Category: Strategic school

Biden’s second strategic change

There are signs that the United States is changing course with its grand strategic plans. The oil dependent United States’ major political actions are often accurately interpreted in the Middle Eastern media platform Al Jazeera. The Al Jazeera news are then reflected in the Israeli news and interpreted in WIN and UWI and probably other Israeli media. The Kuwaitis seem to have realized what is going on in the grand strategic game. An article from February 6, 2022 in World Israel News is the first clear indication.

”Kuwait’s Information Ministry says Gal Gadot’s latest film shouldn’t be screened in country because she served in the IDF.”Quote WIN preamble

Biden has for a long time been increasingly withdrawing from Israel. The Israeli government officials are worried (this was the first sign).

It is not in the line of strategic thinking that the Arabs are failing cognitively. They are at least as good at strategic thinking and analysis as we are, maybe even better. It is in the field of operational and especially tactical areas that they fail cognitively. They also lack self-control to any great extent. Of course, the extremist Jihadists are not very knowledgeable. It is the more moderate Arabs, such as the Al Jazeera journalists, who can figure out grand strategy. They have many years of experience in following international media. Which extremist has that? In what country do extremists have experience in following international media at all? These people can not walk in other people’s moccasins at all. Al Jazeera is also generous with its information sharing and it is straightforward.

The reason why Biden has probably altered the US grand strategy is that the US is dependent on that the war against Iran becomes one in which the world community and above all Europe participates, and the USA is not exactly winning hearts and minds right now. That is probably slowly being rectified by Biden’s new strategic moves.

For those who are living on the back of the moon or are hearing these words at a much later moment in time I will just invoke the notion of a pending war in Europe. If you are preoccupied with the Eurovision festival please use headphones as bullets may be flying around your head.

If the Biden administration could have deceived the EU that it was Iran that wanted a war, then they would still not be able to obstruct China’s influence in the Persian Gulf, the Chinese could continue to buy oil from the oil producing countries there while the US is drained of young blood. Alternatively, there would be a war against China in any case. But it was a limited war that Biden was looking for and it would have been the opposite result in that case. Therefore, Biden probably sees it as a war against China and the United States is inevitable. And that war will not be started by the United States.

But we are not out of the woods yet. Sweden can still become a singular target for Russia. However, I think we can revise our previous position to the United States that Sweden only contributes and fights in its immediate area in the event of a major war if Biden have really changed his mind and called off the impending war against Iran. If so, we can ask what we can do for the US in the event of a war in the South China Sea. We can offer Biden our services.

Sources;

World Israel News (WIN), February 6, 2022;

Kuwait bans upcoming movie starring Gal Gadot, ‘former soldier in Zionist occupying army’

United With Israel (UWI), February 7, 2022;

Biden Should Be Ashamed of His Treatment of the UAE

United With Israel (UWI), February 7, 2022;

Will Biden’s ‘Bad Luck’ with Visits to Israel End in 2022?

Project 2049 Institute

Home

I wonder why Project 2049 Institute has an odd year like 2049 in the name? You could probably figure out why they have this year in their organization’s name. Energy, oil, maritime trade, technology, the Navy, future wars, Cobalt/Nickel and other Rare earth minerals used for batteries, military armament, international politics and alliances certainly play a role there.

I believe that the US withdrawal of their support for the Israeli underwater gas pipeline to Cyprus, Greece and Europe was a trade off to Russia.

One clue is Turkey’s sudden benign approach to Armenia lately. Russia certainly has something to do with it. Biden’s administration’s statement that minor intrusions by Russia into Ukraine is not really a casus belli for a US intervention gives us a clue that the United States wants a war against Iran as soon as possible, preferably involving a UN intervention, and they are really not interested in fighting two or more different adversaries. I am thinking of Iran, Russia and China.

https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/toppdiplomaten-inga-planer-pa-amerikanska-soldater-i-ukraina

  • ”But at present there are no plans to send US ground troops to defend Ukraine.”
  • ”We want Ukraine to be able to defend itself, not go to war with Russia,” the deputy US ambassador to Sweden told Studio Ett.

First, it is hardly Ukraine that is waging war against Russia. Ukraine is defending itself against the belligerent Russia. Does Biden’s administration want Ukraine not to defend itself if only Russia would limit its military influence to eastern Ukraine? ”But we do know it’s playbook,” as Blinken said in late 2021.

WIN January 20, 2022

EastMed pipeline said to be politically “destabilising” as well as economically and environmentally unviable.”

By David Hellerman, World Israel News

U.S. officials have notified Israel, Greece and Cyprus that Washington no longer supports a joint gas pipeline intended to supply Europe with natural gas.

Greek media reports, which broke the story, cited a U.S. “non-document” or unofficial position paper which characterized the EastMed pipeline as a “primary source of tension” and something “destabilising” the region because of Turkish opposition.

The joint pipeline, a $6.8 billion initiative, was expected to provide Europe with ten percent of its energy needs, reducing the continent’s dependence on Russian natural gas.

A widely cited Reuters report quoted a source who said, “The American side expressed to the Greek side reservations as to the rationale of the EastMed pipeline, (and) raised issues of its economic viability and environmental (issues).”

In 2018, Israel signed an agreement with Italy, Greece, and Cyprus to lay the mostly underwater gas pipeline. Running from the Israel’s Leviathan gas field to Italy via a Cypriot gas field, Crete and the Greek mainland, the EastMed pipeline planned to traverse 1,900 kilometers (1,242 miles). The project won U.S. support in 2019.

The pipeline was supposed to be operational in 2025 and eventually carry 10 billion cubic meters of gas to Europe annually.

Media reports say the initiative has not secured funding. None of the EastMed partner countries have publicly commented on what Washington’s position means for the pipeline’s future.

Turkey, which doesn’t recognize Cyprus as a nation, claims the island and its offshore resources for itself, and opposed the endeavor. On numerous occasions, the Turkish Navy harassed Israeli and Cypriot vessels doing exploratory work.

The EastMed project was also competing with a Russian-Turkish pipeline, the Turkstream, which began delivering gas to Europe in 2020.

On Tuesday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters, “If [Israeli gas] would be brought to Europe, it could only be done through Turkey,” according to a transcript released by Erdogan’s office. “Is there any hope for now? We can sit and talk about the conditions.”

The pipeline also faced the formidable geophysical challenges of passing through very deep water, sometimes at depths of 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) in an area known for seismic activity.

I had to include the whole WIN article from January 20 above, because it looks like the Biden administration has struck a deal with Russia. ”We do this for you if you restrain Turkey in the coming US war, Putin.” Biden is raking the manege for the coming war. It doesn’t look like the Israelis are aware of Biden’s plans in the North involving Russia and war.

It is in the interest of the United States that Turkey be kept in check during an American war in Syria against Iran, and Russia’s goodwill is absolutely necessary for that to happen. That is why the course of events between Russia, Turkey and Armenia is benign in January of 2022. There you see, if you just want it hard enough, you can very quickly create peace and harmony in the world. If you can trust World Israel News (WIN) from January 19 2022 Israel wants it bad enough [temporarily].

”…Diplomatic talks are ongoing with Israel, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a press conference late Tuesday, underlining that his Israeli counterpart Isaac Herzog may visit Turkey soon…” Quote; WIN

However, not to mention something important. Biden warned Russia about Russia invading Ukraine, according to Sveriges Radio the 20th of January 2022. ”Do I think he’ll test the West, Yes, I think he will! But I think he will pay a serious and dear price for it.” Quote; Joe Biden

Biden is trying hard to spare Ukraine from a war.

Sources:

https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/toppdiplomaten-inga-planer-pa-amerikanska-soldater-i-ukraina

World Israel News

https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/biden-varnar-ryssland-om-ukraina

The Nile river

Sunni-Muslim Sudan is the next country together with Morocco and Oman to be on the Israeli list of charm offensives, according to the news site United With Israel from the 13th of October 2021.

Of course it helps that Israel can become a conciliator between Sudan and Egypt concerning the fresh water from the Nile and dam projects in Sudan. And why do Israel want to be friends with Morocco? Two words; precious Phosphates, needed by the US farmers. And Oman is strategically located at the inlet to the Persian gulf. That’s it, at least as far as I understand it.

A reiteration: A good two thirds of the world production of phosphates are mined in China, the United States and Morocco/Western Sahara. Morocco and the, by Morocco occupied Western Sahara account for 30 percent of the world export market. US phosphate reserves will last for nearly 30 years for US use only. The United States does not export phosphate ore. Neither does China. The world’s phosphate reserves are estimated to be around 15 billion tonnes, which is sufficient for the world’s consumption for 90 years with current technology, according to the US Geological Survey. Phosphate production in the world will not come to a critical low level before the world’s oil reserves peter out. Thus, phosphate production in Morocco/Western Sahara is strategically secondary, or should be. But this did not prevent the US from making a bilateral trade deal with Morocco in 2006. The European Union didn’t jump on the train until two years later. And the early US bilateral trade deal with Morocco is also a spoiler for us Europeans. Are the US and Israel thus heading for a war on Iran in order to hog the oil from the Persian Gulf? Short answer, Yes. Long answer, don’t forget about Taiwan and the Chinese ambitions.

Also, UAE and Bahrain have been charmed by the Israelis already. The US is going to get a severe oil shortage sometime around 2024. The US wants war, Israel wants war, not necessarily for the same reason, short term. There is going to be a war against Iran, unless Iran complies with their then master the US. Do you think that it is a coincidence that the Arab states, Saudi-Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and UAE suddenly changed their negative policies into an including policy on israel? No, the Arabs on the Arabian peninsula in particular would all too happily see an American and Israeli war against Iran. Iran isn’t just Israel’s worst enemy, it is in practice the Arabs’ worst enemy too. They feel very threatened by Iran. They themselves do not want to fight Iran but would happily fuel the war and support the US use of the American bases in Qatar, Bahrain and UAE.

Saudi-Arabia knows they are not ready to fight Iran, and they probably never will be ready for a fight against Iran. Israel on the other hand is ready for a war. But I am sceptical about how it could be possible for the Israelis to strike the bunker systems at Mashad in Iran where the strategic nuclear forces will be located, at least with the Israeli Air Force without help from the US.

A quote from a seemingly well informed Israeli: ”Indeed, it won’t be easy for the IDF. They do have some bunker-buster technology, but what they need for the Iranian deep, heavily armored and hardened bunkers is re-entrant hypervelocity Mach 10+ bunkerbusters. Those are launched from space and only the US has that capability. The good news is that these are, due to the extreme speed, horrendously powerful. Although completely conventional, one single penetration hit has the equivalent explosive damage as that from a medium-yield nuclear weapon.”

Does the US really have such a space weapon? Who knows, they certainly have become more restricted with publishing information about their military technical progress and achievements.

Source:

United With Israel

China’s grand slam, occupy Taiwan and South Korea

In the online news channel South China Morning Post, or rather in the likely online disinformation channel South China Morning Post, a Chinese retired air force general spoke about that the Chinese aren’t up to invading Taiwan sometime soon. According to SCMP, the air force general is ”seen as a hawkish voice in China”. This so called news flash was from the 4th of may in 2020. Well, they didn’t invade back then. Not that they didn’t want to, I am sure of that.

The article doesn’t sneak around the bushes unnecessarily much, though it does say that it is ”Too costly” to ”take back Taiwan by force”, which isn’t necessarily true. But the article also clearly stated somewhere in there that;

”His [the chinese air force general] remarks come amid rising nationalistic sentiment, with calls for Beijing to take action on the self-ruled island.”

What is unclear, as in a ’fog of war’, is of course that Qiao Liang [the air force general] says; ”the focus should be on achieving ‘a good life’ for all Chinese”. The truth is that the focus for the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) right now is on achieving absolute control down to installing cameras in the peoples’ private toilet seats. I have read somewhere that the surveillance state in China, costs more money to keep going than the whole of PLA (Peoples Liberation Army), which includes the naval forces, the air force, the space force and the strategic forces.

So what do the CCP want? It started out as a simple territorial dispute. CCP claims that Taiwan is a part of China and that the name ’Taiwan’ is not the name of a state, that the name doesn’t exist even. They call Taiwan ”the self-ruled island”. Taiwan claims that China is actually a part of Taiwan for political reasons dating back to before Mao Tse Tung’s power grab. But it is actually the Taiwanese being cocky, as they are David in David and Goliath. Most likely the CCP aim to possess Taiwan’s and South Korea’s semiconductor industry. If they can achieve that, they will control at least three quarters of the semiconductor market around the world and they would have a great bargaining chip for the future. Or if they prefer they could beat the living daylight out of the US and Europe. In particular, it would mean that they won’t have to gather military strength in the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf, which isn’t in the cards for the CCP since they don’t have the reach with Naval forces right now. It doesn’t even appear as if they are aiming for that capacity at all. And therein lies the proof of their strategic goals. They are not going to stop with just invading Taiwan.

That is why Taiwan and Japan are forging a close alliance with economic implications as well as political implications. Taiwan as a country was like several other countries in east Asia occupied by Japan in World War II. But there was little internal resistance to the occupation. Taiwan probably had the most collaborators of any Japanese occupied territory in East Asia at the time. This mirrored the friendly relationship with Japan.

The gigantic Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer TSMC is planning to open up a division in Japan in 2023, to supply SONY with semiconductors. This is a giveaway which can only lead us to the conclusion that Japan is not to be duped. They know that Taiwan is so much more to the Chinese than just an incentive to retake a lost territory. Albeit, China has continuosly been sending the message to the US that their butt hurts, because it suits their agenda.

Japan is reportedly building a military base on the Japanese island of Ishigaki which is located less than 140 miles from Taiwan. What kind of base remains to be disclosed, but Japan will deploy both anti-ship missiles and air-defense missiles between the end of 2022 and March 2023. There are only three beach strips in taiwan that the Chinese military force PLA can do a beach landing at. But they can airdrop airborn troops and materiel and fly in ’special forces’ with helicopters.

Japan has no other choice than to play hardball. The CCP in Beijing seeks to coerce the whole region into submission and gobble up the whole trade route to the Persian Gulf, India and Europe.

Japan is reported to remove Taiwan from China map in defense white paper. (TAIWAN NEWS)

In a warning to China, Japan’s new strategy paper mentions Taiwan for the first time. (FORBES)

Japan’s depute defense minister says ’Taiwan must be protected as a democratic country’ (CNN)

Sources:

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3082825/too-costly-chinese-military-strategist-warns-now-not-time-take?module=perpetual_scroll&pgtype=article&campaign=3082825

Hanoi 2.0 – the total withdrawal

Already Hillary Clinton threw the glove too early at China when she wrote in November 2011; ”When the war in Iraq ends and the US withdraws from Afghanistan, the United States faces a turning point in the US Pacific Ocean.” Hillary Clinton revealed the US plans which could be interpreted as the United States doing as they please and that no morality is necessary to apply to any emerging situation for the US to take the right to intervene in any part of the world.

Trump was the president who almost completed the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Obama was the president who started the withdrawal. What we see is not the result of left-right politics, what we see is the result of an ”America first” policy, which almost all politicians in the United States agree on. Everyone knew that they would withdraw. But if they had taken their time with a sequential withdrawal, it would not have been any better, as far as I can see. Because then the soldiers who remained would have been slaughtered, or at least the risk of that happening would be significant. I mostly object to that the United States and Biden did not warn their allies about the withdrawal. The reason was probably that they did not want to alert the Taliban about the American withdrawal. The US administration had to choose between pulling off the patch quick or slow. I always pull off my patches quickly because it’s milder that way.

The withdrawal came now, because Biden is aiming for a war against Iran via mainly Syria and on Syrian soil first, as also Trump had set his mind on. Trump certainly reduced the troops in Afghanistan from 15,000 to an absolute minimum of 2,500 men. There was only one last remnant of American troops left to bring home for Biden. Plus, the US militarily allied (what a joke) countries’ military forces briefly remained in the country. Several of the allied countries were completely unprepared for the sudden withdrawal by the United States. But American lives must be secured in their own war against the Taliban. It is not optimal to attack Iran with ground forces deployed on Afghan territory.

The United States is not primarily out to ”steal” the Iranian oil. They are trying to prevent a total Chinese hegemony in the Persian Gulf, because the United States needs the oil from the Persian Gulf. China does more business in the Persian Gulf than any other country, and even Saudi-Arabia has committed itself more economically to China than to the United States. But Saudi-Arabia’s US military technology are not necessarily compatible with Chinese military technology. Saudi-Arabia is not likely starting over and instead buying Chinese military technology. Except for maybe drones and some other, less advanced technology then. The United States gets at least a third of its oil from the Persian Gulf and has probably always done so. The fracking in Texas was just a staged scenery, in the regard that they have a very limited amount of oil reserves left. Maybe the gasoline oil in Texas will be sufficient until 2024 if it is to supply the entire United States.

It did not take long before some hawk in Israel acted on the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. because a war against Iran led by the United States, Israel wants and has wanted ever since Trump’s term as president and the Netanyahu era. It makes me suspect that Israel does not have its own strategic nuclear weapons after all.

“Artificially intelligent Israeli-made drones securing UAE oil fields” Headline; WIN August 17, 2021

“Bennett to discuss Iranian threat with Biden in Washington” Headline; WIN August 18, 2021

More puzzle pieces that confirm an impending war will surely follow.

If there comes another big war in the pacific, I hope for the US to win. If there comes a war in Syria to continue in Iran to counter the Chinese influence in the Persian Gulf, I am not so certain I want the US to win.

Sources:

Mimers brunn

World Israel News (WIN)