Yves here. While Andrew Korybko’s gives a useful high-level recap of what Trump was attempting to do to weaken China’s ties with Russia and India, readers are likely to quibble with some of his characterizations. Korybko is sometimes not as precise in his use of language as is ideal. I would not depict Russia as “pivoting” to China. China’s economic support from the start of the Special Military Operation was absolutely essential to Russia, both in and of itself, and in emboldening other states to defy US pressure and continue to trade with Russia. And let us not forget that China and Russia had signed a very broad ranging 5,000 word partnership agreement in early February 2022, as in before the conflict began.
Having said that, it really is remarkable how Trump and his team are utterly convinced that the only strategy in their playbook, extreme dominance, is effective when it keeps backfiring. But then again, the peanut gallery is mistakenly assuming that the objective is to advance American interests, as opposed to orchestrate a show of God Emperor Trump astride the world like a colossus.
By Andrew Korybko, a Moscow-based American political analyst who specializes in the global systemic transition to multipolarity in the New Cold War. He has a PhD from MGIMO, which is under the umbrella of the Russian Foreign Ministry. Originally published at his website
The global systemic transition to multipolarity is nowadays proceeding along a different trajectory than before due to recent shifts in the international system. Up until this point, Trump 2.0 sought resource and military partnerships with Russia and India respectively that could decelerate China’s superpower rise, which would then make it the junior partner in any “G2”/“Chimerica” deal. His Eurasian balancing act has failed, however, due to his arrogant and aggressive approach towards all three countries.
Ties with Russia took a hit after the Anchorage Summit following increasinglyconcerning reports about US plans to support NATO troops in Ukraine, thus spooking Putin into abandoning his country’s own Eurasian balancing act by pivoting to China. This took the form of the legally binding deal that was just clinched for constructing the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline. The US’ envisaged resource-centric partnership with Russia, which aimed to entice concessions on Ukraine, is now much less likely.
As for India, ties worsened during its springtime clashes with Pakistan, which saw Trump favor Pakistan and even lie about India agreeing to an alleged US-mediated ceasefire. The US then hypocritically imposed punitive tariffs on India over its continued trade with Russia despite eschewing such for China and others. All the while, Trump viciously insulted India too. Concluding that he’s hellbent on derailing its rise as a Great Power, India swiftly patched up its problems with China and distanced itself from the US.
With Russia pivoting to China via Power of Siberia 2 amidst the Sino-Indo rapprochement, the resource and military means for decelerating China’s superpower rise through partnerships with them were neutralized, thus leading to any “G2”/“Chimerica” deal now being in China’s favor instead. President Xi Jinping accordingly espoused stronger rhetoric about reshaping the world order during his speeches at the SCO Summit and V-J Day, which prompted Trump to accuse him of “conspiring” against the US.
The interim Sino-US trade deal is now in jeopardy after he just threatened the imposition of 100% tariffs on China by 1 November or earlier depending on when China imposes its export controls on rare earth minerals. Coupled with his dramatic accusation that Xi is “conspiring” against the US in collusion with Putin and Kim Jong Un, this could presage future military-strategic tensions, even if only indirectly via proxy. That would further destabilize Eurasia per the US’ traditional divide-and-rule stratagem.
In clockwise order, these could take the form of: fomenting Color Revolution unrest in Mongolia in order to undermine Power of Siberia 2; Japan, Taiwan, and/or the Philippines provoking an incident with China at sea in contested waters; obstructing China’s access to rare earth minerals in Myanmar’s Kachin State; and/or sowing instability in Central Asia via NATO member Turkiye through the new TRIPP Corridor. China’s response to these scenarios could be to arm Russia and even send troops to help it in Ukraine.
Xi saw how Trump mistreated his friend Modi despite him leading a state that could have joined the US’ anti-Chinese axis, while also watching how he’s betraying Putin in Ukraine after Anchorage, so he expects similar treatment if he agrees to a “G2”/ “Chimerica” deal. He also knows that China now has a target on its back after the latest tariffs and Trump accusing him of a “conspiracy”. It’s therefore little wonder that Trump 2.0’s Eurasian balancing act, which was characterized by arrogance and aggression, has failed.
I do not think Yves is correct in that the purpose is to “orchestrate a show of God Emperor Trump astride the world like a colossus”.
Russia is the pivot state. It can 1) broadly pivot to the US, thereby ensuring US hegemony 2) broadly pivot to China, thereby ensuring Chinese sovereignty or (the US preference) 3) be regime changed and behave like a Eurasian Germany/Japan and be used & destroyed in an American war against China that the US intends to fight. The very purpose of the Ukr proxy war is to achieve #3. All the regime change ops over the decades have been to achieve #3. The US/UK can not accept a Russia that pivots, even softly, to China. It ruins everything.
These three choices have always been the only three choices. The Biden admin chose #3, and the Trump admin is choosing #3, and the Vance or whomever admin will choose #3. This will continue until the full end of the Ukr war + US being pushed back to Hawaii by China.
Please explain Trump’s irrational and inconsistent action with respect to the Ukraine war, repeatedly acting as if he can secure a peace alternating with childish shows of pique that only confirm the Russian view (ex apparently Putin) that they are dealing with someone utterly agreement incapable and that Russia has to finish the job on the battlefield. That’s not consistent with regime change. Trump is surrounded with toadies who are telling him what he wants to hear. But then he also hangs out with EU leaders because that proves his big-dog-ness, and they are good enough at occasionally manipulating him so as to get him occasionally to proceed a bit differently.
In keeping, it has been well reported that Trump does not get any intelligence briefings (historically, the President got daily briefings). Vance gets them and Vance has lunch with Trump once a week. How much do you think is well recounted and retained, particularly given that Trump and Vance likely have many things to discuss?
Similarly, it has been reported that pretty much all of Trump’s information outside his coterie comes from Fox News.
As I said before, invoking a saying sometimes attributed to Sun Tsu: “All tactics and no strategy is the noise before the defeat.”
There is no strategy here. All Trump cares about is short term optics.
Trump’s primary skill, and it is a skill, is distracting everyone with a circus and making himself the center of attention while the actual policy is deployed. In this case, the US is continuing with salami slicing re: Russia. Biden attacked the nuclear triad, Biden destroyed NordStream, Biden attacked the Crimean bridge, Trump is attacking refineries, Trump is going to use Tomahawks and attack Moscow. The two administrations are entirely aligned and consistent in the goal to devalue Russia’s redlines, and the entire concept of MAD itself. The US has clearly demonstrated that the US can attack a nuclear peer competitor without consequence (China should pay attention).
Trump is different from Biden in that he makes a big distracting show of things while the security state continues on per normal. Total consistency in action, divergence in show. Nothing meaningful has changed whatsoever. Nothing will change until Putin decides to impose enormous costs on the American strategy, and it boggles the mind that he himself is duped by Trump’s circus.
Your information is incorrect.
The damage to refineries across Russia has been limited in scope and resulted only in some relatively brief shortages in Crimea and a few other areas.
The US is not deploying Tomahawks. This is all theater.
It has been extensively discussed on YouTube channels by experts that we don’t have a deployable system. We would need to restore an old ground launched design from the 70s and that is estimated to take years.
And there is no consistency in action. There have been plenty of reports of infighting, such as between the China hawks (who want to shut Project Ukraine down so as to preserve our very limited weapons stocks for China), the “wanna be friendly with Russia because business” type (which Witkoff somewhat represents) versus the old Cold Warriors. Look at the flip-flopping on tons of fronts, for starters, Trump rejecting the neocon demand for a ceasefire and then some version of a tripwire force, in the form of the EU “coalition of the willing” peacekeeping/reassurance forces.
The conflict between IndoPacom and NeoCons predates Trump and extends back to the mid aughts. There has been no flip flopping whatsoever. The United States is attacking energy infrastructure in Russia. This is an enormous escalation. If the Tomahawks prove to be unworkable, some other push forward will be found. The US is probing to see what it can get away with (i.e., sanctions from hell were not acceptable, Putin rejected the ceasefire to rearm idea, but Putin also bizarrely and clearly indicated Tomahawks were acceptable – so now the US knows what it can get away with). The actual, material behavior of the US has not changed whatsoever.
Personally I think you’re both correct here. Trump is not a politician and is all about the Show making Trump look good, at least to himself. First time around as POTUS, I think Trump was as surprised as anybody that he actually won, and US elites didn’t know what to make of him.
This time around, he has bigger plans for his Show, and the elites have realized he can be a useful tool for their own aims. They tell him what he wants to hear, he stumbles around the world stage blustering on nonsensically about this and that, keeping everybody off base, and behind the scenes the neocons get on with their nutjob plans for world domination by the US. They’ll go blow something up in a foreign country without necessarily informing Trump first, and once it makes Fox News, they’ll let Trump pretend it was his idea for the cameras.
Trump is just a figurehead, just like all presidents since at least Reagan have been.
Berletic have been talking since forever that US policy does not change, and about salami too. No one in their right mind expected for US material behavior to change, in spite od all the circus.
Berletic have also been talking about all the wunderwaffen that is just not good enough to defeat Russia, including this “brand new one”. The real question is, what after Tomahawks, and whatever wunderwaffe comes after it? What is the endgame? How does one win overextending olympics without snapping first?
I think the Syria example is relevant. The US waged the most disgusting proxy war in the history of American proxy wars and ultimately lost. The US did not give up. It remained focused, adjusted strategy, prepared quietly and then overthrew Assad and installed ISIS.
The reason one would not do this to Russia is that Russia in such a situation could destroy the US, but Russia has clearly communicated that it does not have the huevos to destroy the US, so the Syria strategy is on the table.
The US will continue to push up until the point the Russians very clearly communicate through actions that the US itself is at risk, and even then the US will probably keep going, as it is at root a messianic, revolutionary entity. We are in danger.
Syria is a sidequest, not an endgame. Of lesser importance is that Putin met the headchopper in charge today, in a discusting act of a realpolitik, which means that it’s not game over even there.
The US will continue to push up until the point it can not push any more, hoping that the enemy snaps first. That’s less of a “3D chess”. and more of a “kicking the can down the road”.
There is no “we”. Some have been in danger all along, and see nothing new under the sun. If you have not been in danger earlier, then welcome to the club, we don’t have cookies.
The American success in Syria is illustrative of American strategy. The Russian acceptance of the ISIS government in Syria is illustrative of Russian passivity.
The Americans were able to overcome considerable setbacks in Syria and the lesson from that success is that the US does not ever under any circumstances consider itself defeated. The US is not a bumbling empire. It probes for weakness, it assess setbacks, it is highly flexible and will effortlessly change/adjust strategy, and then goes in for the kill. That is what it is doing with Russia now. Even if Russia takes all of Ukraine in a resounding military victory, the US will simply adjust the ‘destroy Russia’ strategy to accommodate the new material conditions.
Russia have been a target of everadjusting ‘destroy Russia’ strategy long before USA became a thing. This is not their first rodeo.
Previous contenders looked more competent and determined, though (highly flexible and capable of effortlessly changing/adjusting strategy, and going for the kill, and all that jazz). They were also full of praise for themselves.
Sorry, US behavior is changing. Contra Berletic, it is radically redefining its relationship with a very weak NATO.
It is also trying much harder to use economic weapons (where it is also much weaker than it thinks it is) to compensate for its military overextension (which it does recognize).
I would say that US behavior change is not radical but cosmetic in nature. USA is NATO, by design. The rest are meant to be weak and follow orders (the few that stick out are targeted). Keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down..
As far as economic weapons go, they did have the nuclear option (the actual term used for cutting Russia from SWIFT). It turned out to be a dud. Now it’s a war of attrition there too.
You are operating in a fantasy of what the US can do. The US has reached the end of its escalation ladder with Russia ex nukes AND is very short on weapons.
See this intro to a long-form debunking:
https://bmanalysis.substack.com/p/tomahawk-for-ukraine-never-ending
Regardless of if the Tomahawks are viable or not, and I’ve read that Black Mountain piece, and listened to the Duran fellows, etc., the US is nowhere near the limits of escalation. For example, it can step up attacks on energy infrastructure in Russia, it can start sabotaging Russian shipping via terrorist proxies, it can murder Russian officials, it can deploy heaps of terrorists into Russia, it can bribe Russian officials, it can use cyber-attacks, it can destroy TurkStream. There is no end to what the US will do. It is shameless, amoral, capable and resourceful.
The problem with this so-called US strategy is rather obvious. If there is a change of leadership in Moscow it will be facing one that immediately has Russian subs appearing off the coast of the US. Putin is very very ‘moderate’ in Russian terms. Anyone replacing him will be many steps more hawkish. There are only so many oil/gas installations in the US, the Russian weaponry can easily take them out without using nukes. The US clearly using their own missiles to attack Russian equivalents will incur immediate retaliation if anyone other than Putin is in charge, and even him if its obvious that the overwhelming opinion is to retaliate hard. I doubt the US ‘leadership’ has a great understanding of Moscow politics.
Trump has to be either playing poker with no cards or has gone completely mad.
Nope, it cannot. You think there are warehouses full of well trained, prepared, and placed individuals to quickly get activated and execute said plans?
As for bribery, how to do it, with luggage fill with US dollar bills. It took UKR in conjunction with the west 18 month or so to develop that large attack on the Russian military airports.
In the meantime, Russians are not sleeping and are looking at the Central Asian Countries with increasing suspicion and scrutiny…
No you are wrong John W , Russia is far ahead of USA in military terms it has battle ready soldiers and a missile stock that USA cannot compete with , i wont go to nuclear because both USA and Russia could end civilisation with the amount of nuclear weapons they have.Sorry John W but you overestimate what USA can do , lets be clear here , war will not be won on the seas , warships are a thing of the past too easily sunk.
China does not threaten an attack on USA nor does Russia nor does India they all understand that the distance separating them from USA is substantial to the point that the attacking force would be at a considerable disadvantage having to cross thousands of miles of ocean first.
Lastly let me mention China and Russia , they share a border albeit a rather short and remote border but nonetheless a border of importance and i can assure you that if USA attacked China then Russia would do all it could to prevent a USA win knowing that a USA win would give USA access across that border to Russia.Likewise if USA attacked Russia you can be sure that China would not want USA to have control of Russia,s border with China giving USA easy access to China.
If Russia thought it was likely to win a conventional war with the US, or perhaps survive a nuclear war with the US, it would have destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge (or similar) the day of the first attempt on the Kerch bridge. It would have destroyed natural gas export terminals in the Gulf or import terminals in Germany when the Americans destroyed NS2. Russia behaves sheepishly because it has limited options.
No, Russia would not do that. You would, but you are not Russia, or anyone in position to make any kind of decision. Projecting is not good, including the sheepishness
The US does not have escalation dominance in the terrorism domain, as by its global empire’s nature, it is far more vulnerable to that type of warfare than its adversaries. In fact, one wonders if the rash to power transformer shootings is part of this new war.
Look the US grid will collapse if there is a severe solar storm. It doesn’t take much of a push when the barn door is rotten, e.g., by neglecting domestic infrastructure (as opposed to roads in Afghanistan)
The US is a highly corrupt society, even if the corruption was made legal.
In support of Yves, as engineer that has worked on been involved on many military projects (F-22, C-17, F-16, SDI to name a few). First, every military project is at a minimum of 10-15 years out of date. Some of the weapon systems are over 40 years out of date. You are forced to design with the cheapest components (which are going obsolete). The simplest upgrade is at least 5 years out of date. The real questions are how much of military systems really work? the M1 Abrams only goes 40 miles before something breaks. The are a maintenance nightmare. And they didn’t work out well in Ukraine. The F-35 cost $40,000 per hour to operate. So far four of them have fallen out sky. The amount current problems is 857, mostly there are more.
https://www.defensenews.com/smr/hidden-troubles-f35/
Nothing gets maintained. The Patriots are not effective. Tomahawks are extremely old. When was the last time they were used in combat. Desert storm? I could go on and on. This movie is a lesson in how the military works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon_Wars
Tomahawks are too few against too large a target set.
I doubt US would send part of one of its two Typhon batteries.
But, USMC just shuttered its tomahawk JLTV. They bought a small battery of vehicles which now can be donated or given to Army to play with for future use.
These JLTV based could be donated. But the throw is small. One VLS per JLTV.
Russia would do well with layered defense.
Tomahawk looks a lot like Nazi V-1
V-1 redux is Flamingo, with less pointy rear end.
https://aerospaceglobalnews.com/news/ukraine-fp5-flamingo-cruise-missile-soviet-engines/
There’s always been the choice, to the horror of UK and USA, that EU and Russia join forces and act according to their own interest.
Until the rise of China it was the European economic power and political sovereignty that was worrying the State Department. Europeans had to have an economy to be able to get dollar, so they could buy stuff from USA (although Marshall plan mitigated that problem for a while) but no so much an economy as to overpower USA.
This means that preventing option 4 from happening has been way more important than picking between 1,2 or 3.
One would have to be delusional to think Russia can be regime changed (I realize that this isn’t your position, rather the neo-cons.) It’s too big, too powerful, and there is simply no way it is going to happen. It’s the geography, stupid.
So, your position is that the US establishment is essentially fighting the laws of physics. I doubt Trump has any semblance of a strategy – as Yves says he’s all about self-aggrandizement and would happily choose door number 1, but the deep state keeps pushing back.
Oh, Russia had been regime changed before, probably multiple times. But Russian leaders tend not to do biddings of foreigners, not for long anyways. How did that sealed train in 1917 for the Germans?
What Russia lacks caused by the devastating WWI, Civil War, WWII, and the major social and demographic setback of the fall of USSR are people.
However, if lige gets improved, materially and otherwise, maybe Russia will rebound. And then the natural 4) which is the main drive and ideal for Russian state, is total independence and sovereignity. They can be like China, but with all the resources.
The pivot from India to Pakistan is momentous. Trump is perilously close, at times, to magical thinking, believing that he can point a finger and transform countries and continents. It has taken a lot of work, a great deal of evil and filthy lucre–no end of blood–for his predecessors.
I see no evidence of anything but magical thinking from Trump and his clown show, or indeed most of those who are elites in the US.
Because the world is about to change and in that world the US is going to have such a diminished status that nothing in living Americañs’ memories — see John W. above for example– has prepared them for it.
The peanut gallery is mistakenly assuming that the objective is to advance American interests, as opposed to orchestrate a show of God Emperor Trump astride the world like a colossus.
Egg-zack-et-ly. Now, a tldr; hobbyhorsing around on that subject …
National interest is not a thing. It is an ideal, a concept that conventionally imagines what, in some utilitarian way, represents the greatest good for the greatest number. It has one small problem. Power is not utilitarian. Power is what force determines: force of arms, force of money, force of personality, force of argument. Good and truth? Subordinate. Truth is an instrument, not an end. Power has to do with “good” only in the sense of good for the one with power, not the many without it.
In practice states are things not of popular sovereignty but of elite will, or wills, plural, because there is always contention among factions, internal and external. Policy emerges from that struggle, not from disinterested consideration of that mythical animal called national interest. When commentators call policies delusional, stupid, or contrary to national interest, at some higher level they may be correct, but, with rare exceptions, it is generally not at a higher level of intellectual disinterestedness or moral concern that policies are made. Analysis gets further in understanding interests by heuristically assuming they are emergent, local, selfish, and shortsighted.
That is why putting internal politics outside the scope of international relations theory that fancies itself “realistic” is … unrealistic. It is like limiting the study of literature to works in English. While it is an administrative convenience within the university and helps carve out a niche congenial to tenured appointments, it is a laughable taking of part for whole. As Mearsheimer might say, it is not a serious argument. Ironically, Mearsheimer, who regularly invokes national interest as if it were a self-evident thing that states pursue among themselves, wrote a seminal and quite courageous book with Stephen Walt on the Israel lobby, an internal faction that successfully hijacks U.S. policy against what Mearsheimer sees as the national interest. Curious, that.
Thank you for that. It dovetails with the recent nc discussion of “rational interest” or the “rational consumer,” equally mythical animals beloved in economic theory.
Time for us all to cease pursuing fabulous beasts, whether in political life or in our own much-troubled psyches.
I must have slept through “The US’ envisaged resource-centric partnership with Russia, which aimed to entice concessions on Ukraine,” somehow. A real summit follows lengthy negotiations of agreements. If there had been a serious effort at a partnership, perhaps direct flights could have been restored. Or the stolen diplomatic properties returned. There was nothing but a photo op.
China seems more aggressive in its responses than Russia (WRT trade) – perhaps we will start seeing color revolutions in South America in response to a US color revolution attempt in Mongolia.
China doesn’t need to do that.
The US will have a crash soon and [1] not all the monopoly money the Fed can ‘print’ will fix many of the underlying problems that will be starkly visible then but also [2] US elites will again move to offload the costs –e.g. bailouts, reduced services, even systems collapses — onto the mass US population.
If the reaction by the mass of Americans to previous such actions by those elites brought the rise of Trump, what will happen this time around?
(Full disclosure: I left the US at the end of 2021.)
Trump really believes you can do complex deals with a napkin doodle. The Russian team did include for a while a commercial honcho to try to advance….something. Helmer even wrote an annoyed post about what a poseur the guy was. Too lazy to look his name up.
I posted this latest FT headline over in Links, but it’s apropos here —
US warns world will ‘decouple’ from China if it imposes new export controls
https://www.ft.com/content/15a957a7-104e-431a-807e-441e5c2c753f
https://archive.ph/55A3F
[1] To be clear, not only is any US attempt to rebuild its missile arsenal, depleted in Ukraine and Israel, and maintain its air force and the rest of its global bully posture potentially dead because of what China’s done, but also its whole Hail Mary project around AI. As follows —
Role of Rare Earths in GPU and AI Datacenter Tech: Key Uses in AI/GPU/Datacenter Tech
Neodymium (Nd — High-strength magnets in cooling fans, actuators, and HDDs
Dysprosium (Dy) — Heat-resistant magnets for server cooling and robotics
Terbium (Tb) — Enhances magnet performance in high-temp environments
Yttrium (Y) — Phosphors in LED displays and lasers used in chip lithography
Europium (Eu) — Red phosphors in display tech
Gadolinium (Gd) — Magnetic refrigeration and shielding in datacenter cooling
Lanthanum (La) — Optical lenses and catalysts in chip manufacturing
Cerium (Ce) — Polishing wafers and glass for chip fabrication
[2] Now ask the next question: What happens to the AI bubble and the US economy?
Granted, two other big reasons exist for why the US datacenter buildout projected for 2030 was impossible on the scale set out. (Real-world energy, and financial). Still, till those factors came obviously into play, the AI bubble was likely to proceed: ‘markets can be irrational longer than you can remain solvent,’ ‘while the music is playing, you have to dance,’ etc. Now, though, anyone with two brain cells to rub together can see the end is coming in the next few months, maybe two weeks from now, or maybe tomorrow.
In short, they’re all in the role of Jeremy Irons’s character in the bankers’ favorite movie, Margin Call, at that midnight meeting where he realizes: “This is it. This is it.” What’s he say next? “There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat.”
[3] Be first. That’s what everyone has to be considering about now or soon: liquidating at least some of their positions. . So when that triggers a crash, what’s that look like? Because it isn’t just that the likes of Oracle (and estwhile world’s richest man Larry Ellison) is leveraged by a factor of 8.5 (if I understand correctly), but as of Q2 2025, approximately 34 percent of total U.S. household wealth is held in corporate equities and mutual fund shares (including direct stock ownership, equity in mutual funds, and such financial assets). Overall, that translates into $60 trillion of US household wealth.
And so on.
the good news in all of this is that i might find myself to suddenly be a real find on the local dating scene.
at least she’ll be able to eat.
Without the data center (debt-funded), build-out, the US would be in a deep recession with high interest rates to deal with de-dollarization and inflation from tariffs, COVID disruptions, etc., and many trillions of debt to roll over. It could pop a few leveraged bubbles. Could that be China’s goal?
Thanks for this post and informative discussion. I am thinking the wheels might fall off the cart of the economic capitalism experiment before things get to a point of no return with all out war.
How that plays out will be quite dramatic to say the least. The reset hopefully will be a more just economic model. Not sure if I will be around for that. Oh, the planet is dying, so that might be an issue for the existence of humanity. I’ll hope for divine intervention.
I am thinking the wheels might fall off the cart of the economic capitalism experiment
@ Joe Renter –
Agreed!
Hmm. Is any of this real?
What if Trump’s discussion with Putin is more along the lines of “Vlad, do me a solid: I have to keep the Deep State ricebowls filled and I have to expropriate European capital to redeem the fictitious American capital we pretend to have amassed, so let me have another series of “War on Russia” and wunderwaffen. In return, you can make a lot of money dealing with the Global South at the energy prices I am going to rape Europe with. But keep Xi off my back while I do it. And tell me, what the fuck do we about Bibi?”.
Isn’t the war in the Ukrainian just a transatlantic elite’s shell game, while the USA picks Europe’s pocket? Feeling poorer? Russia! Full of migrants? Russia! Cold in winter? Russia? Deindustrialised? Russia? Backdoored comms, digitally ID’d and debanked? Russia!
I think the problem here is far wider. Firstly, it is obvious Russia and China are developing weapons far ahead of Western capacities. I guess they are working in systems that can cope with a First Strike. With 18-Mach missiles is not that hard. Not to say another different weapons, all of them kynetic, for instance Oreshniks which are in service, and clearly if they are not being used it is because they are being reserved.
Secondly, the risk of US imploding and collapsing is high. If such a thing happens, we don’t know what could happen. It is a nightmare scene for everyone that a country with 6,000 nuclear warheads, about which has officialy declared they have a problem of maintenance and management, not to say biological and chemical WMDs, can collapse in some way. A collapsed US structures cannot be quickly substituted by occupation force, not even China nor the whole BRICS for tell a tale, have enough resources not even way to deploy them.
IMHO, the reason the US is being “well treated” is that one. They need some way or another the US come to their senses, and even so, the US will have to be massively helped. You can see it as a blackmail through WMD stockpiling, but it’s what there is.