by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
In Shelley’s most famous poem, the relics are described of Ozymandias, the ancient ruler with his “sneer of cold command” and his ill-fated power projection:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Wess Mitchell, whose grand strategy for Trump was announced this week in Foreign Affairs, the platform of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, places Trump among the rulers of ancient Sparta, then beside Metternich and Bismarck, in expanding his empire while avoiding “delusions of grandeur”.
Trump’s first target is the Kremlin, Mitchell has reported, not to make peace but to neutralize Russia, while Trump swings his guns around to aim at China.
“Today, the weaker rival is Russia. This has become all too obvious as Ukraine has chewed through Moscow’s military resources. The United States should thus aim to use Russia’s depleted state to its advantage, seeking a détente with Moscow that disadvantages Beijing. The goal should be not to remove the sources of conflict with Russia but to place constraints on its ability to harm U.S. interests. This process should begin by bringing the war in Ukraine to an end in a way that is favorable to the United States.”
In this new podcast with Dimitri Lascaris, the two legs of the Ozymandias strategy are analyzed – the correlation of political and military forces in Europe and Asia, as Trump and his men calculate their strength; and the money they are counting to earn themselves from the rearmament of Germany, Japan and other allies whom they plan to supply.
The miscalculation in this strategy is that it concedes that Russia is now stronger on the Ukrainian battlefield than the US and its forces; likewise, China is stronger now for a special military operation in Taiwan than the US and its allies aim to be in a few years’ time. The conclusion is plain – Russia’s security interests in Europe dictate accelerating its westward drive across the Ukraine, while China’s security interests are best served by moving against Taiwan sooner, not later.
As the podcast also reveals, so long as they can pocket billion-dollar riches now, which their placemen at the Pentagon, US Treasury and Department of Commerce are fixing, Trump and his men can afford to ignore the outcome for Ozymandias in the long term.
This is the strategy of fighting one war at a time while making lots of money in the meantime. In tactics it relies on the operations of fraud ahead of the operations of force, and counts on the power of propaganda to convince the world that all Trmup wants is for the killing to stop.
Click to follow the hour-long podcast here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTP7v4BB-Bo
The four Mitchell papers to read for more evidence are:
Source: https://nationalinterest.org/
Source: https://nationalinterest.org/
Source: https://themarathoninitiative.org/
Left: Mitchell’s latest paper at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/.
Right: Jakub Grygiel, a Polish-American academic, professor at Catholic University in Washington, and Mitchell’s co-author at the Marathon Initiative where he is an advocate of German, Polish, Baltic state and Finnish rearmament to fight Russia. Grygiel was a State Department official in Trump’s first term. He is a Russia hater: “There is simply no evidence that Russia shares any of our interests. In a nutshell, it’s foolish to seek a grand bargain with Russia in the naïve hope of support against China…The starting point is money. The most immediate concern, shared with previous administrations and across party lines, is that U.S. allies are not allocating sufficient resources to their defense and the security of the alliance. President Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear that allies, in particular wealthy ones, that are not contributing to security must change their posture—and quickly…The goal is to jolt allies out of their torpor.”
For detailed evidence of the current fight over war policy and big-money contracts inside the Pentagon leadership, read this.
Left to right: Colin Carroll, sacked as chief of staff to Deputy Secretary of Defense Feinberg; Dan Caldwell, sacked as senior advisor to Secretary of Defense Hegseth; Darin Selnick, sacked as deputy chief of Hegseth’s staff; and Joseph Kasper, chief of Hegseth’s staff, reassigned to a low-level Pentagon job and then removed.
Colin Carroll has been an advocate for new artificial intelligence and software applications in military procurement which he represented in his last jobs at Applied Intuition and Anduril Industries; the latter has been financed by Peter Thiel. Both Dan Caldwell and Darin Selnick have been employed by Concerned Veterans for America (CVA) a lobbying agency financed by Charles and David Koch for their financial interests. “They’re not a veterans organization. They’re using veterans issues as a tool to push a political agenda,” reported this study of the CVA.
Joseph Kasper is now reported to be representing Elon Musk’s interests in Defense Department policymaking. Kasper’s last job was with the Ervin Graves Strategy Group, which is a registered lobbyist for military contractors such as General Dynamics.
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