Security

The beltway’s upside-down world has moved into the next phase of gas-lighting the American public over Trump, Biden, and Ukraine. In this establishment media alternate reality using alternative facts, that is ‘fake news’, the criminal is the victim and the victim is the criminal. What we are left with is a narrative in which Trump’s interactions with the Ukrainian president Zelensky over Biden’s illegal shake-down of Ukraine’s judiciary process, are twisted by the establishment media instead as being a case of Trump undermining the legal rights of ‘opposition’ candidate Biden.

After months of rumors, John Bolton was finally fired from the White House but the post mortem on why it took so long to remove him continues, with the punditry and media trying to understand exactly what happened and why. Perhaps the most complete explanation for what occurred came from President Donald Trump himself shortly after the fact.

The Pentagon’s recent Report to Congress on Arctic Strategy makes it clear that the US considers the region as “US homeland” and therefore “When necessary and appropriate, the United States will challenge excessive maritime claims in the Arctic to preserve the rules-based international order and the rights and freedoms of the international community in navigation and overflight, as well as for other, related high seas uses.”

Should we chalk it up to coincidence theory that just days after Trump gives John Bolton the boot as his National Security Adviser, Iran is blamed for an attack on a Saudi oil facility, forcing Washington to forego any hope of peace with Tehran?

Global Islamic Terrorism is universally recognized as today’s big threat and has been the justification for all sorts of changes, especially to life in the West after 9/11. The Islamic terrorists whom we are supposed to fear on a daily basis more or less believe in some form of Wahhabism, which grew up in and is spread from Saudi Arabia. Surprisingly the US and the Saudis have been and still are staunch allies. This makes little sense on the surface but Saudi exceptionalism extends to Russia as well.

In early August India deployed 38,000 troops in Indian-administered Kashmir to join the half-million already there.

China gave Britain a stern warning this week that any naval maneuvers conducted with the US near its declared territories in the South China Sea will be met with a military response.

There is consensus amongst the Washington foreign policy élite that all factions in Iran understand that – ultimately – a deal with Washington on the nuclear issue must ensue. It somehow is inevitable. They view Iran simply as ‘playing out the clock’, until the advent of a new Administration makes a ‘deal’ possible again. And then Iran surely will be back at the table, they affirm.

In the US-and-allied nations, the standard way of interpreting wars and international relations is archetypally exemplified by the internationally respected award-winning American war-journalist Marie Colvin, of the London Sunday Times. Her career was stellar, if not absolutely unmatched: she won the “Journalist of the Year” award from the Foreign Press Association, plus five other international journalism prizes, for herself and her publisher.

The month of August was named for the Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus whose reign from 27 BC to 14 AD is usually remembered for what became known as Pax Romana — an era of peace — but ended with him becoming ever more dictatorial.