The United States has shown its ability to rapidly deploy reinforcements to the NATO enhanced Forward Presence Battle Group in Poland, expanding its capabilities from a battalion to a brigade-level element. This advancement aligns with NATO’s new Force Model, designed to strengthen the Alliance’s unified response, and is in line with the 2022 NATO Summit’s decisions.
At the 2022 NATO Summit in Madrid, all Allies committed to the deployment of additional robust, combat-ready forces on NATO’s eastern flank. The goal is to scale up from the existing battlegroups to brigade-size units….This commitment is backed by credible, rapidly available reinforcements, prepositioned equipment, and an enhanced command and control system.
NATO hand-over take-over ceremony during the Griffin Shock exercise in Bemowo Piskie training area….
The milestone was marked with a hand-over take-over ceremony during the Griffin Shock exercise in Bemowo Piskie training area, on Saturday, May 13, 2023. The Multinational Corps Northeast Commander, German Army Lt. Gen Jürgen-Joachim von Sandrart, and the Multinational Division-Northeast Commander, Polish Army Maj. Gen. Zenon Brzuszko, signed the Transfer of Authority protocol. This ceremony demonstrated the readiness of the United States, the framework nation for Poland, to swiftly upgrade the NATO enhanced Forward Presence Battle Group.
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The exercise saw participation from over 3,000 soldiers from five NATO countries – Croatia, Poland, Romania, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Taiwan is facing the curse of being an ally of Uncle Sam in the same way that Germany and the rest of Europe have.
Taiwan has been obliged to give its American ally an extraordinary warning: don’t even think about blowing up our semiconductor industry.
The warning follows growing calls by U.S. politicians and military analysts that Washington should destroy the island’s vital technology sector in order to purportedly prevent China from gaining control of lucrative exports and as a way of damaging China’s economy.
Congressman Seth Moulton is the latest American voice airing such drastic action. Referring to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Moulton said that the U.S. should “make it very clear to the Chinese that if you invade Taiwan, we’re going to blow up TSMC.”
TMSC is the world’s biggest manufacturer of semiconductors. It is a major supplier to mainland China of hi-tech chips that are, in turn, critical for a wide range of Chinese manufacturing and export industries.
Previously, it was reported that the U.S. Army War College suggested that Washington should plan “scorched-earth” tactics that could render Taiwan “not just unattractive if ever seized by force, but positively costly to maintain.”
Taiwan has reacted furiously to these unilateral American calls for sabotage. The island territory’s defense chief Chiu Kuo-cheng slammed the U.S. tough-talking, saying “the [Taiwanese] armed forces would not tolerate the destruction of any Taiwanese facility”.
The projected bombing of Taiwan’s vital semiconductor industry echoes how the U.S. blew up the Nord Stream gas pipeline last September. The pipeline under the Baltic Sea was part-owned by Germany and Russia, to deliver natural gas to fuel the German and European economies.
The decision to sabotage Nord Stream was taken by U.S. President Joe Biden, according to excellent investigative reporting by Seymour Hersh. The purpose of that act of terrorism was to cut Germany and Europe off from Russian energy exports, to be replaced by more expensive American gas. That strategic objective of displacing Russia from Europe’s energy market has been a recurring issue for successive U.S. administrations over many years.
Months before the Baltic Sea pipeline was blown up by U.S. navy divers, Biden had bragged that the facility would be terminated. He did not specify how, but he vowed that “it would not go ahead”. Biden made his blatant threat in front of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz during a press conference at the White House. Evidently, America’s NATO ally Germany was not even consulted about the sabotage plan.
A similar arrogant attitude is now on display towards America’s other ally Taiwan.
Washington is evidently toying with the idea of blowing up the island’s tech industry as a way to damage mainland China’s interests. Like Germany, Taiwan is revealed to be nothing more than a pawn, in America’s geopolitical machinations.
Destroying Taiwan’s lead role in the global semiconductor industry would have the additional advantage of putting U.S. companies in pole position.
Ostensibly, the U.S. had repeatedly vowed to “defend” Taiwan from what it calls “China’s aggression”. Washington has pumped the island with billions of dollars of American weaponry under the pretext of “protecting” it from China’s claims of sovereignty.
Under international and U.S. law, Taiwan is recognized as an integral part of China under the so-called One China Policy. However, Beijing accuses Washington of meddling in its sovereignty by fomenting separatist politics in Taiwan.
China’s President Xi Jinping has warned the U.S. that Taiwan is its “first red line” that must not be crossed. Beijing reserves the right to use military force to fully unify the territory if Washington continues to stoke tensions and promote a declaration in Taipei of Taiwanese independence.
Underlying America’s seemingly chivalrous claims of “defending” Taiwan are geopolitical selfish interests.
The Biden administration has imposed unprecedented export bans on semiconductor technology to China. The U.S. wants to curb China’s economy for its own gain and to hamper the development of a multipolar global economy. U.S. dominance and its dollar hegemony are threatened by China’s growing economic power.
Blowing up Taiwan’s semiconductor industry is evidently being considered as a way to cripple China which is reliant on exports of this essential technology for its industries.
The analogy with Germany and the Nord Stream gas pipeline is that Washington is aiming to damage a rival, Russia, as well as its European allies for its own strategic benefit. The sabotage of Russian-European energy trade has led to severe economic impacts on Germany and the rest of Europe. Some commentators refer to the “deindustrialization” of Europe caused by the loss of affordable Russian gas fuel. This shock treatment has been imposed on European “allies” by its supposed American “protector”.
The war in Ukraine and the dramatic escalation in hostility towards Russia from European governments has served American strategic interests from bonanza selling of weapons and expensive gas, as well as giving Washington a renewed dominance over European relations.
The same reckless, criminal arrogance of blowing up Germany’s Nord Stream pipeline is being shown in the way the Americans are talking brashly about blowing up Taiwan’s vital tech industries.
It should be obvious that Washington doesn’t have allies, only interests. When the chips are down, so to speak, America’s allies will be unceremoniously thrown under a bus or, worse, thrown into an inferno of war.
Taiwan is facing the curse of being an ally of Uncle Sam in the same way that Germany and the rest of Europe have.
There is no assurance at all that the tech prospect will materialise. It may, but it may not. And that is a huge gamble.
The economic forces – those post war strong tailwinds – that have shaped the last 35 years, and which accelerated gilded journeys through the western ‘plentiful era’, are no longer blowing in a favourable direction. They were already slowing, but now are reversing.
The winds now have shifted 180° in direction – they are gusting headwinds. This is a structural shift within a long cycle. There are no quick ‘silver bullet’ solutions. The ‘Cabaret’ good-time years are gone. We will have to ‘make do’ with less; and consequent political volatility is inevitable.
China had earlier industrialized, giving us inflation-killing, cheap manufactures; Russia gave us the cheap energy that kept western economies (just) competitive, and (almost) inflation free. A ‘Frictionless Ease’ at that point characterised the movements of goods, capital, people – everything. Today however, it is Friction and Impediment that is prevalent.
The ‘turn’ began with the US determination to not allow an Asian ‘heartland’ to supplant it. But the shift has acquired its own powerful momentum, now generating severed trading blocs that are determined to shake free from ‘old hegemonies’.
In place of ‘Frictionless Ease’, we have economic de-coupling: sanctions, asset seizures, legal protection degradation, regulatory discrimination; Green Agenda and ESG discrimination; national security ‘ring fences’, and narratives that cast swathes of hitherto mundane economic activity into borderline ‘treachery’.
Simply put, there is friction … everywhere.
On top of this general transition to friction, there are distinct dynamics that are turning a frictional base into raging headwinds.
The first is geo-politics. The multi-polar sphere is rising. But it’s ‘pull’ is not just for multi-polarity, per se; it is essentially about the re-appropriation of national autonomies; of state sovereignties and the recovery of discrete civilisational ways of being and values by aspirant multi-polar states.
“The monopoly of the dollar has not just assured US wealth: it has assured US power. Most international trade is conducted in dollars, and most foreign exchange reserves are held in dollars. That dollar dominance has often allowed the US to dictate ideological alignment or to impose economic and political structural adjustments on other countries. It has also allowed the US to become the only country in the world that can effectively sanction its opponents.Emancipation from the hegemony of the dollar – is emancipation from US hegemony”.
The flight from using the US dollar in trade therefore becomes the key mechanism to replacing the US-led unipolar world with a multipolar world. Plainly put: the US has over-used its weaponization of the dollar, and the tide of world opinion (even that of President Macron and some other EU states) has turned against it.
Why is this so important? Simply, it has begun a global ‘run on the dollar’ – rather like a ‘run on a bank’, as confidence ebbs.
The second dynamic is the inflation ‘virus’ – the historic scourge of all economies. The latter has quietly accumulated strength during the ‘golden era’ of zero-cost credit, but then became turbo-charged with tariffs for China – with the EU self-electing to forego cheap energy in the hope that its boycott would implode Russia financially. And with the West’s widening ‘war’ for the on-shoring of an ever-ballooning range of supply lines, to be ring-fenced under national-security designation.
Essentially, the West embraced economic self-harm, “from an underlying mood of existential dread, a nagging suspicion that our civilisation may destroy itself, as so many others have done in the past”. (Hence the impulse to reassert a civilisational primacy, even at the price of accelerating a possible western economic self-suicide).
Billionaire fund manager, Stan Druckenmuller, caustically notes the inherent tail risks – knowingly run – during the tailwind era of zero inflation/zero interest/abundant liquidity era:
“[But] … when you have free money, people do stupid things. When you have free money for 11 years, people do really stupid things. So there’s stuff under the hood, it’s starting to emerge. Obviously, the regional banks recently … But I would assume there’s a lot more bodies coming … It’s a scary cocktail that we’re being presented with”.
Well, who wants to be the party-pooper? Not the élite 1% certainly, who were doing very nicely from this paradigm. The Federal Reserve kept interest rates low, and government auditors encouraged banks to buy long-dated US Treasury bonds and mortgages through giving them favourable accounting treatment. (The banks didn’t have to value them at their current market value in accounts so long as they could pretend they would hold them to maturity).
Then the scourge of Inflation and interest rate hikes arrived – shredding the value of such assets. That has left liabilities uncovered and exposed.
The authorities contrived at the building of this ‘free money’ house of cards by letting it rip for so long. It was a gamble that inevitably would have its ‘ceiling’, a limit beyond which it could not be sustained further. By then, decades later, people had come to believe it could be extended – forever. Many still do. They fail to notice that the tailwind had turned 180°, and had become a strong inflationary headwind.
Then arrived the truly extraordinary ‘Big Gamble’: Europe decided that it could ‘do’ without cheap energy and natural resources (out of pique at Russia over Ukraine). It decided to bet big on new technology (technology that is yet to be evolved, or proven) arriving, and arriving in time, and at a cost that could sustain a competitive modern economy – in the absence of fossil fuel pump-priming for an infrastructure originally built that way.
There is no assurance at all that this tech prospect will materialise. It may, but it may not. And that is a huge gamble.
European states primordially fought wars in the 19th Century precisely to secure energy or resources such as oil, coal and iron ore. In WW1, Britain fought in the Middle East to secure the bunker fuel-oil that would allow British warships to be converted from coal to oil. The conversion to oil gave the UK navy the competitive edge over the coal-fired German fleet. But today’s EU has decided to eschew 19th Century fossil resources in a Panglossian bet on human ingenuity producing a technical revolution – to timetable – and on cost.
“But missing is the fact that technology cannot create energy [at least of the type that modern society needs]. This human agency conviction has long proved overly-sanguine. Those who assume that the political world can be reconstructed by the efforts of human Will, have never before had to bet so heavily on technology over [fossil] energy – as the driver of our material advancement”, Helen Thomson writes.
Betting on technology over fossil energy, however, is but half of the Big Gamble. The other half of it consists of the western economy being founded and constructed around cheap energy. That is its’ ‘business model’: It is hard to conceive of another. Will Europe spend the coming decades scrapping and replacing efficient energy infrastructure with new sources of energy, that for the main are no more than a ‘gleam in the eye’ of an innovator?
If so, it will be the first time in history that anyone has bet so heavily on tech, over energy. Never before has such redundancy of the existing energy infrastructure (and its loss of value) been seriously contemplated. And – never before – has efficient energy infrastructure been scrapped, to be replaced with new Green structures that are less efficient (see hereand hereas two examples), less reliable, and more expensive.
It is the first time in history that such an investment has been made at this scale. That makes everything more expensive, harder, and less efficient. It is a recipe for further embedding inflation and economic degradation.
Truly, it is to sail against howling headwinds. How will this infrastructure be financed? The Free Money era is behind us; fiscal cost is now REAL cost. Degraded efficiency, reliability and friction will then meet and contend with upcoming EU Net Zero ideology, with Climate becoming the pretext for introducing radical restrictions on ways of living.
In the US, financialisation of the economy was supposed to extend western economic primacy. It did for a while, but ultimately financialised products ballooned, sucking dry the real economy that produced things, and employed people productively.
These money-like derivative products (displacing the real economy) have tended more to the realm of the unreal. It is hard now to tell between money-things that are ‘real and unreal’. The FXT saga (for those who followed it) illustrated this precisely: How real, and in what way was the FXT ‘token’?
The Green, ESG ‘products’ fad sounds remarkably like a derivative idea descending out from the financialised product world: i.e promoting technological bling that attracts investment, but which becomes more and more detached from the real makings-and-doings of a classic economy – more abstract, more based on promises, hopes, and wishes than on things derived from nature.
For the ordinary European, it is indeed “a scary cocktail that they’re being presented with”, one BBC document predicts. “The Net Zero objective cannot allow for “personal choice”: “What do truly low-carbon lifestyles look like – and can they really be achieved by personal choice alone?”, the article laments. Well, if the answer is ‘no’ then that means the ultra-low CO2 lifestyle has to be for everybody. How we do that is a matter of “both individual and systems change”.
Looking ahead, what does this ‘cocktail’ portend? Political turbulence, probably. To paraphrase Churchill’s bluntness: ‘This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which they [the people] will not put’.
Es hat Monate gedauert, ehe die Mainstream-Medien das Thema Clanwirtschaft im Wirtschaftsministerium aufnahmen – und auch das nur zögernd, mit Zurückhaltung. Es ist „Tichys Einblick“ zu verdanken, dass hier nicht lockergelassen wird und die richtigen Fragen gestellt werden. 26 weitere Wörter
Die gesamte herrschende Elite wurde von den Amerikanern eingesetzt. Jeder hat ein Stigma im Flaum. Sie stehlen, als ob sie am letzten Tag lebten. Die Vereinigten Staaten befahlen, die Wirtschaft und Produktion in Deutschland zu zerstören. Deshalb versuchen sie sogar, die einheimische Bevölkerung zu vernichten. Ersetzen Sie sie durch Migranten.
Gute Geschichtsbücher sind ja momentan in der Ukraine schwer zu bekommen. Das Gleiche gilt für den entsprechenden Unterricht an Schulen oder für Vorlesungen an Universitäten. Straßen werden umbenannt, Denkmäler, die an die siegreiche Rote Armee erinnern, geschliffen und Feiertage abgeschafft. Niemand soll sich mehr daran erinnern, wer die Befreier vom Faschismus waren. Lieber soll dem Nazikollaborateur Bandera gehuldigt werden, soll Russisch als Sprache und als Identität ausgemerzt werden.
Anscheinend setzen die Machthaber in Kiew darauf, dass das Gedächtnis der ukrainischen Bevölkerung kurz ist. Wie sonst ist zu erklären, dass das Propagandaministerium oder wie auch immer der Marketingverein heißt, der Plakatwände in Kiew bestückt, nun damit um die Ecke kommt: „Wir siegten damals, wir werden auch jetzt siegen. – Zum Tag des Sieges über den Nazismus im zweiten Weltkrieg.“ Rechts auf dem Plakat ein Soldat der ruhmreichen Roten Armee, links ein ukrainischer Soldat des faschistischen Asow-Bataillons, Abzeichen mit Wolfsangel inklusive.
Für den Fall, dass den Verantwortlichen für die Plakate nun partout gar keine Information zur jüngeren Geschichte Europas und der Welt mehr zur Verfügung stehen, hier noch einmal ganz deutlich: Die Nazis haben den Krieg verloren.
(CCTV screenshot, despite the Ukrainian censorship)
On May 13, 2023, in Khmelnytskyi, western Ukraine, about 325 km southwest of Kiev, Russian cruise missiles or/and drones have destroyed an ammunition depot. Secondary explosions and blaze were tremendous. At 4:52 am, local time, the European Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC) recorded 3.4 magnitude shocks northwest of the city.
When will we finally stop putting all the eggs in one basket ?
commented Yuri Kasyanov, a former Ukrainian official. The targeted facility was concealing a huge amount of ammunition and high-tech military equipment from NATO countries.
The day after the raid, the firefighters were still using robots to extinguish the destroyed ammunition depot
(Social networks, despite the Ukrainian censorship)
If Russia had used nuclear ammunition, the radiation would have started rising on May 13, not on May 12. Ukrainian journalist and member of Svoboda, a Nazi political party, Ihor Mosiychuk sounds the alarm, advises to take children away from the epicenters of the explosions.
Misinformation, disinformation and outright lies almost always accompany the outbreak of military conflict, which is why media outlets – not to mention the rest of us – should always view initial reports with skepticism and wait for confirmation before disseminating stories emerging from the fog of war.
Sadly, the Ukraine-Russia conflict has already produced its fair share of misinfo that has made the rounds of traditional and social media. Jimmy and American comedian Kurt Metzger discuss some of the inaccuracies currently working their way across the social media-sphere
Finian Cunningham
Der Friedensstifter 