BRITISH/ EU/ NATO COMPLICITY

INDRAJIT—A week before October 7th, National Insecurity Adviser Jake Sullivan said, “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.” America has an entire class of people like him, who are professionally wrong and only fail upwards. Insomuch as America had a strategic direction in the Middle East, it was leaving. Both Republicans and Democrats wanted to pivot to China, not fight another Gulf War.

Remember that tactics are just the toilet that strategy shits on, and that America was strategically defeated before they started. America has no strategic answer for fighting men in tunnels and never has. All it can do is bomb the helpless (and militarily irrelevant) men, women, and children above. America also has no strategic answer to inundation attacks against air defenses.

PETER MAN—Trump will redouble his trade war and low-intensity conflicts with China. He will ignore the Taiwan red line by meeting with Lai Ching-te to test China. He will give the DPP the green light to prosecute and imprison TPP (party leader Ko Wen-je already imprisoned) and KMT lawmakers in a reign of terror. Will China react angrily and issue more toothless protests? Or will they make the nation whole again swiftly and bloodlessly at the time of their choosing (hopefully before being forced to act)? Everything Trump does will hasten the fall of the empire, but he will be more concerned about consolidating his power in America. A hot war, especially a losing one, will scupper his plans. He will try to avoid it. Trump is not hard to understand. He is as predictable as gravity. His presidency will be a train wreck for America and its vassals. The rest of the world, who are not vassals, can humour him and let him bloviate about how great a deal-maker he is.

EDITOR—The U.S. has enabled the slaughter and starvation in Gaza for more than thirteen months. Conservative estimates from medical workers that have served in Gaza put the overall death toll at nearly 119,000, and that number will have risen significantly in the weeks since then. We have seen the same pattern repeat for all that time: the Israeli government commits grievous crimes against the Palestinian civilian population, the administration tut-tuts and asks that Netanyahu and his allies be slightly less sadistic, the Israeli government blows through whatever lines the administration has drawn, and then the U.S. shrugs and takes their word for it that they are improving.

THE GRAYZONE—The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal, Anya Parampil and Wyatt Reed assess Trump’s initial round of Israel First foreign policy picks, and how top donors like Miriam Adelson dictated the selections through his transition team.

CJ HOPKINS—Elon Musk did not “save free speech” or “rescue Twitter” from a “Woke Mind Virus.” He purchased a corporation and rebranded its product for new market demographic. In so doing, he corralled and neutralized most of the conservative populist resistance to the evolution of the global-capitalist system … which is what the system needed to happen. It makes no difference whether Elon Musk understood his role. He played it perfectly. He is continuing to play it perfectly.