While it remains a hypothetical question as to whether Russia has surpassed the rest of the world in terms of fighting preparedness, it would be hard to name another seven days in recent history when the country has unveiled more potential game changers.

If anything demonstrates once and for all that Russia has dusted off the cobwebs of its Soviet past and moved boldly into the future, it was to be found at the MAKS-2021 Air Show in Moscow, held from July 20-25.

The star attraction of the international aviation salon, which draws thousands of visitors annually, was not seen roaring in the skies overhead, but rather it was tucked away inside of a mocked up pavilion. Resembling a premier of the latest Hollywood action flick, visitors lined up almost half a kilometer to catch a glimpse of the Sukhoi Su-75 ‘CheckMate,’ the new stealth fighter that state-owned United Aircraft Corporation touted as superior to Lockheed Martin’s F-35 joint strike fighter. All things considered, it seemed only fair that Russian President Vladimir Putin got the first preview of the aircraft.

YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNDrTSDmaZY

The rollout of the Su-75 is critical for Moscow on several fronts. First, it simply proves that Russia, if there was any doubt about it before, has broken the mold on technological breakthroughs achieved during the communist period. Up until now, the Russian Air Force has been dependent on two-engine warhorses, like the Su-35 and the MiG-35, formidable in their own right but expensive to produce and maintain.

By comparison, the streamlined and lightweight single engine Su-75 costs just $30 million dollars per machine and will allow Russia to close the aviation gap with NATO, which has been able to make up for its technological inferiority with raw numbers.

To quote an article by The Saker: “Russia’s main weakness when compared to the U.S./NATO is primarily quantitative: while they are much inferior, U.S./NATO aircraft are produced in huge numbers the Russian industrial base and finances cannot match, at least not by producing very advanced but also very expensive aircraft a la Su-35S.

“The RAF needs many cheap but highly effective combat aircraft and the Su-75 might well be “the” dream machine for Russia.”

Some of the main technological features of this highly anticipated aircraft include:

–     Top speed of 2400 km/h (about 1500mph or just under Mach 2);

–     Capable of engaging 6 targets simultaneously;

–     1500 kilometer combat range (932 miles);

–     The fighter is “open architecture,” which means it can be adapted to specific needs;

–     $25-30 million apiece to produce, which will make it attractive on foreign markets.

Aside from giving Russia a fearsome addition to its already airtight air defense system, it will also allow smaller countries to punch far above their weight. Insiders say that prospective state buyers of the state-of-the-art aircraft could include Egypt, Iran, Belarus, Venezuela and Syria, which nearly disintegrated into another Libya as multiple NATO states descended upon the country in a muddled attempt to dislodge Islamic State from the territory. Only with the participation of Russian forces – much to the dismay of the Western military alliance, by the way, which seemed content to let the extremist forces overrun the legitimate Syrian government of President Bashar Assad – was the terrorist cancer ultimately removed with surgical strikes.

Speaking of Syria, just this week the country came under consecutive attack by the Israeli Air Force, which has made a habit over the years of conducting airstrikes inside of the Arab republic with the excuse of acting in self-defense against “Iranian” forces operating inside of the country.

The Israeli Air Force is striking targets in Syria again. SAR Air Defense worked in the Syrian province of Homs@serious_war_eng pic.twitter.com/SJe79T0s4W

— Serious War (@serious_war_eng) July 22, 2021

According to reports by the Russian military, two Israeli F-16s launched four missiles from Lebanon airspace at Syria’s Homs province. All of the missiles were reportedly intercepted and destroyed by the Syrian Army using Russian-made ‘Buk’ air defense systems. Days earlier, Syrian air defenses, responding to yet another incursion, shot down seven of eight Israeli missiles during a July 19 raid. The missiles in that attack were launched over Syria proper, after the Israeli aircraft reportedly penetrated an area on the Jordanian border controlled by U.S. forces.

Coincidentally, just one day after the Israeli incursion into Syrian territory Russia released video of the new S-500 anti-aircraft system that is designed to shoot down fighter aircraft. The trials proved successful, with the missile seen obliterating a high-speed target as it streaked across the sky.

Earlier this month, Chief Commander of the Russian Aerospace Forces, Sergei Surovikin, said the new system will be capable of taking down enemy aircraft and even hypersonic weapons in “near-Earth space,” making the S-500 the first generation of such defensive weapons, RT reported.

According to the Ministry of Defense, “after completing all the assessments, there are plans to deliver the first of the S-500 systems to air defense-missile brigades near Moscow.”

Now as if all that were not enough, that same week of muscle-flexing saw the Russian Navy successfully test fire the Zircon missile, which hit a target in the White Sea at a distance of 350 kilometers while traveling at Mach 7, or seven times the speed of sound.

The test comes as competition in the Arctic is heating up, especially as climate change appears to be opening up the region to easier access to oil and gas deposits, as well as highly profitable shipping lanes.

In May, the Russian Ministry of Defense responded to increased U.S. and NATO activity in these frigid northern regions with the announcement that it would deploy a squadron of Su-34 fighter-bomber jets to an updated 14,000 sq. m military base located in the Franz Josef Land archipelago.

Whether or not the move will cool NATO’s engines in the region remains to be seen, but the newfound business and strategic potential in the Arctic remains simply too great for Russia to let down its guard.

On Sunday, July 25, the hyperactive week for the Russian military came to a festive close as Vladimir Putin formally kicked off the annual Navy Day parade in Saint Petersburg, where dozens of vessels – including the 186.4 meters (611 ft. 7 in.) cruiser Marshal Ustinov – sailed down the Neva River as huge crowds watched in awe from the banks.

“Today, Russia’s naval fleet has everything it needs for the guaranteed defense of the country, of our national interests,” the Russian leader proclaimed. “We can detect any enemy and, if necessary, carry out an unavoidable strike.”

Indeed, Russia has, in just one week, upped the military ante to such a degree that long-term peace in this part of the world is a very tempting thought. However, Russia’s long and turbulent history has taught it not to place too much hope on such elusive things. As the famous Russian proverb says, ‘Eternal peace lasts only until the next war.’

New revelations concerning Denmark’s systematic spying upon its closest neighbor leaders—Germany, France, Norway and Sweden—since 2013 were broadcast and published online by the public service medium Danmark Radio (DR), May 30.

1. EU/NATO allies have been spied upon for the United States by the Danish Intelligence Service (Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste-FE), and without knowledge of parliament and, perhaps, even government leaders.
2. France, Norway and Sweden leaders spied upon have come forth with strong critiques and demands for an investigation, for full clarity, and an end to such “grotesque” behavior. They backed up Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel critical statements in 2014 when Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S. tapped into her private cell phone calls. Edward Snowden: Leaks that exposed US spy programme – BBC News
3. This spying by FE is code named Operation Dunhammer (1)

In addition to spying upon its neighbors, FE has been illegally and systematically spying upon its own citizens for United States economic profit and political interests. This has nothing to do with spying upon their ”enemies” (Russia, China, Iran, et. al.). Huge Intelligence Agency Scandal Rocks Denmark and Puts its “Deep State” on Trial – CovertAction Magazine.

FE is the equivalent to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. While the FE jurisdiction also covers military intelligence, they must not spy on Danish people—only foreigners and those in other countries. The Police Intelligence Service (PET) surveils Danes, as the FBI surveils people within the U.S.

Both FE and NSA refuse to comment. Nor has Barak Obama or Joe Biden apologized to Merkel, whom Obama told in 2013 that such tapping into her phone would not occur again.

For several months DR has been working with journalists from Sweden (SVT), Norway, Germany (Süddeutsche Zeitung, NDR, WDR) and France (Le Monde) on these new developments. Their work forced some of 35 national leaders known to be spied upon by the U.S. to come forth.

“We demand to be fully informed about matters concerning Swedish citizens, companies and interests. And then we have to see how the answer sounds from the political side in Denmark,” Swedish Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist told national broadcaster SVT.

Norway, Sweden Demand Answers on Espionage After Report of Denmark Helping NSA Spy on EU Politicians – Sputnik International (sputniknews.com)

“We take the allegations seriously,” his Norwegian counterpart Frank Bakke-Jensen told national broadcaster NRK.

Both defense ministers emphasized that their Danish colleague Defense Minister Trine Bramsen had failed to inform them about the NSA’s espionage against Denmark’s neighbors.

“We did not get to know anything concrete about the case at all,” Frank Bakke-Jensen of Norway complained.”

“The French Foreign Ministry’s minister of state for European affairs, Clement Beaune, called the possible U.S. spying campaign on European politicians a very serious thing, and called for further verification of the information…If confirmed, Beaune did not rule out ’consequences.’”

PM Emmanuel Macron said such behavior is “unacceptable among allies”.

“Danish Defense Minister Trine Bramsen said the government “can and will not enter into speculation about intelligence matters”, yet she emphasized that she views the systematic wiretapping of close allies “unacceptable”.

Just why is it that the Danish government “cannot” speak publically (that is democratically) or even privately to its neighbor leaders about its spying is not forthcoming.

Concerning the new revelations, Edward Snowden states: Edward Snowden på Twitter: “Biden is well-prepared to answer for this when he soon visits Europe since, of course, he was deeply involved in this scandal the first time around. There should be an explicit requirement for full public disclosure not only from Denmark, but their senior partner as well.” / Twitter

Snowden had first revealed some of the spying in 2013, including against Germany Chancellor Merkel. XKEYSCORE

Chancellor Angela Merkel and Helle Thorning-Schmidt. Photo by Emilio Esbardo. Crescita e occupazione in Europa | | il Nuovo Berlinese |

These developments add to earlier ones published by DR last August and December (Huge Intelligence Agency Scandal Rocks Denmark and Puts its “Deep State” on Trial – CovertAction Magazine and Outposts of the U.S. Surveillance Empire: Denmark and Beyond – CovertAction Magazine.)

Denmark will definitely not allow a full disclosure. That was made clear by politicians to DR when it first published the whistleblower’s revelations. DR judiciary reporter Trine Marie Ilsøee said, “We cannot expect that most of the possible illegalities committed will be made public.” She added that Denmark’s intelligence services are connected to and dependent upon foreign powers [i.e. U.S. and not Europe]. Denmark could be compromised if secrets were revealed. “After all, intelligence services operate in secrecy.”

The information of long-standing illegalities, including its constitution, by the Defense Intelligence Service, which the Danish Intelligence Oversight Committee presented last August, includes:

1. Withholding “key and crucial information to government authorities” and the oversight committee between 2014 and today;
2. Illegal activities even before 2014;
3. Telling “lies” to policymakers;
4. Illegal surveillance on Danish citizens, including a member of the oversight committee. (Some of this illegal spying had been shared with unnamed sources [perhaps the U.S.?]);
5. Unauthorized activities have been shelved and;
6. The FE failed to follow up on indications of espionage within areas of the Ministry of Defense.

When DR first exposed some of this spying, Defense Minister Bramsen suspended five FE leaders responsible. Under pressure from several political parties, and most likely the U.S., she reinstated them in different jobs at the same pay.

I wrote about this unconstitutional and anti-democratic policy of aiding and abetting the United States against Europe last December. Outposts of the U.S. Surveillance Empire: Denmark and Beyond – CovertAction Magazine

”Denmark’s military allows the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on the nation’s Finance Ministry, Foreign Ministry, private weapons company Terma, the entire Danish population, and Denmark’s closest neighbors: Sweden, Norway, France, Germany and the Netherlands (NL).”

Information the NSA acquired with the aid of Denmark’s Defense Intelligence Service was used to convince its government to buy Lockheed-Martin’s Joint Strike Fighter F-35 capable of carrying nuclear weapons, albeit Denmark forbids the possession of nuclear weapons on its territory.

“NSA and FE signed an agreement in 2008 that enables NSA to tap huge amounts of data sourced from Danish fiber-optic communication cables passing through Denmark. This metadata is stored by the Danish Defense Intelligence Service in a center built with NSA guidance and technical assistance on the small Danish island of Sandagergaard to which the NSA has access.

“Sandagergaard is one of three Danish military-intelligence ‘listening posts’ which trawls through and analyzes global internet data, seeking information, for example, on what Terma, Denmark’s largest weapons firm, has. This is clearly an intrusion on capitalism’s basic principle and need for free-market competition.”

On September 24, DR published articles (and broadcasted) exposed more illegal activity.

”FE may have violated one of the clear rules that apply to the Danish military and foreign intelligence service: FE is only set in the world to protect Denmark from external threats and to safeguard Danish interests abroad. FE may therefore only come into possession of Danish information by chance.”

Smug Defense Minister Trine Bramsen at ”flag day” ceremony for warring soldiers. Veteraner og udsendte soldater blev hyldet: Se fotos af flagdag og kranselæggelse på Kastellet. – politiken.dk

“Fiber optic cables suck up and copy metadata, sms, chat, telephone calls, emails. The cables fetch data over Danish internet traffic, tapping into Russian communication, as well as German and other European countries’ internet world. Whatever this new equipment is, it probably is similar to or more advanced than XKEYSCORE, which Denmark also possesses….Besides land-based electronic surveillance, there are hundreds of transoceanic submarine cables carrying information between many countries. For decades, Denmark has had a key European cable connected to the U.S., which NSA taps into. In addition, there are new submarine commercial cables.”

A military whistleblower first reported on illegal espionage to the military leadership in May 2015. His reports to superiors were ignored. He waited four years before he revealed illegal spying to the Danish Intelligence Oversight Committee. This undermanned five-person civilian oversight committee, founded in 2014, has only eight employees and a pauper’s budget of $1.3 million. It has no power to interrogate or even to see secret documents the FE wishes to hide.

The Defense Intelligence Service’s 2020 budget was $160 million. How the funds are used is secret, and no oversight committee knows how the money is used nor can they determine its usage.

NSA with FE “are deep inside and digging into some Danish industrial secrets, which is usually what we accuse the Chinese of doing all the time [Huawei],” Tobias Liebetrau, intelligence researcher for the Center for Military Studies at the University of Copenhagen, told DR.”

Prime Minister Frederiksen and President Trump at NATO meeting in London. She said about her talk with Trump, “We swing well.” Mette Frederiksen ved mødet med Donald Trump. I venstre side ses Trine Bramsen og Jeppe Kofod.Shealah Craighead/The White House/Ritzau Scanpix

Colleague Finian Cunningham explains what European “allies” mean in “real politics”.

“What this clearly demonstrates beyond any equivocation is that the European governments are quislings and vassals under Washington’s control. They are not ‘allies’ as that word implies a mutual partnership of equals. They are abject lackeys to American power who cheat on themselves. Talk about treacherous!

“This explains why Russia and China have both seen their relations with Europe deteriorate so badly. Under the prevailing EU governments, it is virtually impossible for Moscow or Beijing to conduct productive relations with Europe. That would require the European Union to have a modicum of independence and autonomy. As it is, however, the Europeans are mere subordinates to Washington’s diktat. And so, America’s renewed Cold War hostility towards Russia and China is reflected unquestioningly by the European bloc. Because the Europeans are nothing but satellites of the US imperium.” US Spying on EU Lackeys – Sputnik International (sputniknews.com)

Conclusion

There are ironies in these matters. First is the betrayal of Denmark’s long-standing friendly association with European countries and its leaders. Also, it has been Social Democrat women feminist leaders who started these spying activities since 2013 when the first SD woman PM was elected, Helle Thorning Schmidt. Following Snowden’s revelations, she embraced her “comrade” Chancellor Angela Merkel assuring her that Denmark was not and would not be involved. All the while she was lying. Then the next Social Democrat woman prime minister, Merete Frederiksen, and her feminist war minister, Trine Bramsen, went deeper into NSA’s spying activities.

These so-called “social democrats”, who are usually referred to as “socialists” by the likes of wishy washy Bernie Sanders, even “communists” by the likes of Donald Trump and other Republicans, are the most endearing Danish politician lap dogs, even more so than the more honest bourgeois politician hawks, who openly swear never-ending loyalty to the United States no matter what.

Another irony is that Denmark’s media, both DR and daily newspapers, did not even cover the extradition trial of Julian Assange in England—nor do they support him. Apparently, Danish media is afraid to back up an active publisher who reveals how the U.S. spies upon any and all, as well as conducting aggressive wars for self-interest profiteering. Yet DR has published a Danish whistleblower’s expose of its own government spying for Big Daddy.

Following DR’s first FE/NSA expose, I spoke on the telephone with DR foreign affairs editor Niels Kvale about the U.S. government threat to all journalists who reveal its “national security secrets”. I told him that DR reporters could be prosecuted in the U.S. just as they seek to do with Julian Assange. Kvale replied: “I was not aware of that. This sounds interesting. Send me your article and I will inform our journalists.”

(1) Dunhammer in English means cattails or bulrush, which grow in bogs. “One particular famous story involving bulrushes is that of the ark of bulrushes in the Book of Exodus. In this story, it is said that the infant Moses was found in a boat made of bulrushes. Within the context of the story, this is probably paper reed (Cyperus papyrus).

When fish make beds over bulrush, they sweep away the sand, exposing the roots. This dense region of roots provides excellent cover for young fish.” Bulrush – Wikipedia.

So Operation Dunhammer could be Danish military intelligence spies’ metaphor for covering up its treachery against its own neighbor allies. Denmark is one of the U.S.’s closest Eyes, “9 Eyes”, which also includes Norway and France, and “14 Eyes”, which includes German and Sweden. That means that Denmark is U.S.’s lead Eye against allies Germany, France, Norway and Sweden. The Nordic countries have the same language and cultural roots, including having been the warring Vikings. Norway and Sweden were also under Danish colonial control for centuries. Outposts of the U.S. Surveillance Empire: Denmark and Beyond – CovertAction Magazine

In January it was noted by a New York Times’ columnist that the nominated Secretary of the U.S. Defence Department, General Lloyd Austin, had “told the Senate he would keep a ‘laserlike focus’ on sharpening the country’s ‘competitive edge’ against China’s increasingly powerful military. Among other things, he called for new American strides in building ‘space-based platforms’ and repeatedly referred to space as a war-fighting domain.” This was not a surprising commitment by the about-to-be confirmed head of the Pentagon, which had already added the ominously named Space Force to its war-fighting assets.

Former White House incumbent, Donald Trump, announced creation of the Space Force in December 2019, stating it would be responsible for “the world’s newest war-fighting domain.” He considered that “Amid grave threats to our national security, American superiority in space is absolutely vital. We’re leading, but we’re not leading by enough, but very shortly we’ll be leading by a lot. The Space Force will help us deter aggression and control the ultimate high ground.” His explicit declaration that Washington is prepared to engage in warfare in yet another “domain” was not surprising, but it is regrettable that the Biden Administration shows no sign of reversing the intention to deploy weapons in space.

Russian reaction to establishment of the Space Force was President Putin’s observation that “The U.S. military-political leadership openly considers space as a military theatre and plans to conduct operations there” which is entirely against the letter and spirit of the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, known generally as the Outer Space Treaty. In Article IV of this agreement of 1967, as recorded by the U.S. State Department, “States Parties to the Treaty undertake not to place in orbit around the Earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, install such weapons on celestial bodies, or station such weapons in outer space in any other manner.”

111 countries have agreed to abide by the treaty, and the 23 that have as yet failed to ratify it are unlikely to engage in space activities of any sort. The accord was a major step forward during the Cold War, and it was hoped that in later years its provisions might be extended and made more precise and binding, but this was not to be. The attraction of space as a war-fighting domain was too attractive to be ignored by Washington, and in 1982 the U.S. Air Force was directed by President Reagan to form Space Command, known as the “Guardians of the High Frontier” and it is not surprising that members of the new Space Force are also titled “Guardians”. The problem is the mission of these people includes “maturing the military doctrine for space power, and organizing space forces to present to our Combatant Commands.”

There has been no rebuttal of Trump’s definition of space as “the world’s new war-fighting domain,” and no modification of the Space Command Mission to “enhance warfighting readiness and lethality through the integration of space capabilities with the joint force, allies, and inter-agency partners in all domains.” And there is rejection of international moves to reduce the possibility of confrontation in space that could lead to outright conflict.

Unconditional U.S. opposition to peace in space was exemplified by its 2014 rejection of a UN General Assembly resolution on the prevention of an arms race in that domain. It is extremely difficult to see how any government could object to a proposal that calls “on all states, in particular those with major space capabilities, to contribute actively to the peaceful use of outer space, prevent an arms race there, and refrain from actions contrary to that objective.” But sure enough, although 178 countries consider this to be a good thing for the future of the world, and voted for the resolution, the United States and Israel abstained. It is verging on the incredible that these countries would not endorse a proposal that there should be peaceful use of outer space.

There was worse to come in the saga of space militarisation, for in November 2020 the First Committee of the UN General Assembly received no support from the U.S. for further initiatives that could guide the world away from the disaster that will befall us if there is no check on movement to “war-fighting” in space. Five resolutions were put forward concerning the furtherance of peace in space, and the U.S. voted against four of them, including the one that specified there should be “No first placement of weapons in outer space.” It seemed that the then U.S. administration actually favoured placement of weapons in space, and it is woeful that the Biden administration has not made it policy to cease militarisation of Trump’s “war-fighting domain”.

April 12 is the International Day of Human Space Flight, marking an important anniversary, not only of technical achievement but of a hoped-for dawn of international cooperation. The UN notes that in 1961 there was “the first human space flight, carried out by Yuri Gagarin, a Soviet citizen. This historic event opened the way for space exploration for the benefit of all humanity.” Formalisation of the anniversary was declared by a UN General Assembly stressing that celebration is merited because of international desire “to maintain outer space for peaceful purposes,” and the U.S. representative declared that the “cold war space race is over and we have all won”.

Unfortunately, the Cold War has been resumed by Washington, and the “space race” has been re-established by creation of the Space Force intended to “control the ultimate high ground.”

The fact that the International Day of Human Space Flight involves remembrance of a Russian astronaut is enough to keep the anniversary out of the U.S. mainstream media, and this affected reporting of an important statement made on that day last month.

Russia’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov reiterated Moscow’s space policy by stating “We consistently believe that only guaranteed prevention of an arms race in space will make it possible to use it for creative purposes, for the benefit of the entire mankind. We call for negotiations on the development of an international legally binding instrument that would prohibit the deployment of any types of weapons there, as well as the use of force or the threat of force.”

The policy could not be clearer. And it was followed by a similar declaration by China’s Zhao Lijian that “We are calling on the international community to start negotiations and reach agreement on arms control in order to ensure space safety as soon as possible. China has always been in favour of preventing an arms race in space; it has been actively promoting negotiations on a legally binding agreement on space arms control jointly with Russia.”

On February 22, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a speech in Geneva that the U.S. should “engage all countries, including Russia and China, on developing standards and norms of responsible behaviour in outer space.”

Even if Blinken’s words fall well short of equating “responsible behaviour” with any indication of a commitment to refrain from placing weapons in space, he did conclude that “I pledge that the United States is here to work, cooperate, and once again use the Conference on Disarmament to create bold, innovative agreements to protect ourselves and each other.”

Well: get on with it, Secretary Blinken. Start talking with people rather than at them. You might even manage to convince your own Space Guardians that peace is better than war.

The U.S. Congress wants answers on what has been apparent foot-dragging by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) in answering congressional questions about NSA forcing the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) into incorporating a NSA-engineered back door into the Dual_EC_DRBG encryption algorithm standard developed for use in federal government computer systems and networks. On January 28, Democratic Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Cory Booker of New Jersey, along with eight of their Democratic colleagues in the House of Representatives – Tom Malinowski of New Jersey, Ted Lieu of California, Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts, Bill Foster of Illinois, Suzan DelBene of Washington, Yvette Clarke of New York, and Anna Eshoo of California – sent a letter to NSA director General Paul Nakasone requesting information on the forced introduction by NSA of the Dual_EC_DRBG algorithm into the products of Juniper Networks that permitted a massive breach of its customers’ systems in 2015, five years before a similar breach occurred with the products of SolarWinds, another vendor reliant on the same NSA-manipulated encryption algorithm.

The gist of the Congressional inquiry into the role NSA may have played in manipulating the U.S. civilian government technical standards development and approval process is not the first time the legislative branch of government has smelled a rat when it comes to NSA inserting “Trojan horses” into standards developed for civilian government and commercial use. In the case of Dual_EC_DRBG, NSA’s zeal in providing itself with a hidden back door to spy on targeted computers and networks relying on the NIST standard may have boomeranged. Back doors of any nature in information technology products is a hack waiting to happen. There is also a suggestion that the U.S. Intelligence Community’s haste in blaming “Russian,” “Chinese,” “North Korean,” “Iranian,” and other hackers for the SolarWinds breach was to cover its own tracks in pushing for widespread use of an encryption standard for which it had implanted a serious security design flaw.

In their letter to Nakasone, the Senators and Representatives wrote, “The American people have a right to know why NSA did not act after the Juniper hack to protect the government from the serious threat posed by supply chain hacks. A similar supply chain hack was used in the recent SolarWinds breach, in which several government agencies, including the Departments of Commerce, Defense, Homeland Security, Justice and Treasury, were infected with malware contained in the updates to SolarWinds software that permitted access by hackers.

A problem in the U.S. government’s supply chain suggests that traditional configuration management controls were abandoned by NIST and NSA, as well as federal agency end-users when it came to approving the contracts with Juniper and SolarWinds for their services.

The history of NSA and civilian and commercial encryption standards is replete with examples of what is the subject of the current congressional probe into the Juniper Networks and SolarWinds events. In the 1990s, the NSA, with the backing of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), pushed for a backdoor in an encryption micro-circuit developed by NSA engineers. Marketed as the “Clipper Chip,” the backdoor technology that foresaw law enforcement holding, in escrow, the decryption mechanism immediately came under attack by privacy and civil liberties advocates, as well as major high-tech computer and telecommunications companies, including AT&T, Microsoft, and Apple. The Clipper Chip backdoor technology was developed in concert with a military contractor, Mykotronx.

Civilian government and commercial users of the 56-bit Data Encryption Standard (DES) algorithm, developed by IBM and issued as a federal standard in 1977 by the National Bureau of Standards, the forerunner of NIST, were content with its security and performance. It would later be discovered that an original 128-bit DES algorithm developed by IBM was scaled back to 56-bits under pressure from NSA. At the time, the code-breaking ability of NSA to crack a 128-bit DES would have taxed other code-breaking priorities, for example those employed against Soviet, Chinese, Israeli, and French diplomatic and military encryption codes. NSA believed it had mastered breaking international diplomatic, military, banking, and industrial encryption ever since it was able to install backdoor decryption capabilities in many Western commercial encryption products, including the Hagelin cipher machines that were produced by Crypto AG of Switzerland. Advances in encryption technology forced NSA to become more aggressive in its demand for a backdoor advantage in cracking encryption products, including the 250-bit RSA algorithm for commercial end-users and the freeware encryption product “Pretty Good Privacy” (PGP).

The Senate-House letter to NSA contains a paragraph that provides some insight into the NSA Dual_EC_DRBG Trojan horse algorithm that was implanted in Juniper Network’s products. That paragraph states, “Sometime between 2008 and 2009, Juniper added the algorithm to several of its products. Juniper made this change secretly, which it kept from the public until 2013. In response to a recent congressional investigation, the company confirmed that it added support for the algorithm ‘at the request of a customer,’ but refused to identify that customer or even confirm whether that customer was a U.S. government agency. According to Juniper, no one involved in the decision to use this algorithm still works for the company.” Based on NSA’s similar efforts in the past, two facts can be ascertained. The “customer” that made the request was, in fact, NSA, and the company employees involved in the decision to use the algorithm were temporary employees provided by NSA.

The FBI also saw sophisticated encryption systems in the hands of the public to be an impediment to its longstanding access to communications systems, with or without a court order. For many years, the FBI enjoyed unhindered access to Washington, DC’s analog phone system from its own remote access wiretapping room located in the Old Post Office on Pennsylvania Avenue, now the Trump International Hotel.

With the current congressional inquiry into NSA blaming various state actors for the Juniper/Solar Winds hacking, it appears that we have come full circle. Some thirty years ago, the NSA back door in question was the Clipper Chip. Today, it is Dual_EC_DRBG. In the early 1990s, the chief critic of NSA’S actions was Democratic Representative Jack Brooks of Texas, the chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee and a cigar-chomping protégé of House Speaker Sam Rayburn and President Lyndon Johnson. NSA was able to withstand the heat placed on it by the likes of Brooks. They obviously believe they will be able to obfuscate on the encryption backdoor issue with Wyden, Booker, and the Democratic House members.

There is every likelihood that the “damaging” hacks from unnamed actors abroad into U.S. federal, state, and local government networks and computer systems, as well as those in the private sector, have been carried out by U.S. Cyber Command personnel testing their backdoor Trojan horse capabilities. For every well-publicized hacker attack blamed on foreign players, the NSA and Cyber Command enjoy huge boosts in their operating budgets. Victims of hacking attacks also bear responsibility for their dilemmas. The rush to outsource computing capabilities and data storage to “cloud” operations brings about inherent security vulnerabilities. Those who began worrying about computer security risks in the late 1960s, including those working for the Central Intelligence Agency, would have gone ballistic if they lived long enough to see the CIA outsource its cloud computing requirements to Amazon.

So, who is ultimately at fault for the succession of major hacking events in the United States? The quote from Cassius in William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” is germane, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

If we go back to 2017 there was one moment when Donald Trump truly “became President of the United States” according to Fareed Zakaria. On April 7^th, to Mainstream Media delight, Trump greenlit the launch of 59 Tomahawk Cruise Missiles at various targets in Syria. This was a rare act of true blunt aggression by Trump, but what was even more unusual was that there was no follow up strike, there was not step two on a roadmap, there was just nothing. After this strike there was no follow up of any relevance. The only thing American forces in Syria seem to have accomplished is playing chicken with the Russians out of boredom.

Image: This unassuming weapon could be an international game changer.

Perhaps the logic of a single large missile strike was to convince Assad to surrender like the Japanese after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Washington often follows its own logic but it is hard to imagine that any analysts would expect this type of strategy to pay off.

An alternative explanation for the missile launch was put forward by Gordon Duff of Veterans Today, who believed the strike was mostly done to test the capabilities of the Russian S-400 anti-missile/air systems in Syrian possession. Duff wrote the following…

“Veterans Today contacted the Syrian Ministry of Information regarding the bizarre news that 34 Tomahawk cruise missiles had simply vanished. VT had even surmised that some may well have been used against other targets, even going as far as to suggest a possible conspiracy to hit Palmyra to aid the ISIS attack there.

A possible confirmation is simply the number fired, 59. This is what would be required to overwhelm the Russian air defense system based on the number of launchers, both S300 and S400 and other “cruise-capable” systems out there…”

The theory that this was some kind of test seems much more reasonable than Trump expecting to one-punch knockout the Syrians through a show of force, or any other shot-in-the-dark answer. The S-400 systems have created a lot more news over recent years than most if not all other weapons systems. The Russians have a new main battle tank (the T-14 Armata) modernized the AK yet again (with too many versions to mention) and the “near future” COD-style Ratnik gear that is being issued to all their soldiers, but all of these only make the news inside of Russia. Besides military hardware fanboys nothing seems to be even close to the S-400 in terms of perking Washington’s ears. In fact, any nation considering buying these devices risks full blown sanctions from the United States. Interestingly enough a few countries have called Washington’s bluff and purchased the anti-air/missile systems anyways. Unnamed CNBC sources said the reason for the furor to get a hold of the S-400 system is that “No other U.S. system can match the S-400′s ability to protect large swathes of airspace at such long ranges” i.e. the Russians have created an affordable anti NATO intervention box.

Image: The Trump missile strike on Syria was a failed experiment.

So perhaps when Trump tested the waters in Syria the results came back negative, due to this affordable Russian anti-missile/air system. If 34 out of 59 Tomahawk missiles “vanished” that means there is a 57% fail rate due to the quality of the missiles themselves, their operators on the warships that launched them and/or the S-400s on the Syrian mainland knocked them out. That last factor is probably the most important.

In terms of the U.S. military budget, 59 missiles is chump change but perhaps this experiment proved that trying to dominate the air over countries like Iraq and Libya may become much more difficult and risk-heavy than it was 10+ years ago. The “wars of convenience” of the Post Cold War period were successful with extremely low American/NATO casualties due to total air dominance, which thanks to the Russians could be over, at least for the foreseeable future.

If the infamy of the S-400 systems inside the Beltway is deserved, then we should actually thank Trump for experimenting first rather than sending countless numbers of airmen to their deaths over Damascus. Throughout history various militaries have tried to fight their “grandfather’s war” and have paid the price for it. Unlike the French who marched into WWI in bright red pants expecting to be firing in tight rank-and-file formations, someone (possibly Trump) was able to see the potential of these missile systems in a real war and decided to pull back and rethink their strategy before it is too late.

Image: What exactly are limited U.S. forces accomplishing in Syria? Without total air dominance – not that much.

At the end of the day Trump was either an exceptionally peaceful U.S. President because he saw it as good for America, wanted to keep his campaign promises or the Syrian missile experiment proved that for now war is too costly. Regardless of which version of history has more truth, the usage of S-400 systems in nations that are the targets of Washington’s hunger could prove to be a game changer. Weaker nations are willing to risk crushing sanctions to get this means of self-defense, some of whom still have U.S. troops all over their country. The big question is that if air-superiority is now out the window, how will this affect American foreign policy going forward? This will either create a peace due to an unfavorable cost/benefit result for Washington or force the U.S. to fight wars with much higher human cost on their side.

Yet were the Doomsday Clock to be reset today, eight months after that last announcement, the time gap to midnight would have to be further reduced, perhaps to a little more than one minute, but not by much – 70 or 75 seconds before midnight probably – or even less.

For the remorseless escalation of tension between the United States and Russia – a process built on a long-rising tsunami of 25 years of shattered pledges, and double crosses by the West of supposedly solemn binding agreements – cannot be turned on a dime, to use the famous American saying. Though Secretary of State Mike Pompeo thinks it can.

On July 23, Pompeo gave a speech at the Nixon Center in California that assured his place alongside Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright as the most fatuous and stupid of all U.S. secretaries of state.

Even Frank Kellogg, who in the 1920s really thought he had outlawed war when Hirohito already ruled in Tokyo and Hitler was rising fast in Germany, did not sink so far.

Pompeo imagined that he could persuade President Vladimir Putin to take him at his word and turn against China, when the United States and not China has remorselessly eroded Russia’s margins of security in the West ever since the end of the Cold War . And the process continues with Pompeo’s eager indeed fervent support to this day.

The U.S. Mainstream Media – run by arrogant, self-righteous fools to lead hundreds of millions of complacent, ignorant sheep – blandly continues to ignore the ever hostile probing of Russia’s defensive airspace by nuclear-armed, long-range bombers equipped withstand off weapons from the north, the west and the south. But when Russia scrambles its own defensive combat fighters to buzz the intruders and serve due warning of their vulnerability, they are invariably cast in the aggressor’s role.

This is a far more deadly, terrifying state of affairs than any that occurred between the development of thermonuclear hydrogen bomb super-weapons of unlimited power by both the United States and Soviet Union in the period 1952 to 1954. For over the next two decades, the dangers of Armageddon were vividly recognized and well understood in both Moscow and Washington and by the populations of both superpowers alike.

But today, the leaders of the West have totally repressed the dangers of thermonuclear Armageddon.

Republican and Democratic lawmakers in both houses of Congress vie with each other in striking fake macho roles of fraudulent heroism and non-existent principle to support ever more reckless and simply insane adventures on behalf of Neo-Nazi and other racist gangster cliques in Ukraine and Georgia.

Outright clowns like President Barack Obama’s ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul – a particular favorite of former Secretary of State Clinton – are sent to insult the leader of one of the world’s premier thermonuclear superpowers and to embrace openly those who hate the leaders of their own country and seek to topple him, and this behavior is seen as perfectly normal, acceptable and even admirable by the thousands of cockroaches who staff the great “think tanks” (an oxymoron if ever there was one) in the city of Washington.

The 100 Seconds to Midnight warning was announced on January 23 – a full eight months ago. Yet I have no doubt that no more than five of the 100 sitting United States senators from both parties know that fact – or take it seriously for a second. It is this astonishing ignorance, a psychological mechanism of willful ignorance and denial that Sigmund Freud himself would be hard put to explain, that is our greatest danger.

In late August, a U.S. B-52H Superfortress strategic bomber carried out a simulated bombing of the Russian Baltic Fleet’s base in the exclave of Kaliningrad, the aircraft monitoring resource Plane Radar has reported, citing tracking data.

Every year, NATO regularly carries out full-scale military exercises unabashedly aimed against Russia with such reassuring titles as “Anaconda.”

What is an anaconda? It is a colossal 20 to 30 foot long fearful snake in the Amazon jungle that first encircles its prey, then crushes and devours it, often still alive. This then, is the strategic message we have been sending to Russia, one of the two most powerful nuclear powers on our planet.

Russia has responded. The development of hypersonic weapons that the West cannot yet match is one loud tolling of Thomas Jefferson’s Fire Bell in the Night. A second, and most grave development is the shifting of Russian strategic forces to a potential first strike posture.

The Russians do not seek to conquer the West or the World. But they are truly fearful that the West is determined to conquer and destroy them. And every message that flows out of the Republican and Democratic national leaderships alike in Congress and the U.S. media and think tanks is consistent with this message.

Western leaders, policymakers and so-called “pundits” – in reality a tame cheering section of trained hyenas – should not therefore be surprised that the Russians have responded as they have.

The Sputnik News Agency noted earlier this month, “Recently, episodes of aircraft interception over the Baltic, the Black and the Barents seas have become more frequent.

“On 31 August,” the Sputnik report continued, “three Russian Su-27 fighters were scrambled as three U.S. B-52 strategic bombers approached the Russian state border over the neutral waters of the Baltic Sea. The bombers were accompanied until they changed course and moved away from the Russian border. On 1 September, a Russian Northern Fleet MiG-31 was scrambled to accompany a Norwegian P-3C Orion reconnaissance aircraft.”

Hysterical, always unsubstantiated claims that Russia is intervening in the U.S. domestic election cycle could not be more misplaced. In 1996, the Clinton administration proudly and openly boasted of decisively swinging the Russian presidential election to re-elect Boris Yeltsin.

The Russians remember this. They are determined not to let it happen again. They are determined not to let their country be dismembered. Yet the U.S. body politic, its policy-shaping institutions and media remain locked on their mad suicidal course of needless confrontation and childish fake-macho bullying and posturing towards Russia.

President Donald Trump, for all the calumnies thrown against him, has made repeatedly clear he does recognize the imminent dangers of world war. Every time he tries to reduce tensions and open new lines of dialogue with Moscow however, some new wave of slander and outright lies is concocted against him, each as outrageous, shameless, ridiculous and virulent as anything Joseph Goebbels ever concocted.

On the other side, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, personally the most humane and decent of men, went along with the mad and wicked Hillary Clinton warmongering that sought to topple stable, lawful governments across the Middle East, Latin America and Eurasia at a cost of millions of lives without a whisper of protest. It is too much to hope for anything better if he is elected in November.

Indeed, all we can reasonably look forward to is a resetting of the symbolic Doomsday Clock by 10 or 20 seconds over the next few months. That really isn’t going to be enough. The Cause of warning the West not to risk setting off a thermonuclear world war certainly demands a bit more.

On July 17, 1975 the first international handshake was occurring in space between Russian Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov and American astronaut Thomas Stafford as the first official act kicking off the historic Apollo-Soyuz cooperative mission. Taking place during age of nuclear terror on Earth, the Apollo-Soyuz represented a great hope for humankind and was the first ever international space mission leading the way to the MIR-USA cooperation and later International Space Station. Starting on July 15 as both Russian and American capsules launched simultaneously and continuing until July 24^th, the Apollo-Soyuz cooperation saw astronauts and cosmonauts conducting joint experiments, exchanged gifts, and tree seeds later planted in each others’ nations.

As hope for a bright future of cooperation and co-discovery continued for the coming decades with mankind’s slow emergence as a space faring species, affairs on earth devolved in disturbing ways. A new era of regime change operations, Islamic terrorism and oil geopolitics took on new life in the 1980s and as globalization stripped formerly productive nations of their industrial/scientific potential, the Soviet Union collapsed by 1991. During this dark time, the consolidation of a corporatocracy under NAFTA and the European Maastricht Treaty occurred and transatlantic globalists gloated over the collapse of Russia and the rise of a utopian end-of-history, unipolar order.

In some ways, today’s world of 2020 is different from that of 1975 and in other ways it is disturbingly similar.

Today, a new generations of Cold Warriors has come to power in the Trans Atlantic Deep State who are willing to burn the earth under nuclear fire in defense of their utopian visions for world government which they see fast slipping away to the Multipolar alliance led by Russia and China. The clash of open vs closed system paradigms represented by the NATO/City of London cage on the one hand and the New Silk Road win-win paradigm of constant growth on the other has created a tension which is visceral and pregnant with potential for both good and evil.

This schism has also split American space policy between two opposing paradigms:

On the one hand a Deep State space vision for full spectrum dominance is defining Space Force (America’s newest branch of the military created in December 2019). Run out of the Pentagon and the most regressive neocon ideologues, this program calls for weaponizing space against the Russian Chinese alliance (and the rest of the world). Another, more sane vision for space is represented by leading NASA officials like Jim Bridenstine who have created NASA’s Artemis Accords calling for a framework for peaceful international cooperation in space. Bridenstine and other NASA officials have worked tirelessly to bring Russia and the USA into cooperative alliances on matters of space mining, asteroid defense and deep space exploration ever since President Trump’s 2017 directive to put mankind back on the moon for the first time since 1972 with plans to go to Mars following soon thereafter.

While U.S.-Russia space collaboration has moved at a snails pace even losing ground won in 1975, the Apollo-Soyuz spirit has expressed itself in another part of the world brilliantly, with the Russian-Chinese pact to jointly build a lunar base announced on July 23 by Roscosmos chief Dimitry Rogozin saying: “Recently, we have agreed that we will probably research the Moon and build a lunar research base together – Russia and China.”

This pact follows hot off the heals of the September 2019 agreement between both nations to jointly collaborate on Lunar activities over the coming decade which would begin with the Chang’e 7 lander and Luna 26 orbiter searching for lunar water in 2022. The Russia-China agreement also announced “creating and operating a joint Data Center for Lunar and Deep Space Research.”

On the same day that Rogozin announced the lunar research base, China’s Tianwen-1 (“Quest for Heavenly Truth”) launched on a Long March-5 carrier rocket from Hainan carrying an orbiter and rover scheduled to arrive in Mars’ orbit in February 2021. Once the rover lands on the surface of the red planet on May 2021, China will become the second nation to complete a successful soft landing after America (which has made 8 such landings since 1976, two of which are still operational). China’s orbiter will join the three American, two European and one Indian orbiters currently circling Mars.

Due to the fact that the Earth-Mars proximity is at it’s closest phase, several other important Mars launches have also occurred, with the United Arab Emirates launching the Arab world’s first interplanetary mission in history from Japan on Monday. This will be followed in short order by America’s Perseverance Mars Rover which will be launched from Cape Canaveral and will join the Curiosity rover that landed in 2012.

NASA has stated that Perseverance’s mission will involve seeking signs of microbial life, ancient life and subsurface water as well as “testing a method for producing oxygen from the Martian atmosphere, identifying other resources (such as subsurface water), improving landing techniques, and characterizing weather, dust, and other potential environmental conditions that could affect future astronauts living and working on Mars.”

What makes this Russia-China pact space pact additionally important is that it creates a potential flank in the anti-China space cooperation ban signed into law with the 2011 Wolf Act. By integrating into China’s advanced space program, Russia (which currently suffers from no similar bans to cooperation from western powers) may provide a lateral pathway for cooperation with China needed to bypass the ban. Russian-USA plans to cooperate on such programs as the Lunar Gateway station orbiting the moon still exists as well as other Soyuz-U.S. collaborative launches that have been planned through 2021 so hope on this level is not without foundation. Even though America has regained the capability to launch manned space craft with the Crew Dragon launch of this year, Bridenstine has said:

“We see a day when Russian cosmonauts can launch on American rockets, and American astronauts can launch on Russian rockets. Remember, half of the International Space Station is Russian, and if we’re going to make sure that we have continual access to it, and that they have continual access to it, then we’re going to need to be willing to launch on each other’s vehicles.”

Putin’s Strategic Open System Vision

We also know that since President Trump’s April 6, 2020 executive order making lunar and mars mining a priority of American space policy, he and President Putin have held four discussions in which space cooperation has arisen. While neocon war haws in the Pentagon and British military intelligence scream of Russian/Chinese aggression and accuse Russia of testing anti-satellite ballistic weapons, the first bilateral U.S.-Russia space security talks have restarted since 2013.

Four days after Trump’s executive order, Putin addressed American and Russian astronauts on board the ISS and said:

“We are pleased that our specialists are successfully working under the ISS program with their colleagues from the United States of America, one of the leading space powers. This is a clear example of an effective partnership between our countries in the interests of all mankind.”

Putin went on to say:

“I believe that even now, when the world is confronted with challenges, space activities will continue, including our cooperation with foreign partners, because mankind cannot stand still but will always try to move forward and join forces to advance the boundaries of knowledge… despite difficulties, people sought to make their dream of space travel come true, fearlessly entered the unknown and achieved success.”

The impending economic collapse has forced certain uncomfortable truths to the surface: 1) we will get a new global economic and security system soon, 2) that system will be of a closed system/unipolar nature or it will be an open system/multipolar character. If it is an open system then humanity will have learned that in order to successfully exist within a creative, evolving universe, we must tie our fates to becoming a self-consciously creative, evolving species locking our economic, cultural and political realities into this discoverable character of reality.

If the new system is of a closed/entropic order as certain advocates of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset are proclaiming, then a much unhappier fate awaits our children and grandchildren which would make World War II look like a cake walk.

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

All the media excitement is sound and fury signifying little. Trump’s troop drawdown is not a gift to Russia. Rather, it is more an expression of rift and a temper tantrum by Trump, with little intended strategic consequence.

For a start, the news of withdrawing American forces from Germany – about a third of the current total of 35,000 – was not officially announced by the White House nor the Pentagon. It was first reported on June 5 by the Wall Street Journal attributed to administration sources. In other words, it has the hallmark of a leak with a political or personal agenda. That suggests the “news” came from President Trump and his clique, including the mischievous former US ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell.

Incredibly, neither the Pentagon nor the German government were officially informed about what would be a momentous troop movement, given that US troops have been stationed in Germany since the end of World War Two. The country houses the largest US bases in Europe. It is therefore a cornerstone to the NATO alliance.

The lack of formal communication indicates that Trump’s purported order was more motivated by pique and caprice than signifying a strategic shift in US forces away from Europe, or, as the president has himself several times threatened to do before, to walk away from NATO. The latter notion touted by Trump in his obsession over squeezing European military budgets is nothing but bombast and bluff, given the structural importance of NATO to American power projection. Transactional money-obsessed Trump probably doesn’t even understand the strategic picture of how NATO and Germany are a vital European bridge for US imperialism.

Secondly, Trump’s record shows that he is all talk and no action when it comes to removing troops. He made a big fanfare about US soldiers coming home from Syria and Afghanistan, yet nearly a year on from those promises there have been no discernible drawdowns.

Even if there was a credible plan to take US troops out of Germany, that doesn’t mean American forces are reducing their footprint across Europe. Under Trump there has been a continued build-up of US forces in the Baltic states with greater emphasis on rotational presence of brigades. His envoys in Europe have also dangled the idea of relocating US forces from Germany to Poland. Given the Russophobic politics of Poland and the Baltic states, the ostensible troop drawdown from Germany would hardly be a “gift” to Russia.

So, what is going on?

Trump seems to be delivering a snub to German Chancellor Angela Merkel as well as to his own Pentagon chiefs.

Several reports indicate that Trump was enraged by Merkel’s decision to skip on a G7 summit to be hosted in Washington by the American president later this month. Her decision reported last week was said to be made in light of coronavirus concerns and also due to Merkel’s misgivings over Trump’s earlier order to pull US funding from the World Health Organization. A few days after Merkel’s reported reluctance to attend the G7 summit the WSJ then reported the news of Trump’s troop pullout plan from Germany. Adding to the sense of retaliation was the astounding fact that Berlin was not consulted or informed in advance. That suggests the aim was to belittle Berlin as much as possible.

The second front of Trump’s malice involves the Pentagon. As Associated Press reported this week the president’s relations with his military chiefs is near “breaking point”. The acrimony is due to the pushback by current and former Pentagon officials over Trump’s threats to deploy the military to curb mass protests against police violence and the killing of African-American man George Floyd in Minneapolis last month.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley have both balked at the president’s call for combat troops to be sent on to the streets of the capital and other cities to quell the protests. Trump has reportedly engaged in “shouting matches” with his senior military officials over their refusal to commit troops in large numbers. The reluctance by the Pentagon is no doubt motivated by apprehensions that such a move could inflame an already volatile situation and provoke mass insurrection.

Knowing Trump’s notoriously thin skin and insatiable ego, the perceived rejection by Merkel over the proposed G7 summit, followed by the Pentagon brass giving a cold shoulder to his domestic executive power display, that had the combined effect of Trump’s hasty leak about taking US troops out of Germany. The move is therefore all about Trump trying to pull rank on America’s German vassal and poking the US generals in the eye.

It is doubtful that the knee-jerk move has any intended strategic significance. Certainly it is not a “gift” to Russia, as some Trump opponents have hyperventilated about.

Just look at the intensifying sanctions belligerence under Trump on Russia over the Nord Stream 2 natural gas project, and the ongoing US-led NATO build-up against Moscow. The latest kerfuffle about Trump purportedly taking troops out of Germany is merely reactionary wheels-within-wheels of a bigger and systematic hostile US posture towards Russia.

Brett Crozier, captain of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier the USS Theodore Roosevelt, is the latest example why. Last Monday, he sent a four-page memo to higher-ups warning that the coronavirus was racing through the ranks and that the only solution was to remove all but a skeleton crew and subject them to a two-week quarantine. “Keeping over 4000 young men and women aboard the TR is an unnecessary risk and breaks faith with those Sailors entrusted to our care,” he wrote.

This was the simple truth, and yet Crozier’s reward was to be fired on the spot. This makes him the American version of Li Wenliang, the 33-year-old ophthalmologist who in December first noticed that a new virus was making the rounds in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Li, who would later die of the disease, got in trouble for telling officials what they didn’t want to hear, and now Crozier has gotten the ax for doing the same.

But Crozier’s message was not only that the Navy faces a huge problem in terms of disease control. Implicitly, it was that the entire U.S. war machine is effectively inoperable. The military could still “fight sick” in an emergency. But since no emergency exists, its only realistic option is to shut down until the pandemic is under control. Otherwise, the military infection rate will continue to climb, spelling disaster for every civilian population the military comes in contact with.

But faced with the loss of its high-tech toys, the brass responded in typical childish fashion by shutting it eyes, stopping up its ears, and screaming, “I can’t hear you!” Crozier is out on his derrière as a result while the Trump administration is now beating the war drums just to show it can.

The insanity was on full display at an Apr. 1 press conference announcing the White House’s latest military offensive against Venezuela. Trump was his usual Mussolini-esque self while Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, a former Raytheon lobbyist, was the perfect image of a self-serving careerist whose only concern is winning his next promotion. “At a time when the nation and the department of defense are focused on protecting the American people from the spread of the coronavirus,” he began, “we also remain vigilant to the many other threats our country faces. Today, at the president’s direction, the department of defense, in close cooperation with our interagency partners, began enhanced counter-narcotics operations in the eastern Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. This initiative is part of the administration’s whole-of-government approach to combating the flow of illicit drugs into the United States and protecting the American people from their scourge….

“Included in this force package,” he continued, “are Navy destroyers and littoral combat ships, Coast Guard cutters, P-8 patrol aircraft, and elements of an army security force assistance brigade. These additional forces will nearly double our capacity to conduct counter-narcotics operations in the region.”

All of which was not only nonsense, but dangerous nonsense at that. Sure, some illicit drugs enter the United State via the eastern Pacific and Caribbean. But they mainly travel by land and by post, with China far and away the leading source for artificial opiates that have wreaked such havoc in recent years. Yet not only is Fentanyl all but impossible to stop since it’s a hundred times stronger than heroin gram for gram, but it can be easily synthesized from precursor chemicals, according to the Rand Corporation, that are themselves perfectly legal.

A destroyer is as useless against such a threat as a medieval crossbow. Moreover, Venezuela isn’t a major player even when it comes to cocaine since production mainly takes place in Peru, Columbia, and Bolivia, all solidly in the pro-U.S. camp, while transport is chiefly overland via Central America and Mexico. As for good old-fashioned heroin, the world’s leading producer happens to be Afghanistan, a U.S. protectorate since 2001.

If the U.S. wants to blockade someone, it should probably start with itself since it’s the chief source of the problem.

So what’s the real explanation for the latest round of saber rattling? Is it because Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro may have begun dabbling in the drug trade like so many others? Or is it because he sits on top of some of the largest oil reserves on earth?

The latter is far more likely, obviously. But with oil already in the mid-$20 range and sure to plunge even lower, even that doesn’t quite make sense.

Rather, the only way to understand it is as a form of imperial madness in which chest-thumping becomes an end in itself. The Trump administration wants to intimidate Venezuela for the same reason that it wants to intimidate Iran or blow up Iraq by launching a military offensive against Shi’ite militias with closes ties to the Baghdad government. It wants to merely in order to show it can. It wants to prove that, virus or no virus, it’s still the toughest guy on block, so everyone else better step said.

But the act rings hollow in an age of Covid-19. A destroyer is more a threat to itself if half its crew is down with corona, and that goes double for an army security force assistance brigade, whatever the hell that is. The Trump administration’s efforts to control the virus have already been a colossal failure domestically while now it’s seemingly doing everything in its power to make the problem worse everywhere else as well. Sending troops into battle, ordering ships to deploy against nonexistent threats, stepping up economic sanctions that cripple efforts to defend against the disease – all of this is merely insures that the disease will intensify and thousands more will die.

An empire that is incapable of responding rationally to an existential threat is not one that’s long for this world. A lot of banks and corporations will go belly up before this crisis is through. But so will political structures, beginning with the rickety structure known as the United States. The gods first make mad whom they wish to destroy.

The move represents a grave assault on existing treaties forbidding the weaponization of space. The NATO announcement is doubly insidious because it gives the appearance of a multilateral acceptance of US attempts to open up the “final frontier” for militarization. A move which is far from acceptable. In fact, illegal, under international law.

Earlier this year, Donald Trump unveiled a new branch of the US armed forces, Space Command, separate from the Air Force. “Spacecom will defend America’s vital interests in space, the next war-fighting domain, and I think that’s pretty obvious to everybody. It’s all about space,” said Trump at a White House ceremony.

It is the first time that a new branch of the US armed forces has been created since 1947 when US Air Force was created out of the Army. The other existing armed services are the Marine Corps, Navy and Coast Guard. Legislation is currently going through Congress which will authorize the president’s order for setting up the new branch, to be known henceforth as Space Force.

All this is happening with barely any public debate or scrutiny. Even though it represents a dramatic escalation of military dimensions. To the existing domains of land, air and sea the United States under Trump is pushing ahead for weaponization of space. As the “war-fighting” rationale of the president makes clear, the development is explicitly about leveraging new military strike potential.

US weaponization of space has been underway for decades, going back to the “star wars” initiative of the Reagan administration in the 1980s and during the GW Bush presidency in the 2000s. However, Trump is taking the program to a whole new level by implementing a separate dedicated Space Force.

This is in spite of the existing UN-ratified 1967 Outer Space Treaty which prohibits any introduction of weapons, including nuclear weapons, into space.

“States shall not place nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies or station them in outer space in any other manner,” reads the treaty, which provides the basic legal framework for international space law.

Russia and China have been consistently strong advocates for upholding the treaty.

Yet proponents of the US Space Force routinely claim that America is being threatened by Russian and Chinese advances in space military technology. It is not clear on what basis these American claims are made.

Republican Alabama Representative Mike Rogers is quoted by Space News as saying: “We have allowed China and Russia to become our peers, not our near peers and that’s unacceptable.”

But like so many other US claims about Russia and China supposedly threatening American interests, there is little or no evidence presented. The claims rely on ideological prejudice and/or a cynical lobbying service for the military-industrial complex. Going into space will convey billion-dollar contracts to US aerospace corporations.

Indeed, there is a resonance with US claims made in the 1950s and 60s of a “missile gap” which alleged back then that the Soviet Union was outpacing America’s arsenal of strategic nuclear weapons. The putative missile gap was invoked as a pretext for greatly expanding the US arsenal, thereby creating an international arms race, only for the so-called missile gap to be found out years later to be a fiction of American scaremongering. Cynically, that fiction was deliberately propagated to the American public in order to provide a tax-payer-funded pork-barrel production line for the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex.

The same process seems to be underway with Trump’s much-vaunted Space Force.

There is another strategic aspect to this American “weaponization of the heavens”. That is, to force Russia and China into an arms race which Washington calculates would be economically ruinous for Moscow and Beijing. What’s at stake here is a pivotal struggle between Russia and China’s vision of a multipolar world and Washington’s desire to be the globe’s hegemonic uni-power. If the US can break Russia and China economically then it wins this era-defining struggle. Launching an arms race is Washington’s gambit for taking down Russia and China.

The precedent is the arms race in the 1980s under Reagan which brought the Soviet Union to collapse. Because of Washington’s presumed right to print endless amounts of dollars and rack up seemingly limitless national debt, the US is waging that it will be the last man standing in an arms race with Russia and China.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly said that Russia will not fall into the trap of unleashing an arms race. At a recent meeting in Sochi with his top defense officials, Putin emphasized the imperative need to focus on efficiency in weapon systems. Russia’s latest-generation of hypersonic missiles which apparently can evade any US defense shield – despite the latter costing trillions of dollars to develop – is one example.

Nevertheless, if – and it is a big if – the US manages to develop space weaponry, the pressure will be on Russia and China to respond in kind to counter a whole new threat level. That would mean both nations diverting resources into another realm of weaponry instead of developing their economies.

The US Space Force has to be seen in the wider context of Washington unravelling the entire system of global arms controls. The US withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty in 2002 was followed by its withdrawal from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty last year. The Trump administration is moving towards scrapping New START in 2021, the third and last nuclear-arms control treaty.

There is an unconscionable effort by US governments over many years to incite a new arms race. Going into outer space is part of that effort. It is a gross violation of international law and the United Nations by the US to open up a new frontier for military dominance. And the US has utilized the 29-nation NATO alliance to rubber-stamp its criminal weaponization of space.