In the process of issuing another not-really-a-denial about a Yahoo News report that the CIA plotted to kidnap, extradite and assassinate WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in 2017, former CIA director Mike Pompeo said that the 30 former government officials the report was based on “should all be prosecuted for speaking about classified activity inside the Central Intelligence Agency.”

Here are some quotes from the exchange on Pompeo’s recent Megyn Kelly Show appearance courtesy of Mediaite:

Kelly asked Pompeo about the claims.

“Makes for pretty good fiction, Megyn,” said Pompeo. “They should write such a novel.”

He added, “Whoever those 30 people who allegedly spoke with one of these reporters, they should all be prosecuted for speaking about classified activity inside the Central Intelligence Agency.”

Pompeo called Wikileaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service” that is “actively seeking to steal American classified information.”

“You deny the report?” asked Kelly.

“There’s pieces of it that are true,” said Pompeo. “We tried to protect American information from Julian Assange and Wikileaks, absolutely, yes. Did our justice department believe they had a valid claim which would’ve resulted in the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States to stand trial? Yes. I supported that effort for sure. Did we ever engage in activity that was inconsistent with U.S. law?… We’re not permitted by U.S. law to conduct assassinations. We never acted in a way that was inconsistent with that.”

Fmr. CIA Director Mike Pompeo calls for mass prosecutions of sources who spoke to Yahoo! News reporters about plans to kidnap or kill Assange.

“Whoever those 30 people [are] who allegedly spoke with one of these reporters, they should all be prosecuted”https://t.co/UWNgmFAvUX

— Kevin Gosztola (@kgosztola) September 29, 2021

Pompeo’s point that “We’re not permitted by U.S. law to conduct assassinations” is not especially convincing considering how the Trump administration openly assassinated Iran’s top military commander Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike last year, a move which Pompeo supported and defended.

“President Trump and those of us in his national security team are re-establishing deterrence, real deterrence, against the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Pompeo gushed in support of the assassination at the time.

Pompeo’s pseudo-denial is of course further undermined by his position that the former officials who spoke to the press should all be prosecuted for “speaking about classified activity inside the Central Intelligence Agency.” Is it false or is it “classified activity”? It can’t be both. The two things Pompeo admitted to, trying to “protect American information” and working to extradite Assange, are not classified information. The classified information he wants them prosecuted for is therefore something else.

After a lot of flailing and humming and hawing Pompeo does eventually make what sounds like a concrete denial with the curiously-worded phrase “I can say we never conducted planning to violate US law.” But even this wouldn’t be a denial of the claims in the Yahoo News report, because the report is mostly about the intelligence community and the Trump administration trying to find legal loopholes that would allow them to take out Assange.

For example, this quote from the Yahoo News article: “A primary question for U.S. officials was whether any CIA plan to kidnap or potentially kill Assange was legal.” This would in no way be contradicted by Pompeo’s claim that “we never conducted planning to violate US law.” It would mean that there were discussions and plans about assassinating Assange amid conversations and debates about whether it would be legal to do so. The fact that they didn’t plan to violate US law doesn’t mean they didn’t plan to assassinate Assange if they could find a legal loophole for it.

There’s no actual denial here. https://t.co/Drj417XJfd

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) September 28, 2021

This follows an earlier non-denial by Pompeo of the exact same nature in an interview with conservative pundit Glenn Beck. Pompeo points out that one of the article’s authors was a Russiagater and says of the former officials cited in the report that “those sources didn’t know what we were doing.” But he doesn’t actually deny it.

If Pompeo had not been involved in plots to kidnap, rendition and assassinate Julian Assange, he would have just said so. He wouldn’t have engaged in all kinds of verbal gymnastics to squirm his way out of a difficult question, and he certainly wouldn’t be calling for the criminal prosecution of his accusers for “speaking about classified activity inside the Central Intelligence Agency.”

Mike Pompeo is a literal psychopath. He chuckles about lying, cheating and stealing with the CIA. He defends murderous sanctions and openly admits to using them to foment civil war in empire-targeted nations. He defends assassination. He strongly implied the US would interfere in UK politics if Jeremy Corbyn became Prime Minister. And yet somehow he escaped the Trump administration the mass media so despised with nary a scratch of media criticism on him.

This is because Mike Pompeo, as full of centipedes and demon spawn as his enormous head may be, is highly representative of the mainstream US power establishment. He is the embodiment of the empire’s values. He’s just one of its less-subtle representatives.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

Laugh if you’d like, but this writer isn’t confident the ambitions of the former secretary of State are a joking matter. 

By Curt MILLS

There is a renewed push for President Pompeo.

It’s something I first reported for this magazine three springs ago. Now, as then, that push comes from at least Mike Pompeo, anyway. The former secretary left little doubt of that speaking last week in Iowa. “This feels like home,” Pompeo said to the Westside Conservative Club in suburban Des Moines. He then paused for a moment, seemingly fearing how canned he sounded, and then bounced back appropriately. “To me.”

The former secretary of State continued: “I’m from not too far down the road… you hit Wichita [Kansas].” Pompeo noted, to audience chuckles: “I see a lot of cameras in the back. [Is] there going to be some big announcement?” Pompeo answered: “But my announcement today is really about you,” to some audible audience groans.

Pompeo has seen himself as in striking distance of the Oval Office for some time. In 2018, the new secretary of State completed a remarkable two-year turnabout from ambitious, if aimless, backbencher—a Trump-skeptical member of the Congress who suddenly morphed into the new president’s consigliere.

Pompeo was a surprise choice for director of the Central Intelligence Agency. But then, many of Trump’s inaugural cabinet choices were surprises.

From a probably disingenuous dance with Mitt Romney, to the selection of the man who would actually become his secretary of State, Exxon honcho Rex Tillerson (who Trump met once before offering him the job), to the installation of James Mattis at the Pentagon, Trump’s first cabinet underscored the softest of soft underbellies in the former president’s political operation: personnel.

Importantly, but now forgotten, both Pompeo and Mattis were on the wishlist of NeverTrump godfather William Kristol to mount a conservative, independent run for president against the New York wheeler-dealer. It’s true; once upon a time, Pompeo’s relationship with Trump was limited, if not non-existent, beyond some self-interested niceties in the close of the campaign. They were most definitely not tight during the primary. The then-Congressman was an enthusiast and loyal surrogate for Marco Rubio—the 2016 model of the Florida senator, anyway.

But come draft day, Trump liked the cut of Pompeo’s jib. For a populist Trump is something of a credentialist snob, those around him concede. The president-elect thrilled at the willingness of the West Point valedictorian and Harvard Law Review alumnus to come aboard the pirate ship.

He sent him to Langley.

Where Pompeo didn’t stay long. He didn’t waste time—or an opportunity for facetime. Trump’s interest in the Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) was passing, charitably, but when the president received it in those early days, then-Director Pompeo is said to have always made sure to apply the personal touch. He made the not considerably convenient trek from Virginia to hold court at the White House, and Trump got to know his spymaster perhaps even as much as Mike Pence, the president’s seemingly inexhaustibly loyal lieutenant at the bottom of the ticket.

And, certainly, Trump got to know his second “Mike P” far better than Secretary Tillerson. By fall 2017, Pompeo seemed to be outright licking his chops. He drew both subliminal and public contrast with Tillerson.

Tillerson had been installed at Foggy Bottom, for his part, but approached the job more as a management consultant than master diplomat. He pursued a vainglorious “redesign” of the State Department, which has since been mercifully junked. Pompeo made clear he didn’t have such picayune preoccupations.

Speaking at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a neocon-friendly think tank that, like Pompeo, found themselves surprisingly happy campers in the Trump years, the CIA director assailed the micromanagement of his predecessor, John Brennan. Brennan, who went on to become an inveterate, if lunatic, anti-Trumper, had favored a “modernization effort” at the CIA. Sound familiar? It was hardly hopscotch to draw a comparison to Tillerson’s labored style. And Pompeo let Tillerson—that is, Brennan—have it.

“I think less about org charts than I do about mission,” Pompeo told the FDD crowd, in which I was included. “I’ve told our team this. I’ve asked everyone to say, ‘Do not print the org chart out!’” In a nod to Exxon, Pompeo said: “I mean look, the finest companies in the world are restructuring their team every day.” He continued: “Start with mission, not with org chart. The organization and the team will fill itself out if everyone’s focused on the mission.”

Process was for the rubes. Whether it was the Boy Scout’s “code of the West” that didn’t allow Tillerson to deny having called Trump “a moron,” or whether Trump was just in a hawkish mood—the early administration, lest it be forgotten, was defined by a fairly mad drive to tear up Barack Obama’s Iran deal, “fire and fury” with North Korea, and what by all rights looks like a greenlight for a regime change in Doha—or whether it was simply that Pompeo outmaneuvered Tillerson with tricks like these, it matters little now, because replace him the 45th president did.

In a little less than three years in the high command, Pompeo extinguished that Iran deal—by the looks of the early Biden administration, likely permanently. Unusual for a diplomat, he ran point on the most undaunted maneuver of the Trump presidency, an assassination of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leader, the legendary Qasem Soleimani. Pompeo deemed Soleimani, and many other leading members of the Iran apparatus, a terrorist—a designation Biden’s crew has not reversed. The U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords, the normalization between Israel and several of the Sunni autocracies, is quite rightly viewed by Pompeo and administration alumni as a crowning achievement in an otherwise ruinous 2020.

But lest he be parodied as an unreconstructed neocon, Pompeo also showed he could play ball. Though the Pyongyang press was never a fan, and though Trump apostate John Bolton made clear the former CIA director was uneasy about it, Secretary Pompeo essentially did his duty as a loyal soldier in what became the 45th president’s glad-handing approach to North Korea. It was a strategy that, while pilloried, was nonetheless a half thaw, at the very worst a partial peeling off of a client state of Beijing’s, and by all appearances preferable to the fight night rhetoric currently coming out of Lloyd Austin’s Pentagon. Deploying the veteran viceroy Zalmay Khalilzad, Pompeo carried out Trump’s wishes to set the table for withdrawal from Afghanistan, an off ramp that’s still there for the taking if Biden is interested, which he is not.

Pompeo has also shown himself to be cleverer than his doubters are willing to concede. Pompeo is no foreign policy restrainer, or even a foreign policy Trumpist. He is to the hawkish right of the ex-president, and was even bold enough to employ former NeverTrumpers in the upper echelons of his State Department. Indeed, Bolton is probably right Pompeo would never have pursued North Korea policy, for instance, in the manner Trump did. But he has proven a master pitchman of picking and choosing the elements of the new zeitgeist he likes, and selling the new blend as a coherent continuation from past to future.

Case in point: Pompeo took a term, “principled realism,” favored by former Trump apparatchiks such as Michael Anton, who is a foreign policy moderate, and turbocharged it. He’s even had the good sense to ape the “endless wars” refrain bandied about by his old boss. “Endless wars are the direct result of weakness,” Pompeo said in the days after slaying Soleimani. Fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here, one might say.

As of now, Pompeo has something that he didn’t five years ago: a real record, hate or love it. He is no longer a meandering ex-businessman from Koch country, the uber-credentialed all-star who had perhaps underachieved, “the Benghazi guy” known only as a committeeman heckler of Hillary Clinton. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, he now has the curriculum vitae to mount a credible campaign for the presidency, and man, does he know it.

When Pompeo spoke to the Westside Club last Friday, it was openly billed by C-SPAN as its kickoff to the 2024 election. Perhaps it’s the malaise of the Biden moment. The new president was asked himself last week if he will be running as an 81-year old in 2024, and likely out of machiavellian necessity, though possibly out of sheer boredom, he just said yes. Iowans relish their starting lineup status in America’s presidential circus, so perhaps they’re something of a highly-selected audience.

But apparently, they like Mike.

Despite Pompeo’s reputation as a sort of unnatural politician, the folks at Westside seemed kind of amped. Braving the primaveral morning cold in Iowa, a grey-haired audience rolled, as many Republican crowds do, as if COVID-19 was yesterday’s news. They had an eye toward the future…Mike Pompeo?

At a time of new culture war, Pompeo, who is now banned by the Chinese Communist Party from visiting that country, takes lessons learned abroad and applies them at home, weaving something of a grand narrative. And it is a narrative that is gaining currency.

“The greatest threats, of course, are that we get it wrong here at home,” Pompeo told the club. “Too many in the Democrat party don’t understand that, frankly, in a way… A woman in the United States Senate the other day said she would not vote for a nominee—she would not vote for a nominee, if they were white. That’s not who we are. That’s not the values we should be championing. And the Chinese Communist Party grabs that.” Pompeo noted the inanity on display in Anchorage earlier this month: “My successor’s counterpart talked about BLM. Think about that. You had the foreign minister, [Wang Yi] and Yang Jiechi talking about Black Lives Matter.” The duo, of course, elided the regime’s monstrous reputation in Africa, as well as its renewed taste for concentration camps.

Pompeo’s China hawkishness, like the hawkishness of many if not most in the GOP, lumps in Iran with the concern with Beijing. It’s an ideological sleight of hand that ignores the pesky reality that recent U.S. policy has served only to bolster Iran’s partnership with the Chinese. Unflinching U.S. demands on the internal structure of the world’s peripheral powers are hardly stripping Beijing of friends, quite the opposite. But Iran hawkishness would seem to be a commitment, not only of the Republican Party, but of President Biden. The choice then would appear to be between a political party comfortable with truly assailing the United States’s direct rival, a rival responsible for a global pandemic that shuttered the world, at minimum, and another party whose raison d’etre is stamping out bigotry, existent or not—sure enough, they say it exists when blaming Beijing for the bare minimum.

Pompeo is counting on such crude stakes.

The hydrogen bomb of the 2024 Republican field is Donald Trump. The blast radius if he runs will be considerable, possibly as successful a clearing of the field as Hillary Clinton’s in 2016, who contended only with a party radical (Bernie Sanders) and a nationally anonymous egomaniac (Martin O’Malley), and yet still almost lost her nomination. So, Trump may have to take some comers, and one could be Pompeo, who would reprise Mr. Kristol’s imagined role for him as a kind of establishment savior, albeit long after Kristol has denounced him. Tellingly, Pompeo was not on a recently spouted-off list of Republicans Trump favored as his heir, but the details of a possible broader rift between the two men are as yet unknown.

If Trump signals he’s in for sure, by next year Pompeo could look at a long-whispered run for Kansas governor in 2022, staying in the game and biding his time. But Trump is not likely to signal until the last minute, those around the president say, thus lording his clout over his frenemies in the Republican Party until as late as possible, and disrupting their plans. Add in the fact that Pompeo clearly wants to be president now, he will likely have to gamble, and pass on reigning in Topeka.

Pompeo’s path to power is, of course, more gilded if Trump doesn’t run. Trump’s run would presently seem about a coin-flip. If it’s tails for Trump, and heads for everyone else, the field would be mammoth. For instance, Pompeo apparently can’t even teach a foreign policy series at the Nixon Foundation without sharing the stage with another 2024 aspirant, former national security advisor Robert C. O’Brien.

But Pompeo would bank on the peculiarity of the primary system and a few, key defining characteristics.

First, he would sell himself as the peerless champion of Israel, and try to take the evangelical crown in Iowa, which has a closed caucus system, not a primary. Delusions that Pompeo is guided by anything other than power, let alone by the rapture, are the stuff of high-handed foreign columnists who view America as a safari.

But Pompeo’s evangelical bona fides, however cultivated, are the real deal.

Ted Cruz, who few thought at the outset would finish as decent as second-place overall, was advantaged in 2016 in such formats, that is, religious plains states’ caucuses. Pompeo has been laying the groundwork for this for some time. He delivered his Republican National Convention address (unprecedented for a sitting secretary of State) from Jerusalem (a foreign city, also unprecedented). Those in attendance at Westside said that Pompeo plugging the relocation of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was perhaps the morning’s most raucous applause line. Moving down the state map, Pompeo would try to capture South Carolina, and then possibly Florida, two states where his military bona fides and staunch support of Israel will matter, respectively.

And Pompeo would try to muscle those such as Senator Tom Cotton from the China lane. He would also likely raise gobs of money, then gird for a bloodbath, and finally, attempt to be the last man standing. Even in the social media influencer age, political parties don’t always anoint celebrities and forces of charisma. Just ask President Biden.

If nominated, critics would doubtless try to dredge up Pompeo’s curious use of government monies to finance his lavish “Madison dinners” while secretary. The American Conservative submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for Pompeo’s spending, and found notably only what is widely known: that Pompeo’s wife, Susan, is his right-hand woman. Pompeo was married and divorced once before, as a young man, but that’s the stuff of yesteryear as much as the fact that the former secretary grew up not in Kansas, but Orange County, California (if you listen closely to him, you can hear the faintest bit of surfer voice). Susan Pompeo is Mike Pompeo’s consigliere, wartime and peacetime; of that there can be little doubt.

Which makes the rest of his political entourage more barebones, and harder to report on. One former senior advisor said that they had never met before coming aboard the seventh floor of his State Department. In a line of work where relationships are power and loyalty is so often the game, that’s unusual.

A look at Pompeo’s top lieutenants at Foggy Bottom—the neoconservative historian Peter Berkowitz, the establishment Republican Mary Kissel, the notorious Elliot Abrams, even his retention of the Iran addict Brian Hook (a holdover from Tillerson)—shows a Wall Street Journal editorial page conservative. That’s concerning news for those who would remake the party. But unlike other rivals in this lane, such as the former U.N. envoy Nikki Haley, Pompeo is never going to denounce Donald Trump. He’s savvier than her.

Pompeo’s ascent would be depressing for many conservative reformers, but would also come at a time when conservatives, and even many not on the right, feel the stakes are civilization. Would anyone in this camp really flinch to vote for him over, perhaps, Kamala Harris? Pompeo’s “take me or leave me” style is gambling, perhaps presciently, that you’ll take him. For anyone who would seek to prevent this binary, it would appear time to take Pompeo as seriously as he takes himself.

theamericanconservative.com

It is finally over. Joe Biden has been inaugurated President of the United States while his predecessor Donald Trump has retired to Florida. Trump intends to remain the driving force in the Republican Party but there are many in the GOP who would like to see him gone completely and the national media is obliging by depriving him of a “voice,” cutting him off from his preferred social media. The Democratic Party’s top “megadonor” Israeli film producer Haim Saban goes one step farther, recommending that all the media stop reporting on Trump and his activities, thereby taking away his platform and making him disappear politically speaking.

Prior to the inauguration, which proceeded protected by an unprecedented display of military and police, there had been so much going on in and around Washington that other serious developments worldwide were not getting the attention that they merited. President Donald Trump was impeached for “high crimes and misdemeanors” relating to his alleged encouragement of the January 6^th rioting at the U.S. Capitol building, but to my mind the recent travels and meetings involving Secretary of State Mike Pompeo could turn out to be far more damaging to America’s long-term interests. One wonders why Pompeo was engaging in frenetic activity with the Administration that he represented being about to vanish in a few days, but the answer is perhaps obvious. Trump and Pompeo want to lay a foreign policy mine field for the Joe Biden White House, locking the new administration into policies that will prove difficult to untangle.

Pompeo has been most active in four areas: Iran, China, Cuba and Yemen. Iran, as has often been the case with the Trump Israeli-driven policy in the Middle East, has been the principal focus. The Trump Administration has consistently responded to Israeli and also Saudi perceptions of the threat from Iran to the entire region, even though those claims were generally based on self-interests and deliberately falsified intelligence. Washington has withdrawn from the nuclear agreement with Iran signed in 2015 and has been waging incrementally expanded economic warfare against the Iranians for the past three years. It has collaborated with the Israelis on assassinations and air attacks on primarily civilian targets in Syria and Lebanon.

During Trump’s last two weeks in power there was much talk about the possibility of a U.S. attack on Iran. The Israeli military was on alert and there was a surge in attacks on Syria, frequently using Lebanese airspace. One incident in particular on January 6^th used U.S. intelligence to enable multiple bombing attacks on targets inside Syria, killing 57. Pompeo reportedly dined publicly in a well-known Washington restaurant Café Milano on the day after the carnage to discuss the “success” with Israel’s head of Mossad Yossi Cohen.

The public meeting with Cohen was a sign from the Trump Administration that the U.S. supports Israel’s bombing campaign against claimed Iranian targets in Syria. If Biden wishes to change that, he will have to do so publicly, earning the ire of Israel’s friends in the Democratic Party and media. And more was to come. Last Tuesday, Pompeo gave a speech in which he accused al-Qaeda and the Iranian government of being “partners in terror” , constituting an “axis” of terrorism. He further claimed that al-Qaeda has a “new home base” and a “new operational headquarters” built for it in Tehran, an assertion that ran counter to the intelligence collected by U.S. counterterrorism officials, who said there was no evidence to support such a claim. In fact, the Intelligence Community has long asserted that al-Qaeda is fundamentally hostile to Shi’ite Iran and that the Iranians return the favor. In other words, Pompeo is either lying or making something up that will be an impediment if Biden tries to improve relations with Tehran. Pompeo also went so far as to declare that Iran is the “new Afghanistan” for al-Qaeda, which is meant to imply that Iran is now its home base and safe haven. There is also no evidence to support that claim.

The Trump Administration has also included Cuba on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, based on nothing whatsoever, apparently as something of a throw away item to shore up support from the rabid Cuban exile community in Florida. So too the decision to designate the Houthis of Yemen as terrorists to give a parting gift to the Saudis and the UAE. Yemen is suffering from famine and the terror designation will have a drastic impact on imports of food and medicine, condemning many Yemenis to death. Daniel Larison opines that the “Houthi designation is by far the worst thing that Pompeo has done as Secretary of State, because if it is not quickly reversed it will lead directly to the deaths of tens and possibly even hundreds of thousands of people. It takes severe cruelty to look at a war-torn, famine-stricken country that depends heavily on outside aid and imports and then choose to suffocate the survivors with additional economic warfare. That is what Pompeo has done, we shouldn’t forget that.”

And, incidentally, the United States gains absolutely nothing from killing thousands of people in Yemen, but that is not all. Pompeo has also opened the door to new problems with China. His easing of the longstanding restrictions on contacts between American diplomats and Taiwanese has been described by the State Department as a strong gesture of support for the democratic government and “ally” in Taipei. It overturns more than forty years of “strategic ambiguity” which has prevailed since Richard Nixon traveled to Beijing and recognized the communist People’s Republic of China as China’s only legitimate government, to include over Taiwan by implication. The so-called “One China” principle states that Taiwan and China are part of the same China with the U.S. recognizing, though not necessarily endorsing, that the PRC has a historic claim to sovereignty over Taiwan.

Apart from locking in policies that Biden will find hard to shift, Pompeo also has a secondary motive. It is widely believed that he would like to run for president in 2024. He will need the support of the Israelis and their powerful domestic lobby as well as the Cubans in Florida and it does not hurt to show him playing hardball in the Middle East and against an increasingly vilified China. The so-called neocons, who have again become influential in the Republican Party and the media, demand tough talk and even tougher action from their candidate and Pompeo is already running hard to oblige them.

Now that a majority of the country believes the election was fraudulent and the Supreme Court has completely abdicated its authority now the next obstacle in front of President Trump is here.

And, as always, it comes from his complicit Secretary of State who undermines Trump with his every move to turn the State, Defense and Intelligence apparatuses of the U.S. against Russia.

Pompeo goes on Mark Levin’s show, whose ratings are through the roof right now, to tell all the slavering normie-conservatives that it was definitely the Russians who hacked our government.

From Zerohedge:

Without offering any evidence or specifics, Pompeo said Russia was “pretty clearly” behind the cyberattack during an appearance on the conservative talk radio Mark Levin Show.

“I can’t say much more, as we’re still unpacking precisely what it is, and I’m sure some of it will remain classified. But suffice it to say there was a significant effort to use a piece of third-party software to essentially embed code inside of U.S. government systems and it now appears systems of private companies and companies and governments across the world as well,” Pompeo explained.

Notice how there is no evidence given, just the typical intelligence agency, “believe me” line, which is your first clue that whoever it was behind this attack the one group who was definitely NOT behind it was the Russians.

This cyber attack on the U.S. government was perfectly timed with the Electoral College submitting its votes to the Congress and Joe Biden claiming he’s president-elect.

The reason why the release of this ‘attack’ on our government was perfectly timed is because it is a distraction from the growing unrest over the Democrats’ having stolen the election and cowering the courts into irrelevance.

This is classic CIA-level misdirection from what was more likely a Chinese or, dare I say it, homegrown operation for the very purpose of blaming the Russians to tamp down the anger and confuse the MAGA crowd.

And it resurrects the ghost of RussiaGate for the libs by putting Trump in a Catch-22. If he doesn’t respond to this it keeps alive the smoldering embers of the TDS crowd watching Rachel Maddow that Trump really does have deep, covert ties to Russia.

If he does react, what possible reaction could he take to escalate the tensions with Russia that are already one step below open warfare?

Oh, and he has to respond to this while also fighting an uphill battle against the courts and his own bureaucracy to invoke his executive order involving outside interference into the election. And in classic Trump fashion he did:

The Cyber Hack is far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality. I have been fully briefed and everything is well under control. Russia, Russia, Russia is the priority chant when anything happens because Lamestream is, for mostly financial reasons, petrified of….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2020

Provoking the exact reaction you’d expect from the BlueChecked Sneetches among the Twitterati. RussiaGate was an embarrassment that should have died years ago but it persists precisely because Trump refuses to formally concede and continues to give his people the opportunity to fight the Swamp.

The only way Putin and the Russians were behind this attack on the U.S. government was as a 5-d chess move where Trump invited them to do it on his behalf to ‘prove’ external interference in the election and allow Trump to cross the Rubicon, invoke the Insurrection Act and his 2018 EO on election interference.

Yeah, by the way, John Le Carre died this week, life ain’t a movie and Trump isn’t that savvy a player. Ye gods, I wish he was. That we are in this mess proves he isn’t.

This pronouncement by Pompeo was just gold ol’ fashioned swamp double talk who continues his job of maintaining continuity of U.S. foreign policy on behalf of the Neoconservatives whose raison d’etre is the destruction of Russia to the exclusion of nearly every other consideration of any other human on the planet.

Don’t be confused by this nonsense. Whoever was behind this attack wasn’t the Russians. The motive for this operation lies squarely with China, The Davos Crowd, the Democrats and our own intelligence agencies trying to move the Overton Window away from the real problem, a stolen election.

Outing Solarwinds and tying it directly to Dominion Voting Systems is your smoking gun.

But the courts, as I said at the open, have left the building. Martin Armstrong pointed out the Supreme Court denied the ‘shouting behind closed doors’ because they met via Zoom call.

But they didn’t deny the substance of the charge against them, that they bowed to political pressure thanks to the Democrats’ open blackmail campaign of terror this past summer.

So, at this point there really is little hope of overturning the election. From what I’ve heard on the ground in Georgia the same Dominion Voting machines are in place there for the Senate runoffs. Those who voted didn’t even get a receipt this time.

So the fix is in there too, folks.

There will be no victories in this fight. Every possible avenue of hope must be crushed if the Great Reset of The Davos Crowd is to occur.  Pompeo plays his part just like everyone else in this pantomime, one day giving Trump supporters hope by saying he’s preparing for a 2^nd term, the next using that cache to undermine him with a far bigger betrayal.

This is how the Deep State works to protect itself and we have to be smart enough to see it for what it is: preparing the ground for the next phase of the greatest intelligence show on earth.

Same spook time, same spook channel.

Anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States got its start during the building of the First Transcontinental Railroad in the mid-1800s when Chinese laborers were imported into the western part of the country. Anti-Chinese laws were introduced by the Federal government – the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882  being the  most notorious — and the states, most notably, California.

Christian Dominionist racist views about the “yellow peril” gained increased currency after the 1899-1901 Boxer Rebellion in China. The “Boxers” were anti-Christian and anti-Western Chinese nationalists whose intent was to drive Westerners, including Christian missionaries and diplomats, from China. News that the Boxers had killed Christian missionaries and their families began to be published in Western newspapers, giving rise to anti-Chinese anger and a belief that “yellow hordes” would sweep from Asia to conquer North America, Europe, and Australia.

Even The New York Times of August 2, 1900 played into such “yellow peril” fears. It referred to China as a “monstrum horrendum” (a horrible monster), a “decrepit old Flowery Kingdom,” that might bring about an Armageddon for the Western powers, which, intriguingly, then included Japan as part of the “armies of Christendom.” Japan has always posed a problem for “yellow peril” believers, be they far-right Christian Reconstructionists like Pompeo, Rushdoony, Rushdoony confederates Gary North, David Chilton, Gary DeMar, Peter Leithart, and Ray Sutton, or the former officials of the apartheid regime of South Africa. In the case of the South Africans and their racial segregation policy, Japanese were deemed “honorary whites” in order to inoculate them from the anti-Asian tenets of the South African Dutch Reformed Church.

During the Japanese invasion of China in the years prior to World War II, China’s Lobby in the United States, backed by missionaries and big business, shifted the “yellow peril” mantra over to the Japanese. These pro-China interests convinced Americans that the Chinese Nationalist General, Chiang Kai-shek, a convert to the Methodist religion, was the salvation for China and the leader that would vanquish, on behalf of the Western Christian powers, both the Japanese and the Chinese Communists. Soon, the China Lobby was convincing the U.S. government to provide military assistance to China even before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the U.S. officially declared war on Japan. During the war, Japanese were pictured on U.S. propaganda posters with unflattering racial imagery and as brutal occupiers. When President Harry S Truman ordered two atomic bombs to be dropped on Japanese cities, there was hardly an outcry in the United States, where Japanese-American citizens remained interned until after the Japanese surrender.

After World War II and the coming to power of Mao Zedong and his Communist Party in China, the China Lobby was transformed into the “Formosa Lobby,” a powerful conservative political bloc that ensured U.S. military and diplomatic support for Chiang Kai-shek’s exiled Nationalist government on the island of Taiwan. The Formosa/Taiwan/China Lobby was funded by Chiang Kai-shek’s political party, the Kuomintang, through his billionaire brother-in-law, T.V. Soong. The lobby had the strong support of far-right groups like the John Birch Society, the Liberty Lobby, and the Young Americans for Freedom.

As Japanese economic power grew during the 1970s and 1980s and as the People’s Republic of China emerged as a major industrialized nation, the Christian Dominionists, represented by the likes of Rushdoony and others, began lumping together Japan, China, emergent economic powers South Korea and Taiwan, North Vietnam (which had, essentially, militarily defeated the United States in the Vietnam War), and the hermit nation of North Korea as all part of a “new yellow peril” that endangered Western Christendom.

Just as the Christian Dominionists sided with the Japanese against the waning Chinese Empire and, later, Chiang Kai-shek against the Japanese imperialists, today we are witnessing neo-Dominionists like Pompeo siding with a bizarre coalition of Chinese exiles and fundamentalist Christian “yellow peril” believers against the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese Communist Party, and Chinese President Xi Jinping. On July 23, 2020, Pompeo announced the ending of what he called America’s “blind engagement” with the government of the People’s Republic of China. Christian Dominionism scored a major victory.

Pompeo’s attitude toward China has not stopped him and other “yellow peril” enthusiasts from forming an anti-Beijing coalition with the Falun Gong, a fascist-oriented Buddhist-Taoist cult with reported links to the Central Intelligence Agency, and its right-wing and pro-Trump media outlets, including The Epoch Times newspaper and Epoch Media Group, which advance various far-right conspiracy theories. Falun Gong is also allied with the Unification Church of its late Korean founder, Sun Myung Moon, and exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wen Gui, also known as Guo Haoyu, Miles Guo, and Miles Kwok. Guo has supported the efforts of former Trump chief political strategist Steve Bannon and his efforts to create a Fascist International, of which it is hoped that Guo’s proposed “New Federal State of China,” designed to replace the People’s Republic of China, would become an active supporter. Guo’s G News and GTV Media, which he operates with Bannon, is believed to have links with Falun Gong’s media operations, including New Tang Dynasty (NTD) Television and the Unification Church-owned and Moon family-run “Washington Times” and United Press International.

Guo lives in Manhattan, where NTD Television is based. Falun Gong’s leader, Li Hongzhi, lives in the Dragon Springs compound in Deerpark, New York, an hour’s drive from Manhattan. Trump’s purge at the Voice of America (VOA) and other U.S. government broadcasters has ensured that problematic propaganda from GTV Media and NTD Television pervades VOA’s and Radio Free Asia’s Chinese language broadcasts. The Guo-Li-Moon alliance also includes pro-independence forces in Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and the Xinjiang-Uighur region of western China.

Pompeo’s “yellow peril” Dominionist agenda has been successfully shopped by his State Department to countries around the world. Today, political parties around the world are being co-opted by a Dominionist-led campaign advancing the canard that the People’s Republic of China poses a “peril” (derived from the original “yellow peril”) to Western civilization. The lobbied political parties of the far right, center-right, center-left, and left that have taken the Falun Gong-Bannon-GTV Media-Unification Church bait include the Radical Civic Union, Republican Proposal,  and Civic Coalition ARI of Argentina; the Australian Greens; the National Party and Liberal Party of Australia; the Social Democratic Party and The Greens of Austria; the Austrian People’s Party; New Flemish Alliance of Belgium; Socialist Party Differently of Belgium; Vlaams Belang of Belgium; Christian Democratic and Flemish Party of Belgium; Green Party of Belgium; Conservative Party of Canada; Liberal Party of Canada; Bloc Québécois of Canada; Green Party of Canada; Republican Party of Chile; Christian and Democratic Union (KDU-ČSL) of Czechia; Civic Democratic Party of Czechia; Czech Social Democratic Party; Czech Green Party; Czech Pirate Party; Danish People’s Party; The Alternative of Denmark; Red-Green Alliance of Denmark; Conservative People’s Party of Denmark; Socialist People’s Party of Denmark; Pro Patria and Res Publica Union of Estonia; Finnish Green League; Center Party of Finland; Finnish Left Alliance; Finnish Social Democratic Party; Swedish People’s Party of Finland; Regions and Peoples with Solidarity of France; Democratic Movement of France; La République en marche (LREM) of France; Radical Party of France; Alternative for Germany (AfD); Christian Democratic Union of Germany; German Social Democratic Party; Christian Social Union of Bavaria; German Free Democratic Party; Politics Can Be Different party of Hungary; Hungarian Momentum Movement; Democratic Party of Indonesia; National Mandate Party of Indonesia; Fianna Fáil of Ireland; Social Democrats of Ireland; Irish Solidarity–People Before Profit party; Irish Green Party; Likud Party of Israel; Zehut Party of Israel; Meimad Party of Israel; Israeli Green Party; Forza Italia of Italy; Lega Nord of Italy; Italia Viva of Italy; Italian Radical Party; Five Star Movement of Italy; Cambiamo! of Italy; Italian Democratic Party; Brothers of Italy; Liberal Democratic Party of Japan; Japan’s Nippon Kaigi, Democratic Party of Japan; Latvian National Alliance; Latvian Unity; Latvia’s First Party/Latvian Way; Latvian Association of Regions; Lithuanian Freedom Party; Lithuanian Homeland Union; New Zealand Labor Party; ACT New Zealand; Netherlands Forum for Democracy; Socialist Party of the Netherlands; Denk (Turkish) Party of the Netherlands; People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy of the Netherlands; Conservative Party of Norway; Polish Civic Platform; Polish Law and Justice; Polish Union of European Democrats; National Liberal Party of Romania; Ordinary People Party of Slovakia; Freedom and Solidarity Party of Slovakia; Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party; Vox Party of Spain; Spanish Popular Party; Més per Mallorca; Swedish Moderate Party; Swedish Christian Democrats; Sweden Democrats; Swedish Left Party; Swedish Social Democratic Party; Swiss Christian Democratic People’s Party; Swiss Green Party; Swiss Social Democratic Party; Swiss People’s Party; Swiss Liberal Green Party; Democratic Progressive Party of Taiwan; UK Conservative Party; UK Labor Party; Green Party of England and Wales; Plaid Cymru of Wales; Voluntad Popular (VP) of Venezuela; and the Republican and Democratic Parties of the United States.

While it comes as no surprise that the far-right parties would support the efforts of a “Yellow Peril” neo-fascist alliance embracing a military showdown with the government of China, the fact that parties of the center-right, center, center-left, and left would support such a fascist contrivance is both shameful and ignorant in the highest degree.

Every single leader of the nations on Pompeo’s itinerary had congratulated Biden on his election as the 46^th President of the United States. Pompeo had earlier offered the leadership of each of the nations he was visiting some thinly-veiled criticism over their decision to congratulate Biden. Pompeo said, “make no mistake about it: We have one president, one secretary of state, one national security team at a time.” Pompeo’s comments were unprecedented as previous lame duck administrations never had any problem with the president-elect or his transition team accepting congratulations or phone calls with foreign leaders. The Trump-to-Biden transition will go down in the history books as one of the most contentious in history, even surpassing the 1932-1933 transition from Republican Herbert Hoover to Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The Trump White House even decided to bar Biden and his Transition Team from receiving federal government office space and other services. The Trump-appointed political lackey in charge of the General Services Administration, Emily Murphy, failed to officially “ascertain” that Biden was the president-elect, a violation of the 1963 Presidential Transition Act.

Pompeo also decided to block Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris from accessing scores of official congratulatory messages received via U.S. diplomatic channels from foreign leaders. In the past, the State Department Operations Center has provided translations for such messages as well as responses from the President and Vice President-elect to the foreign leaders. With Pompeo and his loyalists sitting on the correspondence, many leaders were forced to issue their informal congratulations on Twitter and Facebook.

Pompeo’s foreign jaunt during the interregnum between Trump and Biden appears to be an effort to collect as many photographs as possible depicting Pompeo with leaders like French President Emmanuel Macron, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to burnish Pompeo’s expected 2024 presidential campaign website.

In an unusual statement regarding Pompeo’s visit to Paris, the French President’s office stated in an official press release that Macron’s discussions with Pompeo would be with “complete transparency towards the team of president-elect Joe Biden.”

Pompeo was not scheduled to meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan but, instead, met in Istanbul with Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, the Greek Orthodox leader. Pompeo was also on tap to visit an illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank and the Golan Heights, Israeli sovereignty over which was recognized by the Trump administration. In Georgia, Pompeo scheduled a meeting with Ilia II, the Patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church. Pompeo’s entire itinerary was meant to appeal to Christian pro-Israel evangelicals in the United States with a political eye toward the 2024 race, which is also expected to draw in as presidential candidates, Vice President Mike Pence, former South Carolina Governor and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and, reportedly, Donald Trump. All of the prospective candidates are vying for the votes of the religious right.

Pompeo’s refusal to travel to Ankara to meet with Erdogan, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, and other Turkish government officials was viewed as a snub to the Turkish government, which recently restored Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia, the former Christian Holy See of the Byzantine Empire, to a fully-functioning mosque. That move was condemned by Patriarch Bartholomew and other Orthodox Christian leaders around the world. Pompeo is a devout member of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, which adheres to an extremist Dominionist view that champions Christian supremacy.

The Trump-to-Biden transition appears to be heading in the direction of the most acrimonious in U.S. history, being even worse than that of President John Adams to President-elect Thomas Jefferson in 1801, Hoover to FDR in 1932 and 1933, and President Harry S Truman to President-elect Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952. As bad as the blood was between Adams and Jefferson, Hoover and FDR, and Truman and Eisenhower, none of the outgoing presidents barred the State Department from briefing the presidents-elect.

Vice President Jefferson –  who defeated his boss, Adams, for re-election –  had been involved in a bitter presidential campaign. Adams’s supporters all but called Jefferson an agent for French revolutionary forces and Jefferson backers claimed that the pro-British Adams wanted to hand America back to the British monarchy. Adams skipped Jefferson’s 1801 inauguration, choosing to slip quietly out of Washington by stagecoach and head to his home in Massachusetts. There is speculation that Trump will not attend Biden’s inauguration. Whatever course Trump decides upon, unlike Adams, the departure of Trump from the White House will be anything but quiet and low key. President John Quincy Adams declined to attend the inauguration of his successor, Andrew Jackson and Andrew Johnson skipped the inauguration of his successor, Ulysses S. Grant. In 1837, it was President Martin Van Buren who established the tradition of riding with the departing incumbent president, in his case, President Jackson, from the White House to the U.S. Capitol for the swearing-in ceremony.

President Hoover, who was defeated for re-election by FDR, held a meeting with the Democratic president-elect on November 22, 1932. Hoover, who was trounced by FDR in an election held amidst the Great Depression, believed that he and FDR should jointly tackle some major issues during the forthcoming Roosevelt administration, particularly foreign debt owed to the United States from World War I and the state of the global economy. FDR had his own ideas of what was necessary to pull the United States out of the depths of the Depression and dismissed any proposals from Hoover, who the president-elect believed contributed to the stock market crash and its aftermath. Hoover and FDR did generally agree on the need for America to deal with the debt defaults of Britain, France, and other countries to the U.S. Furthermore, FDR met with Hoover’s Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson – who would later serve as FDR’s Secretary of War – and agreed to jointly denounce Japan’s seizure of Manchuria. After their January 1932 meeting, FDR told Stimson, “We are getting so that we do pretty good teamwork, don’t we?” Compared to the current Trump-Biden transition, that of Hoover to FDR, cited by historians as one of the worst in history, is exemplary.

The other contentious modern-era presidential transition, between Truman and Eisenhower, was, compared to that of Trump to Biden, relatively successful. Truman authorized Eisenhower transition representatives Joseph Dodge office space in the Old Executive Office Building, next to the White House and Henry Cabot Lodge to receive top-level briefings from the Departments of State and Defense. The one thing that separates presidents like Hoover, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, and other presidents from Trump is intellectual maturity. Truman told aides that despite his anger over the rhetoric heaped on him by the Eisenhower campaign in 1952, he recalled how unprepared he was as Vice President to assume the presidency when FDR died in 1945. Truman did not want Eisenhower to suffer the same fate.

Pompeo’s 2024 presidential campaign overseas trip and Trump’s transition tantrums will go down in history as emblematic of the widespread corruption and immaturity of the one-term Trump administration.

Pompeo refused to abide by conventionally courteous diplomatic practice in referring to “the government” of China, preferring, like Trump, to talk about “the Chinese Communist Party” when berating and insulting the Beijing administration. While this is immature and feeble, it is also ironically diverting, because it demonstrates the ever-present double standards of the present Washington establishment. In one attack, he claimed that “the Chinese Communist Party wants the same thing in every place. They want to control and dominate” which was somewhat at variance with his publicly expressed sentiments concerning a nearby country which also has a communist government.

Pompeo’s anti-China swing round Asia included talks in India, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Indonesia, and he ended his trip on 30 October by visiting Vietnam where he declared that “We have enormous respect for the Vietnamese people and your country’s sovereignty.”

It appears he has not read his own Department’s illuminating ‘Report on Human Rights Practices’ in Vietnam, which observes that “The Socialist Republic of Vietnam is an authoritarian state ruled by a single party, the Communist Party of Vietnam” which in 2019 caused concern because “Significant human rights issues included unlawful or arbitrary killings by the government; forced disappearance; torture by government agents; arbitrary arrests and detentions by the government; political prisoners; significant problems with the independence of the judiciary; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; the worst forms of restrictions on free expression, the press, and the internet, including arbitrary arrest and prosecution of government critics . . .” and so on.

This is but one instance of Washington’s double standards and pervasive hypocrisy. If a foreign country is supportive of Trumpian foreign policy and knuckles under in terms of trade, then the Trump establishment ignores human rights violations and many other contraventions of decency (witness, for example, official reaction to the murder of the reporter Jamal Kashoggi by orders of the ruler of Saudi Arabia), in order to further its own interests, which are in the main commercially-based. There are, however, other countries with pristine records in human rights and general governance that ally themselves with the U.S. in pursuit of what they mistakenly imagine is furtherance of freedom.

One country that is disconcertingly supportive of whatever policies are favoured in Washington is Australia, which is making a most serious mistake in seeking ever closer alignment at the expense of its relations with China.

While Pompeo was on his trip in Asia, preparations were in their final stages for the annual anti-China major naval exercise Malabar, nominally sponsored by India and involving its warships and combat aircraft along with those of the United States, Japan and Australia. It began on 3 November and Voice of America observed that “India’s decision to include Australia for the annual drills comes in the wake of a push by Washington for deeper security collaboration in the ‘Quad,’ the informal group that includes the United States, Japan, Australia and India as a counter to China. Australia returns to the exercises after 13 years, when its participation triggered strident Chinese objections. But this time the Malabar exercises will endure as all four participants seek a long-term counterbalancing strategy to China, according to analysts.”

Australia’s embrace of the U.S. is not new, but its current alignment with Washington and others is taken by Beijing as being specifically against China and it is doubtful if it was a coincidence, as noted by the independent analysts of STRATFOR, that “beginning November 6 Chinese authorities will halt all imports of a range of Australian agricultural and mineral exports, dramatically expanding an earlier coal ban.”

The economic effects of Australia’s recent and entirely unnecessary confrontational stance are going to be massive and will not only adversely affect its financial sector as a whole, but will destroy the livelihoods of countless workers. On November 2, the South China Morning Post recorded that “China has banned imports of Australian timber from Queensland and suspended barley imports from a second grain exporter, while Chinese importers are also bracing for a possible new round of bans on copper ore and copper concentrate as well as sugar this week in the latest trade escalations between Beijing and Canberra. The new bans occurred over the weekend as clearance of Australian rock lobster shipments was also delayed in Shanghai due to increased import inspections.”

Collapse of the lobster market, alone, will be catastrophic as it is worth U.S.$ 527 million a year, a modest amount in U.S. terms, but a major item in Australia’s national budget. Further, its lobster fishers will disappear and the fishery ports will be stricken with unemployment.

On 28 October the UK’s Guardian commented that “while it is difficult to quantify the cost of the trade war, research by the Perth U.S.-Asia Centre at the University of Western Australia shows the total value of exports to China from the seven industries affected by declared and undeclared sanctions was $47.7 billion last year.” To an economy the size of Australia’s, this is potentially disastrous, but it seems that the government in Canberra is determined to continue confronting China, no matter the cost to its citizens.

In spite of the combination of U.S. pressure and domestic political intransigence, Australia could have followed the example of Sri Lanka whose Prime Minister Gotabaya Rajapaksa made it clear that zealots such as Pompeo would not be successful in attempts to pressure his country to align with the anti-China league and tweeted that “Sir Lanka will always maintain a neutral stand in foreign policy and will not get entangled in struggles between power blocs.”

The U.S. campaign against China gathered momentum on 6 November when the Commander of the Pacific Air Force, General Kenneth Wilsbach, publicly announced that the U.S. armed forces must be prepared to engage in conflict with China. He insulted the Chinese government by stating that it engaged in “maligned and coercive activity that’s frequently not in accordance with international law” and declared that “We’ve got to challenge and compete with them in accordance with the national strategy, but we also have to be ready in the event we get called to go fight tonight.” There was a time when senior military officers in democracies were forbidden to engage in public comment on international affairs, for obvious and sensible reasons, but it now appears that these people are being encouraged to threaten foreign governments and stoke up tension.

The stage is being set for further confrontation, and Washington is wilfully ignoring China’s determination to continue its own policies. The possibility of conflict is increasing.

Twice in the past week, the United States has clumsily weighed into mounting tensions in the East Mediterranean between Greece and Turkey.

First, Washington announced last weekend the opening of a maritime security base on the island state of Cyprus, which is allied with Greece. Then the U.S. followed up by formally clearing the way to send weapons to Cyprus, ending a 33-year arms embargo. Washington claims the arms are “non-lethal”, but we have seen that semantic ruse played before with regard to U.S. weaponizing Ukraine and other places. Never mind the hairsplitting, the move is a military involvement whichever way it’s presented.

Both U.S. moves have infuriated Turkey, which lies to the north of Cyprus and which maintains territorial claims over the northern part of the island populated by Turkish-Cypriots. The main part of the island, the Republic of Cyprus, is historically aligned with Greece. Cyprus became divided in 1974 after Turkey invaded following a coup led by the Greek military. The territory has been a source of tensions ever since and a recurring cause for confrontation between Greece and Turkey over competing claims.

This year tensions have flared up again over disputed rights to oil and gas exploration in the East Mediterranean Sea. The area is reckoned to be rich in untapped hydrocarbon resources. There are even fears of a military confrontation escalating between patrolling Greek and Turkish navy vessels.

What is remarkable too is that both neighboring states are members of the U.S.-led NATO military alliance, which claims to be a protector of global peace and security. Yet here we have its own members jostling on a hair-trigger which could erupt into war on the southern arc of Europe.

What’s even more remarkable is the ham-handed, destabilizing way that the U.S. is intervening in the dispute. The establishment of a new “security” (read “military”) base at Larnaca in southern Cyprus and the supply of weaponry are viewed by Turkey as a flagrant attempt by Washington to put its thumb on the scale in favor of Greece and Cyprus against Ankara.

Last weekend, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was in Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, where he signed a memorandum of understanding to set up the maritime base at Larnaca. Ironically, the installation is to be known by the acronym, CYCLOPS, after the mythical one-eyed giant of ancient Greek legend.

During his visit, Pompeo rebuked Turkey for stoking tensions in the region and he called for diplomatic resolution of the dispute. Pompeo went on to make a jab at Russia, saying: “Increased tensions help no-one except adversaries who would like to see division in the transatlantic unity.”

The U.S. top diplomat appeared to be referring to a visit to Nicosia only days earlier by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. In his meeting with the Greek-Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades, Lavrov offered Moscow’s help in mediating the conflict with Turkey. Given Russia’s cordial relations with both sides, the offer by Lavrov was certainly a reasonable and pragmatic one. Why Pompeo should seek to portray the Russian intervention as pernicious only betrays the typical reflexive Russophobia that dominates in Washington.

In any case, the reality is that it is the United States which is evidently fomenting tensions in the East Mediterranean through its destabilizing initiatives. Its exhortations for diplomatic resolution is empty hypocrisy belied by its actions.

What is behind the U.S. moves? One reason is the intense umbrage taken by Washington over Turkey’s decision last year to purchase the Russian S-400 air defense system. That represents a big commercial loss for the American military-industrial complex. Ankara’s adopting of Russian air-defense technology also grievously undermines NATO propaganda seeking to portray Russia as a security threat to Europe.

Another factor is Turkey’s warnings that due to American bullying over the S-400 issue it may shut down the NATO base at Incirlik in southern Turkey. If that were to happen, then the U.S. loses an important power-projection point against Russia. Therefore, it seems that the U.S. move to set up a new base at Larnaca in Cyprus may be a hedge against potential closure of Incirlik.

A third factor is proximity to Syria. Cyprus is only 200 kilometers from Syria which hosts strategically important Russian naval and military air bases at Tartus and Hmeimim. Those bases have been crucial in Russia’s alliance with Syria to defeat the U.S.-sponsored covert war for regime change in Damascus. By gaining a foothold in Cyprus, Washington may be trying to curb Russia’s pivotal support for Syria.

Whatever the precise calculus, it is nonetheless clear that Washington’s posturing is both reckless and hypocritical. Cyclops, the ill-fated clumsy giant outwitted by Ulysses, has a 21st century counterpart – the United States.