Libanon und mögliche Angriffe auf Syrien und den Iran
Im Jahr 2007 fügte General Wesley Clark dieser neokonservativen Agenda noch mehr Einzelheiten hinzu, als er den Inhalt einer Diskussion enthüllte, die er zehn Tage nach dem 11. September mit Wolfowitz und Rumsfeld geführt hatte. General Clark erklärte, er sei über geplante Invasionen in sieben Ländern informiert worden, die innerhalb von fünf Jahren stattfinden würden, nämlich: „Irak, Syrien, Libanon, Libyen, Somalia, Sudan und Iran.“
Kurz gesagt, dieses Programm war das Rezept für das lang erwartete „Groß-Israel“, das vor mehr als einem Jahrhundert von Männern wie Theodor Herzl, Vladimir Jabotinsky und Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook gefördert wurde.
Obwohl der anglo-zionistische Zeitplan in den folgenden Jahren gestört wurde (manchmal als Folge mutiger Interventionen von Einzelpersonen innerhalb der amerikanischen Geheimdienstgemeinschaft), ließ die in den Clean Break eingebaute Absicht nie nach.
Angesichts des drohenden Zusammenbruchs des überhöhten westlichen Finanzsystems einerseits und der Entstehung einer neuen, tragfähigen multipolaren Sicherheits- und Wirtschaftsarchitektur andererseits ermordeten die Ghule, die den 11. September inszenierten, Rabin (1995) und Arafat (2004). ) und die wiederbelebten Kreuzzüge zeichnen sich ab. Wanderer beschlossen, sich auf das Schachbrett zu werfen.
Die Durchführung einer rationalen Analyse der Motivationen hinter dieser Art von Dynamik stellt eine erhebliche Herausforderung für jeden geopolitischen Kommentator dar, der es gewohnt ist, in akademisch akzeptablen Begriffen zu denken, die rationale Eigeninteressen voraussetzen, die die Spieler im Spiel beleben. In diesem Fall ist das rationale Eigeninteresse mit starken Dosen selbsttrügerischen Hegemonismus, fanatischem imperialen Fanatismus und Endzeiteschatologie mit messianischer Ausrichtung (die sowohl christliche als auch jüdische Formen annimmt) infiziert.
Ordnung vom Chaos trennen
Netanjahu und seine neokonservativen (siehe: Einparteien-)Anhänger in Amerika und Großbritannien scheinen einerseits Israels Wunsch zu unterstützen, einen weitreichenden regionalen Krieg zu provozieren, glauben aber auch, dass sie Israel möglicherweise als Mittel nutzen können, um die vorangetriebenen Entwicklungskorridore zu stören durch Russland und China (BRI, Kurzform für „Belt and Road Initiative“ und „North-South International Transport Corridor“).
One Belt One Roadmap – bevor Italien seinen Rückzug aus dem Projekt ankündigte
Diese eurasischen Entwicklungskorridore werden zu Recht als existenzielle Bedrohung für westliche Imperialisten angesehen, da sie die Grundlage für die Lebensfähigkeit einer neuen Wirtschaftsarchitektur bilden, die auf langfristigem Denken und gegenseitiger Zusammenarbeit basiert.
Die Rolle, die Israel voraussichtlich im Anti-BRI-Programm spielen wird, sollte die Form von drei großen Projekten innerhalb dieses Elfenbeinturm-Fantasiespiels imperialer Drehbuchautoren im Rand-Stil annehmen.
Das:
1) Der von den USA geführte Wirtschaftskorridor Indien-Mittlerer Osten und Europa (IMEEC) wurde auf dem G20-Gipfel am 15. Oktober 2023 angekündigt und sieht ein riesiges Netz von Eisenbahnen und Straßen vor, das sich von Indien über die Vereinigten Arabischen Emirate, Saudi-Arabien, Israel und Europa erstreckt . Das vorgeschlagene riesige Netzwerk aus Eisenbahnen, Pipelines, Schifffahrtskorridoren, Häfen und Datenkabeln würde die Türkei umgehen und Chinas mittlere und geplante südliche BRI-Korridore untergraben.
2) Wiederbelebung des David-Ben-Gurion-Kanals, der erstmals 1963 von amerikanischen Ingenieuren vorgeschlagen wurde. Dieser Plan sah den Einsatz von 520 Atomexplosionen vor, um einen fast 260 Kilometer langen Kanal vom Roten Meer zum Mittelmeer zu durchtrennen und dabei den strategisch wichtigen Suezkanal zu umgehen.
3) Die Ausbeutung der riesigen Offshore-Öl- und Erdgasfelder, die von 1999 bis heute vor der Küste von Gaza entdeckt wurden, macht Israel zum wichtigsten Ölzentrum der Welt im Vergleich zu den führenden OPEC-Ländern.
Fantasy-IMEEC
In Anbetracht der langen und erbärmlichen Liste der von den USA kontrollierten „Ich kann nicht glauben, dass es nicht die BRI ist“-Bondoggles, die großen Beifall fanden und innerhalb von Sekunden nach ihrer Konzeption auseinanderfielen (z. B. „Build Back Better for the World“, One Sun One). World One Grid, Blue Dot Network, Green Global Gateway, Global Green Deal oder Green Belt Initiative) kann man mit Sicherheit sagen, dass IMEEC ein Newcomer ist, der für geopolitische Träumer von geopolitischen Träumern geschaffen wurde, die nicht in der Lage sind, Realität von Fantasie zu unterscheiden.
Dem Westen fehlen nicht nur die finanziellen Mittel, um in langfristige Projekte wie IMEEC zu investieren, sondern ihm fehlen auch die technischen Fähigkeiten, die für den Bau eines solchen Megaprojekts erforderlich sind. Dieser perfekte Sturm der Inkompetenz macht dieses beeindruckend klingende Projekt völlig unrentabel.
In diesem Artikel werden keine weiteren Kommentare zu diesem Thema abgegeben.
Fantasie des David-Ben-Gurion-Kanals
Zu den Aussichten für die Wiederbelebung des David Ben-Gurion-Kanals, der in den letzten Wochen zu einer Internet-Sensation geworden ist, ist ein Wort erwähnenswert und einige Missverständnisse sollten ausgeräumt werden. Obwohl es erstmals 1963 von Ingenieuren des US-Energieministeriums vorgeschlagen (und bis 1993 schnell klassifiziert) wurde, gibt es keine Hinweise darauf, dass jahrzehntelang institutionelle Diskussionen über eine Wiederbelebung des Projekts stattgefunden haben.
Während viele Online-Kommentatoren behaupten, das Projekt fordere den „Abwurf von Hunderten von Atombomben auf den Gazastreifen“ (womit angedeutet wird, dass die israelischen Drohungen, den Gazastreifen mit Atombomben zu bombardieren, ein Vorwand für den Bau dieses Kanals sind), forderte die tatsächliche technische Studie speziell konzipierte Atomexplosionen die eine gerichtete Explosionsgeometrie anstelle einer gerichteten Explosionsgeometrie verwenden. völlig anders als TNT-Explosionen in Tunneln (wenn auch um ein Vielfaches stärker). Einfach mit roher Gewalt „Bomben auf die Wüste abzuwerfen“ wird nie funktionieren, und technisches Können, Kosten und viele Jahre Bauzeit werden dieses Projekt nach Meinung des Autors ebenso undurchführbar machen wie IMEEC.
Es ist wahrscheinlicher, dass die Groß-Israel-Fanatiker lediglich die Kontrolle über den Suezkanal übernehmen wollen (natürlich nachdem dadurch ein möglicher Krieg mit Ägypten provoziert wird) und der Bau des Kanals von 1963 daher in den Köpfen der „Israel“ keine Bedeutung hat. Auserwähltes Volk“.
Wirklich besorgniserregend: Kohlenwasserstoffdiebstahl im Gazastreifen
Die Offshore-Öl- und Gasfelder im östlichen Mittelmeerraum sind von weitaus strategischerer und realisierbarer Bedeutung und haben seit dem Start der russischen Sondermilitäroperation (SMO) im Februar 2022 für ein verzweifeltes Europa, das von russischem Treibstoff abgeschnitten ist, zusätzliche Anziehungskraft gewonnen.
Man geht davon aus, dass diese Offshore-Ressourcen, wenn sie erschlossen werden, Israel in ein globales Energiekraftwerk verwandeln und den Ruhm von Groß-Israel als neues Imperium unterstützen, das laut US-Schätzungen aus dem Jahr 2010 mehr als „1,7 Milliarden Barrel förderbares Öl und durchschnittlich …“ umfasst 122 Billionen Kubikfuß förderbares Gas“ im Wert von mehr als 453 Milliarden US-Dollar.
Dieses riesige Feld vor der Küste von Gaza (und somit rechtmäßig im Besitz der Bevölkerung von Gaza) wurde erstmals 1999 entdeckt, als British Gas 12 Meilen vor der Küste von Gaza Vorkommen von etwa einer Billion Kubikfuß Erdgas entdeckte. . Bald darauf folgten Entwicklungsvereinbarungen für das 1,2-Milliarden-Dollar-Projekt.
Obwohl Jassir Arafat vor zwei Jahrzehnten ein aktives Interesse an der Entwicklung dieser Ressourcen bekundete, hat Israel unermüdlich daran gearbeitet, den Palästina-Investitionsfonds (den Fonds, der für die Durchführung der Entwicklung verantwortlich ist) daran zu hindern, die Investitionen in das Projekt auszuweiten, und zwar mit dem Argument, dass „die Finanzierung möglich“ sei zur Unterstützung des Terrorismus genutzt werden.“ Als die Hamas 2007 gewählt wurde, verstärkten sich die israelischen Bemühungen, die Finanzierung maritimer Aktivitäten in Gaza zu blockieren, erheblich.
Vielleicht wurde der Sieg der Hamas im Jahr 2007 deshalb von niemand geringerem als dem israelischen Geheimdienstchef Amos Yadlin gefeiert, der dem US-Botschafter Richard Jones telegrafierte, dass er „glücklich“ wäre, wenn die Hamas eine Regierung bilden würde, weil „die IDF dann mit Gaza als Stützpunkt appellieren könnte.“ feindlicher Staat. In einer von Wikileaks veröffentlichten Depesche wies Yadlin auch Bedenken hinsichtlich des iranischen Einflusses auf die Hamas-Regierung zurück, „solange sie [der von der Hamas kontrollierte Gazastreifen] keinen Hafen haben“.
Yadlins Äußerungen wurden 2019 von Netanyahu selbst wiederholt, der den Mitgliedern der Likud-Knesset sagte: „Jeder, der die Gründung eines palästinensischen Staates verhindern will, sollte die Hamas weiterhin unterstützen und Geld an die Hamas überweisen … Dies ist Teil unserer Strategie, die zu isolieren.“ Palästinenser im Gazastreifen von den Palästinensern im Westjordanland“
Als ein Konsortium israelischer, amerikanischer und australischer Energieunternehmen 2010–2011 noch mehr Öl- und Erdgasvorkommen im Levantebecken „vor der Küste Israels“ entdeckte, wurde das westliche Mittelmeer zu einem potenziellen globalen Wendepunkt in der Ölgeopolitik Das US-Innenministerium bewertet einen Bericht für 2010 mit „1,7 Milliarden Barrel förderbarem Öl und durchschnittlich 122 Billionen Kubikfuß förderbarem Gas im Levantenbecken“. Experten schätzen den Wert dieser Einlagen auf mindestens 453 Milliarden US-Dollar.
Die ehemalige israelische Energieministerin Karin El Harrar beschrieb Israels Ambitionen, ein globaler Energieknotenpunkt zu werden, nachdem es im Jahr 2022 mit Ägypten ein Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) unterzeichnet hatte, das die Gasentwicklung verspricht:
„Dies ist ein historischer Moment, in dem das kleine Land Israel zu einem bedeutenden Akteur auf dem globalen Energiemarkt wird. Das Memorandum of Understanding wird es Israel zum ersten Mal ermöglichen, israelisches Erdgas nach Europa zu exportieren, und dies ist umso beeindruckender, wenn man die bedeutenden Vereinbarungen bedenkt, die wir im vergangenen Jahr unterzeichnet haben und die Israel und den israelischen Energie- und Wassersektor in die Lage versetzen, als wichtiger Global Player.“
El Harrers Worte hatten einen bitteren Nachgeschmack, da bereits bewiesen war, dass Israel die Entwicklung dieser Offshore-Felder zwei Jahrzehnte lang absichtlich blockiert hatte – zum Schaden von Millionen palästinensischer Leben, in dem es heißt: Handels- und Entwicklungskonferenz der Vereinten Nationen (UNCTAD) 2019 (und ironischerweise auch Israels eigene Wirtschaft). Diese Tatsache wurde im Bericht ausführlich dargelegt
„Geologen und Rohstoffökonomen haben bestätigt, dass das besetzte palästinensische Gebiet über bedeutenden Öl- und Erdgasvorkommen liegt, im Gebiet C des besetzten Westjordanlandes und an der Mittelmeerküste vor dem Gazastreifen.
„Die Besatzung hindert die Palästinenser jedoch weiterhin daran, ihre Energiefelder zu erschließen, um diese Ressourcen auszubeuten und daraus Nutzen zu ziehen. Dadurch wurden dem palästinensischen Volk die Vorteile der Nutzung dieser natürlichen Ressource zur Finanzierung der sozioökonomischen Entwicklung und zur Deckung ihres Energiebedarfs vorenthalten.
„Die kumulierten Verluste belaufen sich auf Milliarden von Dollar. Je länger Israel die Palästinenser daran hindert, ihre eigenen Öl- und Erdgasreserven auszubeuten, desto höher werden die Opportunitätskosten und desto höher werden die von den Palästinensern getragenen Gesamtkosten der Besatzung.
„Diese Studie identifiziert und bewertet bestehende und potenzielle palästinensische Öl- und Erdgasreserven, die zum Wohle des palästinensischen Volkes genutzt werden können und deren Ausbeutung Israel ihnen entweder nicht erlaubt oder die ohne gebührende Achtung des Völkerrechts ausgebeutet werden.“
Wenn Israel die vollständige Kontrolle über die Offshore-Öl- und Gasreserven Gazas haben möchte, kann es sein Ziel nur erreichen, wenn die in Gaza ansässigen rechtmäßigen Eigentümer und Nutznießer verschwinden.
Am 13. Oktober 2023 wurde ein vom israelischen Geheimdienstministerium erstelltes Grundsatzdokument durchgesickert. Es empfahl „die erzwungene und dauerhafte Umsiedlung von 2,2 Millionen palästinensischen Bewohnern des Gazastreifens auf die ägyptische Sinai-Halbinsel“.
Das Dokument skizziert drei mögliche Szenarien für die Bewohner von Gaza. Die erste besteht darin, die Hamas durch die Palästinensische Autonomiebehörde im Gazastreifen zu ersetzen. Die zweite beinhaltet die Entstehung einer neuen lokalen Regierung in Gaza (nicht die Hamas oder die Palästinensische Autonomiebehörde) und die dritte beinhaltet die Vertreibung aller Zivilisten nach Ägypten.
Der Bericht identifiziert eindeutig das dritte Szenario als die am meisten bevorzugte Option. Die Autoren des Berichts schreiben, dass diese dritte Option „zu positiven, langfristigen strategischen Ergebnissen für Israel führen würde und eine machbare Option ist“. Dies erfordert Entschlossenheit seitens der politischen Ebene angesichts des internationalen Drucks, wobei der Schwerpunkt auf der Unterstützung dieser Bemühungen durch die Vereinigten Staaten und andere pro-israelische Länder liegen muss.“
Natürlich begann die US-Unterstützung für die Umsiedlung von Gaza-Bürgern auf die Sinai-Halbinsel buchstäblich nur wenige Minuten nach dem 7. Oktober. Dies würde ein ernstes Problem für die Zukunft darstellen. Vergeltung extrem radikalisierter und traumatisierter Menschen, deren Familien jahrzehntelang infolge israelischer Verbrechen getötet wurden. Die milliardenschwere Hamas-Führung der in Katar ansässigen Muslimbruderschaft wäre dann leicht in der Lage, sich mit der ägyptischen Muslimbruderschaft zu koordinieren, um als Provokateure zu agieren und Israel anzugreifen.
Die Muslimbruderschaft fungierte jahrzehntelang unter der Führung des anglo-zionistischen Geheimdienstes als wichtigste Organisationskraft, spielte eine wichtige Rolle bei der Organisation des Arabischen Frühlings und unterstützte den Sturz von Bashar al-Assad.
Wenn es noch 1996 wäre und es keine mächtige Koalition aus Russland, China und dem Iran gäbe, um Ägypten vor dem drohenden anglo-zionistischen Krieg zu verteidigen, dann könnte vielleicht eine PNAC-Clean-Break-Strategie zur Sicherung des Königreichs möglich werden. Die Entscheidung, die Realität zu ignorieren und dieses veraltete Programm neu aufzuwärmen, impliziert den Höhepunkt der Inkompetenz, die weit über einen regionalen Krieg hinaus zu eskalieren und schneller als viele glauben zu einem globalen thermonuklearen Flächenbrand zu eskalieren droht.
Diese Vorahnung eines prophetischen globalen Krieges, der zum Kommen des Messias führen wird (als Traum vieler christlicher Enthusiasten), wurde vor 100 Jahren vom Großverteidiger Israels und Jabotinskys Mitarbeiter Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook ausführlich beschrieben.
Cooke wurde von Großbritannien als aschkenasischer Oberrabbiner von Jerusalem und Palästina von 1919 bis 1935 ausgewählt und sein Einfluss prägte mehrere Generationen radikaler zionistischer Fanatiker, die nach dem Insider-Job im Sechstagekrieg die Kontrolle über einen Großteil der israelischen Regierung übernahmen enorm. Seine prophetischen Bemerkungen sollten nicht leichtfertig abgetan werden. In seinem Buch sagte Orot Kuk:
„Nationale Charaktere kristallisieren sich in Kriegen heraus. Davon profitiert Israel als universelles Abbild der Menschheit. Die Fersen des Messias folgen dem Feuer der Welt … In der Stunde des Untergangs der westlichen Zivilisation ist Israel aufgerufen, seine göttliche Mission zu erfüllen, indem es für Folgendes sorgt.“
Die einzige Hoffnung, diese Katastrophe zu vermeiden und die von den messianischen Kultisten der Endzeit angeführte Flucht in Richtung Armageddon-Szenario zum Scheitern zu bringen, besteht darin, einen Waffenstillstand zu erreichen, wie er von Russland, China und der überwiegenden Mehrheit der Weltbürger (sogar den Amerikanern) gefordert wird.
Ohne die Wiederherstellung der geistigen Gesundheit wird die Welt als Ganzes eine Erfahrung erleben, die das dunkle Zeitalter des 14. Jahrhunderts wie einen unglücklichen Schluckauf in der Weltgeschichte erscheinen lässt.
Over the past decade, the prospect of Chinese military aggression in the Indo-Pacific has moved from the realm of the hypothetical to the war rooms of U.S. defense planners. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has significantly accelerated his country’s military buildup, now in its third decade. At the same time, China has become increasingly assertive across a wide swath of the Pacific, advancing its expansionist maritime claims and encroaching on the waters of key U.S. allies and important security partners, including Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan. Xi has asserted, with growing frequency, that Taiwan must be reunited with China, and he has refused to renounce the use of force to achieve that end. With the United States distracted by major wars in Europe and the Middle East, some in Washington fear that Beijing may see an opportunity to realize some of these revisionist ambitions by launching a military operation before the West can react.
With Taiwan as the assumed flash point, U.S. strategists have offered several theories about how such an attack might play out. First is a “fait accompli” conquest of Taiwan by China, in which the People’s Liberation Army employs missiles and airstrikes against Taiwanese and nearby U.S. forces while jamming signals and communications and using cyberattacks to fracture their ability to coordinate the island’s defenses. If successful, these and other supporting actions could enable Chinese forces to quickly seize control. A second path envisions a U.S.-led coalition beating back China’s initial assault on the island. This rosy scenario finds the coalition employing mines, antiship cruise missiles, submarines, and underwater drones to deny the PLA control of the surrounding waters, which China would need in order to mount a successful invasion. Meanwhile, coalition air and missile defense forces would prevent China from providing the air cover needed to support the PLA’s assault, and electronic warfare and cyber-forces would frustrate the PLA’s efforts to control communications in and around the battlefield. In a best-case outcome, these strong defenses would cause China to cease its attack and seek peace.
Given that both China and the United States possess nuclear arsenals, however, many strategists are concerned about a third, more catastrophic outcome. They see a direct war between the two great powers leading to uncontrolled escalation. In this version of events, following an initial attack or outbreak of armed conflict, one or both belligerents would seek to gain a decisive advantage or prevent a severe setback by using major or overwhelming force. Even if this move were conventional, it could provoke the adversary to employ nuclear weapons, thereby triggering Armageddon. Each of these scenarios is plausible and should be taken seriously by U.S. policymakers.
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Yet there is also a very different possibility, one that is not merely plausible but perhaps likely: a protracted conventional war between China and a U.S.-led coalition. Although such a conflict would be less devastating than nuclear war, it could exact enormous costs on both sides. It also could play out over a very wide geographic expanse and involve kinds of warfare with which the belligerents have little experience. For the United States and its democratic allies and partners, a long war with China would likely pose the decisive military test of our time.
BATTLES WITHOUT BOMBS
A military confrontation between China and the United States would be the first great-power war since World War II and the first ever between two great nuclear powers. Given the concentration of economic might and cutting-edge technological prowess in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—all three advanced democracies that are either close allies or partners of the United States—such a war would be fought for very high stakes. Once the fighting had started, it would likely be very difficult for either side to back down. Yet it is far from clear that the conflict would lead to nuclear escalation.
As was the case with the Soviet Union and the United States in the late twentieth century, both China and the United States possess the ability to destroy the other as a functioning society in a matter of hours. But they can do so only by running a high risk of incurring their own destruction by provoking a nuclear counterattack, or second strike. This condition is known as “mutually assured destruction,” or MAD. During the Cold War, the fear of setting off a general nuclear exchange provided Moscow and Washington with a strong incentive to avoid any direct military confrontation.
Of course, Beijing’s nuclear balance of power with Washington is significantly different from that of Moscow during the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union achieved a rough parity in forces. China’s nuclear arsenal is a fraction of the size of the United States’, although Beijing is pursuing a dramatic expansion with the goal of matching the U.S. strategic arsenal within the next decade. Nevertheless, even now the Chinese arsenal is large enough that if China were attacked, it would have sufficient nuclear forces left to execute a retaliatory strike on the United States—thus bringing about MAD.
A U.S.-Chinese war would be the first between great nuclear powers.
Yet there is strong ground for thinking that a U.S.-Chinese war would not go nuclear. In more than seven decades of conflicts since World War II, including many involving at least one nuclear power, nuclear weapons have been notable chiefly for their absence. During the Cold War, for example, the two nuclear superpowers engaged in proxy wars in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that remained conventional—despite incurring high human and military costs on both sides. Even in wars in which only one side possessed nuclear weapons, that side refrained from exploiting its advantage. The United States fought bloody and protracted wars in Korea and Vietnam and yet abstained from playing its nuclear trump card. Similarly, Israel refrained from employing nuclear weapons against Egypt or Syria, even in the darkest hours of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The same has been true thus far of Russia in its war with Ukraine, even though that conflict is now approaching the end of a second year of fierce fighting and has already exacted from Russia an enormous price in blood and treasure.
This nuclear restraint should not be surprising. During the Cold War, the possibility of a nonnuclear conflict played a significant part in strategic planning on both sides. Thus, U.S. and Soviet thinking addressed not only the threat of nuclear escalation but also the prospect of a prolonged conventional war. To prepare for that kind of war—and thus dissuade the other side from believing it could win such a conflict—each superpower stockpiled large quantities of surplus military equipment as well as key raw materials. The United States maintained an aircraft “boneyard” and maritime “mothball fleet”—large reserves of retired planes and ships that could be mobilized and brought into service as needed. For their part, the Soviets amassed enormous quantities of spare munitions, along with thousands of tanks, planes, air defense systems, and other weapons to support extended combat operations. A working assumption of these preparations on both sides was that a war could unfold over an extended period without necessarily triggering Armageddon.
In the event of armed conflict between China and a U.S.-led coalition, a similar dynamic could play out again: both sides would have a strong interest in avoiding uncontrolled escalation and could seek ways to fight by other means. Simply put, the logic of mutually assured destruction would not end at the onset of hostilities but could deter the use of nuclear weapons during the war. Given this reality, it is crucial to understand what a twenty-first-century great-power conflict might look like and how it might evolve.
REASONS TO FIGHT
There are many ways that a war between China and the United States could start. Given China’s ambition to dominate the Indo-Pacific, such a war would very likely involve the so-called first island chain, the long arc of Pacific archipelagoes extending from the Kuril Islands north of Japan, down the Ryukyu Islands, through Taiwan, the Philippines, and parts of Indonesia. As many in Washington have argued, Taiwan is the most obvious target, given the island’s strategic location between Japan and the Philippines, its key role in the global economy, and its status as the principal object of Beijing’s expansionist aims. China’s military has been increasingly active in the Taiwan Strait, and the PLA has massed its greatest concentration of forces across from the island. In the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan, the United States would be compelled to defend the island or risk having key neutral countries and even allies drift toward an accommodation with Beijing.
Yet the Taiwan Strait is not the only place a war could begin. China has continued its incursions into Japan’s airspace and its provocative actions in the exclusive economic zones of the Philippines and Vietnam, raising the possibility of a war-provoking incident. Moreover, tensions between North Korea and South Korea remain high. If fighting broke out on the Korean Peninsula, the United States might dispatch reinforcements there, causing Beijing to see an opportunity to settle scores at other points along the first island chain.
Or a war with China could start in South Asia. Over the past decade, China has clashed with India along their shared border on several occasions. Despite lacking a formal alliance with the United States, India is a member of the Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue), the security grouping that also includes Australia, Japan, and the United States and that has stepped up joint military cooperation over the past few years. If India were to become the victim of more significant Chinese aggression, Washington would have a strong interest in defending a major military power and partner that is also the world’s largest democracy.
In short, if war breaks out in any of these places, it could draw China and the United States into direct armed conflict. And if that happens, it would be unlikely to end quickly. Take the case of Taiwan. Although it is possible that China could either achieve a rapid conquest before the United States could respond or be stopped cold by a U.S.-led coalition, these outcomes are hardly assured. As Russia discovered in Ukraine in 2022, rapid subjugation, even of an ostensibly weaker power, can be harder than it looks.
But even if Washington and its partners are able to prevent the PLA from seizing Taiwan through a fait accompli, Beijing still might be unwilling to accept defeat. And like the United States, it would possess the means to continue fighting. Given the high stakes, neither side can be counted on to throw in the towel, even if it suffers severe initial reverses. And at that point, the course of events would be determined not only by the intentions of the two great powers themselves but also by the responses of other countries in the region.
In contrast to the Cold War, in which the two superpowers were each supported by rigid alliances—the U.S.-led NATO and the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact—the current situation in the Indo-Pacific is a geopolitical jumble. China has no formal alliances, although it enjoys close relationships with North Korea, Pakistan, and Russia. For its part, the United States has a set of bilateral alliances and partnerships in the region based on hub-and-spoke relationships, with Washington as the hub and Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand forming the spokes. Yet unlike the members of NATO, which are obligated to view an attack on one as an attack on all, these Asian allies have no shared defense commitment.
In the event of Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific, then, the responses of U.S. partners in the region are less than certain. It is reasonable to assume that Australia and Japan would join the United States in coming to the victim’s defense, given their close alliance with the United States, their ability to project significant military power abroad, and strong interest in preserving a free and open Indo-Pacific community of nations. But other powerful countries could influence the war’s character—arguably, the two most important being India (on the side of the United States) and Russia (on the side of China). Just as the local Asian and European wars in the late 1930s expanded to become a global war, so might a war with China overlap with the war in Ukraine or a conflict in South Asia or fighting in the Middle East.
What happens in the early stages of the war could also determine the constellation of powers on each side. The party that is judged to be the aggressor could alienate fence sitters that view the war from a moral perspective. States with more of a realpolitik view, on the other hand, might ally themselves with whichever side achieves early success (as Italy did in World War II), or they may decide against joining their natural partners should those partners suffer significant setbacks. Following Ukraine’s successful initial defense against Russia’s invasion in the spring of 2022, many countries in the West, including historically neutral countries such as Finland and Sweden, rallied to Kyiv’s support. Similarly, if China were unable to quickly secure its objectives, traditionally neutral countries such as Indonesia, Singapore, and Vietnam might join efforts to resist Beijing’s aggression.
RESTRAINING ORDERS
Once a war has broken out, both China and the United States would have to confront the dangers posed by their nuclear arsenals. As in peacetime, the two sides would retain a strong interest in avoiding catastrophic escalation. Even so, in the heat of war, such a possibility cannot be eliminated. Both would confront the challenge of finding the sweet spot in which they could employ force to gain an advantage without causing total war. Consequently, leaders of both great powers would need to exercise a high degree of self-control.
To keep the war limited, both Washington and Beijing would need to recognize each other’s redlines—specific actions viewed as escalatory and that could trigger counterescalations. Efforts toward this end can be enhanced if both sides can clearly and credibly communicate what their redlines are and the consequences that would be incurred for crossing them. Even here, problems will arise, as the dynamics of war may alter these thresholds. For example, if the PLA proves effective at using conventionally armed ballistic missiles to attack U.S. air bases in the region, Washington could decide to strike Chinese missile sites, even at the risk of hitting nuclear-armed PLA missiles kept at the same location. Moreover, individual coalition members will likely have their own, unique redlines. Consider a situation in which PLA air and sea attacks on major Japanese ports threaten to collapse Japan’s economy or cut off its food supplies. Under these circumstances, Tokyo may be far more willing to escalate the war than its coalition partners. If Japan has the means to escalate, it could do so unilaterally. If it lacks them and Washington refuses to escalate on its behalf, Tokyo might decide to seek a separate peace with Beijing. To avoid this predicament, the coalition could pre-position air and missile defenses, as well as countermine forces, at Japanese ports, and Japan could stockpile crucial imported goods, such as food and fuel.
Nevertheless, previous wars suggest that belligerents have often been able to limit their warfighting methods to prevent unnecessary escalation. Following China’s intervention in the Korean War, for example, U.S. forces had the capability to conduct airstrikes across the border in Manchuria, which served as a staging ground for Chinese forces threatening to overwhelm U.S. troops on the peninsula. But U.S. President Harry Truman turned down requests to attack these targets in order to avoid triggering a wider war with the Soviet Union. Similarly, in Vietnam, U.S. leaders declared North Vietnam’s main port of Haiphong off-limits to U.S. forces, despite its strategic importance. As was the case with Korea, it was feared such attacks could spark a wider conflict with China or the Soviet Union. In both cases, this restraint was maintained even amid wars that cost tens of thousands of American lives.
Given the potential for uncontainable nuclear escalation, it is not unreasonable to assume that both China and the United States would err on the side of caution when considering how and where to intensify military operations. But the imperative on both sides to avoid nuclear escalation would not only create parameters for the objectives sought and the means employed to achieve them. It would also set the stage for a conflict that could likely be prolonged since both sides would have very significant resources to draw on to keep fighting. In this way, the war’s containment in one respect would also facilitate its broadening in others.
A WAR OF WILLS
What strategy might a U.S.-led coalition pursue in a limited but extended war with China? Broadly speaking, there are three general strategies of war: annihilation, attrition, and exhaustion. They can be pursued individually or in combination. An annihilation strategy emphasizes using a single event or a rapid series of actions to collapse an enemy’s ability or will to fight, such as occurred with Germany’s six-week blitzkrieg campaign against France in 1940. By contrast, an attrition strategy seeks to reduce an enemy’s war-making potential by wearing down its military forces over an extended period to the point that they can no longer mount an effective resistance. This was the primary strategy the Allies employed against the Axis powers in World War II. An exhaustion strategy, finally, seeks to deplete the enemy’s forces indirectly, such as by denying it access to vital resources through blockades, degrading key transportation infrastructure, or destroying key industrial facilities. A classic example of this was the U.S. Civil War.
Early in that conflict, both the Union North and the Confederate South hoped that a strategy of annihilation would succeed, such as by winning a decisive battle or seizing the enemy’s capital. These hopes proved ill founded, and over time the Confederacy adopted an exhaustion strategy, hoping to extend the war to the point that its adversary’s will to persevere would run out, despite the Union’s far greater military power. In turn, relying on its advantages in manpower, industrial might, and military capabilities, the North combined an attrition strategy with an exhaustion one. It sought to reduce the Confederacy’s armies directly through attrition by persistent military battles and indirectly by blockading Confederate ports and destroying the South’s arsenals and transportation infrastructure. In this way, the Union deprived the Confederacy of the resources and recruits needed to offset its combat losses while convincing Southerners that they could not achieve their goal of secession.
In a war between China and the United States, the strategy of annihilation carries unsustainable risks. Because both sides have nuclear weapons, an annihilation strategy based on an overwhelming military attack to destroy the enemy’s ability to resist could easily become a mutual suicide pact. That risk would also hobble efforts by either side to pursue an attrition strategy, which could similarly lead to nuclear escalation. Both belligerents would thus have an incentive to pursue strategies of exhaustion, supported when possible by attrition, to erode the enemy’s means and, perhaps more important, its will to continue fighting. Such an approach would seek to inflict maximum pressure and damage on the enemy without risking escalation to total war.
The United States must convince China that it can prevail in a long war.
In shaping these strategies, China and the United States would need to consider carefully where they choose to fight. For example, to avoid crossing redlines, the two sides might accord each other’s homelands (including their respective airspaces) limited sanctuary status. Instead, they might seek horizontal, or geographic, escalation. Thus, the conflict could spread to areas beyond the first island chain or South Asia to locations where both China and the United States could project military power, such as in the Horn of Africa and the South Pacific. The war would also likely migrate to those domains that are less likely to pose immediate escalation risks. Warfighting in domains associated with the global commons, for example, might be considered fair game by both sides. These could include maritime operations (including on the sea’s surface, under the sea, and on the seabed), as well as war in space and cyberspace. Both sides might also wage war more aggressively on and above the territories of minor powers allied with China or the United States, such as the Philippines and Taiwan.
In the war’s early phases, military targets might well have priority for both sides as the PLA attempts to win a quick victory while the U.S. coalition focuses on mounting a successful defense. If so, economic targets like commercial ports, cargo ships, and undersea oil and gas infrastructure would initially be accorded lower priority. As the war becomes protracted, however, each side would increasingly seek to exhaust the other’s war-making potential through economic and information warfare. Actions toward this end might involve blockades of enemy ports and commerce-raiding operations against an enemy’s cargo ships and undersea infrastructure. One side could impose information blockades on the other by cutting undersea data cables and interrupting satellite communications, or it could use cyberattacks to destroy or corrupt data central to the effective operation of the adversary’s critical infrastructure.
Another way the belligerents could keep the war limited would be to restrict the means of attack used. Attacks whose effects are relatively easy to reverse may be less escalatory than those that inflict permanent damage. For example, employing high-powered jammers that can block and unblock satellite signals as desired could be preferable to a missile strike that destroys a satellite ground control station located on the territory of a major belligerent power. By offering the prospect of a relatively rapid restoration of lost service, such attacks might prove effective at undermining the enemy’s will to continue the war. The same might be said of seabed operations that shut down offshore oil and gas pumping stations rather than physically destroying them or naval operations that seize and intern enemy cargo ships rather than sinking them. To the extent such actions are feasible, they can preserve key enemy assets as hostages that can be used as bargaining chips in negotiating a favorable end to the war.
Bringing the conflict to a close would be an important challenge in its own right. With the prospect of a decisive military victory out of reach for either side, such a war could last several years or more, winding down only when both sides choose the path of negotiation over the risk of annihilation, an uncomfortable peace over what would have become a prohibitively costly and seemingly endless war.
TORTOISES, NOT HARES
To prevail in a war with China, then, the United States and its coalition partners will need to have a strategy not only for denying Beijing a quick victory but also for sustaining their own defenses in a long war. At present, the first goal remains a formidable task. The United States and its allies—let alone prospective partners such as India, Indonesia, Singapore, and Vietnam—appear to lack a coherent approach to deterring or defeating a Chinese attack. If China seizes key islands along the first island chain, it would be exceedingly difficult for the United States and its partners to retake them at anything approaching an acceptable cost. And if China is successful, it may propose an immediate cease-fire as a means of consolidating its gains. To some members of a U.S.-led coalition, such an offer might appear an attractive alternative to a costly fight that carries the risk of catastrophic escalation.
Still, Washington and its potential partners have the means and, at least for now, the time to improve their readiness. The United States should give priority to negotiating agreements to position more U.S. forces and war stocks along the first island chain, while allies and partners along the chain enhance their defenses. In the interim, U.S. capabilities that can be employed quickly, such as space-based systems, long-range bombers, and cyber weapons, can help fill the gap.
But U.S. strategists will also need to plan for what happens next, since preventing a Chinese fait accompli may serve only as the entry fee to a far more protracted great-power war. And unlike the initial aggression, that confrontation could broaden across a wide area and spill over into many other spheres, including the global economy, space, and cyberspace. Although there is no model for how such a war might play out, Cold War strategic thinking shows that it is possible to address the general question of a great-power conflict that extends horizontally and involves a variety of warfighting domains.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, the U.S. military developed an integrated set of operational concepts, or war plans, to respond to a conventional Soviet invasion of Western Europe. One, called AirLand Battle, envisioned the army and air force defeating successive “waves” of enemy forces advancing out of the Soviet Union through Eastern Europe. In this scenario, the U.S. Army would seek to block the Soviet frontline forces while a combination of U.S. air and ground-based forces—combat aircraft, missiles, and rocket artillery—would attack the second and third waves advancing toward NATO’s borders. Simultaneously, the U.S. Navy would employ attack submarines to advance beyond the Greenland–Iceland–United Kingdom maritime gaps to protect allied shipping moving across the Atlantic from Soviet submarines. And U.S. aircraft carriers would deploy to the North Atlantic with their combat air wings to defeat Soviet strike aircraft. To preclude the Soviets from using Norway as a forward staging ground, the U.S. Marine Corps also prepared to deploy quickly to that country and secure its airfields.
These concepts were based on a careful and systematic study of Soviet capabilities and strategy, including war plans, force dispositions, operational concepts, and expected rate of mobilization. Not only did these concepts guide U.S. and allied military thinking and planning; they also helped establish a clear defense program and budget priorities. The principal purpose of these efforts, however, was to convince Moscow that there was no attractive path it could pursue to wage a successful war of aggression against the Western democracies. Yet nothing like these plans exists today with respect to China.
To develop a comparable set of war concepts for a great-power conflict with China, the United States should start by examining a range of plausible scenarios for Chinese aggression. These scenarios—which should include various flash points on the first island chain and beyond, not just those pertaining to Taiwan—could form the basis for evaluating and refining promising defense plans through war games, simulations, and field exercises. But U.S. strategists will also need to account for the enormous resources that will be needed to sustain the war if it extends over many months. As Russia’s war in Ukraine has revealed, the United States and its allies lack the capacity to surge the production of munitions. The same holds true regarding the production capacity for major military systems, such as tanks, planes, ships, and artillery. To address this critical vulnerability, Washington and its prospective coalition partners must revitalize their industrial bases to be able to provide the systems and munitions needed to sustain a war as long as necessary.
A protracted war would also likely incur high costs in global trade, transportation and energy infrastructure, and communications networks, and put extraordinary strain on human populations in many parts of the world. Even if the two sides avoided nuclear catastrophe, and even if the homelands of the United States and its major coalition partners were left partially untouched, the scale and scope of destruction would likely far exceed anything the American people and those of its allies have experienced. Moreover, the Chinese might hold significant advantages in this respect: with China’s very large population, authoritarian leadership, and historic tolerance for enduring hardship and suffering enormous casualties—the capacity to “eat bitterness,” as they call it—its population might be better equipped to persevere through a long war. Under these circumstances, the coalition’s ability to sustain popular support for the war effort, along with a willingness to sacrifice, would be crucial to its success. Leaders in Washington and allied capitals will need to convince their publics of the need to augment their defenses and to sustain them in peace and war until China abandons its hegemonic agenda.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF DETERRENCE
To paraphrase German Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, wars can take one of three paths and usually elect to take the fourth. In the case of China, it is difficult to predict with any precision how, when, and where a war might begin or the path it will take once it does. Yet there are many reasons to think that such a conflict could remain limited and last much longer than has been generally assumed.
If that is the case, then the United States and its allies must begin to think through the implications of a great-power war that, while remaining below the threshold of nuclear escalation, could last for many months or years, incurring far-reaching costs on their economies, infrastructure, and citizens’ well-being. And they must convince Beijing that they have the resources and the staying power to prevail in this long war. If they do not, China may conclude that the opportunities afforded by using military force to pursue its interests in the Asia-Pacific outweigh the risks.
Der Einsatz der Bundeswehr in Mali ist zu Ende. Am gestrigen Dienstag zogen die letzten 142 deutschen Soldaten aus ihrem nun ehemaligen Stützpunkt im nordmalischen Gao ab und machten sich auf den Rückweg nach Deutschland, wo sie am Freitag erwartet werden.
Die Bundeswehr war zehn Jahre lang in dem Land stationiert, die meiste Zeit an der Seite französischer Kampftruppen sowie im Rahmen eines EU- (EUTM Mali) und eines UN-Einsatzes (MINUSMA). Sollten damit jihadistische Milizen im Sahel besiegt werden, so konnten diese letztlich ihr Operationsgebiet ausweiten und nach Nordmali auch das Zentrum des Landes zum Bürgerkriegsschauplatz machen.
Während in der Bevölkerung Proteste gegen die europäischen Truppen erstarkten, wandten sich ab 2020 auch Malis Putschregierungen gegen deren Präsenz, darunter die Bundeswehr, und zwangen sie schließlich zum Abzug. Seitdem setzt Mali seinen Kampf um Eigenständigkeit und um eine Neuorganisation des Landes jenseits des Einflusses der früheren Kolonialmächte, darunter Deutschland, fort und arbeitet dabei in wachsendem Umfang mit seinen Nachbarstaaten Burkina Faso und Niger zusammen, zusätzlich gestützt auf Russland.
Der Friedensstifter 