By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

President Donald Trump has just won the Vietnam War – except that he’s too modest to declare it a victory over Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, or claim theirs was a war against Vietnam which would never have happened if he had been president.

In the first place, Trump’s predecessors would not have contemplated expressing their honour and pleasure in dealing with a Vietnamese Communist. In the second place, they would never have imagined declaring victory over the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army by requiring them to buy US-made SUVs, not when the retreating and defeated US Army was surrendering their vehicles for no charge at all.

“It is my Great Honor to announce,” Trump tweeted on July 2, “that I have just made a Trade Deal with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam after speaking with To Lam, the Highly Respected General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam…The Terms are that Vietnam will pay the United States a 20% Tariff on any and all goods sent into our Territory, and a 40% Tariff on any Transshipping. In return, Vietnam will do something that they have never done before, give the United States of America TOTAL ACCESS to their Markets for Trade. In other words, they will “OPEN THEIR MARKET TO THE UNITED STATES,” meaning that, we will be able to sell our product into Vietnam at ZERO Tariff. It is my opinion that the SUV or, as it is sometimes referred to, Large Engine Vehicle, which does so well in the United States, will be a wonderful addition to the various product lines within Vietnam. Dealing with General Secretary To Lam, which I did personally, was an absolute pleasure.”  

The telephone call with To Lam took place on July 2.  There had been an earlier one between Trump and Lam on April 25.  Between the two, the Vietnamese abandoned their demand for a zero-percent tariff for their exports to the US. There is no telling, however, not from Trump nor from Lam, what agreement they reached on Trump’s demand that Vietnam join his trade war against China and stop importing high-technology components and electronics from China and re-exporting them to the US.

The smell of Trump’s victories over his enemies comes at a small price. Between this latest one over Vietnam, a fresh capitulation over Hamas,  announced on July 1,  and the “total obliteration” of Iran’s nuclear programme on June 22,    Trump has announced that he is selling a line of victory fragrances for men and women; that’s to say Trump’s Fight Fight Fight cologne and Victory 45-47 perfume at $199 and $249, respectively;  $100 discount if you buy two.

No president of the US has ever marketed the scent of his body parts; no president has ever collected money for turning elected office into a brand-name for consumer sales. Not even the kings and queens of England charge merchants for issuing royal warrants. But Trump has made the smell of victory an “official fragrance for patriots who never back down…your rallying cry in a bottle…embodies strength, power and victory”.  

From the Russian point of view, this newest victory of Trump’s confirms he’s nothing more than a вонючка (“stinker”), a conman, a fraud. President Vladimir Putin has already appointed a special negotiator, Kirill Dmitriev, to negotiate bribery, fraud, grand larceny, tax evasion and money laundering with Trump and his business allies.

Putin has said himself in his most recent remarks on Trump: “We have good prospects for economic cooperation. We are aware that American businesses are demonstrating interest, showing intent, and sending signals about their desire to return to our market. We can only welcome this. However, all such developments require consistent preparation. That said, overall, such a meeting [with Trump] remains entirely possible, and we would be pleased to arrange it.”  

This wasn’t exactly the victory smell Trump calls 45-47 Victory. About the negotiations to end the war in the Ukraine, Putin told Trump to look at the term sheets, the 22-point memorandum  tabled by General Keith Kellogg for the Ukraine  and the 33-point memorandum tabled for Russia by Vladimir Medinsky.     “Regarding the memorandums,” Putin said,    “there were no surprises. I will not tell you anything surprising, either. These are two absolutely opposing memorandums, but that is precisely why talks are set up and held – to find ways to bring positions closer. The fact that they were diametrically opposed does not seem surprising to me, either. I would not like to go into details, as I believe it would be counterproductive – even harmful – to get ahead of the talks…The agenda? In my opinion, the discussion should focus on the memoranda from both sides.”

In the new podcast with Nima Alkhorshid, Ray McGovern and I report how our noses smell what is happening between Trump and Putin. The noses have also detected two new smells in the wind – the US arms delivery pause to the Ukraine, and the telephone call of July 1 between Putin and the French President, Emmanuel Macron.

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by Editor - Wednesday, July 2nd, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

President Donald Trump has said he believes he can use nuclear weapons to destroy his enemy’s forces for defending itself, including the enemy’s capacity for deterrence by nuclear counter-attack. This is Trump’s new doctrine of “total obliteration”. It is US shock and awe tipped over the nuclear threshold; it is American first-strike nuclear attack.

“It was so bad that they ended the war,” Trump told the press at the NATO summit in The Hague last Thursday (June 26). Speaking of the US bombing attack on Iran’s nuclear enrichment and weaponization plants on June 22, Trump said: “It ended the war. Somebody said in a certain way that it was so devastating, actually, if you look at Hiroshima, if you look at Nagasaki, you know, that ended a war, too. This ended a war in a different way, but it was so devastating.”   

The enemy Iranians, claimed Trump, were taken by surprise and had no defence. “They didn’t get to see it. It was dark. That’s the amazing thing about the shots. They hit the shots perfectly and yet it was dead dark. There was no moon. There was no light. It was virtually a moonless. It was very dark and they hit — the shots were hit perfectly.”

“It was called obliteration,” Trump said. “It’s been obliterated. Totally  obliterated.” He kept repeating the word obliteration eleven times in forty-seven minutes. “No other military on earth could have done it. And now this incredible exercise of American strength has paved the way for peace with a historic ceasefire agreement late Monday.”  

President Vladimir Putin has not responded to Trump’s claims. Instead, he told reporters on June 27 that he “hold[s] the incumbent President of the United States in the highest regard. His path to returning to power and to the White House has been exceptionally arduous, complex, and hazardous – a fact of which we are all cognisant, particularly given the assassination attempts he has survived, indeed multiple attempts on his life. He is a courageous man, that much is evident.”  

Putin was showing no more respect and courtesy towards Trump than he had shown President Joseph Biden, despite the onset of Biden’s dementia which was too obvious to ignore in private, if not in public. After meeting with Biden in Geneva in 2021, Putin had said:  “I want to say that the image of President Biden that our press and even the American press paints has nothing in common with reality. He was on a long trip, had flown across the ocean, and had to contend with jet lag and the time difference. When I fly it takes its toll. But he looked cheerful, we spoke face-to-face for two or maybe more hours. He’s completely across his brief. He himself does not miss anything, I assure you. It was completely obvious to me.”  

These are not personal compliments; Putin is not ingratiating the US presidents. He is expressing the fundamental assumption in Russian warfighting strategy that whatever their personal eccentricities, medical handicaps, or psychiatric symptoms, the US president will always act rationally in the escalation towards nuclear war; and that he will be advised, persuaded and deterred  against a first-strike nuclear attack against Russia.

This rationality assumption is being tested now by the Kremlin, Security Council, General Staff and the intelligence agencies as they review Trump’s record of bombing Yemen in March, Operation Rough Rider;  his involvement in the attack with Ukrainian proxies on Russia’s nuclear bombers on June 1, Operation Spiderweb;   and finally the US-Israeli war against Iran beginning on June 13 and  ending with Operation Midnight Hammer on June 24,   the US Air Force attack on Iran as reported publicly  by General Daniel Caine, the spetsnaz officer whom Trump has appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  

The clearest recent statement of the rationality standard  applying in an escalating war between nuclear-armed militaries, was spelled out on May 31 by Indian Army General Anil Chauhan, Chief of the Defence Staff. He was explaining India’s conduct of the war with Pakistan which began with Pakistan’s attack in Kashmir on April 22, and concluded with the destruction of Pakistan’s air defences, including its nuclear weapons base, and the ceasefire which took effect on May 10-11.  

“There is a lot of space before the nuclear threshold is crossed,” Chauhan said.    “There is a lot of signalling before that…The most rational people are people in uniform when conflict takes place. That’s because they understand that conflict can swing either way. In every step which happened…I found both sides displaying a lot of rationality in their thoughts as well as their actions. Why should we assume that in the nuclear domain there will be irrationality on someone else’s part?”

This is the question being discussed behind closed doors in Moscow now — whether the assumption of Trump’s rationality continues to be justified, and if his conduct is creating fresh doubt, what to do about it.

It had been three days after Trump had bombed Iran and after he had proclaimed his obliteration doctrine that Putin said: “we highly value both his domestic policies and his endeavours regarding the Middle East situation, as well as his efforts toward resolving the Ukrainian crisis. I have previously articulated this position and wish to reaffirm it publicly: I am convinced that President Trump is genuinely committed to resolving the issue on the Ukrainian track. Recently, I believe he observed that the matter has proven more intricate than external appearances suggested. That is indeed the case. Such complexity is unsurprising – there exists a substantial difference between distant observation and direct engagement with the issue. The same is true of the Middle East crisis. Although he may have greater experience there, having been more deeply involved in Middle Eastern affairs, complexities persist there as well. Real life is always more complex than any notion of it.”  

Putin was restating the strategic assumption that Trump is rational. The evidence of the joint US-Israeli war against Iran, including Operation Midnight Hammer, and the failure, as the Russians understand it, of Trump’s war aims – regime change in Tehran, partition of the country,  elimination of the Iranian military’s nuclear-armed missile capabilities against Israel – is far from conclusive.   

 “Iran is now central in the Russian discourse,” comments a Moscow source in a position to know. “Putin will not deviate from the pure diplomacy. There’s a two-track approach. It is part of Russia’s warfighting strategy. We now know that Trump is refusing to come to any of the terms we have tabled in Istanbul for a peace settlement. He keeps threatening to escalate. His record is  showing the US won’t withdraw from the Middle East war and he is refusing to stop running the Ukraine war. So we draw the obvious conclusions. What’s the point of Putin announcing those if Trump shows he isn’t listening, won’t agree, maybe can’t understand?”

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by Editor - Wednesday, July 2nd, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

When Russia’s master icon painters depicted the male and female faces which are sacred in the Russian Orthodox Church, the noses were always columnar — a long, narrow bridge without curvature – ending in a pointed tip; the lips were exactly as wide as the nostrils on either side of the nose, and the lower lip was full. The cheeks were flat without the prominence of either zygomatic (cheek) bones or flesh. The eyes were always almond-shaped, open without hood (dermatochalasis). The lacrimal caruncle, the tiny circle of flesh in the corner of the eye, did not appear in icons until the seventeenth century.*

The forehead is usually wrinkle-free except that the Mother of God of Kazan displays a vertical line between and above the eyebrows. That glabellar or frown line isn’t from nature; it symbolizes different things, depending on the school of icon painters who painted her.

Realism in icons changes with time just as the secular standard of beauty does in the face. Rank and class, with the money to make plastic change and cosmetic repair, are eternal. Today, with more cash in their pockets, time to expose their skins to the sun on holiday, and the aspiration to rise in social class and display their mobility, Russian men and women are buying more botulinum toxin drugs than ever before. In the latest report this month, consumer spending and unit sales for these drugs are currently jumping by more than a third over the levels recorded a year ago;   they have more than doubled since the war began in 2022.  

Popularly known by the Botox brand name, these drugs are injected in time series to erase wrinkles in the muscular movement of the face, cause lips to pout, and lift hoods over the eyes. Botox is also used to stop excessive sweating, twitching, and drooling. These can be symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome among soldiers returning from the war fronts, but they aren’t the drivers of the Russian Botox boom.

This is not only a boom in consumption of the drugs on the faces of men and women.  It is a boom for Russian pharmaceutical companies to replace French, South Korean, Chinese and other imports of Botox-type pharmaceutical drugs which have been blocked by sanctions:  growth in sales for these Russian Botox makers has been jumping – over the past year, 46% and 63% for the two leading Botox substitutes, Relatox and Miotox.  Also, these products pack three to four times more punch in every shot, or so the Russian marketers, experts and clinics selling cosmetic treatments and plastic surgery are claiming.  

The Russian Botox comes to the people from the people; that’s to say the state.  Relatox, first started in the market in 2014,  is manufactured by Microgen, a subsidiary of the state conglomerate, Rostec.     Miotox is produced by the Chumakov Scientific Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences,  a national leader for research in medical virology, manufacturer and marketer.  

When Rostec’s chief executive, Sergei Chemezov, met President Vladimir Putin this month for their annual review of Rostec’s operations, Chemezov mentioned his group’s medical technology contributions to the war, including a new histological data scanner, bioelectric prosthetic devices, and “sponsored trips to health resorts”.  The Kremlin communiqué doesn’t report whether they discussed the boom in Relatox. .

The face-saving claims, not to mention the adverse side effects and the spread of counterfeit drugs, are sensitive subjects which the experts are willing to discuss in the press. There are greater sensitivities, however.  Nikolai Bespalov, an author of the latest Botox market report by RNC Pharma  in Moscow, and Natalia Goltyakova, chief executive of the  GMT Clinic,  were asked what are the social class dynamics of the Botox boom, and what oligarch groups are active in the market  in combination or competition with Rostec and Chumakov,  but they refused to answer.

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by Editor - Monday, June 30th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

In warfighting against Russia’s enemies, President Vladimir Putin makes mistakes. He admits as much. Unequalled among the current leaders of the enemy states, he has the capability to correct his mistakes quickly. That’s one of the reasons for his unequalled domestic voter support.

Also, Putin is an attentive listener; he brooks criticism on condition it is not intended in a plan for regime change. Every ten years or so, Putin knows that Russia’s main enemies – the US, Germany, the UK – have come up with, will always come up  with regime-changing schemes employing Trojan horses, Fifth Columns and quislings inside Russia.

These started for Putin with the Chechen secession. After he had defeated that, they were followed by the plotting of the oligarchs around Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky and ended with Alexei Navalny. Putin is well enough educated in the methods of analysis of Marxism-Leninism to understand that for Russia, regime change and warfighting, also class struggle, race war and imperialism, are constant and inevitable.

Because of what the Germans did to the Russian people at the time of his father, mother,  brother,  and uncles, Putin knows there is only the deterrence of superior force to stop the Germans repeating themselves; killing Germans is a generational necessity for Russia’s survival. Putin wishes better but knows – especially now – that the good Germans are outnumbered and outgunned, and the bad Germans are planning for worse with US encouragement and armament, as before.  

With the British and the Americans, Putin has tried a combination of traditional economic inducements, regular espionage, and manipulation in the manner of Felix Dzerzhinsky’s Trust.* In the calculus of the force required for divide-and-rule and warfighting against the Anglo-American empires, Putin has also understood that time is needed to rebuild Russia’s capacities, economic and military, from the level of destruction which Washington inflicted through the time of the Gorbachev and Yeltsin capitulations. In correcting his predecessors’ mistakes and their misjudgements of the Americans, Putin has been a quick study but a slow learner.

Then there is Putin’s philosemitism in dealing with the Jewish state. Joseph Stalin believed Israel  to be an anti-imperial ally, but it has turned into a battleship for the empire in destroying all of Russia’s traditional Arab allies, and now Iran — the last holdout before Putin must fight a war on the southern front.

There, Putin’s policy towards Iran combines two hundred years of Russian trial-and-error, some of the errors fatal ones.   

In the tradition of male loyalties in the Russian tusovka – mishpocha is the Jewish concept – Putin is both comfortable with and dutiful towards the Jewish men he shared his Leningrad boyhood with. Such loyalty is lifelong.  No Russian can forget – even if Americans, Germans and British make a point and policy of forgetting  – that they survived the war but not their grandparents, fathers, brothers and womenfolk. Putin has been persuaded that the 15% of Israel’s population who are Russian by language, history, and habit are an extension of the tusovka to which he should show the loyalty which survivors must show each other.

There has been nothing comparable towards the Iranian side; towards the Arab world, genuine Russian sympathy and cultural orientalism died with Yevgeny Primakov (1929-2015). Ties of trade, investment, and military cooperation are a poor substitute, as unpredictable and as fraudulent as the spot and future markets in commodities, including money itself.

In this podcast recorded yesterday, Dimitri Lascaris discusses the lessons Putin and the Russian General Staff are learning from the Iran war, both to guide their next steps for the security of the southern front, and also for negotiating and fighting the war in the Ukrainian sector of the western front.

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by Editor - Friday, June 27th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Why do so many CIA and MI6 officers (retired) know and say so much about the damage Israel and the US have inflicted on Iran since they began their war on June 13, but so little about the damage Iran has inflicted on Israel (lead image)?

“As you know,” President Donald Trump said last night, following the NATO summit meeting in The Netherlands, “last weekend the United States successfully carried out a massive precision strike on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities. And it was very, very successful. It was called obliteration. No other military on earth could have done it. And now this incredible exercise of American strength has paved the way for peace with a historic ceasefire agreement late Monday.”  

He then asked his Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth to clarify how to interpret the military intelligence reporting from “the group [Defense Intelligence Agency] that’s run by this gentleman, in fact, he may want to talk about it for a second.”   Hegseth: “somebody somewhere is trying to leak something to say — oh, with low confidence – [that] we think maybe it’s moderate. Those that drop the bombs precisely in the right place know exactly what happened when that exploded. And you know who else knows? Iran. That’s why they came to the table right away because their nuclear capabilities have been set back — back beyond what they thought were [sic] possible because of the courage of a commander in chief who led our troops, despite what the fake news wants to say.”

By this intelligence reporting standard, escalation of force by the US has compelled Iran to negotiate terms of capitulation which it was refusing to accept before June 13.  But what, according to this intelligence standard, has been motivating Israel to accept Trump’s ceasefire?  

The answer to that is the most classified secret the Trump Administration, the Israeli government, and the Jewish financiers of Trump’s election campaigns are keeping. This is also a secret so sensitive that not one of the US media Trump is attacking dares to publish it.

The secret is simple: Israel was desperate to have Trump call the ceasefire in order to obtain emergency resupply of US air defence missiles. And Trump was in just as much hurry because the cost which Iran’s war has imposed on the US defence budget is more money than Trump currently has the legal authorization to spend.

According to this painstaking analysis of the available intelligence, “between the start of the war on June 13 and the announcement of a ceasefire on June 23, a race was under way. The Israelis were racing to destroy Iranian missiles and launchers before the Iranians launched enough missile salvos to deplete the Israeli interceptor magazine. Considering estimates placed Iranian ballistic missile stocks at about 2,000-3,000 before the war started, the Iranians would eventually exhaust Israeli interceptors if they weren’t attrited, making the left-of-launch or missile-defeat element of the Israeli strategy critical. If the Iranians had the missiles and launchers available to continue generating salvos against Israel, there would have come an inflection point in the amount of damage they were able to do, and that inflection point would have arrived once Israel ran out of interceptors.”  

This is the intelligence assessment for Israel which Trump and Hegseth are not acknowledging: “a lot of interceptors have [been] fired in less than two weeks. 39 THAAD interceptors in nearly the full loadout of a 6 launcher THAAD battery without a reload, 48, so that system may be close to being out of interceptors. It seems likely it was deployed with reloads based on the satellite imagery, but considering the number of Iranian strikes missing from Abbadi’s videos, I think this is a fair judgement. Similarly, 34 Arrow-3s is a lot, nearly double the number used in October. While there is little insight into how deep Israel’s Arrow-3 magazine is, the presence of THAAD in Israel suggests it may not be much deeper. Nevertheless, based on the [Wall Street Journal ]  reporting and this data, it seems likely that Israel and the U.S. THAAD battery are hurting for interceptors.”  

That last phrase means Trump was compelled to announce his ceasefire on June 23  to save Israel from running out of interceptors as Iran accelerated its strikes, according to the rope-a-dope strategy reported here.  

Trump and Hegseth also needed the ceasefire because they were running out of budget money to pay for re-supply to Israel. “According to the FY 2025 Missile Defense Agency budget, each THAAD interceptor costs approximately $12.7 million. The minimum of 39 THAAD interceptors therefore cost over $495 million. The budget projects only 32 THAADs will be procured in FY 2026, so more than an entire year’s worth of interceptors were fired in twelve days (The production rate in FY 2025 was only 12 interceptors.) Arrow-3 costs are more difficult to estimate. The $4 million price-tag often mentioned is probably not quite right. While the exact cost is unclear, the 34 Arrow-3s cost at least more than $100 million. Considering these numbers…it is fair to say that more than a billion dollars was spent on interceptors during the twelve-day conflict.”  

In today’s Gorilla Radio discussion, Chris Cook also reports that the Iranian campaign has been so effective,   it has triggered an unprecedented exodus of Israeli refugees to Cyprus and Greece, and then to the Jewish homelands – the US, Canada, UK, Germany, and Australia.  

The official Israeli state admission is that almost 90,000 Israelis fled the country through December 31, 2024.   The exodus this year, accelerating from June 13, is “Dunkerkian”, Cook says. For Israel and the Jewish diaspora, this war damage inflicted by Iran has reversed the national ideology of the Aliyah – that the Zionist state is the safe refuge for Jews. This is a regime-changing outcome for Israel, not for Iran.

“It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change’,” Trump tweeted on June 22. “But if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”  What is proving politically impossible for Trump to say now is that he is being forced to MIGA — MAKE ISRAEL GREAT AGAIN!!! — and lacks both the money and the weapons to succeed.

This is the lesson President Vladimir Putin and his advisors are learning before deciding on their next negotiating and fighting steps in the Ukraine war.

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by Editor - Wednesday, June 25th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

President Donald Trump and the Israelis cannot accept that in this round of the war against Iran, they are losing escalation control.

Trump and the NATO allies will not accept that this is what Russia is taking from them on the Ukrainian battlefield.

In the history of the world it has never happened before that people with superiority complexes as all-consuming as Trump’s, the Israelis’, and the NATO leaders’ can’t see through the dark to their toilet, and when they get there to do their business,  they can’t flush because their electricity and water supplies have been destroyed by missile attack.

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by Editor - Wednesday, June 25th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

According to the Unified Rules of Boxing issued by the US Association of Boxing Commissions and Combative Sports, when the bell sounds for the end of each round, there is a “rest period” before the boxers resume their fight, or one retires too hurt to continue.

The ceasefire between Israel and Iran which President Donald Trump (lead image, left, right) has congratulated himself for arranging is the bell sounding for the rest period to begin.

Iran’s rope-a-dope strategy allows rest periods.  But for this strategy to succeed, the rest periods must be too short for Israel to be re-supplied by the US, Germany and other allies, compared to the re-supply arrangements which Iran is now trying to make with Russia, China, North Korea and other sources.

Since Trump’s first announcement allowed Israel and Iran to continue striking each other for six hours, his deadline was roughly 7 am Teheran time today, June 24.  In reply, Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s Foreign Minister, announced “there is NO ‘agreement’ on any ceasefire or cessation of military operations. However, provided that the Israeli regime stops its illegal aggression against the Iranian people no later than 4 am Teheran time, we have no intention to continue our response afterwards.”   

According to Trump, “Israel & Iran came to me, almost simultaneously, and said, ‘PEACE!’”   Trump has then claimed he had forced them. “We couldn’t have made today’s ‘deal’ without the talent and courage of our great B-2 pilots, and all of those associated with that operation. In a certain and very ironic way, that perfect ‘hit’, late in the evening, brought everyone together, and the deal was made!!!”  

Sources in Moscow say the terms of the Trump “deal” are quite different.

On the one hand, according to the sources, Trump understands that unless he orders a halt to US arms supplies and battlefield intelligence to the regime in Kiev, Russia will not halt its arms supplies and intelligence-sharing with Iran. The sources add that for the time being Iran is not requesting fresh Russian aid. “Several individuals have been moved under Russian protection; these are individuals and families who have been moved into Russia. North Korean deliveries have been crucial in the run-up — they are basically Chinese. So Iran has not been lacking. They have been ready.  Also, they have the capacity to fire several large missiles per day for several weeks, if not months, which the Israelis and Americans cannot stop. These will get through to Israel’s water, gas, and electricity plants, other fuel supplies, and ports.”

The assessment in Moscow is that Iran has demonstrated it has escalation control for the long term, and that in the short term Israel needs US re-supply, re-financing, and recovery more urgently than Iran. In exchange for Trump’s “ceasefire” to meet the Israeli requests, President Vladimir Putin has communicated that Trump must do nothing to block the acceleration of Russia’s offensive in the Ukraine.

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by Editor - Monday, June 23rd, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

When Muhammad Ali famously demonstrated the rope-a-dope strategy in the Zaire title bout  against George Forman in October 1974, he allowed Foreman to start attacking him against the ropes in Round 3. By Round 7 Foreman had exhausted his punching strength. In Round 8, Foreman dropped his guard, and Ali counterattacked with a combination of punches which knocked Foreman out.  

Watch carefully how it was done in seven punches, eight seconds.   

According to General Daniel Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the US has knocked out Iran’s nuclear enrichment and nuclear weapon preparation plants with “extremely severe destruction”;     “completely and totally”, according to President Donald Trump.   

The punches were delivered by “tactical surprise”, Caine has announced, with a “deception effort known only to an extremely small number of planners and key leaders here in Washington.” He said the “strike packages” comprised more than 125 aircraft and one submarine. They fired 16 GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) bombs, more than 24 Tomahawk missiles, and a total of 75 precision-guided weapons at three land targets – Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. According to Caine’s report, no Iranian shot was fired against the US attackers as they flew on to these targets nor “on the way out.”    Instead, “decoys” and “preemptive suppressing fires” were launched. “Iran’s fighters did not fly,” Caine claims, “and it appears that Iran’s surface-to-air missile systems did not see us. Throughout the mission we retained the element of surprise.”

The entire operation took 25 minutes. That’s the equivalent in the boxing ring of seven rounds. Iran reports the US had telegraphed its punches with advance notice that the bombing raid would be restricted to the three land targets.

Knocking out the Iranian leadership, including military and civilian leaders, plus Ayatollah Ali Kamenei, has been denied by Vice President JD Vance,   then reasserted by Trump.  

“No other military in the world,” said Caine, “could have done this.”

Iran has not acknowledged that rope-a-dope is its warfighting strategy. As Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi prepares for his meetings on Monday with Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has issued a warning to Russia and China that they are failing to do enough to meet longstanding assistance promises and treaty obligations. “We may forget the words of our enemies, but never the silence of our friends,” the IRGC media platform Sepahi News has announced just after midnight on Monday morning (June 23). “After going through this sensitive situation, there will undoubtedly be a serious review of relations with some countries.”  The text was accompanied by a picture of Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping together at a ceremony shaking hands.

The former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, spokesman for the Security Council, has issued a personal declaration supporting Iran’s war against both the US and Israel, and implying not only that Israel is losing the war,  but also there is Kremlin backing for the Iranian nuclear weapons programme. “The critical infrastructure of the nuclear cycle appears not to have been damaged or even slightly affected.  The enrichment of nuclear materials, and now we can say it,  the future production of nuclear weapons, will continue. A number of countries are ready to directly supply Iran with their nuclear ammunition. Israel is under attack — thundering explosions, people in panic. The United States is drawn into a new conflict with the prospect of a ground operation. The Iranian political regime has been preserved, and with a high degree of probability it has become stronger.”  

“With such successes,” added Medvedev for the General Staff and intelligence services, “[we don’t see] Trump [winning] the Nobel Peace Prize, despite the utter venality of this nomination. Good start — congratulations, Mr. President!”  

This is Russian for rope-a-dope.

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by Editor - Sunday, June 22nd, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

It was just before high noon in Moscow on Thursday, June 19, when President Vladimir Putin initiated his telephone call to President Xi Jinping of China. A read-out by Putin’s foreign policy assistant, Yury Ushakov, followed almost immediately.  

Xi did not authorize his summary for twenty-four hours until the Chinese official media organ, Global Times,  published an editorial titled “The ‘four-point proposal’ injects stabilizing force into the crisis in the Middle East”.   Another official version from Beijing, delayed for nine hours, can be read here.  

In between Putin’s read-out and Xi’s editorial, the Russian General Staff leaked its assessment that the US, Israel and their allies are demonstrating in the Iran war,  as they have already demonstrated in the Ukraine war, that negotiations for a ceasefire, a truce, or a peace agreement are pointless now.

Pretending this isn’t so is the Kremlin consensus for the time being. According to Xinhua, repeating the pretence in public is also the Bejing consensus.  

Before he called Xi, Putin told the Xinhua press agency and other reporters: “we are ready and substantively guide the [Ukraine war] negotiations on the principles of settlement…We are in contact, our negotiation groups are in contact with each other. Only just now [Kremlin negotiator Vladimir] Medinsky asked — he says that only today he was talking to his counterparties from Kiev. In principle, they agree to meet after June 22.”  

Unspoken in public for the time being is the discussion among Russian political and military leaders on what Putin’s surprise statement revoking the terms of the Russian pact with Iran means to the remaining treaty allies, China and North Korea.  “With regard to the Strategic Treaty,” Putin has announced for the “Treaty on the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Russian Federation” he signed on January 17, 2025  — “there are no articles related to the defence sphere.”  

Moscow knows this is false.

According to a well-informed source, “the Iranians have assured Putin through the security people that they are able to hold out. Putin is not calling out Trump’s lies because there will be no burning of bridges with Trump for as long as possible. Nothing will be gained from this. Calling Putin out on Israel is something everyone is avoiding here and might be the most sensitive nerve. So it’s best avoided.”

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by Editor - Thursday, June 19th, 2025
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By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Exaggerating the true fact to mean the false factoid is SOP (standard operating procedure) in information warfare. It’s to be expected from President Donald Trump (lead image, right) and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (left) and their intelligence chiefs (centre), military officers, and media supporters.

The truest of the facts in the war so far are arithmetic: (1) that the clock is showing five days and nights long; (2) that there is no lessening in the tempo of the Iranian barrages against Israel; (3)  that the Israeli counts of interceptions and target strikes represent less than 5% of US and Israeli estimates of Iran’s drone and missile stocks before the war.

There is more arithmetic. If Russia, China, and North Korea aim to re-supply Iran, there is no sign yet of increased shipborne deliveries from Astrakhan, Mahachkala and Olya, the Russian ports on the Caspian Sea, or from Turkmenbashi, the main port of Turkmenistan on the Caspian.     If President Vladimir Putin, President Xi jinping, and Kim Jong Un have agreed in secret to assist the Iranian side, then their deliveries are likely to travel by air and rail into Turkmenistan first, and then by road across the border at Sarakhs into Iran. For the time being, the reports at Sarakhs say “light traffic” and “currently no alerts”.  

Conclusion from these facts: Israel’s first shock-and-awe strikes have failed to produce a significant loss of Iran’s military capacities and political will to continue the war until Israel loses its capacities and will. Consequence of conclusion: if shock-and-awe fails, then schlock-and-flaw follows. Schlock is New York Yiddish for badly made merchandise, cheap junk.

This was demonstrated by Trump’s airplane remarks as he headed into Washington the night before his June 18 Situation Room session. Asked what end of war terms he is planning for Iran, he said: “An end. A real end, not a ceasefire. An end…[Question: So something that would be permanent?] Yeah, or — or, uh, giving up entirely…Certainly possible that they would give up. That’s possible.”  

This is the schlock. For analysis of the flaw in the US-Israel war plan, click to listen to the new podcast with Nima Alkhorshid and Ray McGovern.    

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by Editor - Wednesday, June 18th, 2025
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