The president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, has arrived in China on his first official visit abroad after his recent inauguration. He was received by his Chinese counterpart, President Xi Jinping, with whom he held talks agreeing to deepen mutual political trust and contribute to global security and stability.
After decades of waging war against impoverished nations with destitute armies, or no standing armies at all, the US has suddenly found itself in a rapidly changing world where peer and near-peer competitors are outpacing it in military capabilities. Many of these capabilities are showing up on the battlefield in places the US has until recently enjoyed relative military superiority.
The first-ever US Department of Defense National Defense Industrial Strategy (NDIS) confirms what many analysts have concluded in regard to the unsustainable nature of Washington’s global-spanning foreign policy objectives and its defense industrial base’s (DIB) inability to achieve them.
At one point, in their conversation, they mention Operation Starvation. I’m not well-versed in WWII history, but I’ve included a link to an article on the aftermath of Operation Starvation, below.
As Russia’s special military operation (SMO) approaches two years of intense fighting, having parried Ukraine’s “spring counteroffensive” and with the initiative shifting to Russian forces, Western capitals are now admitting they are reaching the limits to remaining support for Kiev.
Today, as the U.S. is drawn into wars in Israel and Ukraine, as well as the defense of now-peaceful Taiwan, I’m writing about war. Not the policy choices, or whether U.S. military power is a net force for good or ill, but the actual practical machinery behind the American defense base that produces the weaponry necessary to sustain the military.
The Biden administration helped Pakistan get a controversial new bailout from the International Monetary Fund after Pakistan agreed to secretly sell arms to the United States for the war in Ukraine, according to a new blockbuster report by The Intercept. The deal allows Pakistan to sell some $900 million in munitions while keeping IMF loans flowing to the government in Islamabad amid a spiraling economic crisis, which is driven at least partly by the austerity measures imposed by the IMF loan. Pakistan’s position on the war in Ukraine has shifted significantly since Russia’s invasion and the ouster of Prime Minister Imran Khan, who was removed from office in 2022 under pressure from U.S. diplomats who objected to his “aggressively neutral” stance on the war. Khan is now imprisoned in Pakistan on corruption charges. Meanwhile, the caretaker government backed by Pakistan’s powerful military has delayed planned elections, widely seen as an attempt to block Khan’s supporters from power. “When the United States has a primary foreign policy objective, in particular when it’s a war, everything else falls away. That’s what you’re seeing in Pakistan now,” says The Intercept’s Ryan Grim.
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