Land Destroyer

US Cements Political Capture of Armenia as it Advances “Extending Russia” Strategy

2026-06-23T22:37:07.926-07:00

June 15, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - The United States continues pursuing its decades-spanning policy of maintaining global primacy by encircling and containing rivals as described in the 1992 New York Times article, “U.S. Strategy Plan Call for Insuring No Rivals Develop.”

As part of this long-standing strategy the US has developed specific plans to encircle and contain key nations including China, Iran, and of course Russia. These plans often overlap - as degrading the power and influence of one targeted nation reduces the combined power and influence of all three as well as the multipolar world order they seek to construct.

For Russia specifically, the RAND Corporation’s 2019 paper, “Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground” lays out policy options the US has clearly pursued for years leading up to its publication and ever since.

These options targeting Russia include those of an economic dimension such as, “hinder petroleum exports,” “reduce natural gas exports and hinder pipeline expansions,” “impose sanctions,” as well as geopolitical measures like “provide lethal aid to Ukraine,” “increase support to the Syrian rebels,” “promote regime change in Belarus,” “exploit tensions in the south Caucasus,” “reduce Russian influence in Central Asia,” and “challenge Russian presence in Moldova.”

Virtually all of these options have been implemented in one way or another - from the US sending lethal aid to Ukraine the same year this paper was published under the first Trump administration, to the continued arming of terrorists in Syria by the US culminating in the collapse of the Syrian government in 2024, to the physical destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines as well as constantly expanding US-led sanctions and maritime interdiction operations targeting Russian energy exports.

Exploit Tensions in the South Caucasus: Politically Capturing Armenia

In light of the recent elections in Armenia (in the south Caucasus region) and the President of the European Commission Ursula Van Der Leyan congratulating Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan by exclaiming, “the spirit of the Velvet Revolution you led in 2018 is alive and well,” it appears that once again the US objective of “extending Russia” has been further advanced.

While many have been tempted to assign Armenia’s pivot away from its traditional Russian partnership to the European Union and NATO to European influence - the US government itself engineered the protests in 2018 Van Der Leyan referenced, with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) itself admitting in its 2018 annual report that:

NED’s many grantees in Armenia were in the forefront of the “Velvet Revolution” last spring that swept from office a corrupt and autocratic president who wanted to manipulate the constitution to retain power. In subsequent elections held in December, the party alliance of the new Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan won 70 percent of the vote, setting the stage for building accountable and effective government ministries, reforming the judicial system, and strengthening the media as a critical watchdog over government performance.

By “corrupt and autocratic” the NED means a government that does not answer to Washington at the expense of its own national interests, and by “accountable and effective ministries,” the NED means accountable to and effective at serving Washington - even at the cost of Armenia’s own interests.

Organizations involved in the US-engineered “Velvet Revolution” in Armenia and the subsequent cementing of US political capture over the nation include the “Union of Informed Citizens” whose 2021 annual report admitted extensive US government backing and direction continued well after the 2018 protests - as well as Boon TV which is admittedly funded by the NED’s European counterpart, the unimaginatively named “European Endowment for Democracy.”

Just like with other nations the US has politically captured, Armenia’s “color revolution” and “regime change” were just the beginning. With a client regime in place, the floodgates of foreign interference by the US are opened.

The NED reported the following year in its 2019 annual report that US government interference shifted from producing desired outcomes during elections to consolidating political control in their aftermath, noting, “since the 2018 revolution in Armenia, NED grantees have shifted their focus from holding a corrupt regime accountable to supporting governance reform.”

Again - language like “corrupt regime” and “reform” translate into a government unwilling to subordinate itself to US interests and consolidating US control.

The same 2019 NED annual report notes how “several NED grantees have entered government,” demonstrating how US-engineered protests not only seek to overturn a targeted government, but replace it with a US-prepared and selected client regime.

NED subsidiaries like the National Democratic Institute (NDI) announced in their own 2020 report regarding Armenia the launching of two programs, “the Intern Program of the National Assembly of Armenia and the Katarine Women’s Political Leadership Program.”

The same report mentioned, “a graduation ceremony for the Institute’s Young Political Leadership Strategy Program.”

In other words the NED and its subsidiaries and European counterparts are not just funding protests, opposition parties, and placing into power client regimes, but are creating a much wider pipeline for transforming young people into pro-Western, pro-American, pro-NATA and pro-EU cadres and manipulate public sentiment into serving US interests at the cost of their own, objective best interests.

The political capture of Armenia by the United States mirrors that of Georgia and Serbia in the early 2000s and the more recent political capture of Ukraine in 2014.

The London Guardian in its 2004 article, “US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev,” admitted the protests in Ukraine that year were, “an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes,” that “the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box,” and that “Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia.”

Again, terms like “rigged elections” and “unsavoury regimes” translate into elections that did not turn out the way the US preferred, and governments not yet subordinated to Washington.

Extending Russia

Within the 2019 RAND Corporation paper, “Extending Russia” under, “Measure 4: Exploit Tensions in the South Caucasus,” US policymakers specifically mention Armenia.

The paper states:

The United States could extend Russia in the Caucasus in two ways. First, the United States could push for a closer NATO relationship with Georgia and Azerbaijan, likely leading Russia to strengthen its military presence in South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Armenia, and southern Russia.

Alternatively, the United States could try to induce Armenia to break with Russia.

The paper unapologetically admits the capture of Armenia - as well as Georgia - would enhance the encirclement of not only Russia, but also neighboring Iran as well as provide the US access to energy resources in the Caspian Sea.

The paper explicitly states:

While the principal aim of these policies would be to extend Russia, closer relationships with Georgia, Azerbaijan, or Armenia might yield important secondary benefits for the United States. The geographic position of Azerbaijan makes it a prime location for both intelligence gathering and deterrence measures relating to Iran, especially because many of Iran’s Kurdish and Iranian populations are concentrated near the Azeri-Iranian border. Stronger ties with Georgia, hailed by the conservative Heritage Foundation as “one of America’s best allies in Europe” for providing one the largest contributions of troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, could pay strategic dividends in the future.

Increased U.S. involvement in the region could produce additional economic benefits as well. The Caspian Sea remains a key producer of both oil and natural gas. Indeed, the U.S. Department of Energy estimates that there are “48 billion barrels of oil and 292 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in proved and probable reserves in the Caspian basins. Almost 75 percent of oil reserves and 67 percent of natural gas reserves are located within 100 miles of the coast.” A closer political relationship with Azerbaijan would help secure continued access to these resources for the United States and—perhaps more important— for its allies in the future.

Far from ensuring US national security - US foreign policy is predicated entirely on compromising the national security of all other nations around the globe - “friend” and foe alike. The goal is to first subordinate as many nations as possible, then encircle, contain, and eventually collapse those it cannot.

While the 2019 RAND Corporation paper feared “flipping” Armenia would likely be difficult - it appears the US has successfully managed to do so nonetheless.

This may be in part due to the entire premise of the paper itself, “extending Russia.” An overextended Russia may focus more resources on one crisis the US creates for it - say in Ukraine - at the expense of being able to prevent other US-created crises from overwhelming its available resources elsewhere.

Syria - mentioned specifically in the RAND Corporation paper - is one such example. Russia’s military commitment to fighting against the US proxy war in Ukraine left little resources to continue defending Syria from a similar US-backed proxy war in West Asia, resulting in the collapse of Syria in late 2024. Prior to 2022, Russia had not only stopped the advance of US-backed terrorists in Syria, but managed to stabilize Syria for several years.

“Extending Russia” may have forced it to likewise concentrate resources on preserving its relationships with nations like Belarus and perhaps Georgia at the expense of other nations like Armenia for the time being.

Washington’s Unnoticed Superweapon

The admitted election interference and political capture of these nations by the United States spanning the entire 21st century has changed the global geopolitical map in Washington’s favor. Yet this process still remains a poorly understood, under-reported, yet an incredibly powerful US tool in its pursuit of primacy and its “insuring no rivals develop.”

Nations like Russia and China are clearly aware of this US method of infiltrating and capturing the political, educational, cultural, and informational space of targeted nations along their respective peripheries and beyond - leading to the subsequent hijacking and transformation of these nations’ military and economic power from serving self-preservation to serving as self-destructive proxies aimed at both nations.

Both nations through government and media programs have published reports and documentaries detailing the process - but often long after US success.

Unfortunately, the state media of both nations have repeatedly failed to “get ahead” of US infiltration and subversion - often with both Russian and Chinese state media simply repeating Western media narratives depicting protests organized by the US as “pro-democracy” or “anti-corruption” movements - thus amplifying US information warfare.

While both nations have “proofed” themselves against this form of US interference and political capture, they have failed to provide their partners and allies with the means to defend against this threat as well.

Both Russia and China have created their own domestic social media platforms and have displaced US-based social media platforms which are used specifically to capture and control a targeted nation’s information space. Yet neither nation has successfully exported either these social media platforms themselves or the capability of creating domestic versions of them in partner nations to secure their respective information spaces.

Global campaigns, forums, and other formats used to raise awareness of US political infiltration and political capture have been meager and ineffective in exposing US methods and the dangers they pose - even as the glow of Ukraine’s burning to the ground serves as a warning to the world of the final destination awaiting US politically captured nations.

At the moment, Armenia is transitioning into another US-captured battering ram to use against both Russia and Iran.

In the Asia-Pacific region the US is likewise rapidly transforming the Philippines into the “Ukraine” of Southeast Asia vis-a-vis China.

Other nations around the globe leaning toward the multipolar world Russia, China, and Iran advocate, remain targets of US infiltration and political capture, with armies of NED-funded organizations hard at work, quietly building up not only opposition parties to protest in the streets and interfere in elections, but also through the US capture of their respective information spaces - misleading the public into believing US interests are somehow “their own” interests.

Russia and China both provide partner nations with the military means of defending their traditional national security domains - air, land, and sea. A concerted effort to both expose the danger the US poses to non-traditional national security domains like political and information space, and by providing a package of technologies and methods to defend against this danger could provide these nations the ability to thwart Washington’s aggression this century, similar military backing provided nations like Vietnam to defend themselves with last century.

Nations must create educational and training pipelines within their own borders to produce the human resources required to both administer the nation and inform the public of national affairs through the media. Sending young people abroad to the West to study “journalism” or “political science” only ensures their indoctrination by the West and their likely lifelong service to the West when they return home.

Infrastructure essential to this process such as social media platforms are as important to be controlled within a nation’s borders as are physical roads, borders, shores, and airspace. In the 21st century, allowing US-based social media platforms to dominate any other nation’s information space would be like allowing US troops to mind another nation’s roads, borders, shores, and airspace. If the latter is unthinkable, why is the former still the norm?

Until nations around the world can first see this danger to their political and information space as clearly as they see military threats to their physical borders and take the steps required to secure them - the US will continue to exploit this advantage, often toppling and capturing entire nations without deploying a single US soldier or firing a single shot - all before feeding these captured nations into regional proxy wars as well as global campaigns of political and economic pressure against Washington’s enemies - all to Washington’s benefit and at the expense of everyone else.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.

West Says Ukraine is Now “Winning” and Why it is Lying (Again)

2026-06-23T22:34:43.732-07:00

May 25, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - A recent article published in the Kyiv Independent titled, “Is Ukraine starting to win the war again?” tests the maxim that if you need to ask, the answer is probably “no.”

As the collective Western media has done since 2022, the Kyiv Independent cites “flatlined” Russian territorial gains and expanding drone strikes deep inside Russian territory (the article attributes to Ukraine despite the New York Times admitting such strikes are enabled by the US Central Intelligence Agency and the US military) - all as evidence of growing Russian weakness and increasing Ukrainian strength.

A War of Attrition Is Not Measured in Territory or Headlines

In reality - and even as the article itself admits - the war is not one of territorial gains or headline-grabbing drone strikes, but one of attrition.

At one point the article even admits, “the upper hand will be gained by the side in whose favor the long attritional fight is running.”

In any war of attrition, the primary factors lending leverage to one side over another is military industrial production and the ability to maintain or expand trained manpower. By implication this also means the ability to maintain the economic, social, and political stability required to support these enabling factors.

Here the Kyiv Independent concedes Russia wins out big in both categories, admitting “Russia continues to be able to steadily recruit between 30-35,000 new soldiers per month, enabling Moscow to sustain its losses on the battlefield,” and that, “Moscow aims to produce 7.3 million FPVs in 2026.”

While the Kyiv Independent claims the quality of those 30,000-35,000 Russian troops recruited each month are low, poorly trained, and poorly equipped in the field, it avoids discussing Ukraine’s recruitment struggles. This includes the fact that - unlike Russia’s recruited manpower who voluntarily sign contracts - much of Ukraine’s manpower is pressed into service - sometimes literally being beaten into submission and dragged to the frontline.

Regarding drone production, other Ukraine-based sources put Ukraine’s drone output somewhere around 4 million per year, or about half of Russia’s production numbers according to the Kyiv Independent.

It should be pointed out that in addition to Russia outproducing Ukraine (and in reality, Ukraine’s American and European sponsors) in terms of drones - an area of supposed “Ukrainian” strength - Russia continues outproducing Ukraine and its Western sponsors in all other categories of conventional military power as well, from artillery shells and precision-guided missiles, to armored vehicles and anti-aircraft systems.

Imagining Victory

The article repeats recent talking points circulating throughout Wall Street-funded Washington-based policy think tanks regarding the cutting off of Russian forces from use of US-based SpaceX’s Starlink satellite communication network as well as high-profile drone strikes deep inside Russia threatening to risk what Western pundits call “breaking the key social contract at the heart of Putin's rule,” - that is - the illusion of peace at home while Russia wages war abroad.

However, none of these claims - whether real or imagined - impact the fundamental factors that either win or lose a war of attrition.

Drone strikes on Russia have targeted energy production, storage, and export facilities, manufacturing centers, and other infrastructure critical for both Russia’s military and economic viability. While these strikes have caused damage, it has not been at a pace greater than Russia’s capacity to repair and/or adapt to the strikes.

The drone strikes have raised the costs for Russia of the ongoing US proxy war, but have not changed the overall math of attrition that favors Russia owed to its structural advantages. And while this might seem like a fundamental failure for the US - it is actually precisely what US policymakers set out to do as laid out in policy papers stretching back years before the Russian operation began in 2022.

US Seeks to “Extend” Russia, Not Necessarily Defeat it in Ukraine

What the drone strikes also achieve is the creation of a psychological effect - not on Russia’s leadership or population - but on the Ukrainian population and the wider Western public - especially the European public.

Creating the illusion of success and the possibility of eventual victory is essential to politically justify the immense amount of public resources being redirected from social programs and infrastructure into arms and ammunition production, vehicles, logistics, and training programs, as well as the astronomical amounts of money being spent to prop up the Ukrainian government, economy, and Ukrainian society.

The illusion of success and imminent victory also convinces Ukrainians themselves to continue fighting on. A proxy war cannot continue if the proxies themselves succumb to defeatism driven by compounding battlefield realities.

It should be remembered that provoking and prolonging proxy war with Russia in Ukraine - not necessarily “winning” it - was/is a stated US geopolitical objective.

In the 2019 RAND Corporation paper, “Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground,” a wide variety of “measures” were proposed - all of them meant to be implemented in concert to create pressure on Russia both within its borders and along them - hoping eventually to precipitate a Soviet Union-style collapse.

Among these measures was “providing lethal aid to Ukraine.”

Under “benefits,” the RAND paper noted that:

“Expanding U.S. assistance to Ukraine, including lethal military assistance, would likely increase the costs to Russia, in both blood and treasure, of holding the Donbass region. More Russian aid to the separatists and an additional Russian troop presence would likely be required, leading to larger expenditures, equipment losses, and Russian casualties. The latter could become quite controversial at home, as it did when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.”

Under “risks,” the paper admitted that triggering a war with Russia in Ukraine might lead to, “disproportionately large Ukrainian casualties, territorial losses, and refugee flows,” and “might even lead Ukraine into a disadvantageous peace.”

In other words, the arming of Ukraine by the US would not only knowingly provoke a war with Russia, it would likely end in Ukraine’s destruction and defeat.

However, in the process, tremendous costs would be exacted from Russia, pressure placed on it militarily, economically, and politically - and contribute to a broader campaign of encirclement, containment, and overextension toward what the US hopes eventually results in Russia’s collapse.

Other measures mentioned in the paper revolve around Russia’s energy production and exports. The paper lists such measures as, “hinder petroleum exports” and “reduce natural gas exports and hinder pipeline expansions.”

Even before the paper was published, and of course, ever since - the US has actively implemented all of these “measures.” This includes placing a growing number of sanctions on Russia and coercing US proxies to follow suit. The US has also outright attacked pipelines including the Nord Stream pipelines as well as others as part of attacks attributed to “Ukraine.”

At one point in the RAND Corporation paper proposes undermining Russian energy exports to Europe by ramping up US LNG exports to Europe as an alternative. The paper laments that, “reducing European peacetime consumption of Russian gas has a medium to low likelihood of success.”

Of course, the solution the US employed was to take “peacetime” and turn it into perpetual wartime.

The continued implementation of this long-standing US policy of belligerence toward Russia has spanned every US presidential administration throughout the 21st century including both the previous and current Trump administrations.

The purpose of the proxy war is to “extend Russia” by constantly increasing the cost of the war in Ukraine the US itself deliberately provoked by “providing lethal aid to Ukraine,” while also permanently disrupting peacetime and the flow of Russian energy to Europe peacetime had enabled.

A Division of Labor: Europe Working For, Not Against Washington

It should be noted that the February 2025 US directive delivered to Europe by US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth demanding Europe “double down” on its support and involvement in America’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine continues to be implemented faithfully and enthusiastically by Washington’s European proxies.

This includes a recent proposal by NATO’s secretary general that member states “commit 0.25 percent of their GDP to Kyiv” as reported by Politico, in addition to the increase of NATO spending from 2% of each member state’s GDP to 5% already demanded by the US and now being implemented.

As long as these US objectives continue to be advanced by the US proxy war in Ukraine against Russia - the war will continue - whether the US says so openly or hides behind its disguise as “neutral mediator” for the war it itself provoked while portraying Europe and even Ukraine itself as “obstructions” to a supposed US-mediated “peace.”

For Russia’s part - Moscow must certainly understand this, yet goes along with the US narrative likely for one practical reason - to allow the US an exit ramp if and when Russia resolves the war in Ukraine on the battlefield.

Unfortunately, the US is not running short on proxies - even if the war appears to be drawing to an end in terms of grinding Ukraine down through attrition, the US is willing, capable, and actively preparing to feed the rest of Europe into the proxy war next - meaning Russia will then have to repeat the entire process again - but against a much more dangerous combined European force including member states armed with nuclear weapons.

Thus, until the very source of the conflict is addressed - Washington’s pursuit of global primacy and its use of war, proxy war, and a wide variety of other multi-domain strategies to do so - the US will find ways of perpetuating its “extending Russia” policy which - in turn - is one part of a much greater strategy aimed ultimately at containing the rise of China and asserting US hegemony worldwide.

Russia is not simply fighting back against this US proxy war in Ukraine. Russia is faced with a US campaign of encirclement targeting Russia all along its peripheries far beyond just Ukraine.

Russian victory in Ukraine alone will not be enough to defend Russia from US encroachment and aggression. Russia is thus contributing toward a global effort to displace US primacy with multipolar alternatives precisely to undermine the very source of Wall Street and Washington’s menace to the entire world, not just Russia alone.

Only time will tell the final outcome of not only the proxy war taking place within Ukraine - but the much wider global struggle between the multipolar world’s attempts to build faster than US-led unipolarism can destroy.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.

Afghanistan: America’s Other Ongoing Proxy War

2026-06-23T22:31:29.409-07:00

May 11, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - A recent article published by the US arms-industry, big-tech, banking, and other Western special interests-funded Lowy Institute’s “Interpreter,” boldly claims “Afghanistan is surrendering its mineral wealth - and its future.”

China is accused of simply digging up and removing raw minerals from Afghanistan for processing elsewhere - a process the article claims amounts to China robbying Afghanistan of its natural resources and deliberately leaving it in a state of perpetual destitution.

What the article deliberately omits is the presence of armed extremists attacking Chinese investments, diplomatic missions, and personnel across the country, making it physically impossible for China to invest in and enable Afghanistan - for the time being - to process this raw mineral wealth domestically and export higher-value industrial inputs for greater profits.

China’s attempts to work with Afghanistan - providing it immediate and desperately needed income to rebuild the nation comes after 20 years of US military occupation and abuses - coupled together with the US seizure of over 9.5 billion USD in Afghan assets from 2021 onward and the use of US-backed extremists to sabotage any attempt to stabilize, rebuild, and perhaps even develop the Central Asian country.

The US, having created the death, destruction, and poverty Afghans currently suffer under, through its propaganda organs are attempting to shift the blame onto nations like China attempting to work with Afghanistan despite the challenges deliberately created by the US to do so in the first place.

Washington’s Long History of using Extremists to Destabilize Others

While the US wages high profile wars and proxy wars around the globe - from attacking Venezuela in Latin America, to attacking Russian energy production, storage, and export facilities and attributing it to “Ukraine” in Europe, and its ongoing war of aggression against Iran in the Middle East - the US is also waging a number of dirty wars everywhere in between.

This includes across the Central Asian state of Afghanistan - wrecked by decades of US provoked war - both its proxy war against the Soviet Union in the 1980s and its invasion and occupation of Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021.

Despite officially leaving Afghanistan - analysts at the time warned about stay-behind networks of terrorists the US had and would continue to arm and back - preventing Afghanistan from achieving any sort of socio-political or economic stability and spoil attempts by Afghanistan’s neighbors to work with and help stand up a functioning nation-state and economy capable of providing for its people at home and trading with partners abroad.

This includes especially China.

To achieve this destabilization, the US has utilized its decades-spanning policy of arming and backing extremists through a global network of intermediaries and using them as an expeditionary force where ordinary US forces cannot afford to go politically or are incapable of doing so militarily.

The US famously used such extremists as part of its 1980s proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan specifically.

In 2007, Seymour Hersh in his article “The Redirection,” would warn:

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

Following the admittedly US-engineered “Arab Spring” in 2011, the US began mobilizing precisely these prepared networks of extremists to provoke proxy war, then US-led war against nations including Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq.

From 2011 onward, as these conflicts began destroying the entire Arab World - US-based publications like the New York Times and Washington Post admitted the US was spending billions of dollars arming and training what were called at the time “moderate rebels.”

However, by 2014, it was abundantly clear no such “moderate rebels” existed. The US media began spinning narratives of extremists having somehow “routed” the US-backed moderate rebels, and that is how the vast majority of their arms, vehicles, and equipment ended up in the hands of US-listed terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda affiliates Jahbat Al-Nusra aka Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS).

In reality, there were never any “moderate rebels” to begin with. As Seymour Hersh reported as early as 2007 - the US plan was always to use extremists to reorder the Arab World ahead of a wider war on Iran (and eventually China).

Having successfully overthrown the governments of Libya, Yemen, and Syria from 2011-2024 the US is still employing these extremist organizations around the globe.

The US officially delisted HTS as a US-designated foreign terrorist organization and now recognizes its figurehead, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani (now referred to as Ahmed al-Sharaa) as de facto president of Syria.

Other terrorist organizations are still used by the US for this method of plausible deniability including ISIS, which in turn has given rise to a number of subsidiaries specialized for advancing US geopolitical interests beyond the Middle East including Islamic State, Khorasan Province or ISIS-K.

It is precisely ISIS-K the US is using to attack and undermine the stability of Afghanistan - targeting both government officials, buildings, and infrastructure, as well as the personnel, diplomatic missions, and investments of friendly neighboring nations like China which shares a small length of border (92km) with Afghanistan in its western Xinjiang region.

Only One of Many Dirty Wars the US is Waging Like This…

The location of Afghanistan has been central to first British imperial ambitions and subsequently US ambitions. Bordering Iran, Pakistan, and China while located in Russia’s near-abroad - maintaining Afghanistan as a destabilized, dysfunctional hotbed of extremists capable of exporting terrorism and instability across Eurasia has been central to America’s decades-spanning pursuit of primacy over Eurasia.

Not only can the US block any sort of positive development between China and Afghanistan, undermine regional security creating perpetual threats to both nations - the US can use this exported violence to target and undermine neighboring Pakistan and its joint projects with China. This includes China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

CPEC has become a regular target of US-backed terrorism - attempting to disrupt its construction by targeting and killing Chinese engineers, undermine the political and economic stability of the projects themselves by attacking and killing local Pakistani security forces, as well as attacking high-level Chinese diplomats as was the case in the 2021 attempted assassination of China’s ambassador to Pakistan in Quetta.

Further beyond Central and South Asia the US has reused this same process - albeit with an entirely different brand of extremists - most notably in the Southeast Asian country of Myanmar. Here, the US has used militants and US-backed opposition parties to contest the power of Myanmar’s central government and military. Amid years of fighting US-backed militants have specifically targeted Chinese investments across the country as well as the Myanmar-China pipeline built specifically to enable China to bypass any potential US maritime blockade imposed on the Strait of Malacca - China’s most essential maritime artery for importing energy and exporting goods.

US policy papers have specifically discussed not only closing the Strait of Malacca to strangle China economically, but to militarily attack the Myanmar-China Pipeline to prevent China from bypassing the US blockade.

In the 2018 US Naval War College Review paper titled, “A Maritime Oil Blockade of China,” the paper suggests:

“A distant blockade also would need to interdict the Myanmar–China oil pipeline, which eventually could move as much as 440 kbd of crude oil from Kyaukpyu in coastal Myanmar to Yunnan Province in southwest China. Preventing tankers from offloading at the Kyaukpyu terminal would require few, if any, naval platforms to remain onsite. The area could be declared an exclusion zone for the duration of a conflict, and if the Myanmar authorities failed to comply, the facility could be disabled via air strikes, aerial mining, or other kinetic action. In short, US forces likely would be able to neutralize rapidly China’s overland routes for seaborne oil imports to avoid the Strait of Malacca and other choke points farther east and prevent them from diverting forces needed to seal other maritime ingress routes.”

It is clear the US has decided to use the same sort of armed proxies it has already reordered the Arab World with to launch attacks on Chinese BRI projects without necessitating direct US military action - thus advancing its geopolitical objectives and maintaining plausible deniability at the same time.

The emerging pattern is a series of US-engineered dirty wars launched all along China’s peripheries specifically to damage the flow of overland energy, raw materials, and finished exports at the same time the US is now openly imposing an expanding maritime blockade on China’s Russian and Iranian allies which in turn directly targets and blockades China itself - considering both nations count Beijing as their closest and most important economic and trade partner.

Upon understanding this reality, then re-reading “Interpreter’s” article about Afghanistan “surrendering” its future to “China,” it becomes clear just how deliberately sanctimonious not only this specific article is - but the entire Western foreign policy establishment it represents - one that has created these conditions in Afghanistan to begin with and are now exploiting their own successful campaign to block Afghanistan’s reconstruction through the use of terrorist organizations to blame the few nations taking the risk in an attempt to undo these decades of damage.

Unfortunately, most reading headlines like “Interpreter’s” will not question accusations against China - even among those critical of Western foreign policy - because of deeply ingrained biases against China and Asia in general.

Ultimately - if the true nature of the problem remains obfuscated by Western propaganda - or shifted entirely onto other nations - in this case China - it will become difficult if not impossible to solve the problem in the first place.

Nations like Afghanistan have little means to reach international audiences with the truth because of the US’ control over global information space - and China’s ability to aid Afghanistan will continue to be “rewritten” through that same controlled information space as “exploitation.”

If individual people are ultimately the most basic building block of human civilization and the direction it takes, then control over the information they see and believe is the most basic and fundamental means of controlling the direction of human civilization. Deep investments in military and economic development by nations like China while ignoring US information dominance allows the US to continue defining reality in the minds of people no matter how divergent it is from actual reality.

At some point in the future this disconnect may create a cataclysmic collapse in US power and influence worldwide - but for the time being it continues to be among its most effective and powerful “super weapons.”

For Afghanistan - and because of the US’ ability to determine what is an issue of focus and which is forgotten entirely - Washington’s continued campaign of impeding its recovery toward peace and prosperity will not only continue - but will continue in almost complete darkness.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.

America’s Future: A Prosperous, Peaceful Nation, or a Bankrupt, Violent Empire?

2026-05-23T04:39:54.269-07:00

May 7, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - The US is at a juncture faced with two choices. It can either manage a transition from global hegemon to a prosperous, peaceful nation working together as equals with all other nations, or it can double down on its continuation as a bankrupt, violent empire seeking continued control over all other nations.

To answer the question as to which path the US will take requires understanding the structural features that underpin US hegemony in the first place.

A System Built on Domination

The current US system is predicated on global domination.

The US dollar as the global reserve currency is what has allowed the US to accumulate a multi-trillion dollar debt and still maintain immense power and wealth not only within its borders but far beyond them.

This resulting hegemony allows the US to set “global norms” regarding global trade, human rights, and the development of and control over key technologies - especially in terms of exercising immense hypocrisy and selective enforcement while doing so.

It has also allowed the US to create a network of what it calls "security guarantees” in which US military forces occupy nations around the globe, from Europe and the Middle East, to Southeast and East Asia - predicated in principle on ensuring the security of these “allies,” but in practice simply serving as cover for what the US calls “power projection” - the ability of the US to exercise military aggression virtually anywhere on Earth at a moment’s notice.

Often this US “power projection” comes at the cost of the security of nations hosting US troops.

The threat or use of US military aggression around the globe is essential for maintaining the US dollar as the global reserve currency and thus American hegemony overall.

US military aggression serves to degrade or eliminate potential rivals and the alternative financial and monetary systems they inevitably seek to create to work their way out from under subordination to Wall Street and Washington.

This has been US policy spanning decades - including from the end of the Cold War to today.

The growing power of alternative systems across what many call the emerging multipolar world has forced the US to embark on not only unprecedented wars of aggression around the globe including wars and proxy wars against Venezuela, Russia, Yemen, Lebanon, and Iran, but also unprecedented military spending with the current US military budget hovering around 1.5 trillion US dollars and growing.

While at face value this appears to be unsustainable and irrational - there are several reasons why the US refuses to adopt a more rational course of policy.

The US military industrial base is composed of immensely wealthy and influential corporations. The US dominance stemming from the military aggression worldwide they enable, helps establish and expand monopolies across other US industries including big-oil, big-agriculture, the auto industry, big-pharmaceutical corporations, big-tech and many more.

These industries together serve as the foundation of US economic, military, political, and informational power. Each corporation’s trajectory is guided by shareholder primacy - meaning each and every one of these corporations are required by law to constantly expand profit for its shareholders.

Because perpetual growth is both irrational and unsustainable in a finite world, with a finite population, and finite resources - this creates structural necessities to constantly expand markets and growth at any cost - including through war, exploitation, predatory lending, and many more toxic practices.

While this economic system drives the pursuit of US primacy around the globe, ideology serves as structural reinforcement - this includes the notion of “American exceptionalism” which insists the US is not only inherently superior to all other nations, but that it has a moral and even “divine” duty to assume global hegemony.

Not only is perpetual growth within a finite system irrational and unsustainable - there are other external reasons the US pursuit of hegemony is dangerously unrealistic.

China’s rise is driven by several core realities the US cannot readily change including the fact that China has a population over 4 times greater than the US thus a vastly larger workforce, a vastly larger industrial base, better infrastructure, deeper and better developed supply chains, a better education system producing millions more graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and growing military power - both conventional and nuclear - that make the application of US military aggression less and less likely to succeed in coercing or containing China.

“What if…”

What if the US were to decide to abandon this irrational and unsustainable pursuit of global hegemony?

Analysts imagine the US could achieve this by retreating to the Western Hemisphere, reshoring industrial capacity, auditing and cutting the US “defense” budget, shifting from global “power projection” to investing in domestic infrastructure, and rebuilding the strength of the US dollar on productivity rather than global military aggression.

The US State Department would have to recognize the reality of a multipolar world and find a rational, proportional place within it - abandoning its “rules-based order” in which the US and the US alone makes the “rules” and gives the “orders,” and instead adopt a non-interference policy both within the Western Hemisphere itself - and all around the rest of the globe.

The US would also have to finally adhere to actual international law - which would end the era of US-led unilateral sanctions and military interventions worldwide.

At home - the US would have to transition from rent-seeking economic practices to actual, physical, industrial production and invest in both universal healthcare and affordable, quality education to rebuild the workforce required to do all of the above.

Many analysts before the 2024 US presidential elections assumed the rhetoric from the Trump campaign aligned with this desire to transition from global hegemon to regional power in the Western Hemisphere, to reinvest in US industry and infrastructure, and that a “grand bargain” was imminent with Russia or China, or even both.

However, before the 2024 US presidential elections and now clearly since the elections, the US had already committed to doubling down on domination.

The US desire to “reindustrialize” was spurred not as a fundamental economic transition, but a geopolitical necessity to build the arms and ammunition required to fight increasingly powerful nations like China, Russia, but also Iran, and many other nations increasingly tilting toward the multipolar worldview.

Even within the pages of the 2025 US National Security Strategy - that many of these same analysts cited as evidence of America’s desire to retreat to the Western Hemisphere and seek a “grand bargain” with nations like Russia and China - the US laid out continued ambitions to deter the rise of rival powers anywhere on Earth.

At one point the 2025 NSS stated:

"…the U.S. will organize a burden-sharing network, with our government as convener and supporter. This approach ensures that burdens are shared and that all such efforts benefit from broader legitimacy. The model will be targeted partnerships that use economic tools to align incentives, share burdens with like-minded allies, and insist on reforms that anchor long-term stability. This strategic clarity will allow the U.S. to counter hostile and subversive influences efficiently while avoiding the overextension and diffuse focus that undermined past efforts."

In other words - the US is simply recognizing the rising costs of global primacy and outsourcing them to its various proxies - from Europe to the Asia-Pacific - allowing the US to continue confronting the potential rise of alternative centers of power at the expense of the nations in these regions the US has already politically captured.

Examples of this include not only Ukraine but increasingly the rest of Europe vis-a-vis Russia, the Persian Gulf Arab states and Israel in the Middle East vis-a-vis Iran, and Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and the island province of Taiwan in the Asia-Pacific region.

Rather than retreat to the Western Hemisphere and seeking a “grand bargain” with either Russia or China - and rather than building a functional peacetime economy - the US has simply doubled down on military industrial production at home as well as “friend-shoring” it to US proxy nations, and has adopted an all-or-nothing mindset that is clearly targeting and destabilizing the global economy for proxies and rivals alike.

Thus, instead of ending wars as some analysts predicted - the US has escalated each and every war it was in or sponsoring before the 2024 US presidential elections, and it has started several new wars - including the incredibly dangerous and disruptive US war of aggression against Iran in the Middle East.

The Potential Costs of “All-Or-Nothing” Thinking

In the minds of American policy makers and the special interests driving their decisions, ruling over the ashes is preferable to the inevitable collapse of the current US system because of its precarious dependency on the global reserve status of the US dollar and the rent-seeking nature of its economy versus the rapid rise of alternative economic systems built on purpose and production.

Because of this, the US is rapidly approaching overextension abroad and accelerated decay at home.

The US hypothetically seeking a constructive role among nations rather than seeking dominance over them is for a nation that wants to be stable. The current US strategy is driven by a desire to be supreme. Historically, when a great power chooses supremacy over stability, the transition to a new international order usually happens through a major crisis - like a world war - rather than a “grand bargain.”

Looking at the US proxy war in Ukraine escalating through the US itself expanding drone strikes on Russian energy production, storage, and export facilities, the US targeting of tankers carrying Russian energy exports, the US war of aggression against Iran and its subsequent blockading of the Strait of Hormuz, and the US’ continued military build-up in Asia-Pacific off of China’s shores and even within its internationally recognized borders (Taiwan) - we see that exact major crisis taking shape right now.

The gap between a rational, sustainable, and constructive plan for peace and the actual momentum of US policy is separated by structural entrenchment. Once a nation builds its entire economy, currency, and identity around being a hegemon, the cost of transitioning away to a more sustainable and rational path becomes an existential threat to the people and interests in power.

Anyone regularly listening to US Senate and House hearings can witness for themselves the sense of existential threat and fear of losing complete dominance over the planet that commands the thoughts and decisions of not only US senators, house representatives, and the White House itself - but the special corporate-financier interests - the arms industry, big-oil, big-ag, big-tech, big-pharma, and many others who placed them into office and work through them to advance US foreign and domestic policy on their behalf.

For politicians - these fears stem from the many structural reinforcements used to regiment America’s political class and to a certain extent - many in the American public - like American exceptionalism, racism, xenophobia, and supremacy.

For the corporate-financier interests - these fears stem from the painful transition from rent-seeking to actual production - the narrower but more sustainable margins that result from doing so - and the fact that no matter how successful that transition is - China because of its fundamental advantages - from a larger population, a larger industrial base, a larger and better education system - will inevitably emerge stronger and more influential than the US.

Because of that - should such a transition take place - these US corporate-financier interests will never have the opportunity to use force - be it military, economic, or political - to take from others whatever it wants, wherever it wants, and at whatever cost it chooses - ever again.

However, if this is what drives the existence of the current US system - and transitioning away from it constitutes an “existential threat” - it is a system that shouldn’t exist in the first place.

It is a system the American people - and the rest of the multipolar world - should work together to expose, divest from, and displace with purpose-driven economic activity under the primacy of national sovereignty within actual international law.

The United States has the possibility of transitioning to a stable, prosperous, powerful member of the multipolar world - but first it must cut its addiction to global hegemony. To beat any addiction - one must first admit there is an addiction to begin with. Only time will tell whether or not the US can see this for themselves, or if the multipolar world can create the global conditions that make perpetual US control over the world impossible and leave it with only one option - transitioning to a more sustainable and constructive role within the world.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.

The US War for Energy Dominance Leads to Dominance Over Europe and Asia

2026-05-23T04:15:14.142-07:00

May 3, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - The US war on Iran - at face value - appears to be a catastrophic tactical and strategic US failure demonstrating the limits of its military power and further exposing the limits of its military industrial capacity.

However, just as with its still-ongoing proxy war on Russia in Ukraine, its inability to overwhelm targeted nations with outright military power distracts away from the many ways the US is still advancing its geopolitical objectives by other means.

In Ukraine, the US has categorically failed in defeating Russian forces through its support of its Ukrainian proxies. However, it has used the war to lock Russia into an expensive, prolonged, high-intensity conflict that has demonstrably compromised Russian interests beyond Europe - especially regarding the 2024 collapse of Syria.

The war has also succeeded in cutting Europe off from cheap, reliable, and plentiful Russian energy and is placing Europe under increasing, and likely irreversible energy dependence on the United States.

This energy dependence on the US obviously benefits US-based energy corporations financially but also enhances Washington’s strategic leverage or even outright control over Europe. This control is being used to successfully create a united front across Europe against Russia.

In a similar manner - the US is using its war on Iran to strangle energy exports from the entire Middle East to Asia to decouple Asia from cheap, reliable, plentiful gas and oil and place it under US energy dependence, thus providing the US strategic leverage over Asia to create a similar united front against China.

Decoupling Europe from Russian Energy Through War Was Planned

In the 2019 RAND Corporation paper titled, “Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground,” a number of “economic” and “geopolitical” measures were laid out, designed to “extend” Russia and possibly precipitate a Soviet Union-style collapse like that which ended the Cold War.

Under “economic measures,” the paper lists “hinder petroleum exports,” “reduce natural gas exports and hinder pipeline expansions,” “impose sanctions,” and “enhance Russian brain drain.”

The paper first argues that one of the main methods of implementing these measures is to expand US oil and gas production and its export to Europe.

However, under a section titled, “likelihood of success," the paper explicitly admits:

“Reducing European peacetime consumption of Russian gas has a medium to low likelihood of success. Diversifying away from Russia is expensive, and projects might be difficult to accomplish.”

It should be remembered that at the time, the US was already investing in LNG export facilities and even exporting LNG targeting markets in Europe - at a time US policymakers admitted it made no financial or economic sense to do so.

However, the paper was far from finished. Under “geopolitical measures,” the paper lists first and foremost, “provide lethal aid to Ukraine.”

The paper admits that:

In other words, by providing lethal aid to Ukraine - which the US began doing under the first Trump administration - the US would be knowingly attempting to provoke a war with Russia in Ukraine.

Not only would the resulting war generate high costs for Russia militarily, it would also obviously transform the chief obstacle to reducing/hindering Russian oil/gas exports and expanding US LNG exports - that chief obstacle being “peacetime” - into unending wartime.

Indeed, while sanctions began targeting Russia’s economy from 2014 onward, the war in Ukraine provoked by the US through its policy of militarily building up Ukraine on Russia’s borders resulted in the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines and ever-tightening sanctions on Russian energy exports that have made otherwise irrational US LNG imports to Europe essential.

To further tip the balance of energy dominance in America’s favor, it was revealed by the New York Times in late 2025 that it was the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the US military supercharging “a Ukrainian campaign of drone strikes on Russian oil facilities and tankers.“

The US-provoked war provided the perfect means to decouple Europe from otherwise cheap, reliable, and plentiful Russian energy exports that had flowed during peace. While the process of decoupling has taken years and is still in the process of being fully implemented - it has proven successful - so much so - it is almost inconceivable US interests haven’t considered repeating that success regarding the Middle East and Asia.

Strangling China

US foreign policy papers spanning decades have discussed options, proposed policies, and guided actual weapons and force organizational programs seeking to strangle China economically through blockades - often specifically in the Asia-Pacific region but also at maritime chokepoints and ports around the globe.

A 2018 Naval War College Review paper titled, “A Maritime Oil Blockade Against China – Tactically Tempting but Strategically Flawed” would list the obstacles facing such a policy and various means to overcome them.

It focused on not only cutting off maritime shipping to China at chokepoints such as the Malacca Strait in what it called a “distant blockade” (a blockade imposed beyond the reach of most of China’s military capabilities), it also discussed severing China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects built specifically to enable China to circumvent these chokepoints.

At one point in the paper it discusses the Myanmar-China oil pipeline which allows China to offload Middle East energy at port facilities on Myanmar’s coast, and pipe the energy across Myanmar directly into China’s southern Yunnan Province.

The paper suggests:

“A distant blockade also would need to interdict the Myanmar–China oil pipeline, which eventually could move as much as 440 kbd of crude oil from Kyaukpyu in coastal Myanmar to Yunnan Province in southwest China. Preventing tankers from offloading at the Kyaukpyu terminal would require few, if any, naval platforms to remain onsite. The area could be declared an exclusion zone for the duration of a conflict, and if the Myanmar authorities failed to comply the facility could be disabled via air strikes, aerial mining, or other kinetic action. In short, US forces likely would be able to neutralize rapidly China’s overland routes for seaborne oil imports to avoid the Strait of Malacca and other choke points farther east and prevent them from diverting forces needed to seal other maritime ingress routes.”

Far from just theoretical proposals, the US has been backing armed militants in Myanmar for years fighting against the central government. These militants have repeatedly attacked the Myanmar-China oil pipeline and have in recent instances attempted to seize territory through which the pipeline crosses.

In other words, rather than waiting for a US-China conflict to erupt before attacking the pipeline with US military assets, the US has instead used armed proxies to attack it before any direct US-China conflict even begins. Such attacks serve as evidence that the US hasn’t just considered the notion of a “distant blockade” on China - but has already decided to incrementally impose them.

The US has backed armed militants disrupting similar pipelines and economic corridors in Pakistan while the US itself continues growing its military footprint in the Asia-Pacific region to threaten maritime shipping near both Taiwan and in the South China Sea.

However, the notion of a “distant blockade” isn’t restricted to just the Asia-Pacific region. The US war on Iran has created a de facto blockade much further from China still - in the Middle East.

The war has not only impeded maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz through both Iranian and US-imposed restrictions, but US attacks on Iranian energy production facilities have resulted in retaliatory strikes on the energy production facilities of Persian Gulf Arab states hosting US troops.

The reduced energy production across the entire region, coupled with disrupted maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has resulted in an energy crisis for nations dependent on the Middle East for their energy imports - especially Asia and including China.

Decoupling Asia from the Middle East

Asian states like Pakistan, Myanmar, Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, Japan, and South Korea get anywhere between 50% to 90% of their total imported energy from the Middle East, according to Western publications like Politico.

China receives up to 50% of its imported energy from the Middle East. Its island province of Taiwan gets over 60% of its imported energy from the Middle East.

With production and exports disrupted by yet another US-provoked war, Asian states instead of Europe - have now been forced to look elsewhere to meet their energy needs.

And just as the US had done regarding its premeditated decoupling of Europe from Russian energy imports, the US has spent years proposing, investing in, constructing, and even bringing online LNG export facilities specifically targeting markets in Asia. With this capacity already partially online - it is in place just in time to take full advantage of the energy crisis the US itself created in the Middle East now threatening nations across Asia.

Nations like Vietnam - for example - have been left with two choices - either leave tens of millions of its people without energy including essential commodities like cooking gas - or buy the only alternative available to make up for disrupted imports from the Middle East.

Vietnam’s state-owned gas major has reportedly purchased up to 66,000 tons of LPG (liquefied petroleum gas) from the US vs 44,000 tons from the Middle East. It should be noted that this is the first year it has ever purchased US energy.

Vietnam of course has close ties with Moscow and purchases part of its energy mix from Russia and also imports coal from China, but neither has sufficient capacity to immediately make up for the over 80% of Middle East energy imports Vietnam depended on that are now disrupted.

Other nations, including Thailand, Japan, and South Korea, as well as the island province of Taiwan, have all likewise been forced to seek alternatives. While in some cases Russia has been approached and able to make up for some shortfalls, the US has deliberately positioned itself as the only other alternative.

It should be mentioned that the LNG export projects the US invested in over recent years to target Asian markets struggled to propose a viable business model during their early proposal and approval stages - just as LNG export projects targeting European markets had until the US proxy war on Russia began. .

One project - Alaska LNG by Glenfarne - made “energy security” and routes through “uncontested and safe shipping lanes,” a primary selling point as recently as 2025. However - at the time - there were no contested or unsafe shipping lanes impeding the flow of energy exports to Asia to justify this selling point.

The only shipping lanes that might ever be contested or made unsafe, would be the various straits the US has discussed and prepared to contest and make unsafe for decades - not just in the Asia-Pacific region but also the Strait of Hormuz in the Middle East and beyond.

Of course - now with the US war on Iran disrupting energy exports from the Middle East - projects like Alaska LNG have gone from poor business proposals to a desperately needed and perfectly positioned source of energy - all of it - just like with US LNG exports to Europe - by design.

A recent Wall Street Journal article titled, “U.S. Energy Exports Hit Records as World Adjusts to a Closed Persian Gulf,” would note that, “oil, gas shipments have soared but U.S. will face obstacles turning wartime demand into a permanent boost.”

The false assumption made is that the US war on Iran is not connected to US oil and gas shipments soaring or to “wartime demand” - and that this is just somehow a profitable coincidence.

But just as the RAND Corporation made clear back in 2019 - any policy proposal like decoupling Europe from Russian energy that doesn’t work during “peacetime,” can be made to work by simply taking “peacetime” and transforming it into “wartime.”

That is what the US did to Europe - it is now clearly repeating this process targeting Asia.

It will be up to Russia, China, Iran, and the rest of the independent world - including nations across Asia and in particular South and Southeast Asia, to carefully navigate this dangerous trap that has been sprung by the US and avoid complete energy dependence on the US as has been imposed upon Europe.

Europe has already suffered what is likely irreversible political and economic damage from its political capture by the US and now its growing energy dependence on the US.

Asia risks being likewise weakened by growing energy dependence on the US, making political capture much more likely by the US, then being transformed into a united front - this time against China rather than Russia - and used to wage war on the US’ behalf at the expense of the people, peace, and prosperity of Asia.

While the US does indeed face growing challenges in terms of its military power and its military industrial base, it is pursuing full-spectrum dominance using multi-domain warfare - spanning not just military force, but economic and financial force, operating not only in the physical space of the battlefield most people associate warfare with, but in political space, and most importantly information space.

The US has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to side-step its growing military weakness relative to the rest of the world and leverage its political capture of nations around the globe, its monopoly over global information space, and now its growing weaponization of energy.

The US is weaponizing energy both through the production and export of energy from the US - and by carrying out a systematic attack on, and seizure or destruction of alternative energy sources - Venezuela, Russia, and Iran among others.

Only time will tell if the multipolar world can adequately organize itself not just in the domain of military power, but also all other domains the US is waging war against them in.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.

Why the US is at War with Iran and Why the War Might Pause but Won’t End

2026-05-09T23:15:00.000-07:00

April 28, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - While much discussion of the US war of aggression against Iran has focused on regional-specific factors including the myth the US is fighting Iran on “behalf of Israel,” there are far more realistic and important global factors that have led to the war and will unfold because of it.

The war on Iran is part of a decades-spanning US project to assume complete control over the Middle East and the oil and gas that is produced and exported from the region. This is not as a means of taking the energy for the United States’ own use, but to establish and enhance a US monopoly over energy production and exports from the US itself and from the nations and regions the US is assuming control over.

This includes most recently Venezuela in Latin America. The early 2026 US war of aggression against the Venezuelan state, kidnapping of the Venezuelan president, and the taking hostage of the remaining Venezuelan government led to the almost immediate cutting of Venezuelan oil exports to China and the distribution of Venezuelan oil wealth to US corporations.

A similar war of aggression by the US against Russia through Ukraine is also quickly expanding into a war directly against Russian energy production, storage, and export infrastructure through the use of drones that - while attributed to Ukraine - the New York Times has revealed is actually overseen by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the US military.

Likewise the US is encouraging its European proxies under a “division of labor” to expand maritime tracking, interdiction, and seizure of tankers carrying Russian energy exports, as well as a US campaign using maritime drones to attack the tankers. Again, the NYT has identified the US CIA and US military as having "supercharged" what are nominally claimed to be “Ukrainian” operations.

Together with the war on Iran, a clear, global pattern emerges of what is the deliberate US disruption, destruction, and even shutting down of energy exports to Asia in general, but to China specifically.

While the US was likely also attempting to quickly topple the Iranian government to enhance its control over the region and further isolate both Russia and China, a much wider and more global-focused objective was to cut off energy not just from Iran to Asia and specifically China, but from the entire Middle East to Asia and China.

The most recent phase of US aggression against Iran - beginning in late February and as a continuation of violence launched against Iran in both 2025 under the Trump administration and even 2024 at the end of the Biden administration - involved targeting Iranian energy production as well as strikes on Kharg Island - Iran’s key energy export facility.

US strikes on Iranian energy production led to retaliatory strikes by Iran on America's Pesian Gulf Arab state proxies including Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia.

Collectively, this violence led to reduced production across the entire region subsequently leading to lower energy exports of gas and oil from the entire Middle East to China when compared with pre-war levels.

From the late-February start of hostilities to the recent ceasefire agreement, energy exports from the entire region to China dropped from approximately 52% of China's total imported needs to around 30%, according to Reuters.

A March 2026 Politico article makes it clear that beyond just China’s dependence on the region for energy, Asia as a whole depends on energy imports from the Middle East for between 70% to 90%+ of their total energy import needs - especially US proxies like Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and the island province of Taiwan.

Isolating China, Controlling Asia

Just as the US had previously done to Europe through its instigation of war with Russia in Ukraine, the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, and the implementation of sanctions on all other energy imports from Russia - and now including the striking of Russian energy production, storage, export facilities and actual tankers carrying Russian energy exports - all of this forcing Europe into energy dependence on US exports - the US is now pursuing a similar policy targeting China and the rest of Asia by deliberately disrupting access to Middle East energy exports.

The war on Iran has led to the close regulation of maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz by Iran, followed by a US-imposed blockade primarily targeting ships exporting energy from Iran to China. While US claims of completely controlling maritime traffic to and from Iran is false, the US blockade has turned back or seized at least half of all maritime traffic attempting to leave Iran onward mainly to China, the Financial Times reported.

This means that the total energy exports from the region to China has dropped yet again - with many other options held by the US in reserve to decrease regional exports to Asia and specifically China even further.

One option is the threat of resumed US military aggression against Iran which could see both the deliberate targeting and wider destruction of Iranian energy production and export infrastructure and further Iranian retaliatory strikes on energy production across the US’ Persian Gulf Arab proxies.

The emerging consequences of the US war on Iran and the regional impact it is having is analogous to the US-destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines and the incremental targeting, sanctioning, and restriction of Russian energy flows to Europe leaving only US energy exports as an option - an option that was not economically viable until the US eliminated existing, cheaper, and reliable alternatives.

With the US war open-ended - having continued from late 2024 to today - with only months of relative calm between US campaigns of military aggression - the prospects of accessing affordable and reliable energy from the Middle East for China and the rest of Asia are steadily fading.

“Serendipitously,” the US has already begun the expansion of an already massive energy production and export industry targeting Asia specifically.

In 2025, US-based energy corporation Glenfarne and its CEO Brendan Duval repeatedly mentioned the fact that their new LNG project under construction in Alaska could export energy to Asia “through uncontested and safe shipping lanes.”

No mention was made at the time that it would be the US itself contesting shipping lanes and making them unsafe and thus enhancing the viability of both Glenfarne’s Alaska LNG project as well as the expansion of US energy export capacity in general.

It should be noted that Glenfarne had honed its expertise in exporting/importing LNG through a project in Columbia made possible only by the US sanctioning of neighboring Venezuela and the closure of pipelines that would have otherwise supplied Columbia with gas. Only because of the US-imposed pipeline closure in Venezuela did the importing of Texas LNG to Columbia by Glenfarne make any economic sense.

Similarly, only through US threats of conflict and actual conflict endangering vital maritime chokepoints around the globe does the exporting of LNG to Asia and beyond make any economic sense - just like exporting US LNG to Europe only made sense after Nord Stream was destroyed and sanctions placed on much cheaper and more readily available Russian energy.

The Cart Before the Horse, But for a Reason

By the early 2030s, the US is expected to double its LNG export capacity making it capable of meeting the demands of key Asian proxies including South Korea and Japan as well as the island province of Taiwan - but again - only if cheaper and more reliable alternatives remain off the market.

This means that while the US is essentially placing the cart before the horse, it is ensuring that when the horse finally arrives, conditions are ideal for the US and the US alone to benefit.

Just like with Europe and the elimination of their access to cheap Russian energy imports - complete energy dependence on the US of America’s Asian proxies will transform them further and fully into extensions of US geopolitical ambitions in the region and around the globe.

Just like with Europe - serving US interests will come at the cost of each US proxy in Asia as well as at the cost of peace and stability for the entire region, and specifically at the expense of China’s continued rise, just as Europe has been used to target Russia at the expense of both Russia and the rest of Europe.

In addition to the US political capture of these Asian proxies, the presence of US military forces on their territory, and now the imposition of energy dependence upon them - a recent US Senate hearing has made it clear nations like Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines will be shaped into military industrial outposts of US power in the region, helping minimize the “tyranny of distance” the US is faced with when provoking war with China on the other side of the planet from where the US is actually located.

The creation of factories making US weapons in Asia and port facilities in the region for implementing repairs on US ships is already underway with Japan having manufactured and in some cases even sending back to America Patriot missile interceptors and South Korea securing deals to maintain US naval cargo vessels.

All of these preparations are taking place ahead of what the US sees as an inevitable confrontation with China itself - which is ultimately the priority driving US conflict against Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and many other nations in the first place, all as a means of first isolating and containing China before confronting it directly.

Considering the costs Europe and Persian Gulf Arab states are paying for their subordination to the US and their role in hosting and facilitating US wars of aggression in their respective regions of the world, Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines are likewise painting targets on themselves ahead of any confrontation with China.

What the US often refers to as “security guarantees” for its “allies” is merely a euphemism for US military occupation, political capture, and control of what are actually proxies - not allies. The purpose of maintaining a global network of proxies from Europe to the Middle East to the Asia-Pacific is specifically to have other nations pay all the costs for US foreign policy, allowing the US to assume any and all benefits solely for itself.

The prospect of US war around the globe continuously escalating in the near to intermediate future is inevitable because the wars taking place now are being fought specifically to prepare for a future confrontation with China itself. For this reason, the prospects of the US arriving at any sort of “peace” deal with Russia or Iran is near zero.

Until the interests driving US foreign policy - including the arms industry, big-oil and gas, big-tech, the automotive industry, and many others - are displaced around the globe by the alternatives offered by multipolarism, and until the multipolar world can create sufficient deterrence against not only US military aggression, but the economic coercion, political interference and capture that leads to that aggression - the US will continue to hold global peace, prosperity, and stability hostage to its demands for continued unipolar hegemony over the planet.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.

Western Media Hails More Ukraine “Wonder Weapons” That Russia Also Has

2026-05-09T23:12:00.000-07:00

April 7, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - The Western media has shifted much of its attention toward the most recently launched US war of aggression in the Middle East against Iran - but corners of the Western media remain dedicated to shaping public perception regarding many other fronts along the US’ global war on multipolarism, including the ongoing US proxy war on Russia in Ukraine.

Familiar propaganda formulas continue to be utilized to keep these other, older wars raging as the US escalates around the globe elsewhere, including claims of new “wonder weapons” given to or developed by Ukraine.

Ranging from M777 artillery pieces, to HIMARS, Patriot missile systems, F-16s, and ATACMS - each weapon platform was introduced as a “gamechanger” that would shift Ukraine’s fortunes on the battlefield despite the same media also insisting Ukraine was already “winning.”

What many of these articles leave out, however, is even more important than what they present to audiences.

Ukraine’s Robotic Wonder Weapons

A recent surge in stories about Ukrainian “ground robots” is now following this familiar pattern.

The Guardian in its article, “‘The frontline is like Terminator’: fighting robots give Ukraine hope in war with Russia,” is just one of many articles claiming Ukraine is transforming into a “centre for the development of unmanned weapons,” implying unparalleled expertise possessed by Ukraine regarding aerial drones and now “ground” or “land robots.”

The Guardian insists Ukraine’s expertise is so immense that it is “highly sought after” even amid Washington’s latest war against Iran - claiming Saudi Arabia and Qatar are among several Persian Gulf states that have signed a 10-year defense agreement with Ukraine “to provide them with low-cost Ukrainian interceptors.”

What the Guardian fails to mention is the fact that the deal involves technology sharing, factory construction, and localized production in the Middle East that will take years to manifest into actual military capabilities for these Persian Gulf states, implying that Ukraine itself lacks a surplus in drone production as it struggles on the battlefield against Russia.

The article is - however - primarily about UGVs (unmanned ground vehicles) and how they have filled every combat role along the frontline from infantry and engineering, to logistics and medical evacuations.

Buried deep in the article, almost at the very end, it makes an admission that, “Russia also makes extensive use of ground systems.”

What the article does not say is that Russia is producing many times more unmanned weapons of all kinds, from drones to ground vehicles, in quantities the collective West’s collective military industrial production cannot match.

Careful readers would have spotted claims within the Guardian article that Ukraine’s UGVs were providing “hope” along the front in places like the city of Pokrovsk - which has long since changed hands to Russian forces who have taken the city and have continued to advance westward still.

The Guardian attempts to argue that Russia only controls about 20% of Ukraine and has “failed to make significant progress,” since 2022 before citing 1.2 million Russians either killed or wounded.

What the Guardian fails to mention is the attritional nature of the fighting which has driven Ukraine to invest so much in drones and UGVs in the first place.

Another article published amid this recent surge of UGV stories, by The Interpreter, notes, “throughout the war, Ukraine has relied on technology to offset Russia’s greater numbers in personnel and materiel. Aerial drones became the backbone of that effort, helping blunt assaults, guide artillery and strike deep behind the front. Now the same logic is moving onto the ground.”

The problem, again, is that whatever aerial drones or UGVs Ukraine is producing, Russia is producing more of them, plus leveraging their admitted “greater numbers in personnel and materiel.”

Both the Guardian and The Interpreter articles cite the same Ukrainian military unit rolling out these UGVs, calling into question just how widespread and successful this technology has actually been. Were this technology as widespread and as successful as presented, wouldn’t there be stories from across many different units utilizing it?

Instead, both articles cite Ukraine’s “3rd Assault Brigade,” also known as “Azov.”

What Else the Guardian (and Others) Aren’t Saying

Ukraine’s 3rd Assault Brigade or Army Corps is actually a modern-day Nazi military formation.

It openly operates under a stylized WW2 Nazi wolfsangel which can actually be seen all throughout the Guardian article’s photographs, adorning the chassis of the UGVs featured in the story.

The same Guardian article also cites Andriy Biletsky, the 3rd Corps’ commander, who claimed “new tactical approaches would determine which side prevailed ultimately.”

The Guardian never mentions the Nazi insignia covering the Ukrainian UGVs or mentions Biletsky’s background as a notorious neo-Nazi - despite the Guardian itself reporting on both in previous years.

In a 2014 Guardian article titled, “Azov fighters are Ukraine’s greatest weapon and may be its greatest threat,” admits, “the battalion's symbol is reminiscent of the Nazi Wolfsangel,” and that, “many of its members have links with neo-Nazi groups.”

One Guardian article from 2018 titled, “Ukraine's National Militia: 'We're not neo-Nazis, we just want to make our country better',” mentions National Militia members pledging oaths of allegiance to the above-mentioned Biletsky.

The Guardian describes the National Militia as “an ultranationalist organisation closely linked to Ukraine’s Azov movement, a far-right group with a military wing that contains openly neo-Nazi members.”

Despite this, the Guardian still attempts to whitewash Biletsky himself claiming he has, “toned down his rhetoric in recent years,” but that, “the former Azov battalion commander declared in 2010 that the Ukrainian nation’s mission was to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen [subhumans]”.”

The fact that all these years later Biletsky still commands a prominent Ukrainian military unit openly operating under the WW2 Nazi wolfsangel - not even mentioned by the Guardian anymore - indicates that the process of whitewashing, renaming, and otherwise covering up for Nazism deep within the ranks of the US-backed Ukrainian armed forces has given way to blunt lies by omission - hoping the general public doesn’t recognize the WW2 Nazi insignia covering the UGVs the Guardian and The Interpreter are promoting in their articles, or remember Biletsky as being an admitted, ardent neo-Nazi even by the Western media itself.

If the Western media is glossing over the overt Nazism of the Ukrainian military units it is promoting in its recent articles, it is unsurprising the Western media is also glossing over the fact that while Ukraine is fielding aerial drones and UGVs in greater numbers - Russia is fielding even more - in addition to Russia’s admitted advantages in manpower, materiel, and all other matters of modern conventional military power.

Just as the Western media did as early as 2014 when the US violently overthrew the Ukrainian government using these same neo-Nazi extremists before forming them into standing military units, it is advancing a narrative meant to create the illusion of hope both within Ukraine and among the general public in support of Ukraine and its continued proxy war on Russia - despite the reality Ukraine is outnumbered, outgunned, and losing a war of attrition drones and robots cannot help reverse.

More than just lying about the latest “wonder weapon” to keep Ukrainians fighting on the frontline and the Western public lined up in support of the war for as long as possible - the Western media, in a deeply concerted manner, continues to mischaracterize the war itself and those the US is backing in it, including unrepentant Nazis.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.

The US War on Iran is a US War on Multipolarism

2026-05-09T23:10:00.000-07:00

April 3, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - The US war of aggression launched against Iran on February 28, 2026 is only the most recent US aggression launched to undermine and dismantle the multipolar world. The US has not only threatened the existence of Iran as a nation state as well as the security of the entire Middle East, but the death and destruction it has caused has already begun to radiate out across the world in terms of disrupted or destroyed energy exports and rapidly unraveling economic stability.

The US - being energy independent itself - has forced much of the world into an American energy monopoly - having placed sanctions on Russian energy exports and now either seizing, disrupting, or destroying all other potential competitors.

This includes a US invasion of Venezuela just earlier this year, kidnapping the Venezuelan president and holding the remaining government hostage while openly seizing the nation’s natural resources - including oil - for the US itself.

The current US war of aggression against Iran is not only targeting Iranian energy production but has resulted in regional conflict damaging or destroying energy production across the Persian Gulf altogether. .

Because the US produces nowhere near the amount of oil and LNG required to make up for disrupted or destroyed energy production and exports from the Middle East, this will result in global energy shortages and subsequent collapses in both industry and consumer demand.

The world which had been collectively rising above and beyond the reach of US primacy now faces the prospect of being deliberately destabilized and dragged down by the US.

The US itself, incapable of competing within the very world order it created following the World Wars, has decided to use its remaining military, economic, financial, and political strength to demolish it in the hope of emerging from the settling debris once again “strongest.”

Far from an obscure theory, this is an observation made even by Russia’s top diplomat, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who in a recent interview would say that, “the events in Latin America and the Middle East directly stem from the West’s attempts to preserve the remnants of its dominance,” and that, “the elites of Western countries, continue to invest whatever political and economic resources they have left in their confrontation with our country.”

Far from a last minute plan, the US spent much of the 21st century preparing not only for the now ongoing war with Iran but also its ongoing proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, and its growing encirclement of China in the Asia-Pacific region - targeting all of multipolarism’s major pillars and many in between.

On the Path to Persia

To encircle and weaken Iran, the US invaded Afghanistan to its east and Iraq to its west in 2001 and 2003 respectively under the Bush Jr. administration. During that same administration, the US began preparing armies of extremists to wage proxy war against Iran and its regional allies including Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, the nation of Syria, and Ansar Allah in Yemen.

During the Obama administration at least as early as 2008, the US began training and equipping opposition groups across the Arab World for the eventual 2011 so-called “Arab Spring.”

Together with the armies of extremists prepared under the previous Bush Jr. administration, the US-engineered protests and ready-made violence served as cover to trigger regional chaos resulting in US wars and proxy wars against Libya, Yemen, and Syria leading to the collapse of all three as unified nation-states.

While the same Obama administration signed onto the so-called “Iran Nuclear Deal” in 2012, US policy papers dating back to as early as 2009 sought to use such diplomacy - not to avoid war - but to serve as a pretext for war.

One such paper published by the Brookings Institution titled, “Which Path to Persia?” noted that, “the ideal scenario in this case would be that the United States and the international community present a package of positive inducements so enticing that the Iranian citizenry would support the deal, only to have the regime reject it,” before stating, “under those circumstances, the United States (or Israel) could portray its operations as taken in sorrow, not anger, and at least some in the international community would conclude that the Iranians “brought it on themselves” by refusing a very good deal.”

And that is precisely what happened - come 2018 under the first Trump administration, the deal was unilaterally withdrawn from by the US after baselessly accusing Iran of violating its terms before applying “maximum pressure” on Iran in the lead up to the war the US is now waging against Iran.

In 2024 with the collapse of the Syrian government under the Biden administration, Syria’s advanced integrated air defense network was destroyed leading to the creation of open air corridors to Iran and almost immediately to direct US and Israeli strikes spanning 2024-2025 and of course this year.

The now ongoing war on Iran is just one piece of a wider global strategy to destabilize and destroy the multipolar world before its otherwise inevitable displacement of American unipolar primacy.

Extending Russia

Russia, another central pillar of emerging multipolarism has been besieged by US-led NATO expansion since the end of the Cold War.

Throughout the 21st century, the US has systematically destabilized and attempted to politically capture nations along Russia’s periphery including Serbia in 2000, Georgia in 2003, and failed attempts to capture Belarus and Ukraine in 2001 and 2004 respectively.

Upon Georgia’s capture in 2003, it was immediately militarized by the US and transformed into a battering ram against neighboring Russia culminating in war in 2008 the European Union’s own investigation concluded was provoked by US-backed Georgia.

By 2014, the US had successfully captured Ukraine as well and immediately began to militarize it on a much greater scale than Georgia from 2003-2008. This included not only the reorganization and training of Ukraine’s military, but also the capture and control of Ukraine’s security and intelligence agencies by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

By 2017 under the first Trump administration, the US began openly supplying Ukraine with arms - likely the final red line crossed forcing Russia to pre-emptively strike before another Georgia 2008-style war was launched against it - but on a much greater and more dangerous scale.

The resulting war occupied tremendous amounts of Russian resources and attention, undermining its ability to sustain Syria’s stability and is likely a contributing factor to the Syrian government’s collapse in 2024, helping set the stage of the US’ direct war on Iran today.

Both the US provoked proxy war in Ukraine and additional pressure on Syria were laid out in a 2019 RAND Corporation paper titled “Extending Russia” - both scenarios, together with many other options that have since been implemented against Russia, having sought to extend Russia and eventually precipitate a Soviet-style collapse.

Throughout the ongoing US proxy war on Russia in Ukraine the US CIA has coordinated and directed long-range drone strikes on Russian energy production deep inside Russian territory as well as conducted maritime drone strikes on tankers carrying Russian energy exports.

Together with the US invasion of Venezuela, its ongoing war on Iran, the attack on Russian energy production and exports reveals a troubling pattern - the seizure, destruction, or degradation of China’s major energy partners around the globe.

Blockading China

In addition to targeting China’s largest and most important energy partners, the US has also spent years attempting to likewise destabilize, destroy, or deliberately provoke conflict along China’s immediate peripheries and even within Chinese territory itself.

This includes years-spanning terrorism targeting China’s Xinjiang region, US-backed riots in Hong Kong as recently as 2019, and the backing and arming of the separatist administration on the Chinese island province of Taiwan.

Beyond China’s own territory, since the end of World War 2, the US has spent decades attempting to politically capture and pivot nations into battering rams against China along three fronts; Japan-Korea, India-Pakistan, and Southeast Asia. This includes the Philippines which has abandoned modern infrastructure deals with China and redirected national resources to an expanding US military presence within the former US colony and an expanding confrontation with China in the South China Sea.

Closer to China’s borders in Myanmar and Pakistan, the US has backed terrorists in attacking key components of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) including the Myanmar-China pipelines US policy papers including one from the US Naval War College Review in 2018 had previously proposed bombing during any open conflict with China as part of a wider “maritime oil blockade” on China.

Instead of waiting for open conflict with China, US-backed terrorists have repeatedly attacked the pipelines for years including last year.

Earlier this year, an American and several Ukrainians were caught smuggling drones into Myanmar in a bid to assist US-backed opposition groups in overthrowing the China-friendly central government.

Taken together - the US has waged wars and proxy wars against China’s key allies as well as waged a dirty war all along China’s own borders and even within them.

The most recent war on Iran targeting the majority of China’s energy imports from abroad seeks to damage China’s economic development as much as possible before a 5-10 year window of opportunity closes as China reaches energy independence.

China Has Prepared

China was well aware of US efforts to blockade it for decades and has invested both domestically and internationally in both preparing for it and defending against it.

The distant blockade the US Naval Review College paper proposed imposing at the Malacca Strait in 2018 is now likely no longer possible as China’s military power has drastically expanded since then. Not only does China have a vastly larger and more capable missile force, it also has a physically larger navy than the United States does and has concentrated its navy in the Asia-Pacific region.

This is likely why the US has instead imposed the blockade at the Strait of Hormuz - much further from Chinese military capabilities. However, China appears to have prepared for this as well.

China has built up vast strategic crude oil reserves, is rapidly expanding coal-to-liquid fuel production, and has invested in and adopted renewable energy resources on a scale unseen in human history.

While the majority of vehicles on Chinese roads are still dependent on refined oil fuel products, over 50% of all new cars, trucks, and motorcycles are electric. China possesses the largest and fastest passenger rail network on Earth and also possesses the most powerful electric freight locomotives ever built.

While the United States appears to be making a drastic global lunge at China and its network of partners and allies, China has spent decades preparing for exactly this scenario.

What is left to determine is whether the US’ capacity for global death and destruction can outpace China and the multipolar world’s capacity of resilience and economic, technological, and civilizational expansion. Only time will tell for sure.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.

American/Ukrainians Caught Arming Militants in Myanmar and the US Dirty War on China

2026-03-29T04:22:00.000-07:00

March 20, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - India’s national media reported the arrest by Indian security services of US mercenary Matthew VanDyke and six Ukrainians for illegally crossing the border into neighboring Myanmar to provide military training to armed groups fighting Myanmar’s central government.

Indian security services have also linked the suspects to “importing huge consignments of drones from Europe to Myanmar via India” for “ethnic armed groups,” matching the established pattern of US proxy war waged around the globe throughout the 21st century.

The military support provided by groups like VanDyke’s “Sons of Liberty” and other US-linked organizations like former US Special Forces operator David Eubank’s “Free Burma Rangers,” together with overt US government funding and support for political opposition groups the US seeks to install into power, have fueled decades of conflict inside Southeast Asia’s nation of Myanmar.

US-Backed Militants in Myanmar

VanDyke has gravitated toward US wars and proxy wars of aggression around the globe including the US war on Libya in 2011, against Syria also in 2011, and in Ukraine from 2022 onward according to Western sources like Newsweek.

VanDyke’s recent operation in Myanmar involved not only training militants, but also equipping them with “huge consignments” of drones, indicating a significant source of funding. Because the funding is not disclosed by VanDyke’s “non-profit security contracting firm” it is very likely - as with all other aspects of Myanmar’s opposition - it is funded by the US government and simply laundered through fronts like VanDyke’s.

Other similarly US-backed operations training and equipping militants in Myanmar include David Eubank’s “Free Burma Rangers” (FBR). US diplomatic cables made available by Wikileaks revealed Eubank regularly reports to US government representatives at the US consulate in neighboring Thailand (here, here, here, here, and here).

While FBR poses as some sort of nongovernmental organization (NGO) which “assists ethnic resistance groups” with “humanitarian operations,” videos produced by Free Burma Rangers themselves and those by the militant groups they help train and equip, depict the organization providing military training (including weapons training), as well as FBR members themselves carrying weapons on patrol with local militants.

The political opposition these armed groups seek to install into power, the so-called “National Unity Government” (NUG) is itself a documented wholecloth creation of the US government.

In its earlier days it was referred to as the “National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma” (NCGUB) and was literally based in the US, just outside of Washington D.C. in Rockville, Maryland. A 2013 “The World” article would admit the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was the “main supporter of the NCGUB.”

The NED’s website indicated an extensive list of politically invasive programs it was funding, interfering in virtually every aspect of Myanmar’s internal political affairs - everything from supposed “human rights,” to media, the development of “youth leaders,” resource management, “political participation,” legal aid funds, election monitoring, labor, and information space.

The 2020 NED disclosure for Myanmar - still referred to by the NED by its British colonial nomenclature of “Burma” - focused extensively on targeting the specific ethnic groups among which the armed militants VanDyke, his Ukrainian counterparts, and other organizations like FBR have provided military support to.

The most recent iteration of the “NCGUB” is the NUG and is made up of mostly US government NED funding recipients.

For example, the NUG’s so-called “Minister of Foreign Affairs,” Zin Mar Aung, whose official NUG biography openly admits, “in 2012, she was awarded the International Women of Courage award by the United States Secretary of States,” and that she was a “fellow in the Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow of the National Endowment for Democracy program.”

Her profile on the NED’s official website also noted she “co-founded the Yangon School of Political Science, a NED-funded institution.”

In other words - the US government has a long documented history of both building up and attempting to maneuver into power the Myanmar political opposition throughout its various iterations up to and including the current “NUG” - which in turn openly presides over many of the armed groups fighting the central government.

While the US government doesn’t openly supply arms and other military support to the NUG’s militant wings, Americans and now Ukrainians fighting amid America’s multiple wars and proxy wars elsewhere, clearly serve as a vector through which the US government can do so covertly.

The violence these armed militants are carrying out also happen to specifically advance US geopolitical objectives in the region - not just in regards to undermining and attempting to topple Myanmar’s government, but in the encirclement, containment, and attempted toppling of China itself.

America’s Dirty War against Myanmar is a War Against China

Myanmar, which shares a border with both India and China, is a key partner of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). BRI infrastructure in Myanmar includes the Kyaukphyu deep sea part in Myanmar’s Rakhine State along the Bay of Bengal and the Sino-Myanmar Oil and Gas Pipelines.

Together, these projects allow hydrocarbons imported from abroad to be off-loaded along Myanmar’s coasts and piped across the country toward China’s Yunnan province along the Myanmar-Chinese border, thus by-passing the Strait of Malacca.

Not only does the port and pipelines save up to 5-6 days versus transiting the Strait of Malacca toward China’s own shores, it hedges Chinese energy imports against the threat of a US-imposed maritime blockade either at the Strait of Malacca itself or anywhere beyond it in the Asia-Pacific where tens of thousands of US forces are stationed specifically to encircle, contain, and if possible, cut off China.

Beijing’s concerns are far from “paranoia.” They are a direct reaction to decades-spanning US policies describing the implementation of a global maritime oil blockade on China specifically at the Strait of Malacca. These policies have driven the deployment of the US military forces into the region to potentially impose it as well as arms and force restructuring programs to better enable their ability to do so.

One such policy paper published by the US Naval War College Review in 2018 is literally titled, “A Maritime Oil Blockade Against China.” It introduced the concept of a “distant blockade” designed to reduce the threat of Chinese anti-access area-denial (A2AD) systems by being imposed just beyond the range of most of China’s military capabilities including “the Strait of Malacca and a handful of other passages that the US Navy could seal off effectively.”

The purpose of the “distant blockade” would be to impose crippling pressure on China to impede, arrest, or even reverse its economic development, in addition to other forms of military, technological, and economic pressure the US has already spent years applying.

The 2018 paper mentioned the Sino-Mayanmar Pipeline by name, explaining, “a distant blockade also would need to interdict the Myanmar–China oil pipeline,” and that, “the area could be declared an exclusion zone for the duration of a conflict, and if the Myanmar authorities failed to comply the facility could be disabled via air strikes, aerial mining, or other kinetic action.”

While the 2018 paper proposed a maritime oil blockade as a measure applied during an active conflict, the US has since used the armed militants it has backed in war against Myanmar’s central government for decades to begin carrying out attacks-by-proxy on the pipelines instead.

This has resulted in years of attacks killing security personnel guarding the pipelines, damaging equipment used to operate them, and at various periods of the ongoing conflict, US-backed militants taking over entire sections of the pipelines themselves including just last year.

Taken together with the recent US invasion and seizure of Venezuela’s government, drone strikes the New York Times admits are directed by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) deep inside Russia at its energy production, as well as the ongoing US war on Iran - all three nations counting China as their largest energy export partner - the US dirty war in Myanmar is just one of many fronts the US is waging a proxy war on China itself.

Not only is a “maritime oil blockade” being imposed on China, it is being imposed on China worldwide - from Latin America to the Middle East and Eurasia - much further beyond China’s military reach than a closure at the Malacca Strait would have been.

Myanmar’s military, supplied and supported by both Russia and China, has failed to restore peace and stability across the country specifically because of the hundreds of millions of dollars (or more) the US has spent over decades propping up proxy political forces and covertly arming their militant wings.

The recent arrest of American and Ukrainian citizens providing these militants with additional training and modern combat drone technology is not just a war against Myanmar’s central government and the peace and stability of the nation and people of Myanmar, but also a war against China and the peace and stability of the entire Asia-Pacific region - even the world.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.

At the AI Race’s Finishing Line: A World of Abundance or Automated Dominance?

2026-02-23T21:05:00.000-08:00

February 12, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance, an important but unnoticed debate is taking place within the halls of Western power and among a handful of billionaire business leaders and investors regarding the shape of the world to come as this technology permeates every aspect of modern civilization.

Western-based optimists insist that AI will bring about a utopian world of abundance, eliminating poverty, illness, and violence and insist that the US must win an intensifying AI race with China to do so.

Paradoxically, it is the US who has, in the past several decades - including throughout the entirety of the 21st century, perpetuated and even compounded existing poverty, illness, and violence stretching from Latin America to Central Asia and everywhere in between. The US has - in the past 26 years alone - invaded and destroyed entire nations, killing millions and displacing 10s of millions fleeing from the poverty, illness, and violence stemming from US-led war.

Even within US borders, these same interests have ravaged the American population through predatory economic practices prioritizing profit and power over any semblance of societal or civilizational purpose. This has manifested itself as rotting infrastructure, inaccessible healthcare, unaffordable education, and the growing dearth of opportunities emerging from a society systematically exploited and neglected rather than built-up and invested in.

For a Western-based billionaire - this reality may not be apparent because of the cocoon of luxury, comfort, and security immense wealth affords anyone, anywhere - but it is reality nonetheless.

China, on the other hand, has already spent the last several decades lifting hundreds of millions of its own people out of poverty, improving healthcare, and eradicating violent crime within its borders long before AI became a practical reality.

China Pursues Abundance, Cooperation, and Coexistence

Throughout the 21st century China has not invaded a single nation nor participated in the sort of unilateral economic sanctions the US and its partners have used to target scores of nations around the globe with the explicit purpose of crushing economies and dividing and destroying populations to in turn induce “regime change.”

Instead, China has continued to rapidly build out its own infrastructure while partnering with nations around the globe, long neglected under decades of Western domination, to build desperately needed modern infrastructure creating what China refers to as the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI).

Nations like Laos in Southeast Asia - upon which the US dropped more bombs during the Vietnam War than the nation's total population - received its first and only modern rail route thanks to China’s BRI - a high-speed rail line that has transformed the landlocked impoverished nation into a logistics and tourism corridor between China and the rest of Southeast Asia.

Neighboring Thailand has also greatly benefited from the rise of China in profound ways decades of “major non-NATO ally” status with the US failed to provide including expanding trade, tourism, manufacturing, infrastructure expansion, and technology transfers rapidly modernizing Thailand at a pace US-proxies in the region like the Philippines will likely never experience in the near or intermediate future.

Consumer costs for cars, computers, smartphones, and all other types of consumer and industrial electronics and equipment have plummeted across nations in Asia trading with China - empowering individuals, small businesses and large enterprises alike to do more, more quickly, and with less resources.

A visit to anywhere across Asia where Chinese-driven development has escaped US efforts to sabotage, stagnate, or reverse, reveals stunning progress at all levels of society, not just for a handful of billionaires.

Within China itself, government policy has focused on investing in the best interests of society even at the cost of maximizing profits. China’s network of high-speed rail lines is a perfect example of this. While the overall network turns a profit, there are entire lines that do not. These lines are maintained at a loss to contribute to the overall benefit of society and the economy in ways Western-style profit-driven market economics cannot and will not.

Chinese policies like the "Healthy China 2030" initiative seeks to invest in healthcare to deliberately extend the “health-span” of its citizens through bio-technology and active anti-aging research - mirroring the ambitions of Western-based billionaire AI optimists - but in ways Western governance and profit-driven market economics will never pursue because of the immense profits that exist for preying on and exploiting human health problems rather than permanently solving them.

Ironically, optimistic abundance-seeking billionaires in the West cheering for a US victory in the ongoing AI race, appear to have missed years of the US accusing China of “overcapacity” which should more honestly and accurately be called abundance - abundance the US has taken active measures to try to sabotage, stagnate, and even reverse.

Wall Street and Washington See Abundance as an Obstacle, Not an Objective

Toward this end, the US has pursued geopolitical policies aimed at encircling and containing China politically, economically, and even militarily.

The US maintains tens of thousands of troops closer to China than to America’s own shores and has used its political capture, domination, and even military occupation of nations like Japan and the Philippines as a means of projecting military power both directly and by proxy against China within Chinese territory and along essential sealanes required for Chinese commerce.

US policy papers explicitly lay out plans for maritime blockades, attacking the Chinese BRI including through military strikes, and mitigating Russia’s ability to supply energy to China across their long, shared border - all as a means of economically strangling China.

Since (and even long before) such papers were published, the US has actively executed these policies including by reorganizing the US Marine Corps specifically into an anti-shipping force for implementing a maritime blockade in the Asia-Pacific region, by arming and backing militants both in Myanmar and Pakistan to physically attack Chinese BRI projects and to maim or kill both the Chinese engineers working on them and local security forces trying to protect them.

Regarding Russia’s long shared border with China and the immense and growing amount of energy exports crossing over into China, the US has admittedly been conducting long-range drone strikes on Russian energy production deep inside Russian territory as well as maritime drone strikes on Russian energy exports - all as part of crippling Russia’s ability to sustain its own economic stability and that of importers dependent on its energy production and exports - especially China.

Spanning multiple US presidential administrations regardless of political party affiliation - concerted efforts have been made to constrain Chinese technological development including through import bans on Chinese technology to cripple companies like Huawei, and through export bans on semiconductors and equipment used to manufacture them - both as a means of hobbling Chinese technological development overall, but specifically to hinder China amid the current US-China AI race.

And much more obvious than all of these actions are the words of the US government itself - in its own 2025, “America’s AI Action Plan,” the very first page declares the US must win the AI race to, “achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance.”

This is the very same “unchallenged global technological dominance” the US has squandered and exploited, cutting its swath of death and destruction from Latin America to Central Asia and everywhere in between throughout this 21st century alone - in stark contrast to China which has instead chosen to cooperate, construct, and coexist with the world around it.

The US has in both words and actions demonstrated that it pursues AI as a means of enhancing its already demonstrated desire for domination over the planet - a desire that sees abundance for all as an obstacle rather than an objective.

China has already committed to a national and global model of abundance and is tangibly leveraging AI to enhance this model - so much so the US has openly targeted Chinese-driven abundance as “overcapacity” that needs to be stamped out.

Western Optimism and Cognitive Bias

For Western-based billionaire optimists insisting the US must win the AI race based on US talking points about Chinese “authoritarianism” and the Chinese “surveillance state,” in between praising the advent of cameras on American university campuses for driving down crime, or eagerly awaiting upcoming Apple products like its “AI pin” that records every conversation wearers have demonstrates profound cognitive bias.

It is not that these optimists have operated from first principles to arrive at their conclusions objectively - but instead have applied their cognitive bias to a desired outcome that reflects them. They are Westerners, therefore the West should “win” the AI race - even if it comes at the expense of advocating for a system that uses emerging AI technology to maintain a crumbling status quo over one that is clearly using it as the scaffolding for a highly efficient, rapidly developing society.

For those who objectively seek a future of abundance and the use of rapidly developing AI to shape it, they must align themselves with those who have been and are currently - and very deliberately - pursuing abundance now.

Investing in and supporting those who are openly and aggressively trying to vilify and stamp out abundance in the hope that - upon arriving at artificial superintelligence - their sentiments suddenly shift toward utilizing it for universal abundance rather than establishing a future of automated domination - is perhaps the greatest example of how wealth and influence does not translate into intelligence or good judgement.

For the rest of the world, it is important to understand that AI is here, is rapidly advancing, and is not going to be “paused,” “uninvented,” or waved away by denying it exists. The only question that remains is in whose hands will this tremendous power fall and what will be done with it.

If we desire a future of universal abundance over one of automated domination, we need to see how the AI race fits into the greater struggle unfolding between Wall Street and Washington’s pursuit of a unipolar world order and its war on the emerging multipolar world and how it seeks to use AI as a “force multiplier” to do so.

Only time will tell how this race ends - but experts on all sides agree that time is short and that this matter will be settled in the matter of years, not decades. If this is true, every day counts and that the time to debate and determine the future of AI and the world it will create must begin today.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.

US Consolidates Control Over Proxies Amid War on Multipolarism

2026-02-09T21:13:00.000-08:00

February 2, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - Behind the political theater that is the “US-European split,” exists an aggressive campaign of US consolidation over its many proxies - including and perhaps especially over Europe itself.

Narratives floating through Western media space depict the US as challenging or threatening not only Europe over control of Denmark’s Greenland territory, but also Canada in North America. Articles are written telling tales of Europe and Canada seeking leverage against Washington and countermeasures to protect themselves and their interests up to and including preparations for “guerrilla warfare” against potentially invading American forces.

In reality, nothing of the sort will take place.

Already, opportunities for gaining actual leverage against the United States have been eagerly surrendered to the United States, particularly with the recent decision by the EU for a “complete ban on Russian gas imports by 2027.”

The ban means the EU will completely eliminate any alternative to its growing dependence on US LNG imports leaving the US with disproportionate leverage over the EU as a whole and its members individually regarding virtually any matter of foreign or even domestic policy. It is inconceivable that the EU’s leadership would surrender such leverage to the US amid a supposed and growing “split” with the US unless of course there was no real split to begin with.

A Matter of Perception Management

Instead, what is unfolding is perception management meant to shape both the American and wider Western public ahead of implementing the publicly declared “division of labor” and “burden-sharing network” announced by the Trump administration and already taking shape during the previous Biden administration.

It was under the Biden administration that the first National Defense Industrial Strategy was published - admitting to the US’ failure to match Russian let alone Chinese military industrial production and the necessity for the United States to consolidate control over its vast network of “allies and partners,” combining their collective resources, industrial capacity, and military power to confront Russia and China’s growing power across all relevant domains.

Under a section titled, “Engage Allies and Partners to Expand Global Defense Production and

Increase Supply Chain Resilience,” the Biden-era paper noted:

“The global activity of pacing threats increasingly requires a global approach to defense industrial relationships, concerns, and competition. International allies and partners, each with their own robust defense industries, will continue to be a cornerstone of the DoD’s concept of Integrated Deterrence. Indeed, the global system of alliances and partnerships is central to the NDS, which calls to incorporate allies and partners at every stage of defense planning. Such linkages and relationships will continue to be a cornerstone of Integrated Deterrence in resisting and, if necessary, defeating known and emerging threats.”

The paper also noted:

“The United States has a complex web of friend-shoring-suitable alliances and partnerships around the world; a partial list includes Australia, Canada, the European Union, India, Israel, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom.”

The paper defines “friend-shoring” as, “a process that engages allies and partners in production and processing of critical and strategic materials and supplies.”

The concept of the US exploiting its “web” of “friend-shoring” partners to compensate for the US’ own limits regarding military industrial production and to serve as an extension of America’s own military power has been continued - even accelerated - during the subsequent Trump administration.

In a February 2025 directive US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth delivered to Europe in Brussels, he made it clear that Europe in particular would have to increase defense spending from 2% of each member nation’s GDP to 5% which all European nations have subsequently agreed to do.

Secretary Hegseth also demanded Europe prepare troops for deployment to Ukraine to ensure any freeze in the fighting would be made permanent, and noted that Europe must donate "more ammunition and equipment,” and expand its defense industrial base - again - all steps Europe has since taken despite claims of a growing “US-European split.”

Finally, Secretary Hegseth made clear that the US was not abandoning Europe amid its own proxy war on Russia, but rather establishing a “division of labor that maximizes our comparative advantages in Europe and the Pacific respectively,” admitting that the US must prioritize China in the “Indo-Pacific,” “recognizing the reality of scarcity” in terms of the US confronting both Russia and China at the same time.

Toward the end of the same year the Trump administration published its “National Security Strategy” which included an entire section titled, “Burden-Sharing and Burden-Shifting,” highlighting the necessity of using US “allies and partners” to add to America’s own limited power.

The document stated:

“…the United States will organize a burden-sharing network, with our government as convener and supporter. This approach ensures that burdens are shared and that all such efforts benefit from broader legitimacy. The model will be targeted partnerships that use economic tools to align incentives, share burdens with like-minded allies, and insist on reforms that anchor long-term stability. This strategic clarity will allow the United States to counter hostile and subversive influences efficiently while avoiding the overextension and diffuse focus that undermined past efforts. “

What this “burden-sharing network” represents is the US’ use of subordinated nations and regions as an extension of its own military, economic, and industrial power, pursuing foreign policy objectives at the cost of these nations and regions.

This has already manifested itself as joint arms production or expanding joint arms production schemes where nations like Germany and Japan have been or will begin mass producing US-designed weapons like the Patriot missile air defense system and munitions for US-made multiple launch rocket systems to compensate for the US’ own inability to sufficiently expand military industrial production at home.

Japan, which has manufactured Patriot missiles on a relatively small scale since 2008, more recently doubled production and has even begun exporting these missiles back to the United States starting in 2024 in direct response to limits in US military industrial production exposed in the ongoing proxy war in Ukraine.

Since the Trump administration took office, attempts to rapidly accelerate this process of consolidation has included proposals to radically rewrite both US laws and those of its “allies,” as well as openly expressing a desire to outright seize territory (Greenland, Venezuela) and facilities (ports near the Panama Canal) deemed necessary for the explicit purpose of confronting both China and Russia.

An April 2025 CNN article noted US interest in using South Korean shipyards to build and repair US warships because US shipbuilding and repair capacity has drastically decreased over decades and is incapable of closing the gap on its own with China - as pointed out in the Biden-era National Defense Industrial Strategy paper.

The CNN article pointed out that South Korean shipyards were already repairing US warships “in theater,” meaning in Asia-Pacific where the US seeks to encircle and contain China. The same article mentioned the necessity of changing current US laws prohibiting foreign nations (like South Korea) from building US warships the US itself is not and will not be capable of building itself.

Nations like Japan and the Philippines are circumventing their own laws to allow both a wider US military presence within their territory as well as for their own military forces to play a more integrated and active role in advancing US foreign policy in terms of confronting and containing China in the region.

Of course, by doing so, both nations are undermining regional stability required for their own peace and prosperity as well as their own respective relationships with China itself - both nations counting China among their largest, most important trading partners.

And now Europe is preparing to surrender itself into similar receivership to be used to advance US foreign policy objectives at Europe’s expense, and to a much greater degree than it already has between 2014 and today regarding the ongoing US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

Already, Europe has played a role in the US proxy war on Russia as well as in the US’ ongoing policy of encircling and containing China - both through direct measures taken against Russia and China, as well as assisting the US in political interference, proxy war, and the political capture and dismemberment of nations working together with Russia and China.

Europe’s participation in these US policies has left the region itself in terminal decline - with its collective industry collapsing because of rising energy costs, collapsing social programs as greater sums of public funding are diverted to underwriting Washington’s proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, and the possible collapse of Europe itself as the prospect of a direct confrontation between Europe and Russia is increasingly presented to the European public as both a necessity and an inevitability.

Ukraine itself is a microcosm of this wider “burden sharing network” in which US proxies are compelled to abandon their own objective best interests in favor of serving US interests at their own expense. Ukraine’s political system was violently overthrown by the US in 2014 and replaced by a US client regime for the sole purpose of transforming Ukraine into a battering ram to be used against neighboring Russia.

Regarding wider Europe, over the decades following WW2, the US has politically captured the continent, replacing national centers of political and economic power with the regional bureaucracy of the European Union, overriding the best interests of the European people regionally and collectively in service of advancing US special interests. This includes everything from waging wars of aggression alongside the US within Europe (Serbia and now Ukraine) and far beyond it (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria) - to subordinating and even sacrificing its economic wealth to isolate and cripple the economies of targeted nations ranging from Iraq and Iran to more recently Russia and China.

While explanations for the EU leadership’s behavior have dwelled on ideological or political obsession or a recent divide between a “conservative” US administration and a “liberal” EU political order - the answer is far simpler. Just as is the case for Ukraine specifically - where a US-installed client regime was placed in power solely to serve US interests at whatever the cost to Ukraine - Europe in general has been consolidated under the EU for the very same purpose. EU leadership has been placed into power, shaped, and directed by the same US-based special interests that likewise drive American foreign and domestic policy regardless of the cost to the average American citizen.

Even as EU leadership sells a narrative of a widening “US-European split” to justify the transfer or greater percentages of public funding for what is entirely Washington’s proxy war on Russia, it continues to consolidate power over its individual member states for the sole purpose of transferring this power to and in service of US interests - the ban on Russian gas imports only one of many recent examples.

Until a greater percentage of journalists, analysts, and the general public can strip away the political theater used to perpetuate this continuity of agenda and reduce analysis to its material realities - revealing the simple structure of what is modern American empire at work - this destructive process will continue to erode and destroy both members of the multipolar world and the West itself.

Only time will tell whether or not the multipolar world can expose this process for what it is and propose a more compelling vision of a collective future for the world - and in the meantime - defend itself and its aspiring members from the global war Wall Street and Washington is waging - and now expanding - against the multipolar world.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.

Washington’s War on Iran: The Importance of Defending Information Space

2026-02-09T21:11:00.000-08:00

January 15, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - The US has demonstrably continued its war on Iran through the execution of long-laid plans aimed at destabilizing the nation through US-backed protests and armed terrorists targeting major cities over the course of several days.

This follows a nearly 2 week-long war the US and its Israeli proxies launched against Iran in mid-2025 - only having been placed on pause ahead of the next round of destabilization and military aggression which appears to be unfolding now.

Amid the US-organized unrest in January 2026, the US has openly backed the opposition calling for armed militants to continue their operations and to even seize government institutions.

Associated Press would quote the US president as saying, “keep protesting and take over your institutions if you can,” and that, “help is on the way,” in reference to previous threats of US military strikes on Iran in support of the opposition.

Beyond rhetorical support, evidence of direct US involvement began to surface amid Western media reports.

The BBC in a recent article admitted - buried deep in the report - that “security forces have also been killed,” implying heavily armed elements amid the so-called “protests.” The same article admitted that informants contacting the BBC from within Iran were using “Starlink” satellite connections - referring to US-based SpaceX’s satellite communication network.

This comes as no surprise. As early as 2022, CNN reported that, “the White House has engaged in talks with Elon Musk about the possibility of setting up SpaceX’s satellite internet service Starlink inside Iran,” as one of several ways to “support the Iranian protest movement."

More recently, Forbes has admitted, “tens of thousands of Starlink units are operating inside Iran,” a metric of how aggressively the Biden administration-era initiative was executed and then continued under the subsequent Trump administration.

Beyond continuity of agenda between the supposedly “opposing” presidential administrations, plans to back violent unrest inside Iran have been laid out by US policymakers as early as 2009 in the Brookings Institution paper, “Which Path to Persia?” and seamlessly carried out by each successive administration regardless of political affiliation or campaign rhetoric.

The paper contains entire chapters titled, “The Velvet Revolution: Supporting a Popular Uprising” and “Inspiring an Insurgency: Supporting Iranian Minority and Opposition Groups,” as well as a chapter literally titled, “Leave it to Bibi: Allowing or Encouraging an Israeli Military Strike,” in which it stated, “the United States would encourage—and perhaps even assist—the Israelis in conducting the strikes themselves, in the expectation that both international criticism and Iranian retaliation would be deflected away from the United States and onto Israel,” a scenario that would unfold verbatim mid-last year.

Regarding US-engineered unrest, the 2009 paper proposes using US State Department-listed Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) including the Mujahedin-eKhalq (MEK) the paper admits is highly unpopular inside Iran, had killed American citizens and military personnel in the 1970s, and has most certainly carried out terrorism against others since, but that it should be removed from the US FTO list in order for the US to provide greater and more open support.

In 2012, MEK was delisted under the Obama administration after years of lobbying from neoconservatives who would later line President Donald Trump’s first administration.

In regards to other groups now involved in unrest inside Iran, the 2009 paper stated, “the United States could opt to work primarily with various unhappy Iranian ethnic groups (Kurds, Baluch, Arabs, and so on) who have fought the regime at various periods since the revolution. A coalition of ethnic opposition movements, particularly if combined with dissident Persians, would pose a serious threat to regime stability. In addition, the unrest the groups themselves create could weaken the regime at home.”

This is now precisely what is taking place inside Iran today.

Despite preparations for both internal subversion and direct US military strikes on Iran spanning not only the Biden-Trump administrations, but going as far back as the Bush Jr. and Obama administrations, Iran has weathered these attempts for years and appears to have been at least partially prepared for the most recent round of US-engineered unrest.

The above-cited Forbes article reported Iran successfully shut down not only internet services US-backed militants were using to coordinate their actions and communicate with their foreign sponsors, but also managed to extensively jam Starlink terminals in critical regions.

The same article speculated that Iran’s success may be owed to the transfer of Russian electronic warfare capabilities perfected in the US proxy war taking place in Ukraine where Starlink has also been extensively used.

These developments highlight the priority of securing and defending national information space - space that in the 21st century constitutes as critical a national security domain as a nation’s airspace, land borders, and shores. Failure to do so has proven catastrophic.

US Weaponization of Information Space in the 21st Century

Throughout the 21st century, the US has deliberately and maliciously weaponized its domination over global information space, specifically through US-based social media platforms like X (formally Twitter), Meta/Facebook, YouTube, Google, Instagram, and many others.

As early as 2011 the New York Times admitted the so-called “Arab Spring” was in fact a long-planned and prepared for regional destabilization campaign organized by the US government and its partners across big-tech.

Its article, “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings,” would admit, “a number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington, according to interviews in recent weeks and American diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks.”

The article also admitted that a number of the opposition groups involved attended, “a 2008 technology meeting in New York, where they were taught to use social networking and mobile technologies to promote democracy. Among those sponsoring the meeting were Facebook, Google, MTV, Columbia Law School and the State Department.”

In fact, this “technology meeting” was held annually for several years and built on the experience the US government obtained from similar political interference aimed at nations like Serbia, Georgia, Belarus, and Ukraine between 2000-2004.

The Guardian in 2004 would admit that ongoing protests in Kiev at the time were, “an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.”

It also admitted that, “the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box. Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze. Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organised a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman, Alexander Lukashenko,” which the article admitted failed.

Thus, from 2000-2004 the US attempted serial overthrows of targeted governments across Eastern Europe, in 2011 the US refined these techniques to burn to the ground much of the Arab World, then successfully overthrew and plunged the nation of Ukraine into destruction-by-proxy war from 2014 onward, while last year overthrew the government of Nepal on China’s borders, and is now openly attempting to use these same tactics coupled with the threat of overt military aggression to topple the Iranian government.

While analysts have documented the growing disparity between the US and both Russia and China’s military industrial power, the US has retained almost uncontested dominance over global information space. Looking at the swath of destabilization, death, and destruction the US has cut from North Africa to Asia and everywhere in between throughout the 21st century, it has more than compensated for its lack of military industrial production. US information dominance has proven as much, if not more of a threat to the world than America’s still formidable military menace.

The US Threat to Global Information Space Requires Global Defense

The nations of Russia and China have - over the course of many years and through extensive work - secured their respective information space. This has - in turn - allowed both nations to secure and stabilize their political space providing the social harmony required to not only survive ongoing attempts by the US to encircle and contain both global powers, but in many instances to thrive.

This has been achieved through the creation of domestic alternatives to the US-based social media platforms that otherwise dominate global information space. Both nations have online networks that can be disconnected from Western-influenced information space when and if necessary.

Beyond this, both nations have created domestic pipelines ensuring crucial human resources such as programmers and technicians required to maintain the physical infrastructure of their information space are trained in-country and with the nation’s best interests in mind, as well as the media personnel, government officials, and other civil servants who use each nation’s information space.

This is not unlike the physical infrastructure built within any sovereign nation. Roads, rail, airports, and seaports are all acknowledged to be integral to national security and thus their construction, maintenance, use, and protection are determined accordingly.

Unfortunately, many policymakers across the planet have yet to understand that information space in the 21st century is as important - if not more so - than this physical infrastructure or traditional national security domains.

Allowing the US to not only provide US-based social media platforms to nations rather than nations developing their own, but allowing the US to also control the flow of information and thus ideas and consensus on these platforms is as bad, or worse, than allowing foreign interests to control a nation’s physical borders, infrastructure, and even a nation’s own citizenry.

The cost of surrendering a key - if not the key - domain of national security to the United States is political infiltration, capture, and even complete collapse as admitted US operations spanning the 21st century from Europe to the Arab World to Asia and back again have sufficiently demonstrated.

While the multipolar world joins to discuss cooperation across the traditional spheres of national security, urgent attention to securing of the globe’s information space from US influence and control is required.

Russia and China - which export weapons to help partner nations defend their traditional domains of national security - could export turnkey domestic alternatives to US social media platforms, physical infrastructure and gateways as well as electronic warfare equipment to defend against the sort of interference the US just executed across Iranian information space, as well as opportunities to link domestic social media platforms to multipolar alternatives to US-based X, YouTube, Facebook, and other platforms.

Iran, a nation with significant conventional military power, has been undermined and weakened because of its delay in securing its information space and thus political space sufficiently from foreign interference. And while it has acted decisively in recent weeks (and appears to have prepared at least months in advance) only time will tell if it is just in time or still too late.

The future of the multipolar world may depend not on how large the disparity is between it and the US hegemony in terms of traditional military power, but how quickly the rest of the world realizes the importance of controlling information space the US has understood and exploited across the entirety of the 21st century.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.

US War on Venezuela is a War on the Multipolar World

2026-01-14T01:08:00.000-08:00

January 13, 2026 - (Beijing Review - Brian Berletic) - In brazen violation of international law and abandonment of even the illusion of legitimacy, the United States has launched a war of aggression against the Latin American nation of Venezuela. The operation included missile strikes and the bombing of targets across the country as well as the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by US forces who have since delivered him to New York where he is being put through a show trial.

This attack represents the culmination of a decades-long project aimed at dismantling Venezuela, reasserting Washington’s hegemony over the Western Hemisphere, all while escalating its war against emerging multipolarism worldwide.

Drugs as “Weapons of Mass Destruction”

The justification provided by the Trump administration for military intervention centers on President Maduro as “the kingpin of a vast criminal network responsible for trafficking colossal amounts of deadly and illicit drugs into the United States.”

US President Donald Trump has gone so far as to equate drug trafficking to "weapons of mass destruction," recycling the same false pretext used to sell the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 to the American and global public.

However, Washington’s own internal documentation contradicts this narrative. The Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment in its 80-pages mentions Venezuela only six times. To put this in perspective, Mexico is mentioned 70 times, China 17 times, and even Canada - a close US ally - is mentioned seven times.

If Venezuela’s government was indeed responsible for “trafficking colossal amounts of deadly and illicit drugs into the United States,” and on a scale justifying military intervention, it would have been the centerpiece of the DEA’s report.

Instead, the report only mentions Venezuela under a section titled, “other violent transnational criminal organizations” and describes "Tren de Aragua" (TDA) as a street-level gang whose drug activities are "small-scale" and limited to the distribution of "tusi," not the “collosal” shipments of fentanyl or cocaine Washington accused the Venezuelan state of orchestrating. In fact, the DEA report does not mention the Venezuelan government or President Maduro even once in the entire report.

The disparity between the administration’s rhetoric and the DEA’s own documented findings reveals the pretext of “drugs” flowing from Venezuela no more a reality than “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq - both deliberate lies told to sell otherwise unprovoked wars of aggression.

Beyond Just an Oil Grab…

The true objectives of this war were laid bare during a recent White House press conference following the military strikes.

In a transcript of the conference, the word "drug" or "drugs" was mentioned only nine times. In contrast, the word "oil" was mentioned 27 times. President Trump’s rhetoric shifted rapidly from the supposed drug threat to the logistical details of seizing Venezuela’s natural resources.

President Trump declared the US would “run” Venezuela and that American oil companies would take over energy production in the seized nation.

Beyond a brazen resource grab, the attack on and toppling of Venezuela’s government fits into a much larger global war the US is waging both against the concept of multipolarism and its chief proponents, namely China and Russia.

At the same time the US declares control over Venezuela, it is fomenting deadly violence in the streets of Iran after having carried out direct military strikes on it mid-last year.

Recent reports in the New York Times admit the US has also been carrying out strikes on Russian energy production deep inside Russian territory itself (via the CIA) as well as conducting maritime drone strikes on tankers exporting Russian energy.

Venezuela, Iran, and Russia all share common characteristics - they are partners of and major oil exporters to China.

Venezuela shipped over 80% of its oil to China. In the middle of the US’ military build up and subsequent blockade of Venezuelan maritime shipping, at least one tanker bound for China was outright seized by the US.

Zooming out of the Western Hemisphere and accounting for ongoing US war and proxy war worldwide, a larger strategy emerges. Washington is in the process of implementing a long-desired, global energy blockade on China.

A 2018 policy paper from the US Naval War College Review titled "A Maritime Oil Blockade Against China" discussed the process of closing maritime chokepoints as part of a “distant blockade” just beyond the range of the majority of China’s military capabilities.

It also noted that China had worked to diversify away from overdependence on these maritime chokepoints, including through the construction of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The paper proposed that BRI routes be targeted and cut.

Using the Myanmar-China pipeline as an example, the 2018 paper noted that if Myanmar’s government refused to close the pipeline during a US-China conflict, the US could disable it “via air strikes, aerial mining, or other kinetic action.”

Since the paper’s publication, the US has backed armed militants in Myanmar who have targeted, damaged, and at one point seized a section of the pipeline, jeopardizing one of China’s alternative land-based energy routes. The US has also promoted similar terrorism targeting Chinese BRI infrastructure in Pakistan as early as 2011 - terrorism that has been carried out since and continues to this day.

The 2018 paper also mentioned Russia’s ability to help sustain China even if a maritime blockade and cutting BRI infrastructure were successfully implemented. Though no recommendations were presented in the paper, the US is now admittedly in the middle of degrading Russian energy production and exports.

All of this taken together demonstrates how dangerously far this strategy has come to taking full shape.

A Wake Up Call

A particularly flawed theme has emerged across commentary circles, citing the US strike on Venezuela as a “retreat” to the Western Hemisphere where it seeks to carve out a “sphere of influence” rather than the continued pursuit of global dominance.

Often cited is the recent US National Security Strategy paper itself, which actually states, “the United States rejects the ill-fated concept of global domination for itself.” However, in the same sentence it also admits, “we must prevent the global, and in some cases even regional, domination of others,” which - in order to do so - necessitates continued US global dominance.

The attack on Venezuela did indeed take place in the Western Hemisphere. The US has indeed declared it seeks to dominate the entire Western Hemisphere.

However, at the same time, the US continues waging proxy war against Russia, destabilizing Iran, backing militants striking at China’s BRI infrastructure, all while US forces based in the Asia-Pacific region continue threatening maritime routes vital to China. The US maintains tens of thousands of troops in bases dotting the planet - located closer to the borders of Russia, Iran, and China than to America’s own shores.

This does not add up to “retreating” nor does it equate to creating a “sphere of influence” just because the US has attacked yet another nation elsewhere. Instead, it clearly constitutes a continued attempt to influence - and indeed dominate - the entire planet.

The future will depend on the world’s awareness of the persistent danger the US poses, its ability to protect itself from it, and multipolarism’s ability to build the world up faster than the US is demonstrably threatening and destroying it.

The author is a Bangkok-based independent geopolitical analyst and a former U.S. Marine.

New Year Starts, Same Old US Proxy War Continues

2026-01-04T07:49:00.000-08:00

January 3, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - While the United States government poses as “pursuing peace” with Russia regarding the ongoing war in Ukraine, it is now admitted that the US is overseeing a “supercharged” campaign targeting “Russian oil facilities and tankers” aimed at crippling Russia’s economy and its fighting capacity.

The revelation should come as no surprise. The campaign of long-range aerial drone strikes conducted deep inside Russian territory as well as maritime drone strikes taking place both within the Black Sea and far beyond it - in the Mediterranean Sea and off the coast of West Africa - requires intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities (ISR) only the US possesses.

Not only has the US made essential ISR available for these attacks, but both the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and at least the US Navy have been implicated in assisting directly in these attacks.

A New York Times article from early 2025 titled, “The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine,” would admit in regards to repeated maritime drone strikes carried out across the Black Sea that:

…the Biden administration had authorized helping the Ukrainians develop, manufacture and deploy a nascent fleet of maritime drones to attack Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. (The Americans gave the Ukrainians an early prototype meant to counter a Chinese naval assault on Taiwan.) First, the Navy was allowed to share points of interest for Russian warships just beyond Crimea’s territorial waters. In October, with leeway to act within Crimea itself, the C.I.A. covertly started supporting drone strikes on the port of Sevastopol.

If Ukraine was incapable of conducting their own maritime drone strikes along the coasts of Crimea, it most certainly would not have been able to conduct strikes much further abroad, meaning that more recent strikes carried out far beyond the Black Sea almost certainly required as much or more direct US involvement.

This has now been confirmed by a more recent NYT article.

Titled, “The Separation: Inside the Unraveling U.S.-Ukraine Partnership,” the article at first attempts to portray the administration of current US President Donald Trump as undermining Ukraine amid continued conflict with Russia. But the article then admits that just beneath the facade of “peace negotiations,” the US has actually escalated what has always been a US-instigated and US-led proxy war against Russia fought merely through Ukraine.

The article admits:

“Even as Mr. Trump bullied Mr. Zelensky, he seemed to coddle Mr. Putin. When the Russian stiff-armed peace proposals and accelerated bombing campaigns on Ukrainian cities, Mr. Trump would lash out on Truth Social and ask his aides, “Do we sanction their banks or do we sanction their energy infrastructure?” For months, he did neither.

But in secret, the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. military, with his blessing, supercharged a Ukrainian campaign of drone strikes on Russian oil facilities and tankers to hobble Mr. Putin’s war machine.”

This dovetails with reports from October 2025 that US intelligence agencies were assisting Ukraine in aerial drone strikes on Russian energy production facilities deep inside Russia. The NYT article also mentions “tankers,” implicating the US in the series of recent maritime drone strikes carried out on Russian-linked tankers worldwide.

The NYT article explains further:

“In June, beleaguered U.S. military officers met with their C.I.A. counterparts to help craft a more concerted Ukrainian campaign. It would focus exclusively on oil refineries and, instead of supply tanks, would target the refineries’ Achilles’ heel: A C.I.A. expert had identified a type of coupler that was so hard to replace or repair that a refinery would remain offline for weeks. (To avoid backlash, they would not supply weapons and other equipment that Mr. Vance’s allies wanted for other priorities.)”

And that:

“The energy strikes would come to cost the Russian economy as much as $75 million a day, according to one U.S. intelligence estimate. The C.I.A. would also be authorized to assist with Ukrainian drone strikes on “shadow fleet” vessels in the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Gas lines would start forming across Russia.”

In other words - the US launched attacks on Russian energy production inside Russia as well as conducted maritime drone strikes on tankers moving Russian hydrocarbons wherever the US could find them - all of this politically laundered through Washington’s Ukrainian proxies - attacks Ukraine itself would be incapable of conducting on its own.

President Trump Helped Start War with Russia, and is Helping Escalate it

While US President Donald Trump has repeatedly depicted the ongoing conflict in Ukraine as “Biden’s war,” it was actually precipitated and prosecuted by a combined effort spanning the Obama, first Trump, Biden, and now second Trump administrations.

It was under the Obama administration that the US violently overthrew the Ukrainian government after years of attempted “color revolutions” stretching all the way back to 2004.

It was under the first Trump administration that lethal military aid began flowing publicly from the US to Ukraine - a policy option the RAND Corporation in its 2019 paper “Extending Russia” admitted would likely lead to, “more Russian aid to the separatists and an additional Russian troop presence,” policymakers hoped in turn would overextend Russia in the same way America’s proxy war with the Soviet Union had in Afghanistan.

The paper also inferred that providing lethal aid to Ukraine could ultimately lead to a large-scale conflict ending in, “disproportionately large Ukrainian casualties, territorial losses, and refugee flows,” and that it might even lead to, “a disadvantageous peace” for Ukraine in the end - all of which has now since taken shape.

Considering the role each US administration has played since 2014 in provoking and expanding this conflict, it should come as no surprise that President Trump simply picked up right where both his predecessors and he himself had left off last.

US “Peace Negotiations” vs. Division of Labor

The very idea that the US now suddenly seeks to end a proxy war of its own design is itself a key function of perpetuating it even further.

In February 2025 US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth would deliver a directive to European nations in Brussels demanding they increase defense spending to 5% of their respective GDPs, “double down” on arming and backing Ukraine, expand their defense industrial bases, prepare the European public for “spending more on defense,” as well as preparing “European and non-European troops” for deployment inside Ukraine.

All of these demands were made under the framework of what Secretary Hegseth himself called a “division of labor,” within which Europe would take up a greater role in Washington’s proxy war with Russia while the US committed greater resources for an equally unnecessary confrontation with China in the Asia-Pacific region.

No part of this directive suggested a genuine desire to end the conflict in Ukraine - but rather an attempt to either freeze it under a Minsk 3.0-style ceasefire or otherwise pass the majority of the cost and risk of continuing the conflict onto Washington’s European proxies.

Since then, the US and Europe have posed as “splitting,” enabling European politicians to depict themselves before the European public as “abandoned” by the United States and thus left with no other alternative but “spending more on defense.”

In fact, in a New Year’s Eve address, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz would literally say, “for us Europeans this means that we must defend and assert our interests much more strongly by ourselves,” exactly as Secretary Hegseth ordered European leaders to do in early 2025 under his “division of labor” framework.

Under any "division of labor,” the overall project is not being “abandoned” by any participant - rather, various aspects of the project are assigned to different participants. The project at hand for the US is its continued decades-spanning pursuit of global domination. The US is merely feeding Europe into its proxy war with Russia to a greater extent and at greater risk to Europe than ever before.

The US has and will continue to oversee the entire conflict, making all major decisions - as it has done from its military command center in Wiesbaden, Germany - and making available unique ISR capabilities only the US possesses to continue its proxy war with Russia - simply swapping out its exhausted Ukrainian proxies with fresher European proxies.

The fact that the United States has escalated its proxy war with Russia through attacks it itself is planning and carrying out merely under the guise of a “Ukrainian” campaign, proves America’s actual intentions regardless of its empty rhetoric regarding “peace.”

The US Proxy War with Russia is Key to Containing China

In the background of Washington’s ongoing war on Russia is a much larger and more urgent policy of confronting and containing China - an imperative that necessitates continued pressure on China’s allies in Moscow.

Much of Washington’s strategy in confronting and containing China is based on a combination of maritime “distant blockades” imposed by a now completely reconfigured anti-shipping-centric US Marine Corps, attacks and disruptions along China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) land routes, as well as the degradation of Russian energy production that could sustain China’s economy and warfighting capacity even if the former two options are successfully implemented.

Laid out in detail in a 2018 US Naval War College Review paper titled, “A Maritime Oil Blockade Against China,” the US would impose a maritime blockade against Chinese shipping across the Asia-Pacific region including in the Malacca Strait, the South China Sea, and in and around the waters of the island province of Taiwan, the Philippines, Japan, and South Korea.

The paper also discusses the necessity to disrupt China’s BRI which serves as alternative routes circumventing possible US maritime blockades. At one point in the paper it is suggested that the US could demand BRI partner nations to shutdown pipelines for the duration of any US-imposed action - and any failure to comply would result in US “air strikes, aerial mining, or other kinetic action.”

It should be noted that since the paper was published in 2018, the US has already begun carrying out strikes-by-proxy against BRI infrastructure, including on a Myanmar-China pipeline the paper used specifically as an example.

The 2018 paper then mentions Russia, noting that existing and expanding pipelines could allow China to adapt to any attempt by the US to impose a maritime oil blockade on it. While no measures are proposed on how to mitigate Russian oil exports to China in the 2018 paper - since then - the US has successfully provoked a large-scale protracted proxy war with Russia in Ukraine.

As the NYT has recently reported, the US has begun conducting a large-scale strike campaign against Russian energy production inside Russia as well as targeting Russian maritime energy exports - part of a US blockading policy that is also targeting Russian-Chinese ally Venezuela in Latin America and Iran in the Middle East - a policy that has already seized ships bound for China itself.

Because the US seeks to continue encircling and containing China, and degrading Russian energy production (and Russia’s utility as a Chinese ally in general) is a key prerequisite in doing so, the US is almost certainly not going to end its proxy war against Russia.

Instead, it will continue, possibly even escalate its campaign striking Russian energy production inside Russia, Russian pipelines, and maritime oil shipping, and gradually expanding operations to set the stage for similar operations aimed at China directly.

Thus, Washington’s “peace negotiations” amount to empty rhetoric, drowned out by America’s own actions through its Ukrainian and European proxies in a war that seeks to set the stage for an even larger, more dangerous confrontation with China.

Russia and ultimately China’s ability to counter not only US proxy warfare, but also the tools it uses to set the stage for it - including America’s uncontested global information dominance and the inability of potential US proxies to defend their information space against US political capture - will determine whether or not US policy is blunted and stopped or allowed to draw the rest of the world into the destructive conflict currently consuming both Russia and Europe.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.

US Seeks Greenland Grab as Pursuit of Primacy Accelerates

2025-12-29T22:43:00.000-08:00

December 30, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - All under the guise of “pursuing peace” in a proxy war the US itself engineered and is for all intents and purposes fighting against Russia simply through its Ukrainian proxies, the US continues setting the stage for wider and more dangerous escalation - both in terms of expanding an emerging global maritime blockade against Russian, Iranian, and even Chinese maritime shipping, as well as in terms of preparing Europe to feed itself into Washington’s proxy war as Ukraine’s fighting capacity collapses.

Continued (and now renewed) US interest in seizing Greenland from Denmark serves to accomplish both of these objectives.

A New Base for Wider Proxy War with Russia

Existing US military bases in Greenland are located closer to Moscow than any other US military base outside of mainland Europe (including Turkiye) and the UK.

Assuming that open US plans to have Europe “double down” on supporting Ukraine, including expanding military industrial production and arms shipments to Ukraine as well as preparing “European and non-European troops” to actually enter into Ukraine proceed, all under a US-led “division of labor,” US military facilities across mainland Europe and the UK would run the risk of dragging the US itself into any resulting Russian-European conflict.

This would defeat the purpose of this “division of labor.” Thus the US either reducing its military presence across mainland Europe and the UK or relocating essential operations to Greenland allows the US to provide close, but technically indirect support for European forces fighting Russia in the same way the US is currently providing close, but technically indirect support for Ukraine as it fights Russia.

Greenland could serve as a base of operations for continued and essential US ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) support, without which neither America’s Ukrainian nor its European proxies could effectively fight and successfully overextend Russia.

With the US operating outside of most of Europe, it could project the illusion of plausible deniability amid a Russian-European conflict enough to give itself and Russia the ability to avoid escalation into a direct US-Russian conflict - an escalation both Washington and Moscow presumably seek to avoid.

For the US, the entire purpose of waging this proxy war is to have US proxies pay the full cost of the conflict while the US enjoys the full benefits of it. For Moscow, the Ukraine conflict expanding into a European-Russian war backed by the US is still a lesser evil than a direct US-European-Russian war.

The US Preparing a Global Blockade

For years, prominent US corporate-financier funded think tanks have published policy papers planning blockades to strangle all peer and near-peer adversaries into submission. Chief among these adversaries is China.

A 2018 US Naval War College Review paper titled, “A Maritime Oil Blockade Against China,” describes not only a strategy to cut China off by imposing a maritime blockade, but examines all potential ways in which China would seek to circumvent such a blockade and proposes measures to take (which have since been implemented) to prevent China’s success in doing so.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) - a network of land routes that allow China to circumvent many of the key maritime chokepoints the US has invested decades of military expansion to threaten - is identified as one of these possible means of circumvention. The paper suggests targeting and destroying these routes, using the Myanmar-China oil pipeline as an example.

Since the paper was published, US-backed militants have actually begun physically targeting this pipeline (and more recently here). The paper itself suggests that amid any potential open US-China conflict, the US itself could conduct military strikes against such infrastructure.

US-backed militants have also attacked Chinese BRI infrastructure in Pakistan - particularly in Pakistan’s southwest Baluchistan region where US policymakers have sought to eliminate BRI projects since as early as 2011.

The 2018 paper also mentions Russia as a key partner of China, sharing a long land border and already exporting huge amounts of energy across it to China. Russia presents a formidable challenge to US plans to strangle China through maritime blockades. Since the 2018 paper was published the US has since begun its proxy war with Russia itself - and more specifically - targeting both Russian energy production itself and Russian energy exports.

Nominally “Ukrainian” maritime drones have begun targeting Russian energy exports far beyond just the Black Sea and have now carried out attacks in the Mediterranean Sea, the Caspian Sea, and even off the coast of West Africa.

The New York Times itself, in a March 2025 article titled, “The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine,” would admit:

The implication is that the US is both supplying the maritime drones being used to attack Russian vessels, as well as “supporting the drone strikes” themselves through deep CIA involvement. More recent “Ukrainian” maritime drone strikes far beyond the Black Sea are almost certainly the product of US support being only possible leveraging America’s global network of military and covert action facilities.

Not only do these strikes on Russian energy production undermine Russia’s own economic stability, it fulfills a primary objective in preparing the ground for a successful maritime blockade of China itself - eliminating or severely reducing Russia’s ability to support China in the event of a US-imposed blockade on China in coordination with strikes on China’s BRI infrastructure.

More alarming still are reports that the US’ current and widening covert and overt maritime blockade being carried out worldwide, has targeted ships bound for China - specifically off the coast of Venezuela in Latin America.

As the US ramps up covert/overt maritime seizures and blockades worldwide, the US expanding its presence in Greenland essentially “corks” the Russian-Chinese Northern Sea Route - a sea route that connects the Bering Strait to the Norwegian Sea via Arctic waters and has remained relatively out of reach of the US and its proxies.

Beyond simply examining maps and speculating about US motives, the current US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has admitted that controlling Greenland is directly tied to controlling shipping lanes along the Arctic.

In a January 2025 interview published on the State Department’s official website, Secretary Rubio explicitly stated:

“…the Arctic Circle and the Arctic region is going to become critical for shipping lanes, for how you get some of this energy that’s going to be produced under President Trump – these energies rely on shipping lanes. The Arctic has some of the most valuable shipping lanes in the world. As some of the ice is melting, it’s become more and more navigable. We need to be able to defend that.

So if you project what the Chinese have done, it is just a matter of time before – because they are not an Arctic power. They do not have an Arctic presence, so they need to be able to have somewhere that they can stage from. And it is completely realistic to believe that the Chinese will eventually – maybe even in the short term – try to do in Greenland what they have done at the Panama Canal and in other places, and that is install facilities that give them access to the Arctic with the cover of a Chinese company but that in reality serve a dual purpose: that in a moment of conflict, they could send naval vessels to that facility and operate from there. And that is completely unacceptable to the national security of the world and to the United – to the security of the world and the national security of the United States.”

While Secretary Rubio attempts to frame US actions as responding to a supposed Chinese threat, the purpose is clearly to close off any potential alternative to the maritime chokepoints the US has already poised its military forces across the Asia-Pacific region to close.

The BBC in a more recent article cited US President Donald Trump and his specific mentioning of “Chinese and Russian ships as potential threats in the nearby seas.”

While theories abound of why the US is targeting Venezuela and Greenland - mainly centered on a US “retreat” from global hegemony - in reality the US is targeting both as part of an accelerated pursuit of Russia and China’s encirclement, containment, and ultimately, primacy. Not only does Venezuela factor into a growing global maritime blockade the US and its proxies are incrementally imposing, its elimination through military-imposed regime change further isolates its Russian, Chinese and also Iranian allies.

Greenland’s seizure by the US allows the US to not only expand its maritime blockade to target the Northern Sea Route, it also allows the US to fully implement its “division of labor” in Europe regarding its continued proxy war with Russia from a relatively safe distance.

Only time will tell whether or not Russia, China, and the rest of the aspiring multipolar world are able to counter these accelerated US ambitions or will be fooled by disingenuous “peace deals” and feints of a “retreat” to the Western Hemisphere. The sooner these US ambitions are exposed and checked, the sooner they can be stopped, and the less damage they are able to inflict on the world.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.

A New Space Race Above Earth May Determine Who Prevails Upon It

2025-12-24T03:26:00.000-08:00

December 24, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - In early December 2025, private Chinese aerospace company, LandSpace, test-launched its Zhuque-3 rocket. The rocket is designed to place payloads into Earth orbit while recovering its first stage booster, much like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch system and now Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket.

The launch was a partial success. The second stage successfully reached orbit while the first stage struck the landing pad hundreds of miles downrange destroying it. Despite an obvious anomaly preventing a successful landing - industry analysts concluded the attempted landing came spectacularly close for a first attempt.

It took Falcon 9 several attempts before successfully landing its first stage booster, and more recently, US-based aerospace company Blue Origin 2 attempts to successfully land New Glenn’s first stage.

Blue Origin is only the second company to do so after US-based SpaceX which - for years now - has routinely launched payloads to orbit with its Falcon 9 launch vehicle while recovering and reusing Falcon’s first stage boosters.

The Reusable Rocket Revolution

SpaceX has refined this process of launching and recovering first stage boosters to the extent of launching, landing, recovering, and turning around boosters for their next launch within 30 days.

The rapid reusability of SpaceX’ Falcon 9 has already revolutionized access to Earth orbit - drastically reducing costs while vastly expanding the number of launches possible per year. Blue Origin, should it successfully repeat New Glenn’s recent success while scaling up production and its launch cadence, would expand US access to orbit even further.

Rapid reusability allows for the deployment of vast constellations of satellites over vastly shorter periods of time. SpaceX’ Starlink constellation, a low earth orbit network of 8,000+ communication satellites improves global coverage and significantly reduces signal latency over older, less numerous existing satellite communication networks located in higher, geostationary orbits.

Such constellations lend significant advantages to the nations who deploy and have access to them.

As demonstrated in Ukraine, networks like SpaceX’s Starlink don’t just improve civilian satellite communication, but also enhance military communication as well as providing links to long-range drones (especially naval drones) line-of-sight radio signals cannot match.

SpaceX has provided a significant advantage to the US commercially and militarily - an advantage the US seeks to fully exploit, and do so far beyond Starlink.

For example, the US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) has enlisted SpaceX and its Starlink platform to develop what is calls, "Starshield," essentially a military version of Starlink, merging its communication capabilities together with target tracking, optical and signal surveillance, as well as early missile warning capabilities.

Between being publicly announced in 2022 to present day, nearly 200 Starshield satellites have been placed into orbit - an achievement that would have been impossible without SpaceX and its fleet of reusable launch systems - and an achievement other nations like Russia and China cannot currently match.

Russia, China Playing Catch Up

While nations like Russia and China have their own constellations of civilian and military satellites, neither have constellations as large as the US primarily because of limitations on how quickly launches can be conducted to place them into orbit.

Throughout 2025, for example, the US conducted (approximately) 170 launches versus China’s 78, and Russia’s 15.

In previous years, China had actually overtaken the US in annual launches. However, with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch system, this balance has been decisively tilted back in America’s favor.

Zhuque-3 test launches are expected to continue throughout 2026 with the company aiming to continue reaching orbit while finally successfully landing the first stage booster. From there, it will depend on how quickly and reliably LandSpace can repeat this success as well as how fast it can expand both rocket production and supporting infrastructure to significantly expand its launch cadence.

Just as SpaceX - a single aerospace company - has radically expanded US access to orbit, LandSpace could be positioned to do likewise for China.

However, just as the US now has Blue Origin pursuing its own reusable launch system, China has several other private companies and state-owned enterprises aiming to do likewise.

Private company Space Pioneer with its Tianlong-3 rocket and China’s Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology - under the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) - with its Long March 12A rocket are both planning to launch and possibly attempt to recover first stage boosters in late 2025 to early 2026.

Both rockets represent systems similar in size and with roughly similar potential capabilities as SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

Russia, on the other hand, had announced its Amur (or Soyuz-7) launch system as a candidate for reusable launches, but has drastically delayed its development to prioritize the production and launch of existing rockets, including newer launch systems much closer to completion. This includes continued Soyuz crewed and uncrewed flights, Proton launches, the planned initial launch of Soyuz-5 which is intended to replace the older Proton system, and continued launches of Russia’s relatively new family of Angara rockets.

Thus, the likelihood of Russia developing its own reusable launch capability in the near future is low. However, as a close partner with China, it will likely benefit from any success China achieves in the near future in a variety of ways.

Purpose-Driven Capabilities Exploited by Primacy-Driven Interests

SpaceX and Blue Origin ostensibly claim their primary objective is to expand humanity beyond Earth. SpaceX has been focused on the colonization of Mars while Blue Origin’s founder, Jeff Bezos, has made proposals for massive orbital habitats (similar to those proposed by physicist Gerard K. O'Neill in the 1970s) in his 2019 “For the Benefit of Earth” talk.

Both companies are also participating in NASA’s bid to return human beings to the moon.

However, whatever truth there is behind these purpose-driven objectives, both US-based companies exist within a profit-driven system engaged in the pursuit of global primacy, increasingly using the capabilities these companies have developed not “for the benefit of Earth,” but to dominate it.

Blue Origin-developed rocket engines, the BE-4, have already been used on joint Lockheed-Boeing United Launch Alliance (ULA) missions for the US NRO.

In addition to SpaceX’s collaboration with the NRO in the creation of Starshield, it has for years regularly conducted launches for the US Space Force, and before that, the US Air Force. These capabilities, in turn, have enabled continued US global military encroachment and aggression targeting both Russia and China’s partners and allies, as well as threatening both nations themselves.

SpaceX is an anomaly amid the US aerospace industry - an industry that has for decades been driven by the pursuit of profit over any other purpose, including innovation.

Before SpaceX’s Falcon 9 became operational, most US national security payloads were launched using United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V and Delta IV rockets. Both rockets were fully expendable. Their designs represented upgrades of rockets and systems from as early as the 1960’s. Because ULA (and before that, Boeing and Lockheed which merged to create ULA) held a monopoly over orbital launches and existed solely to maximize profit - there was no need to innovate. Any excess revenue diverted toward research and development would only have undermined shareholder primacy.

SpaceX, a private corporation founded by Elon Musk, disrupted the comfortable monopoly Boeing and Lockheed enjoyed, prioritizing rapid innovation over shareholder profits. Not only has SpaceX succeeded in cutting edge innovation, it is also making profits and outcompeting Boeing and Lockheed’s ULA.

Initially, lobbyists representing established aerospace corporations attempted to block SpaceX’s entry into government launches. Today, US policy think tanks funded by corporations like Boeing and Lockheed, hold SpaceX up as an example of the innovation possible because of the American system. In reality, SpaceX succeeded despite it.

These same policymakers now seek to exploit the capabilities a purpose-driven SpaceX developed to enhance the continued profit and power-driven pursuit of US primacy.

Russia and China, on the other hand, have entirely purpose-driven state-owned enterprises engaged in every aspect of national development - from energy production, to military industrial production, and aerospace research and development.

Russia’s limitations come in the form of its smaller population and economy and the constraints placed on it by ongoing US containment and confrontation, especially amid the ongoing proxy war in Ukraine. While it is unlikely Russia can now match or exceed the capabilities enabled by SpaceX, Russia had previously surpassed the US in terms of launch capabilities - at one point shuttling US astronauts to and from the International Space Station for years because of the inability of US aerospace monopolies to develop a timely replacement for the Space Shuttle.

China, on the other hand, has a larger economy, a vastly larger industrial base, more modern and extensive infrastructure, and millions more STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) graduates each year than the US. Together with purpose-driven state-owned enterprises and national policy promoting purpose-driven private business, China has already surpassed the United States across a number of fields and will almost certainly surpass US space launch capabilities in both quality and quantity, barring extreme preemptive measures taken by the US.

A New Space Race - New Rules

SpaceX’s Elon Musk, in regards to the test launch of Zhuque-3, remarked that even if it is successful, by the time it reaches large-scale production and use, SpaceX’s next-generation launch system - Starship - will have surpassed it.

However, linear comparisons to China’s development have proven tragically flawed.

Just because it took years for China to catch up to the US in terms of space launch capabilities before SpaceX pushed the US back into the lead, and now it has taken several more years for China to begin developing and testing its own reusable rockets, doesn’t mean it will take the same amount of time to match SpaceX’s Starship, or that China won’t be able to leapfrog US space launch capabilities altogether.

China is already developing the super-heavy Long March 9 and 10 launch systems meant to perform the same roles as SpaceX’s Starship, with engine production and testing already ongoing.

While the US has one purpose-driven space launch company - perhaps two (Blue Origin) - China represents a vastly larger purpose-driven nation with all the ingredients necessary to not only rapidly match the US, but permanently surpass it.

In an overall military, economic, and industrial competition the US is losing to China in virtually all regards, it is unlikely to maintain its advantage over China in terms of space launch capabilities - especially considering these capabilities were developed despite the primary characteristics of America’s socio-economic and political system, not because of it.

Should China fail to catch up to the US for a variety of reasons - including ongoing US ambitions to encircle and contain China with chaos, conflict, and even proxy war in the same manner it has done so to Russia - a large and dangerous advantage will be given to the US who has long-since demonstrated an eager desire to fully exploit it economically and even militarily.

The lopsided access to space afforded by reusable launch systems means placing not only larger and more capable satellite constellations into orbit, it also means being able to target and remove the constellations of others from orbit.

This includes the use of co-orbital satellites (sometimes called "killer satellites" or "inspector satellites") able to approach the satellites of other nations. Nations like the US with a high launch cadence can quickly put new, more advanced co-orbital satellites into orbit, or replace any losses from an adversary’s co-orbital or anti-satellite capabilities.

This represents a lopsided balance of power in orbit, creating a potentially lopsided balance of power back on Earth.

Only time will tell whether or not China’s ability to match the US in all matters on Earth can be extended over this new space race above it.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.

Thai-Cambodian Conflict Threatens Asian Stability by Design

2025-12-18T04:03:00.000-08:00

December 15, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - Major hostilities erupted once again early to mid-December in Southeast Asia along the borders of Thailand and Cambodia following a troubled “ceasefire” which included incidents and provocations for months since the last round of major fighting took place in July 2025.

Despite any resulting ceasefire, the fundamental issues driving the conflict remain entirely unresolved, primarily because these issues stem from foreign interests using regional conflict to complicate both Asia’s rise in general, and China’s rise specifically.

The Nature of the Fighting

Fighting erupted after Cambodian land mines and small arms fire left Thai troops injured and dead early December 8 leading to spiraling violence involving heavy artillery, warplanes, drones, and intense small arms fire at locations all along the Thai-Cambodian border.

Cambodia launched hundreds of BM-21 unguided multiple launch rocket system munitions into Thailand prompting the Thai military to respond with air and drone strikes targeting both the launchers themselves as well as local ammunition depots used for staging rockets. Positional fighting resulted in disputed territory changing hands day-to-day just as it had during the previous fighting in July.

Amid the fighting, footage and Thai military statements indicated Cambodia was also using Ukrainian-style FPV (first-person-view) drones - there were also intercepted communications featuring English-speaking drone operators.

This indicates that the US, either directly or through one of its many proxies, has aided Cambodia in a similar manner to its successful overthrow of the Syrian government late last year. It was admitted then that similar Ukraine-style FPV drones and Western operators aided militants in pushing back and eventually overrunning Russian and Iranian-backed Syrian forces.

Adding further to suspicions of a US role in the recent violence is Cambodia’s own vocal, repeated appeals for US involvement as a mediator, versus Thailand’s repeated refusal to accept directives delivered from Washington.

“Extending China”

The on-and-off border fighting disrupts peace and stability threatening the rapid rise of not only China, but the rest of Asia with it - including close Chinese partners like Thailand and obviously Cambodia itself.

The conflict represents part of a strategy already documented and being applied to Russia meant to encircle and contain it through economic pressure and the creation and expansion of multiple simultaneous conflicts along its periphery.

This strategy was laid out in detail in the 2019 RAND Corporation paper titled, “Extending Russia,” and included plans to provoke a deadly proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, to continue arming “Syrian rebels” who have since overthrown the Russian-backed government in Syria, for attempted regime change in Belarus, to exploit tensions in the South Caucasus, to reduce Russian influence in Central Asia, and to challenge Russia’s presence in Transnistria.

It should be mentioned that all of these options have either been implemented or are in the process of being implemented and that the US is pursuing an identical strategy in regards to China as well.

Earlier in December of this year, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute hosted current US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine. In the talk he specifically mentioned the ongoing US strategy to maintain global primacy and to confront a rising China.

During the talk he explicitly stated:

“…so when we look at the rise of the Chinese military, what our goal in the joint force is to create multiple, simultaneous dilemmas for ALL of the adversaries around the world, so that they are very cautious and concerned about doing something that would bring any sense of threat to the American people. “

While it could be argued that General Caine meant ”dilemmas” created by US military capabilities amid a hypothetical conflict with China, throughout the talk he repeatedly linked the concept of creating “dilemmas” to all domains of US geopolitical power, including the ongoing AI (artificial intelligence) race - well outside any ongoing US-China conflict - just as the US has done to Russia.

In many ways the US is already pursuing an “extending China” policy as laid out in the RAND paper against Russia, but targeting China along its periphery.

The US already backs armed conflict to Thailand’s west in Myanmar where it supports militants attacking Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) infrastructure carrying hydrocarbons from Myanmar’s coast to China’s southern border. Composed of pipelines, the infrastructure allows China to bypass the Strait of Malacca the US has planned to blockade in the event of an open US-China conflict, according to US policy papers.

The same policy papers even noted that in order for a maritime blockade of China to succeed, China’s BRI infrastructure would need to be severed as well. One paper even proposed bombing it amid any US-Chinese conflict, but it is clear the US has already begun attacking Chinese BRI infrastructure by proxy long before any such conflict erupts.

Similar US-backed attacks are taking place across Pakistan targeting Chinese BRI infrastructure there.

As part of this strategy of “extending China,” the US has stationed tens of thousands of US troops across South Korea, Japan, and increasingly the Philippines. It also maintains hundreds of US troops on the Chinese island province of Taiwan itself. In addition to hosting US troops, these nations have been encouraged by Washington to adopt increasingly hostile postures toward Beijing despite the economic damage caused in the process.

The US military operates throughout the South China Sea supposedly to preserve “freedom of navigation” against what it depicts as a threat from China when, in reality, US government-funded think tanks admit the majority of navigation through these waters is coming from and going to China itself. This means the US seeks to threaten and eventually disrupt navigation through the South China Sea - not protect it.

Just as the RAND paper sought to overthrow nations along Russia’s periphery, the US has, for years, attempted to overthrow and politically capture nations along China’s periphery through opposition groups funded and directed by US “soft power,” including the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Most recently, the US successfully overthrew the government of Nepal, right on China’s border.

The US has also extensively targeted Southeast Asia with political interference, specifically to remove China-friendly governments and replace them with US client regimes - including in Thailand.

Targeting Thailand to Extend China

The US since 2001 has sought to politically capture Thailand through US-backed billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra and his political allies. In recent years, the US has also begun backing Thai billionaire Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit and his various political parties.

Both billionaires represent eager servants of US interests. During Thaksin’s time in office from 2001-2006, he helped privatize Thai state-owned enterprises before selling them off to US investors, sent Thai troops to participate in the US occupation of Iraq, and hosted secret CIA detention camps. While Thaksin never publicly opposed Thai relations with Beijing, he clearly had/has a preference for Washington.

Thanathorn, however, is a vocal opponent of closer cooperation with China. His various political parties have consistently opposed arms purchases of any kind from China, opting for US-European arms deals instead. Thanathorn himself had previously called for the cancellation of the already-under-construction Thai-Chinese high-speed railway in favor of the non-existent “hyperloop” system.

During a public hyperloop presentation, Thanathorn would expose his underlying intentions, saying:

“I think over the past 5 years we have been giving too much importance in dealing with China. We want to reduce that and we want to rebalance our relationship to Europe, to Japan, to the US more.”

Over the past 20+ years, the US has helped organize violent “color revolutions” seeking to install Thaksin, Thanathorn, and their political allies into power. Former Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, a close friend and associate of Thaksin, aided US political interference in Thailand by hosting Thai opposition groups and allowing Cambodia to serve as a base of operations for them.

Even amid fighting along the border, US-backed opposition parties have sought to rewrite the entire Thai constitution, specifically to make it easier for US-backed parties to take power and prevent Thai institutions, including both the courts and the Thai military, from removing them.

Among the “nongovernmental organizations” (NGOs) promoting a constitution rewrite is “iLaw.” Admittedly funded by the US government NED and George Soros’ Open Society, iLaw represents a vector of foreign influence targeting Thailand’s most sensitive internal political affairs on behalf of equally compromised US-backed political parties.

This foreign influence constitutes a danger lurking inside Thailand as dangerous as the foreign-influenced danger targeting Thailand’s border with Cambodia. Together, these “dilemmas” are being created specifically to undermine and eventually strip away one of the region’s closest partners to China.

Chinese-Thai Relations Are the Target

Despite enduring stereotypes regarding Thailand’s “pro-US” position and Cambodia being “pro-China,” a close look at current reality reveals a different story.

One of the most cited points in favor of this theory is Thailand’s status as a “major non-NATO ally” of the United States - a status granted to Thailand in 2003 when Thaksin Shinawatra was at the height of his power and in the process of delivering Thailand as a proxy to Washington, before a military coup ousted him in 2006.

Following Thailand’s military ousting Thaksin and his sister Yingluck Shinawatra from power in 2006 and 2014 respectively, Thailand has spent approximately two times more on weapons from China than Cambodia has, including larger quantities of weapons and more sophisticated weapons. This includes main battle tanks, armored personnel carriers, infantry fighting vehicles, air defense systems, jointly-developed long-range guided multiple launch rocket systems, drones, and even naval vessels.

China’s trade with Thailand is vastly greater than with Cambodia, as are its investments in infrastructure. In addition to the high-speed rail line, China has also invested in or has been contracted to build hospitals, government buildings, and airport terminals throughout Thailand. Chinese companies, especially from its auto industry, are investing in factories in Thailand - representing vastly more value than Chinese investments in neighboring Cambodia.

China represents both Thailand’s largest source of imports as well as its largest export market.

In addition to economic ties and the Thai military’s large and growing relationship with China, the revered Thai monarchy has also built a close relationship with Beijing. The current Thai king, King Rama 10, has even recently visited Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing - the first Thai king to do so. King Rama 10’s sister, Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn speaks Mandarin and has made repeated official trips to Beijing.

For this and many other reasons, the Thai military and monarchy have been targeted for years by US-funded opposition groups attempting to mute or remove entirely both as strong, independent Thai institutions.

Cambodia: A Weak Link

Cambodia, on the other hand, despite the vast majority of its military equipment being Chinese-made, and hosting Chinese investments in real estate and manufacturing, counts the United States as its largest export market while using the US dollar as a de facto currency within Cambodia itself.

In the past 2-3 years, Cambodia has also begun a pivot toward closer cooperation with the United States militarily since former PM Hun Sen’s son, Hun Manet - a US West Point graduate - took power. During this period, Cambodia has hosted US warships at ports near those recently refurbished by China (with plans to visit the refurbished ports in the near future), announced renewed joint military drills with the US, and has begun discussions of wider “defense cooperation.”

In other words, while China represents Cambodia’s primary source of military hardware and foreign investment, the US still maintains disproportionate leverage over Cambodia - first economically, and now politically.

Because exports make up the majority of Cambodia’s GDP, and the vast majority of Cambodian exports go to the US, with those exports being primarily textiles and garments produced in factories built by Chinese investors, the US can easily extort concessions from Cambodia’s government by threatening to impose bans on goods it can claim circumvent US trade controls on China itself.

It is easy to see how not only the Thai-Cambodian border conflict fits into an already ongoing US “extending China” policy, but also how the US convinced Cambodia to volunteer itself into becoming a Southeast Asian “Ukraine” to do so.

Regardless of any ceasefire following December’s hostilities, US intentions to use the Thai-Cambodian border conflict within its much wider “extending China” policy means the danger of instability will hang over the region well into the foreseeable future.

The only question now is whether both Thailand and China can maintain peace and stability in the region to maintain Asia’s continued rise, or US attempts to gnaw at a key Chinese partner - both along its borders and from within its own political system - can turn Asia into the same environment of conflict and chaos the US has turned the Middle East, Europe, and Africa into for so many years.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.

US Beta-Testing China Blockade with Attacks on Russian Energy Exports

2025-12-18T04:01:00.000-08:00

December 6, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - The incremental build-up toward an overt blockade against Russian energy exports continues with recent aerial and naval drone strikes on both Russian energy production facilities deep within Russian territory, as well as Russian energy terminals and ships used to carry Russian energy exports moving to and from them.

The most recent incidents include attacks on tankers off the coast of Turkey in the Black Sea and naval drone strikes on the Novorossiysk Fuel Oil Terminal. There was also an apparent attack on a tanker involved in moving Russian energy exports, off the coast of Senegal in West Africa, Newsweek would report.

Western media sources have, over the course of several years now, admitted that Ukraine’s aerial and naval drone campaigns are facilitated and directed by the United States through its military command center in Wiesbaden, Germany as well as through the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) which has assumed control over Ukraine’s intelligence services since as early as 2014, the New York Times admitted.

The New York Times in its 2025 article, “The Secret history of America’s Involvement in the Ukraine War,” would admit specifically that:

“…the Biden administration had authorized helping the Ukrainians develop, manufacture and deploy a nascent fleet of maritime drones to attack Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. (The Americans gave the Ukrainians an early prototype meant to counter a Chinese naval assault on Taiwan.) First, the Navy was allowed to share points of interest for Russian warships just beyond Crimea’s territorial waters. In October, with leeway to act within Crimea itself, the C.I.A. covertly started supporting drone strikes on the port of Sevastopol.”

Besides admittedly directing the attacks itself, the US enables such operations through the use of unique intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities no other Western nation possesses. Thus, attempts to assign responsibility to nations like the UK and France still ultimately implicate the US.

In regards to aerial drones strikes on Russian energy production facilities deep inside Russian territory, Reuters would publish its article, “US intelligence helps Ukraine target Russian energy infrastructure, FT reports,” noting:

“The U.S. has been helping Ukraine mount long-range strikes on Russian energy facilities for months in a joint effort to weaken the economy and force President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.

U.S. intelligence has helped Kyiv strike important Russian energy assets, including oil refineries, far beyond the front line, the newspaper said, citing unnamed Ukrainian and U.S. officials familiar with the campaign.”

While the recent attacks on Russian energy production and exports is being presented by the Western media and even some independent commentators as being at cross purposes with US President Donald Trump’s various “peace” proposals, they are actually the manifestation of long-standing US geopolitical objectives aimed at stretching out and undermining Russia and beyond.

Attacks on Russian Energy Production and Exports Years in the Making

This strategy was laid out years before Russia launched its Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine in 2022, aimed at “extending Russia,” eventually precipitating a Soviet Union-style collapse, and all as part of a much wider strategy of likewise isolating and containing a rising China.

In a 2019 RAND Corporation paper literally titled, “Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground,” in its table of contents included both “geopolitical measures,” like “provide lethal aid to Ukraine” to trigger the now ongoing proxy war with Russia, and “economic emasures” including “hinder petroleum exports” and “reduce natural gas exports and hinder pipeline expansions.”

Very clearly these policies have been implemented for years under the Obama, Trump, Biden, and now second Trump administrations and include, first sanctions targeting the construction of Nord Stream 2 and eventually its destruction, as well as sanctions placed on Russian energy production and exports from 2014 onward. The more recent physical attacks on Russian energy production inside Russian territory with the aid of US intelligence and now strikes on tankers used to transport Russian energy exports abroad represents an escalation of these long-stated US objectives.

Not only do these attacks have an impact on Russia’s economy regardless of whether this impact meets US expectations, it also creates a dilemma for another nation targeted by US encroachment, encirclement, and containment - Russia’s close partner, China.

A 2018 US Naval War College Review paper, “A Maritime Oil Blockade Against China,” would explicitly lay out a strategy to blockade China, noting the obstacles impeding any attempt by the US to do so when the paper was written. An array of proposals were made in order to remove these obstacles - proposals that have since begun implementation including the reconfiguration of the US Marine Corps into an Asia-Pacific anti-shipping force enabling the US to establish chokepoints depicted in a map included in the 2018 paper.

The paper also discussed land routes China was creating through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to bypass these maritime chokepoints and the necessity to pressure nations hosting BRI infrastructure to close it down during a US-Chinese conflict or face US military strikes to physically destroy it. However, long before any open US-Chinese conflict has begun, the US has already conducted strikes-by-proxy on BRI infrastructure, particularly in Pakistan and Myanmar, through US-backed militants.

The paper also noted the significance of Russia’s and China’s shared land border and the already large supply of energy exports Russia was sending China in 2018 and how these exports would only expand over time. The paper made it clear that even with a US maritime blockade imposed on China and the physical destruction of BRI infrastructure, Russian energy exports to China may be enough to allow China to endure.

The implications were clear, in order to successfully and fully blockade China and deliver a crippling blow to its economy and thus its continued rise, not only would the US need to continue preparing for a maritime blockade and the targeting of BRI infrastructure, it would also need to degrade Russia’s ability to supply China with energy.

Now, just as the US is using armed proxies to strike at Chinese BRI infrastructure, the US is using Ukraine to carry out an expanding armed campaign against both Russian energy production within its borders, and Russian energy exports around the globe.

The 2018 paper, far from an obscure, random brainstorm, reflects US policy both past and present. Just as the 2018 paper linked Russia to US efforts to contain China, current US “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth has linked the ongoing US proxy war on Russia to US efforts to contain China and the urgent necessity of a “division of labor” with which Washington’s European proxies continue “extending Russia” in Ukraine while the US continues its expanding strategy of encircling and containing China in the Asia-Pacific.

Not only does the US strategy of attacking and degrading Russian energy production and exports serve its stated objective of “extending Russia,” it is also a prerequisite for Washington’s stated objective of containing a rising China. The nascent blockade the US is incrementally imposing on Russia will also serve as a “beta-test” for likewise imposing a blockade on China.

Conversely, Russia and China’s ability to counter this US strategy will determine not just the viability of America’s proxy war on Russia in Eastern Europe, but that of its growing confrontation with China in the Asia-Pacific.

Russia’s and China’s Deterrence Deficit

The US’ ability to impose such dilemmas on both Russia and China through proxies affords it the illusion of plausible deniability - preventing Russia and China from retaliating directly and instead forcing both nations to retaliate against US proxies the US itself sees as fully disposable.

Following attacks on Russian energy production and exports, Russia has threatened to, in turn, blockade Ukraine. While this will have devastating consequences for Ukraine itself, it will do little to deter the United States which devised this strategy, enables Ukraine to conduct these attacks, and even directs the attacks itself.

Unless Russia and China can devise a means to actually deter the US itself from its strategy of waging war by proxy (or prevent the US from politically capturing nations and using them as proxies in the first place), the US will continue to inflict damage on both Russia and China, at little to no cost to itself.

Alternatively, Russia and China can continue building up their military and economic capabilities faster than the US can degrade or destroy them, preventing the US from ever successfully blockading and strangling either nation socioeconomically, while continuing to invest in and build up a multipolar alternative to US unipolar hegemony.

Only time will tell whether or not Russia and China fully understand both the actual objectives of US foreign policy and the means by which to defend against and overcome it. The future of not only Russia and China hangs in the balance - but also that of all other nations - from those used as proxies by the US, to those the US seeks to target or use next in its global pursuit of primacy.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.

New US “Peace” Proposal is “Minsk 3.0” Repackaged (Yet Again)

2025-12-18T03:59:00.000-08:00

November 28, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - The US has once again proposed what it calls a “peace plan” amid its own ongoing proxy war with Russia in Ukraine.

The contents of the proposal are irrelevant. The US does not seek peace in general, and certainly not with Russia specifically. Instead, and what previous proposals likewise represented, this is an attempt to freeze the ongoing conflict, rebuild Ukraine’s armed forces - and if possible - move Western troops into Ukraine itself to create a bufferzone possibly forcing advancing Russian forces to stop.

Beyond mere speculation, this is what US Secretary of Defense (now “Secretary of War”) Pete Hegseth laid out himself in a public directive delivered to Europe in Brussels in February of this year.

Despite Secretary Hegseth going out of his way to insist, “this must not be Minsk 3.0,” the directive not only explicitly lays out a “Minsk 3.0” framework complete with freezing the ongoing conflict (not ending it), “doubling down” and “re-committing” to Ukraine’s “security needs,” thus rebuilding Ukraine’s armed forces, it actually exceeded it with an additional Syria-style bufferzone imposed by “European and non-European troops.”

Just as Minsk 1 and 2 prevented Ukraine’s armed forces from being overwhelmed and any actual peace being achieved, this new “Minsk 3.0” proposal seeks to freeze the conflict once again, specifically to prevent any genuine resolution from emerging.

With “European and non-European troops” placed into Ukraine, Russia’s ability to resume its Special Military Operation (SMO) once it becomes clear the US has once again violated its agreement with Russia, will be complicated by a now deeply entrenched NATO presence inside Ukraine - just as US and Turkish forces complicated the full retaking of Syria by Damascus and its Russian and Iranian allies, ultimately leading to the complete collapse of the Russian and Iranian-backed government in late 2024.

Even if the US were to propose a deal explicitly excluding any of these possibilities it must be remembered the original Minsk 1 and Minsk 2 agreements did as well and were simply, blatantly, and very deliberately violated by both the US and its Ukrainian and European proxies.

It must also be remembered that the US, far beyond just the conflict in Ukraine, has violated every single agreement, treaty, and understanding ever proposed to Russia - and before that - the Soviet Union. There exists a long trail of unilaterally upended arms treaties, memorandums, and agreements left by successive US administrations including by President Donald Trump himself including the now scrapped Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty and the Treaty on Open Skies.

The current Trump administration has in just under its first year in office alone, used proposed “peace deals” and “ceasefires” with Iran and Lebanon-based Hezbollah as cover for attempted and successful decapitation strikes by both US proxies (Israel), as well as strikes carried out by the US itself against Iran.

The Russian Response

It is impossible to say with certainty how the Kremlin interprets these proposals. It is almost impossible to conceive Russia’s leadership could be naive enough to believe anything being proposed by the US or even believing the US could in any conceivable way seek peace in the first place.

However, with Minsk 1 and 2 in hindsight and Russian President Vladimir Putin himself having agreed to both proposals despite later admitting they were “sheer deception” according to Russian state media, TASS, it raises questions as to why these agreements were ever accepted in the first place and whether or not Russia will accept future proposals by the West.

It could be that Russia was simply not ready in 2014-2015 to launch what would eventually shape into the 2022 SMO and felt the time Minsk 1 and 2 created for both sides could be better utilized by Russia and eventually place it in a stronger position than Ukraine and its US sponsors when the SMO was launched.

This latest proposal by the US must be understood by Russia as yet another obvious deception, with Secretary Hegseth admitting to the real objectives the US was and still obviously is working towards in regards to encircling and containing both Russia and its Chinese allies.

Agreeing to it would only happen if Russia felt it required a pause itself and believed it could once again use the time a pause would afford it better than the US and its proxies. It would also have to believe it would be prepared to deal with any deployment of “European and non-European troops” to Ukraine in a manner more successful than it did in the now toppled and decimated Syrian Arab Republic.

Or, Russia may simply play along with each successive proposal while Russian forces continue their exponentially accelerating advance on the battlefield in Ukraine as Ukraine’s fighting capacity collapses.

By now, it should be abundantly clear that the US, regardless of its current presidential administration or the composition of the US Congress, is agreement incapable, and that nations faced by its decades-spanning global-spanning pursuit of primacy must balance strategies to defend against it with a means of avoiding a dangerous spiraling into escalation.

Making Real Sense of US Foreign Policy

For observers trying to make sense of successive US proposals, it would be useful to consider the various layers of US policy.

These layers include (1.) the most shallow, almost meaningless rhetoric, propaganda, and political theater, (2.) that of ongoing US military operations, posture, and preparations, (3.) corporate-financier policymaking taking place within the halls of well-established think tanks where papers are transformed into bills by teams of lawyers before being sent to Washington by lobbyists merely to be signed off on, and (4.) the deepest layers where principal motivations of maintaining US primacy over the globe and an urgent desire to confront and dismantle “collective internationalism” or “multipolrism” drive all other policies.

A focus on and analysis of the upper layer of rhetoric, propaganda, and political theater will consistently lead to confusion, disastrously failed predictions, and an overall general inability to understand US policy, motivations, and interests.

By diving deeper into these other, more relevant layers, the deliberate confusion created at the surface can be cut through, and a deep, fundamental understanding of US power, its actual intentions, methods, and motivations can be achieved.

It also equips those targeted by US policy with the best chance of formulating realistic strategies to defend themselves against both the deception that accompanies it, and the dangers of the treachery those deceptions are meant to distract away from.

Layer 1: Rhetoric, Propaganda, Political Theater

The US is only talking “peace” in the first place because of Russia’s objective success on the battlefield, just as conditions in 2014-2015 forced the US and its European proxies to talk “peace” ahead of the Minsk 1 and 2 agreements.

Otherwise, just as was the case in Syria in 2024 when an opportunity presented itself to overthrow the Syrian government and fully politically capture the Syrian Arab Republic, the US and its proxies would pursue an uncompromising policy seeking to inflict maximum cost to its designated adversaries.

In this first, superficial layer, the US performs with its proxies, including both Ukraine and the rest of Europe, a form of political theater meant to compartmentalize the means through which it will both shape disingenuous agreements with Russia regarding Ukraine, and the means by which it and its proxies will inevitably violate any agreement Russia accepts.

First and foremost among Washington’s intended violations will be the creation and implementation of a “European and non-European” force intending to enter into Ukraine. The theater of “disagreement” between the US and its Ukrainian and European proxies allows the US to propose and if possible implement a “peace deal,” while Ukraine and Europe can take responsibility for violating it, affording the US plausible deniability while still enjoying the benefits of a frozen conflict and a US-planned “European and non-European” force now standing between Russia and any potential restart of its SMO.

The US also performs this theater within its own political system. A proposal made by the “Trump administration” is automatically attacked by his supposed opponents in the Democratic Party, prompting Trump supporters to likewise automatically support the proposal regardless of its contents and its contradiction of the very promises made by US President Donald Trump during campaigning in 2024.

Even within the Trump administration itself this theater is performed. More “aggressive” members of President Trump’s cabinet take responsibility for both a proposal at odds with President Trump’s 2024 campaign promises, while more “reasonable” voices, like Vice President JD Vance, pretend to uphold those promises despite the administration's blatant violation of them, preserving at least some public support and hope despite the obviously opposite direction the Trump administration has headed in.

Layer 2: Operational Reality

Operational reality includes the actual actions of the United States in regards to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

The US in 2014 politically captured and now completely controls Ukraine politically, militarily, and economically.

The US, through its operational base in Wiesbaden, Germany, controls every aspect of the ongoing war, forming the very top of Ukraine’s armed forces’ chain of command, overseeing everything from devising high-level strategy, to selecting individual Russian targets on the battlefield and even deep within Russian territory itself.

The US, since 2014, has also taken over, rebuilt, and now directs every aspect of Ukraine’s intelligence capabilities, as the NY Times would reveal in its 2024 article, “The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin.”

The US still maintains tens of thousands of troops across Europe, overseeing US policy that includes militarizing NATO and even non-NATO members along Russia’s own borders in the same manner it did regarding Ukraine from 2014 onward, provoking this conflict in the first place.

All of this objectively continues regardless of the rhetoric, propaganda, and political theater taking place in the above layer, indicating much more accurately US intentions than any amount of political assurances, promises, or proposed agreements.

Layer 3: Corporate-Financier-Funded Policymaking

Deeper still are the policy papers laying out the strategy guiding Washington’s global operational reality, including its continued hostility, encroachment upon, and encirclement of Russia - again - regardless of its rhetoric, propaganda, political theater, or promises.

US operational realities regarding Russia specifically have been explicitly laid out in the 2019 RAND Corporation paper, “Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground,” which proposed the now ongoing US proxy war with Russia in Ukraine through, “Measure 1: Provide Lethal Aid to Ukraine,” noting it would:

Expanding U.S. assistance to Ukraine, including lethal military assistance, would likely increase the costs to Russia, in both blood and treasure, of holding the Donbass region. More Russian aid to the separatists and an additional Russian troop presence would likely be required, leading to larger expenditures, equipment losses, and Russian casualties. The latter could become quite controversial at home, as it did when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.

The paper also proposed pressuring Russia all along its periphery and even beyond its near-abroad with measures like, “promote regime change in Belarus,” “exploit tensions in the South Caucasus,” and even “reduce Russian influence in Central Asia,” and “increase support to the Syrian rebels.”

The paper also proposed economic measures including, “hinder petroleum exports,” “reduce natural gas exports and hinder pipeline expansions,” “impose sanctions,” and "enhance Russian brain drain,” all measures the US has since implemented and are still implementing - spanning the Obama, Trump, Biden, and now second Trump administrations.

Again, despite whatever these various administrations said publicly or promised Russia privately, policy papers like RAND Corporation’s “Extending Russia” constituted the actual blueprint driving US policy toward Russia regardless, manifesting itself in operational reality both past and present.

Worse still is the larger picture such policies targeting Russia fit into.

In a 2018 US Naval War College Review paper titled, “A Maritime Blockade Against China,” Russia is identified as a substantial obstacle against any successful containment and/or blockade of China primarily because of its large energy production capacity, its long, shared border with China, and ongoing construction of pipelines to supply this energy to China.

Even with a successful maritime blockade of China along with the targeting and destruction of China’s Belt and Road Initiative land routes, Russian energy exports to China would still make a successful US blockade difficult. Thus, far beyond long-standing policies of containing Russia itself, doing so fits in with a much more urgent and deeply-desired policy of containing China.

Secretary Hegseth even mentioned the urgency with which the US must pivot to contain China in his February directive to Europe earlier this year.

Even if Russia were to concede entirely to the US in all aspects regarding Ukraine, unless it likewise conceded in terms of cutting off or even adopting a hostile posture toward China, the US would continue its encroachment upon Russia’s periphery far beyond just Ukraine.

The RAND Corporation and other policy think tanks, hardly independent institutions, are instead funded and directed by corporations and financial institutions representing the most powerful, influential interests from across the collective West including arms manufacturers, big-oil, the pharmaceutical industry, big-tech, banks, equity firms, and more. This leads to a deeper layer still.

Layer 4: Principal Corporate-Financier Objectives

If these policy think tanks are driven by large corporate-financier interests, what drives these interests?

The answer is the perpetual pursuit of power and profit, which is institutionalized by principles like “shareholder primacy,” demanding the maximization of shareholder wealth. An infinite desire for profit and power within a finite or even sometimes shrinking population and likewise finite markets means eliminating any and all competition - not only within the United States itself through a process of consolidation and monopoly, but all across the entire planet - demanding access and monopolies over the populations and market shares of all nations on planet earth - including Russia.

The ultimate expression of these principles and their impact on Russia took place during the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the US-European plundering of the nascent Russian Federation. Drives to dismantle purpose-driven state enterprises and “privatize” them before stripping and selling them off for profit rendered millions impoverished and with dim prospects.

The promises of “free market capitalism” never availed themselves to the Russian public, just as they have failed to avail themselves to others across the former Soviet Union’s members “warmed” by the glow of Western capitalism for decades since.

It was the current political interests now running Russia including President Putin and his political allies who reestablished Russian sovereignty, reestablished policies, institutions, and industry shifting priorities back closer to purpose over profit, that has led to the subsequent reemergence of the Russian Federation into the global power it is today.

From Wall Street and Washington’s perspective, this is an obstacle to their principal objectives of pursuing power and profit and thus why Russia (along with many other nations constituting the multipolar world - especially China) has been designated an “adversary” and has been set upon by decades-spanning policies aimed and encroaching upon, encircling, and ultimately up-ending them just as the Soviet Union had been and other nations like Syria, Libya, Iraq, and most recently Nepal have been much more recently.

Until these principal objectives change (and they haven’t), the policy they drive the creation of will not, nor will the operational realities of these policies being implemented.

The only thing that will change will be the rhetoric, propaganda, and political theater used to distract and disarm both the global public and decisionmakers around the world from this reality to afford additional space, time, and opportunity for their further advancement.

A full analysis of US foreign policy must extend through all of these layers, consistently building understanding upon the first principles of how US foreign policy is actually created and why. Focusing on the top-most superficial lawyer of rhetoric, propaganda, and political theater gives no more understanding of geopolitical realities than studying the waves in an ocean reveals all the many millions of organisms, currents, and features laying far below them.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Al Qaeda in the White House and its Implications Far Beyond it

2025-12-18T03:56:00.000-08:00

November 18, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - In perhaps 20 years’ time, the Western media will reflect back on the radical shifts in narratives surrounding the head of Al Qaeda in Syria, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani now rebranded and presented as “Ahmed al-Sharaa,” who recently visited the White House and posed for pictures side-by-side an eagerly grinning US President Donald Trump.

Al-Jonali’s rebranding follows that of the terrorist organization he nominally heads, most recently referred to as “Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham” (HTS) but previously known as Jabhat al-Nusra, a notorious terrorist organization heading the US-engineered proxy war against the government, military, and people of the now decimated and divided Syrian Arab Republic.

Side-by-side with the likewise US-sponsored “Islamic State” (ISIS), HTS openly documented its war crimes spanning the 2011-2024 period the US proxy war unfolded.

By 2025, however, like al-Jolani himself, the terrorist organization he headed previously featured on the US State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, was inexplicably removed.

The Washington Post in its recent article, “Syrian president meets with Trump in White House after unlikely ascent,” depicts the rise of al-Jolani as “improbable,” noting his journey from “al-Qaeda to the West Wing.”

In reality, this was an entirely probable, even inevitable outcome - considering the history of US state sponsorship of terrorism, al-Qaeda in particular, and the circular pattern depicting the terrorist front as both freedom fighters and villains spanning decades of US proxy wars and outright wars of aggression from Afghanistan in the 1980s to Syria today.

As in the Past, So Too in the Present…

Short memories are shocked by recent developments, but considering the trajectory of another infamous al-Qaeda leader, Osama Bin Laden, recent developments seem as natural as the sun rising and setting daily.

In 2013, Business Insider published an article reflecting this trajectory. Titled, “This Mind-Boggling Profile Of Osama Bin Laden Came Out Exactly 20 Years Ago Today,” would exclaim:

This article from Dec. 6, 1993, by Robert Fisk of The Independent with the title "Anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road to peace" is stunning to consider 20 years later.

Osama bin Laden, fresh off the US-backed mujahedin's victory over Russia in 1989, flew his men, materials, and money down to Sudan, ostensibly to start public works projects.

It then notes:

The piece is fascinating because it is a positive profile of a man who would become a global terrorist mastermind.

Al-Jolani’s career mirrors that of Osama Bin Laden. Just as a mirrored reflection shows a similar but reverse reflection - al-Jonali has gone from a “terrorist mastermind” with a 10 million USD bounty on his head the US only recently withdrew, to an open ally in America’s continued war for primacy over the Middle East and beyond.

Just as Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda were originally created and sponsored by the United States government to wage proxy war against its designated adversaries including the Soviet Union (later, against the Russian Federation), China (particularly in Xinjiang), and their partners, al-Jolani and al-Qaeda today (along with ISIS and other extremist organizations) have been and will continue to be used to wage proxy war or serve as a pretext for actual war against Russia, China, and other nations investing in a multipolar future.

Bigger Picture: Syria as an Epicenter for Exporting US-Sponsored Terrorism

It is abundantly clear the US will continue backing al-Jolani and the terrorist network now posing as Syria’s new “armed forces” - not to defend Syria - but to continue the fight against US-targeted nations and organizations across the region including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, and even Iran itself.

The US will also seek to export Syrian-based extremism far beyond the region, including all along Russia’s and especially China’s peripheries.

Among al-Jolani’s extremist forces includes the so-called, “Turkestan Islamic Party” (TIP) also known as the “East Turkestan Islamic Movement” (ETIM).

TIP/ETIM was disingenuously removed from the US Foreign Terrorist Organizations list in 2020 specifically to provide it with wider and more overt support.

DW in its article titled, “US removes China-condemned group from terror list,” would claim TIP/ETIM was removed as a terrorist organization by the US government, “because, for more than a decade, there has been no credible evidence that ETIM continues to exist.”

This, however, is untrue. The US Department of Defense (now "Department of War”) admitted to having carried out airstrikes against the group in Afghanistan only 2 years prior to its delisting, NBC News would report. This is just one of many instances of US narratives and who it designates as “terrorists” changes based solely on what advances US foreign policy, not any sort of actual metric based on national or international security.

Now, the organization the US government claims no longer exists, is in Syria and constitutes an entire military unit alongside al-Jolani’s HTS, having aided in the overthrow of the Syrian government late last year. Since then, it has announced ambitions to expand its operations far beyond Syria.

The London Telegraph in a December 13, 2024 article titled, “Uyghur fighters in Syria vow to come for China next,” claims “a Uyghur militant group that helped to topple Bashar-al Assad has vowed to take the fight to China.”

The ability to do so - “take the fight to China” - is only possible with continued US government backing including training, weapons, and logistics via regional proxies including Turkey, who prepared and incorporated the militants in the invasion force that toppled Syria’s government in the first place.

The US is also clearly rehabilitating the terrorist organization, its HTS partners, and HTS’ leader, al-Jolani himself - both enabling greater, more open support from the US for these terrorist attacks and enabling the US to condemn any measures China and its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) partners attempt to take to stop it.

Short of fighting in China itself, the Telegraph in an accompanying video would note, “can TIP take the fight to China, home to the world’s largest military with 2 million active troops? It’s easier said than done. Still, TIP could target Chinese projects or embassies abroad.”

This fits into an already ongoing US-sponsored campaign of targeting Chinese BRI projects across Eurasia including in Baluchistan, Pakistan and Myanmar.

An army of well-trained, well-armed experienced terrorists fresh from the battlefield in Syria and now being recognized and more openly backed by the US directly, are poised to significantly escalate what is already a US war on China by proxy along the length of Beijing’s BRI and ultimately aimed at China itself.

This in turn fits into a long-standing US global policy of eliminating all rivals through persuasion, coercion, sanctions, US-sponsored sedition, terrorism, and military confrontation – by proxy and directly.

The fall of Syria and other nations like it contribute toward a more dangerous world where larger and more stable nations may be targeted, undermined, and toppled next.

Going Beyond Counter-Terrorism to Preempt US Aggression

Among the most effective and so far unanswered weapons the United States government wields is its dominion over global information space and its global-spanning network of political interference and capture, centered around the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and adjacent government and corporate-funded foundations.

Russian and Chinese military and economic power continues to rise, and both nations have successfully protected their respective information spaces from US interference or capture. However, the US continues, unopposed, undermining nations along both Russia and China’s peripheries, politically capturing nations and transforming them into political and even military battering rams against both targeted nations.

Syria’s collapse in the first place began through a decades-spanning process of politically undermining Syria’s previous government and through the US-sponsored rise of opposition groups including armed terrorist organizations, funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) up until the 1980s when the NED assumed many of the CIA’s regime change roles.

While China may have successfully uprooted US-sponsored extremism in Xinjiang, the US continues arming, backing, and promoting these same extremists out of China’s reach in recently decimated Syria and even closer to home in neighboring Pakistan and Myanmar.

Through Washington’s control over information space outside of China, and the political capture and control this grants the US, these terrorists are being created, backed, positioned inside targeted or captured nations, and then presented as “freedom fighters” in much the same way the US has presented HTS, and decades before, the “anti-Soviet warrior,” Osama Bin Laden.

Russia and China aid partner nations in the defense of their traditional national security domains – air, land, and sea – but have failed to export their own domestic success in securing a 21st century national security domain – information space.

Should Russia and China succeed in doing this, Washington will be denied one of its last and most effective weapons used to sustain global hegemony, greatly reducing or even eliminating the US’ ability to build armies of global-spanning terrorists upending peace and stability, and making multipolarism inevitable rather than a mere possibility.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.

US Plans for China Blockade Continue Taking Shape

2025-12-18T03:54:00.000-08:00

November 10, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - In 2018, the US Naval War College Review published a paper titled, “A Maritime Oil Blockade Against China – Tactically Tempting But Strategically Flawed.” It was only one of many over preceding years discussing the details of implementing a maritime blockade as part of a larger encirclement and containment strategy of China.

At first glance the paper looks like US policy thinking considered, then moved past the idea of blockading China. Instead, the paper merely listed a number of obstacles impeding such a strategy in 2018 - obstacles that would need to be removed if such a strategy were to be viable in the near or intermediate future - and obstacles US policymakers have been removing ever since.

More contemporary papers published, including those among the pages of the US Naval Institute (here and here), have updated and refined not just an emerging strategy to theoretically confront and contain China, but a plan of action taking tangible shape.

Cold War Continuity of Agenda

Throughout the Cold War and ever since its conclusion the US’ singular foreign policy objective has been to maintain American hegemony over the globe established at the end of the World Wars. A 1992 New York Times article titled “U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring no Rivals Develop” made it clear the US would actively prevent the emergence of any nation or groups of nations from contesting American primacy worldwide.

In recent years this has included preventing the reemergence of Russia as well as the rise of China. It also involves surrounding both nations with arcs of chaos and/or confrontation - either through the destruction of neighboring countries through political subversion, or the capture of these nations by the US and their transformation into battering rams to be used against both nations.

Ukraine is an extreme example of this policy in action. The US is also transforming both the Philippines and the Chinese island province of Taiwan into similar proxies vis-a-vis China.

Beyond this - the US seeks to prevent the majority of nations currently outside US dominion from joining with and contributing to the multipolar world order proposed by nations like Russia and China.

This strategy of coercion, destabilization, political capture, as well as proxy war and outright war has been used to target both Russia and China directly, their neighbors, and a growing list of nations far beyond their near abroad.

Strengths and Weaknesses of American Primacy

Enabling this strategy is America’s global-spanning military presence facilitated by its “alliance network.” This network of obedient client regimes both hosts US military forces and serves as an extension of US military, economic, and increasingly military industrial power. US “allies” often pursue US geopolitical objectives at their own expense.

Again, an explicit example of this is Ukraine which is locked in proxy war with Russia, threatening its own self-preservation as a means of - as US policymakers described in a 2019 RAND Corporation paper - “extending Russia.”

While conflicts like that unfolding in Ukraine or the US-backed military build-up in the Philippines or on Taiwan has exposed a critical weakness of the United States - its lagging military industrial capacity vis-a-vis either Russia or China - let alone both nations - the US has demonstrated the ability to compensate through geopolitical agility the multipolar world is struggling to address.

This includes the ability of the US to mire a targeted nation in conflict in one location while moving resources across its global-spanning military-logistical networks toward pressure points in other locations, overextending the targeted nation and achieving success in at least one of the multiple pressure points targeted.The US successfully did this through its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine which tied Russia up sufficiently for the US to finally succeed in the overthrow of the Syrian government where Russian forces had previously thwarted US-sponsored proxy war and regime change.

It also includes the ability of the US to target partner or potential partner nations of Russia and China through economic, political, or even military means in ways Russia and China are unable to defend against - including through political subversion facilitated through America's near monopoly over global information space.

These advantages the US still possesses also make potential maritime blockades very difficult for Russia and China to defend against.

Russian Energy Shipments as a Beta-Test for Blockading China

France recently announced seizing a ship accused of being part of Russia’s “ghost” or “shadow” fleet - ships refusing to heed unilateral sanctions placed by the US and its client states on Russian energy shipments.

This was just one of several first steps toward what may materialize into a wider and more aggressive interdiction or blockade of Russian energy shipments. This may also be a beta-test for implementing a long-desired maritime blockade on China.

A rapid, full-scale blockade would cause energy prices to spike and could blowback to the US as negative economic consequences. By incrementally pressuring Russian energy shipments, the US can slowly adjust energy markets in an incremental manner to cushion a sudden shock the public would immediately notice and potentially react to.

Russia and the rest of the multipolar world’s response to this increasingly aggressive targeting of maritime shipping may determine whether or not the US adopts the strategy of maritime blockades on a wider scale.

Setting the Stage for a Blockade of China Has Already Begun

The 2018 US Naval War College Review paper lays out the realities of a potential blockade against China in 2018, noting the various opportunities and risks associated with such a strategy.

The paper notes that, “China’s reliance on seaborne oil supplies has risen steadily over the past decade and could rise further as domestic production declines,” and that, “the imported oil passes overwhelmingly through the Strait of Malacca and a handful of other passages that the U.S. Navy could seal off effectively.”

It also talks extensively about a “distant blockade,” it says would be “imposed far from the Chinese coast, reducing the threat to U.S. forces from Chinese A2/AD systems.”

This recognizes China’s growing military capabilities - military capabilities US policymakers admit are being developed and deployed to defend China, not project military power abroad - a fact US policymakers openly seek to exploit through America’s existing, global-spanning network of military power projection.

The paper includes a map marking various maritime chokepoints the US Navy then and today is capable of closing off beyond the reach of Chinese military power, backed by the growing US military footprint in the region, particularly across the Philippines, Japan (as well as its island province of Okinawa), as well as the Chinese island province of Taiwan itself.

It also mentions ongoing efforts by China to establish land routes to circumvent these maritime chokepoints including the Myanmar-China oil pipeline, claiming:

A distant blockade also would need to interdict the Myanmar–China oil pipeline, which eventually could move as much as 440 kbd of crude oil from Kyaukpyu in coastal Myanmar to Yunnan Province in southwest China. Preventing tankers from off-loading at the Kyaukpyu terminal would require few, if any, naval platforms to remain on-site. The area could be declared an exclusion zone for the duration of a conflict, and if the Myanmar authorities failed to comply the facility could be disabled via air strikes, aerial mining, or other kinetic action. In short, U.S. forces likely would be able to neutralize rapidly China’s overland routes for seaborne oil imports to avoid the Strait of Malacca and other choke points farther east and prevent them from diverting forces needed to seal other maritime ingress routes.

Far from just theoretical war planning, this Myanmar-China oil pipeline has since been targeted by US-backed militants operating inside Myanmar, fighting the central government and using the conflict as cover to strike at, compromise, and even destroy Chinese investments across the Southeast Asian country.

In February 2022, US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funded opposition media organization, The Irrawaddy, reported in its article, “China-Backed Pipeline Facility Damaged in Myanmar Resistance Attack,” that:

An off-take station of the China-backed oil and gas pipelines was damaged when a local resistance group attacked regime forces guarding the facility in Mandalay Region…

And that:

Anti-Chinese sentiment swelled in Myanmar following the military coup last February, with many people believing Beijing had a hand in the takeover. At that time, there were calls for a boycott of Chinese products, along with calls to blow up the pipelines if China refused to condemn the regime.

The calls prompted China to urge the regime to increase security for the pipelines. Since March last year, the regime has assigned extra forces to protect them.

Likewise, the US has been backing extremists in southwest Pakistan to target the Chinese-built China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) over the course of several years spanning the Obama, first Trump, Biden, and now second Trump administrations (including in 2021, 2024, and 2025).

In other nations, like the Southeast Asian Kingdom of Thailand, US-sponsored opposition leaders like billionaire Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit have openly campaigned to stop Chinese infrastructure projects like high-speed rail lines as part of slowing down, stopping, or even reversing progress for China’s BRI network and thus eliminating the BRI as an alternative to circumvent a US-imposed maritime blockade on Chinese shipping.

The 2018 paper also identifies Russia as a primary alternative source for Chinese energy imports - which is one of the reasons the US is waging its ongoing proxy war against Russia through Ukraine and why the US is overseeing an expanding campaign to attack and destroy Russian refineries and other forms of energy infrastructure across Russia.

In other words, while US policymakers envisioned an opportunity for using US military power to attack and dismantle China’s Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure amid a US-Chinese conflict and other measures to cut China off from crucial energy imports including from Russia, since then, the US has used armed extremists it funds and backs inside nations hosting Chinese BRI projects to begin attacking these projects before any direct US-Chinese conflict commences - together with a dangerously large proxy war being fought against China’s ally, Russia, to complicate or cut off significant alternative energy imports.

The paper concludes that any blockade should not be seen as a single, independent solution to eliminating an adversary and that the US must also continue building up the forces necessary to wage war against China as well.

Since the paper was published, the US has pursued both continued preparations for a maritime blockade of China itself, as well as build up a number of regional proxies to wage war against China as the US wages proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, and increasingly, through the rest of Europe.

While this reality continues to take shape, political rhetoric in Washington attempts to disarm China and its allies from taking action to prepare for the inevitable confrontation the US is preparing for by creating the impression Washington seeks to “retreat” from the “Indo-Pacific” region to defend the “homeland” in the Western Hemisphere.

While some in the public and even across the alternative media have fallen for this rhetoric, it is unlikely anyone in Beijing, Moscow, or other BRICS capitals could be so naive - especially as these empty words from Washington are overshadowed by the US’ continued physical militarization of China’s periphery, continued regime change operations along China’s borders - most recently in Nepal - and the continued US proxy war against Russia aimed specifically at crippling its energy production capabilities - a key prerequisite for a successful maritime blockade of China.

To understand Washington's strategy toward China, one should not look to the political rhetoric of "retreat" or "homeland defense" in the Western Hemisphere, but rather to the tangible actions taking place across the Asia-Pacific and beyond - the meticulous encirclement of China's periphery, the sustained attacks on its critical overland energy and trade links (BRI/CPEC), the calculated incapacitation of Russia as a potential energy supplier, and the establishment of local proxy forces (the Philippines, Japan, separatists on Taiwan) prepared to wage war.

Far from an abstract or "flawed" concept relegated to think-tank papers, the maritime oil blockade - or wider general blockade against China is being incrementally prepared in real-time. By systematically removing the very obstacles noted in the 2018 Naval War College Review paper, the US is demonstrating a clear, unwavering commitment to a multi-layered strategy of containment, coercion, and confrontation designed not just to prepare for conflict, but to make that conflict both inevitable and successful for the singular goal of maintaining global American hegemony.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.

Future Global Order Pivots on Ukraine Proxy War

2025-11-09T03:08:00.000-08:00

October 21, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - Russian forces in recent weeks have been increasingly encircling the cities of Pokrovsk in central Donetsk while approaching Lyman and Siversk further to the north. Looking at various live mapping projects tracking the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, nascent pincers appear to be emerging in what some analysts believe could be a large-scale encirclement of what remains of Ukraine’s “fortress belt” in the Donbass region.

Comprising a number of heavily-defended built-up urban centers from Kostiantynovka and extending northward toward Kramatorsk and Slovyansk closer to Lyman, Ukraine’s remaining fortress belt likely comprises thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of Ukrainian forces. Their encirclement by Russian forces would deal a catastrophic defeat to Ukraine and its US sponsors and signify the achievement of a major Russian objective amid its ongoing Special Military Operation (SMO) - the full capture of the Donbass region.

Over the next weeks and months, the fate of this military operation will be decided, both on the battlefield in the Donbass region, far beyond it in the strategic depths of both Ukraine and Russia, as well as geopolitically worldwide.

Realities of a Major Donbass “Encirclement”

While many may imagine a World War 2-style physical encirclement of Ukraine’s fortress belt by rolling columns of Russian armored and infantry units, the encirclement will much more likely take the form of an operational, rather than physical envelopment.

Russian ground forces will continue their incremental advance along the line of contact, approaching Ukrainian-held towns and cities, besieging them, and eventually taking them, ensuring salients that emerge are well-protected from Ukrainian-counter attack as well as from the sort of operational envelopment Russia itself has been and seeks to continue to impose on Ukrainian forces.

Instead, Russian long-range warfare capabilities and drone warfare in particular - which has evolved rapidly in terms of both quality and quantity - will be able to target Ukraine’s line of communications along the entire rear of its remaining fortress belt. With the inevitable fall of Pokrovsk to Russian forces in central Donetsk and Russian forces approaching Lyman in the north, Russian FPV (first-person view) and fiber optic drones will be in range of virtually everything in between.

The encirclement of Pokrovsk and the emerging salient extending north reaching almost directly west of Kostiantynovka has already compromised logistics for Kostiantynovka itself. As Russian forces consolidate control in this region, drone operations targeting logistics for Kramatorsk and Slavyansk will become increasingly effective together with Russian forces doing likewise while moving from north to south near Lyman and Siversk.

The closer these pincers get to one another, the more effective operational encirclement will become and the more precarious Ukrainian positions will become in between them.

Just as Pokrovsk itself does not require complete physical encirclement by Russian forces to severely compromise Ukrainian logistics and thus undermine defensive positions inside the city, Russia does not necessarily need to physically encircle the Kramatorsk-Slavyansk section of Ukraine’s fortress belt to severely compromise both logistics for it and military positions within it.

In some ways, an operational encirclement would be preferable to a physical envelopment.

Because Russia is fighting what is essentially a war of attrition seeking to demilitarize Ukraine rather than focusing on the rapid seizure of territory, it seeks to force Ukraine to commit huge amounts of reserves to Pokrovsk and elsewhere along the fortress belt to meet well-established Russian military positions and long-range fires.

A rapid Russian advance toward the Dnieper River or beyond, would be costly and would afford what remains of Ukraine’s forces the ability to operate closer and closer to their own base of material support along its border with NATO. Instead, Ukraine is forced to continuously send troops and material to the current line of contact where Russia is destroying it.

Western Actions On and Beyond the Battlefield

The Western media now accepts that Russia is both fighting and decisively winning this war of attrition and that there is little the US and its European client states can do to stop it - at least in terms of continued military support for Ukrainian forces.

This is why the US and Europe have insisted on a ceasefire and what would essentially be a “Minsk 3.0” freeze during which the collective West would expand its own military industrial production, and just like during the first Minsk agreements, rebuild Ukraine’s armed forces for the next round of hostilities.

Russia’s rejection of a ceasefire and continued successful military operation inside Ukraine has forced the US to both escalate on the battlefield and turn toward means beyond the battlefield in Ukraine to force a freeze or, short of that, raise the cost as high as possible for Russia to continue its SMO.

One option has been the threat of sending Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine. Not a war-winning capability in and of itself, its introduction would once again incrementally increase the cost of continuing the conflict for Russia forcing it to reorganize its air defenses to defend deeper inside Russian territory and possibly slowing down the progress of operations along the front line. The missiles could also perhaps strike at and inflict larger-scale damage on Russian military industrial and energy production infrastructure than ongoing US-directed drone and missile strikes already have.

Together with this escalation on the battlefield, the US has also threatened a range of sanctions and tariffs aimed both at Russia itself as well as at its closest trading partners, especially India and China.

The threats are aimed at forcing India or China (ideally both) to choose access to US markets and its US dollar-dominated global financial system over trade with Russia, thus isolating Russia and making it infinitely more difficult for Russia to continue its military operations in Ukraine. Should India and China cave to US demands and Russia find itself isolated or even collapse economically and politically, this would further isolate both India and China themselves - a key component of US strategic sequencing and its ultimate objective of preventing all rivals (ally or adversary) from rising to prominence.

Should India and China stand firm, the US imposed sanctions and tariffs would do short-term damage to both India and China but also to the US itself. Washington’s significant escalation in terms of sweeping sanctions and tariffs potentially accelerates the long-term trend toward a multipolar economic order. T

The immediate challenge to nations like India and China - being cut off from the US dollar and Western markets - forces a rapid diversification of trade and financial settlement systems which has already been ongoing since the inception of BRICS. This additional US strategic pressure, intended to inflict short-term pain on Russia, inadvertently incentivizes and hastens the development of non-Western alternatives, including to the US dollar and US-dominated payment systems.

The battle for Ukraine's fortress belt is thus a microcosm of the larger US proxy war in Ukraine against Russia - a slow, grinding military operation that dictates massive geopolitical consequences. The outcome of this battle will likely cement the overall outcome of the Ukraine conflict itself. More broadly, the US response, pivoting from military containment to economic warfare against Russia’s global partners, confirms that this conflict has always been just one part of a much larger US strategy toward its ultimate aim of eliminating rivals and maintaining primacy worldwide.

The coming months will be pivotal not just in terms of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, but in terms of the global order that emerges as part of the larger conflict the US is fighting against not just Russia but the entire multipolar world.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.

US Threatens Russia with Tomahawk Cruise Missiles Amid Latest Escalation

2025-11-09T03:06:00.000-08:00

October 17, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - US President Donald Trump in recent weeks has repeatedly mentioned the possibility of sending long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine, following a now-revealed US-directed drone campaign targeting Russian energy production deep inside Russian borders, all after US attempts to deceive Russia into a “Minsk 3.0” freeze has categorically failed.

The predictable escalation confirms for Russia the necessity of continuing military operations into the near and intermediate future to end the conflict on the battlefield in Ukraine rather than at the negotiation table.

The introduction of Tomahawk cruise missiles will constitute a further escalation amid a war current US President Trump both accused previous US President Joe Biden of unnecessarily starting and had campaigned for office in the first place by promising to end within “24 hours.”

It is also a war the US continues escalating current US Secretary of State Marco Rubio himself has described as a US proxy war fought against Russia through Ukraine.

While Russia has reacted to each US provocation with patience and persistence in pursuit of its national security objectives, the Tomahawk cruise missile represents another step closer to provoking direct conflict between Russia and either Europe and/or the US itself.

Predictable Escalation Amid Predictable Continuity of Agenda

Despite claims of wanting to end the conflict, the Trump administration had no intention of ever doing so, and simply sought to freeze it as it prioritized containing China before circling back to restart hostilities with Russia once Ukraine’s battered armed forces were reconstituted and Western military industrial production sufficiently ramped up.

Even before the 2024 election, then US Vice President nominee JD Vance simply prioritized war with China over proxy war with Russia and sought the creation of a “heavily fortified demilitarized zone” at the existing line of contact - not actually resolving the conflict - so the US could divert resources toward confrontation with China.

Following the 2024 US presidential election, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in a February directive delivered to Europe in Brussels told European nations to double down on both military industrial production and arms shipments to Ukraine as well as prepare European and non-European troops to enter into Ukraine to enforce what was essentially a “Minsk 3.0” freeze to the conflict despite explicitly claiming the directive “must not be Minsk 3.0.”

Secretary Hegseth also mentioned Russian energy production and its role in funding the “Russian war machine,” claiming:

To further enable effective diplomacy and drive down energy prices that fund the Russian war machine, President Trump is unleashing American energy production and encouraging other nations to do the same. Lower energy prices coupled with more effective enforcement of energy sanctions will help bring Russia to the table.

While Secretary Hegseth publicly mentioned American energy production and sanctions as means to lower energy prices and target Russian energy production, the Financial Times has since revealed that Ukrainian drones striking at Russian energy production to further this stated US policy objective were overseen by the US itself and was enabled by US intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) without which such drone strikes would not be possible.

While the FT article confirmed the US’ role in drone strikes deep inside Russia, it was by no means a revelation.

The New York Times last year admitted that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) deployed its officers to Ukraine directly after the US overthrew the elected government in 2014. Since then, it has built a network of bases, trained entire units of Ukrainian intelligence agents, and has directed Ukrainian intelligence operations - including throughout the Russian Special Military Operation (SMO) beginning in 2022.

Since the CIA oversees Ukrainian intelligence units like the SBU involved in drone strikes on Russia, utilizing US ISR,the US is all but carrying out these strikes itself.

This means that as US President Trump invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to the US state of Alaska in August for “peace talks,” the Trump administration had already initiated a deep strike drone campaign targeting Russian energy production in an attempt to cripple both Russia’s energy industry and Russia’s economy, in the hopes of forcing Moscow to concede to a ceasefire under a defacto “Minsk 3.0” framework.

Having failed to achieve this, the US is continuing escalations further, including with the threat of deploying Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine to extend the range and impact of ongoing US-directed deep strikes into Russia together with growing threats to the maritime shipments of Russian energy exports.

The Tomahawk: Dangerous but Not Decisive

The Tomahawk cruise missile, with a range of up to 2,500 km, could strike targets well beyond Moscow itself, including as far as the legendary Uralvagonzavod tank factory in Russia’s city of Nizhny Tagil. It also places a larger number of Russian energy production facilities at risk - and for facilities already within range of Ukrainian drone and missile strikes, the Tomahawk possesses a much larger warhead with greater destructive capacity which could deal out potentially greater damage to these facilities.

Before the first Trump administration withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 2019, the Tomahawk missile was launched from surface naval vessels and submarines and played pivotal roles in US wars of aggression from the Gulf War in the 1990s, the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s, and the US wars on Libya and Syria from 2011 onward.

Following the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the INF Treaty, development and deployment of ground-launched missile systems capable of firing the Tomahawk began, producing the Typhon system currently deployed by the US Army including in the Philippines aimed at China, as well as the Long Range Fires (LRF) Launcher developed for testing by the US Marines until last year when the US Marines abandoned it.

Citing difficulties in using the LRF Launcher in austere conditions US Marines would likely operate in on islands across the Asia-Pacific region, the US Marines adopted the Navy-Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System (NMESIS) launching the smaller, shorter-range Naval Strike Missile. However, the working LRF Launchers are now being considered by the US Army for testing as early as next year, and are likely capable of being sent to Ukraine as the most likely candidate for launching Tomahawks into Russia.

The LFR Launcher uses only one Mk 41 vertical launching system (VLS) cell per launcher (versus 4 cells for the Typhon launcher) and would require reloading after firing each missile. Possibly used together with other truck-mounted prototypes in the US military’s inventory, only a small handful of Tomahawk missiles could be fired from Ukraine into Russia at a time.

Ordinarily, well-protected targets would require large numbers of Tomahawk missiles as demonstrated in the 2017 US strike on Syria’s Al Shayrat airfield involving up to 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Because salvos on this scale launched from ground launchers in Ukraine are unachievable, the US would likely combine the use of Tomahawk missiles together with Western air-launched cruise missiles, drones, and decoys. These less-capable systems would be sent in waves ahead of the Tomahawk missiles in an attempt to saturate Russian air defenses before the Tomahawks themselves are launched.

Similar tactics have been used with limited success in conjunction with Western air-launched cruise missiles like the British Storm Shadow and French equivalent (SCALP).

Like many other weapon systems the West has transferred to Ukraine over the course of the SMO, small-scale deployments of the Tomahawk could be expanded by sending more missiles and more improved and more numerous ground launcher systems in the near future.

Among these may be replacements the US Army is already seeking out for its existing Typhon system. Naval News in its article, “Oshkosh Ground-Based Tomahawk Launcher Breaks Cover,” reports on the development of a much more mobile and autonomous ground launcher capable of carrying up to 4 Tomahawk cruise missiles versus the currently deployed and very cumbersome Typhon and the more mobile but limited LRF Launcher. The article doesn’t mention when these systems may be available, but manned variants of these trucks could be developed and tested within a year or two, with autonomous systems being rolled out later, with the LRF Launcher used in the interim.

The real bottleneck has been and will continue to be the annual production rate of US munitions with the Tomahawk cruise missile being no exception.

Reuters in a recent article noted that only about 55 to 90 Tomahawk missiles are produced per year, compared to estimates of Russia’s equivalent Kalibr cruise missile ranging from 300-360 a year together with hundreds of other types of cruise missiles and tens of thousands of long-range strike drones like the Geran-2. Another Reuters article from 2023 noted that Russia had - at that point - fired a total of 7,400 missiles and 3,700 drones into Ukraine since the beginning of the SMO in 2022.

Considering the effect of Russia’s missile and drone campaign on Ukraine and the much larger geographical size of Russia and the much larger scale of Russian industry and energy production, an equal or greater number of missiles and drones would be required to significantly affect Russia’s military industrial and energy production on a similar or greater scale.

Reports vary regarding the impact of the ongoing US-directed deep strikes on Russian energy production. The introduction of Tomahawk cruise missiles would likely increase this impact, but to what extent remains to be seen.

With or Without Tomahawks, Escalation Continues

Whether the US deploys Tomahawks to Ukraine or not, the US will continue escalating its proxy war with Russia. As US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth laid out in February of this year, the US is urging Europe to prepare to fill the void created by Ukraine’s incrementally collapsing fighting capacity.

While the US seeks to redirect its resources toward its growing confrontation with China in the Asia-Pacific, it continues to oversee its proxy war in Ukraine - the latest example being the long-range drone strike campaign targeting Russia’s energy production facilities.

While many analysts agree there is little likelihood Ukraine and its Western sponsors can turn the tide in this conflict, it should be noted that as early as 2019 in a RAND Corporation paper titled, "Extending Russia,” it was made clear Ukraine had little chance of winning in the first place.

The goal, as the title of the paper suggests, was simply “extending Russia” along a number of pressure points, Ukraine being only one. Since the SMO began in 2022, the US has taken advantage of Russia’s commitment in Ukraine to topple the Syrian government amid a US regime-change war fought there previously stalled by Russian military intervention. The collapse of Syria has been used to pave the way toward direct US-Israeli conflict with Iran - a Russian ally - who now finds itself precariously isolated in the Middle East as well.

The ongoing attacks on Russia’s energy sector ( including possible use of Tomahawk cruise missiles) will, on their own, not “win” the war with Russia, but will contribute to this larger strategy of “extending Russia” even further.

Washington will continue its strategy of overextending Russia and attempting to pick apart its interests along its near abroad through a division of labor and strategic sequencing. At the same time, Russia will attempt to outpace this US strategy by continuing to expand its military and industrial capabilities along with its coordinated response with allies like China, North Korea, and Iran to first paralyze US interference across Eurasia and beyond, then roll it back.

Both the US and Russia are operating at the near limits of their material, military, and political power, playing to their respective strengths. While Russia’s strengths appear to lie in terms of military power and industrial production, the US excels as projecting its military power globally along with its still potent ability to politically coerce and capture targeted nations enabled by its near monopoly over global information space.

The future world order will be decided by which has greater staying power and utilizes their own strengths while neutralizing those of their adversary most effectively. Will the US and its network of client states match or exceed Russia’s military industrial power before Russia and its allies expand their traditional military and industrial expertise to effectively counter US political interference and its monopoly over information space? Only time will tell.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.

US Sows Chaos Across Asia as it Aims for China

2025-11-09T03:04:00.000-08:00

September 30, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - In late May 2025 US Secretary of Defense (now called the “Secretary of War”) Pete Hegseth warned the world the US was in the process of implementing a division of labor in both Europe and the Middle East while pivoting its attention and all of the interference, instability, conflict, and even war that comes with it toward Asia.

More specifically, Secretary Hegseth stated, “we are reorienting toward deterring aggression by Communist China.”

By “deterring aggression by Communist China,” Secretary Hegseth meant preventing China from defending itself and the stability of the region it is located in from Washington’s attempt to maintain primacy over Asia from the other side of the planet.

Among the manufactured threats Secretary Hegseth cited as justification for US meddling in the Asia-Pacific (referred to as the “Indo-Pacific” by the US government) was China “invading Taiwan.”

Taiwan is recognized both under international law and by the US State Department itself as part of “One China.”

On the US State Department’s official website under, “U.S. Relations With Taiwan,” it states explicitly that, “the United States approach to Taiwan has remained consistent across decades and administrations. The United States has a longstanding one China policy,” and that, “we do not support Taiwan independence.”

In practice, however, the US maintains the political capture of Taiwan’s local administration, arms and politically supports it, while encouraging it to pursue separatism from the rest of China.

This, not “Chinese aggression,” is at the root of US-Chinese tensions, a modern-day continuation of Western colonialism over the Asia-Pacific region spanning generations. China’s growing economic and military power threatens to overturn centuries of Western hegemony.

This is the true “threat” Washington is reacting to - not unwarranted Chinese influence over its own region of the world, but the irreversible end of America’s unwarranted influence over the opposite side of the planet.

Turning Asia Upside Down

Despite hallucinations of a US “retreating” from Asia under the current Trump administration, the US is in the middle of region-wide destabilization carried out by the various tools of US political coercion and capture, namely the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), USAID programs now continuing more quietly under the US State Department itself, and adjacent Western foundations like George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.

Much in the same way the US targeted North Africa and the Middle East during the “Arab Spring” in 2011, it is now targeting first Indonesia with deadly riots disrupting the new BRICS member’s participation in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting which took place in early September, then toppling the government of Nepal right on India and China’s borders with equally deadly violence, and more recently targeting both the Philippines and border regions of India with the same “Gen Z” branded unrest.

By doing so, the US is shaping the region as part of a continued effort to encircle, contain, and undermine China itself.

Those married to the illusion of an America “retreating” from Asia have attempted to sell this recent unrest across Asia as “organic” and “spontaneous,” despite extensive evidence of US NED-funded organizations both leading and promoting the protests and an interim government now taking shape in Nepal in which half of the 8 ministers appointed by mid-September being drawn from US NED-funded fronts - many of which these interim ministers actually founded or directed.

These ministers include Om Prakash Aryal appointed Minister of Home Affairs, who served as a member advocate of the USAID, NED, and Open Society-funded Justice and Rights Institute - Nepal, Jagadish Kharel appointed Minister of Communications and IT who founded the USAID-funded Media Help Line organization, Mahabir Pun appointed Minister of Education, Science, and Technology who directed the USAID-funded National Innovation Centre, and Prasad Pariyar appointed Minister of Agriculture who directed the USAID, NED, CIA-proprietary The Asia Foundation, and Open Society-funded Samata Foundation.

Dr. Sangita Mishra who has been appointed Minister of Health previously served as director of the Paropakar Maternity and Women’s Hospital which regularly took USAID funding with US Embassy statements mentioning her by name during “hand-over ceremonies.” While this funding could be considered on its own potentially “innocent,” together with overtly US-backed figures being appointed alongside her indicates an overwhelmingly pro-US (and US-dependent) interim government taking shape in addition to the US-funded organizations that promoted and led the protests themselves.

In the Philippines, protests were led by Tindig Pilipinas, a member of the US NED-funded International Center for Innovation, Transformation and Excellence in Governance (INCITEGov) and promoted by US NED-funded media outlet Rappler, founded and directed by Maria Ressa who literally has her own webpage on the NED’s official website.

While the current government in the Philippines has been extensively servile to Washington at the expense of the Philippines itself, the unrest could serve as either a means to root out any independent political forces not yet subordinated by the US, or as a means of coercing the current government because it has hesitated to fulfill Washington’s increasingly dangerous demands in regards to confronting China.

US interference and the networks it uses to implement it span the entirety of Asia with additional unrest in other nations across the region all but inevitable.

Continuity of Agenda

Washington’s goal is to surround China with either hostile US-captured client regimes, or instability denying China political, economic, and even potentially military partners.

At the same time, the US continues transforming nations like South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines into militarized battering rams to both provoke China and potentially fight a proxy war against it in the same manner the US is currently using Ukraine and the rest of Europe to fight the Russian Federation.

All of this has taken place through a process spanning the entire 21st century regardless of who sits in the White House or who controls US Congress.

Under the current Trump administration, in the same late-May speech by Secretary Hegseth, he bragged about the development and deployment of US weapon systems specifically designed for conflict with China including the Navy/Marine Corps Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System (NMESIS) designed for targeting naval vessels, as well as the Typhon missile system which was previously prohibited under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty President Donald Trump withdrew from during his first term in office.

The systematic unilateral withdrawal from arms control treaties and the subsequent development and deployment of previously prohibited weapons along both Russia and China’s periphery by both the Trump and Biden administrations demonstrate that the US - far from “retreating” - is engaged in a deliberate and methodical escalation toward containment and confrontation with both nations spanning multiple presidential administrations and continuing to this day.

Beyond developing and deploying weapons along China’s periphery, the US is coercing its client states in the region to divert public money away from social programs and infrastructure and toward arms manufacturing and maintenance facilities to sustain US conflict in the region otherwise inhibited by what US policymakers often refer to as the “tyranny of distance” - the reality of the US picking a fight with China on the other side of the planet from where the US and the source of its military industrial production is actually located in on a map.

Called the “Partnership for Indo-Pacific Industrial Resilience” (PIPIR), Secretary Hegseth described it as, “a U.S.-initiated multilateral forum of 14 allies and partners working with industry, capital providers, and key non-governmental stakeholders, to strengthen industrial resilience, expand our capacity, and accelerate deliveries,” involving aircraft and naval vessel repair facilities, the standardization of drones and input components across the region, and the production of US weapons like the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) used by M270 and HIMARS launch platforms.

PIPIR is meant to exploit US client states in the region to compensate for America’s own military industrial shortcomings back home as exposed amid its proxy war with Russia in Ukraine as much as it is meant to provide logical support for large-scale conflict with China from within the region rather than far beyond it.

Despite some analysts cherry-picking episodes of diplomatic posturing by the Trump administration to portray it in “retreat” from Europe or Asia, the very existence of these ongoing programs demonstrates the US’ desire to continue encircling and encroaching upon China both with continuously expanding US military power and through US political interference and regime change targeting China’s allies and partners.

Secretary Hegseth closed his mid-May speech in Singapore by claiming:

The motto of my first platoon, first one I led, was: "Those who long for peace, must prepare for war." And that's exactly what we're doing. We are preparing for war in order to deter war — to achieve peace through strength. And we look out in this room and we look to you — to our allies and to our partners — to join us in this important work.

In reality - the US has been in a continuous state of war throughout the 21st century and continues both waging war and proxy war around the globe today. Secretary Hegseth and the interests he serves are not attempting to “prepare for war in order to deter war,” but rather continuing to wage constant war to deter any sort of equitable peace.

Washington’s sustained campaign of political destabilization, military encroachment, and economic warfare across Asia demonstrates a refusal to accept the reality of a sovereign China and a broader rising Asia which seeks to define its own regional destiny free from Western interference. Washington’s true objective is demonstrably not peace, but the continuation of its historically unwarranted dominance, even at the cost of turning the Asia-Pacific region, or even the rest of the world into spiraling chaos, conflict, and catastrophe.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.

New US Administration, New Wonder Weapons for Ukraine

2025-11-09T03:01:00.000-08:00

August 30, 2025 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - The US has announced plans to ship 3,350 air-launched Extended Range Attack Munition (ERAM) missiles to Ukraine in yet another escalation amid a war the current Trump administration vowed during the 2024 US presidential campaign to end in “24 hours.”

As another example of US foreign policy continuity of agenda, the ERAM program began under the previous Biden administration and has simply been continued without interruption under current US President Donald Trump.

The ERAM (not to be confused with the anti-air RIM-174 Standard Extended Range Active Missile also referred to as ERAM or SM-6) is essentially a turbine engine-powered glide bomb. A likely candidate for the arms program is the Boeing PJDAM which literally stands for “powered joint direct attack munition.” The ERAM is similar to glide bombs the US has already shipped to Ukraine in large quantities but with a longer range expected to reach between 240-450 kilometers according to The War Zone (TWZ).

The powered glide bomb would be used to strike much further behind Russian lines than previous Western weapons have allowed including HIMARS, ATACMS, various air-launched cruise missiles, and the standard glide bombs the ERAM is likely based on, but with limitations.

Hype Versus Reality

Reporting on the ERAM’s delivery to Ukraine has been particularly ambiguous amid flagging fortunes for Ukraine’s US-sponsored (and directed) armed forces on the battlefield and chronic weapons shortages owed to the collective West’s inadequate military industrial base.

Headlines claiming 3,350 missiles are on their way to Ukraine belie the likely details of the arms program with production only having just started and the first 1,000 missiles likely to reach Ukraine over the course of 2 years, and the rest over a period of up to 3 years or longer.

Even if 3,350 missiles were available today to send Ukraine, the fact that these are air-launched missiles means the most significant bottleneck for use on the battlefield will be combat aircraft and pilots available to deliver the weapons on target.

Limitations regarding Ukrainian airpower have prevented other air-launched and air-dropped munitions from reaching their full potential on the battlefield including Storm Shadow and SCALP air-launched cruise missiles (with ranges of up to 250 km) as well as the aforementioned US-made JDAM glide bombs and even French-made AASM Hammer glide bombs which are powered with a solid rocket motor but fall far short of the ERAM’s longer range of 240-450 km at only 70 km.

Ukrainian airpower, beyond issues of quantity, also face significant challenges from active Russian measures to defend against their use including extensive air defense capabilities targeting both Ukrainian warplanes and the munitions they launch, but also constant efforts to target Ukrainian military aviation on the ground where they operate from.

The longer range of the ERAM will afford Ukrainian warplanes greater safety while conducting stand-off attacks in ways US JDAM and French Hammer munitions cannot, but the low quantities of ERAM missiles and aircraft to deliver them means that - at least in the first 2-3 years - only about 1 missile could be launched per day, or more likely, 1 larger-scale coordinated attack carried out once a week, every other week, or even more infrequently.

A larger number of ERAMs would be required per strike to saturate Russian air defenses in the hopes that at least some of the munitions would make it to their targets.

Compared to Russia’s tempo of airstrikes, missile strikes (ballistic and cruise) as well as long-range drone strikes, the inclusion of ERAMs for Ukraine will make no noticeable difference in terms of the balance of military power on and above the battlefield.

A Battle of Attrition Russia is Still Winning

By the end of 2023 alone, Reuters would report Russia had carried out 7,400 missile and 3,700 Geran-2 drone strikes alone. Since then, Russia has drastically increased the production and use of both.

By 2025, Russia would launch a staggering 6,400 missiles and drones into Ukraine in just a single month, ABC News would report.

According to Ukrainian media based on Ukrainian intelligence reports, Russia is producing anywhere from 720-840 Iskander-M ballistic missiles, 120-180 hypersonic Kinzhal missiles, 300-360 Kalibr cruise missiles, 720-840 Kh-101 cruise missiles, 240-360 Iskander-K cruise missiles along with a variety of other cruise and hypersonic missiles annually.

This adds up to between 2,100 to over 2,580 missiles a year, with production numbers continuing to climb. The opening phase of Russia’s Special Military Operation drew from large stockpiles of missiles. Russian missile production is now reaching levels enabling a similar but sustainable scale of missile strikes.

The very nature of the ERAM program represents an admission of and an attempt to overcome the obvious shortcomings of America’s military industrial base and the many doctrines that have up until now shaped it, versus the vast and still growing size of Russian military production.

Implications of ERAM: Facing the Reality of Attrition Warfare

For decades, the United States has pursued the role as sole global superpower following the Cold War. This worldview, laid out explicitly in Pentagon documents reported on by the New York Times as far back as 1992, aimed to perpetuate American primacy through a combination of military might and economic influence. This policy set the stage for decades of US wars of aggression, political interference, and an ever-expanding series of confrontations, focused specifically on a reemerging Russia and a rising China.

This narrative of uncontested American military supremacy was carefully maintained through a series of conflicts with significantly weaker nations. The wars in Iraq and the toppling of the Libyan government were held up as proof that American precision and technology were vastly superior. America’s military industrial base worked along two premises, "quality over quantity," and profit over purpose, based on a belief that expensive, precision-guided munitions could achieve with one round what would otherwise require dozens of less-profitable conventional munitions.

Washington's proxy war with Russia, however, has revealed American weapons, while technologically advanced, are often not produced in sufficient numbers to counter a peer adversary capable of waging a war of attrition. The myth of quality over quantity has unraveled on and over the battlefield in Ukraine.

The staggering volume of Russian firepower ranging from artillery shells to missiles, rockets, drones, and glide bombs, have ground down the US-European trained and armed Ukrainian armed forces over the course of the 3+ year war - a staggering volume of firepower the US and its European client states have so far failed to match both in terms of quantity, but also quality.

Russian precision-guided weapons have turned out to be at least as effective as US weapons, cheaper, and many times more numerous.

This emerging paradigm has resulted for a variety of reasons, chief among them is the very organization of the collective West’s arms industry under a for-profit model versus the network of for-purpose state-owned enterprises that Russia’s arms industry consists of - within a society that likewise prioritizes purpose over profit.

Russia’s arms industry produces munitions of quantities and quality required to meet the objectives of the state whether or not they produce a profit, while the West’s arms industry produces munitions of quantities and quality to maximize profit.

The fundamental for-profit vs. for-purpose mindset extends further beyond just the arms industry alone into areas like education and infrastructure that provide essential inputs for the arms industry.

According to a 2017 Forbes article, Russia (despite having a population half the size of the United States) had a comparable number of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics graduates per year - meaning that Russia had (and still has) a larger number of STEM graduates per capita than the US, despite fluctuating numbers since 2017.

Russia’s close partnership with China and India further enhances its access to industrial inputs produced by even larger pools of highly skilled labor collectively dwarfing those of the West.

The creation of the ERAM program and others like it, seek to shift the established paradigm of “quality over quantity” in terms of military industrial production. While the ERAM represents a more effective approach, the US and its European client states still fall far short in terms of either quantity or quality precisely because the fundamental differences between the collective West’s approach to military industrial production and Russia’s have not been fully addressed.

The ERAM and other programs like it seek to narrow the existing gap between Western and Russian military industrial production (as well as China’s), however, currently, Russia continues to expand its own production as well as invest in contributing factors like education and infrastructure to expand skilled labor and supply chains even further.

The ERAM program, therefore, is one part of a wider attempt to pivot from the myth of absolute Western technological supremacy to the reality of attrition warfare, one that the West's for-profit military-industrial model is fundamentally ill-equipped to win. While Washington’s political machine continues to wage a fierce and highly effective campaign of information warfare and covert interference far beyond the battlefield, its ability to back these efforts with tangible military power is visibly waning.

The ERAM is not a "wonder weapon" that will change the course of the conflict; it is a belated, and likely inadequate, response to a strategic reality that Russia and its allies have already established.

For the emerging multipolar world, the key to navigating this new era is not to simply match or exceed Western military power, but to continue building a more resilient, purpose-driven industrial and societal foundation - one that is as apt at defending against US influence and interference as it is at outproducing it in terms of artillery shells, missiles, and drones.

In America’s pursuit of full-spectrum dominance, only full-spectrum defense will prevail.

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer.