Zone of Turbulence

With the election victory of Donald Trump, many peace-loving people around the world reached for the champagne corks to celebrate the imminent outbreak of world peace. A few people even dreamt about the reestablishment of normalized relations between the USA and Russian Federation.

Why There Won't Be an Istanbul 2.0 peace deal

However, any such celebrations are wildly premature. In truth, there's a good chance that no peace talks to resolve the conflicts in Ukraine or the Middle East will ever produce a resolution, just as the Istanbul talks when Russian troops stood on the outskirts of Kiev failed (or more accurately, were scuttled by the warmongers on both sides of the Atlantic).

Russians are almost three years and 100s of thousands of dead Ukrainians and Russians in to this #WW3byProxy conflict, and the stakes have become existential. Russia cannot tolerate even a territorially reduced rump Ukraine that will remain a part of NATO in all but name, which could use a temporary armistice to re-arm. Larger warhead kamikaze drones and ground launched missiles would render any proposed Korea-style DMZ settlement obsolete and inadequate to secure Russia's southwestern flank.

Above: OpenAIArt depiction of Russian soldiers raising Russia's flag in the rubble of a town in the Donbass

The Neutering of Trump Admin 1.0 and POTUS45's Cabinet by the Deep State

Which brings us to the composition of a future Trump cabinet. If we examine the evolution of the first Trump Administration as foreshadowing this second one, there's little reason to expect a dramatic improvement on the failures of 2017-2021. It should be noted that in January 2017, Trump came into office surrounded by a select few of excellent and forward-thinking people. These were the likes of decorated Army intelligence General Michael Flynn, Navy veteran Steve Bannon, the arch 'protectionist' Peter Navarro, Paul Manafort who witnessed Ukrainian corruption and politics firsthand (and therefore had to be prosecuted by the deep state Dems with their sticky hands in the Kiev till), and several others.

All of these people, even if they happened to be China hawks, intended to recharge relations with Russia and shake up Washington. The campaign slogans "Make America Great Again" and "Drain the swamp" resonated with millions of American voters, but those plans were scuttled. Within six months, all of these important Trump 2016 campaign advisors were gone, and many of them later wound up in jail on various charges cooked up by the DC elites. Most egregious was the railroading of General Michael Flynn, who had enraged Obama's CIA director John Brennan by going on Al-Jazeera months before the 2016 election and accusing Brennan and the CIA's of arming jihadist enemies of the US to topple Assad.

The Trump Admin 1.0 team did not understand the power of the entrenched class of corruption and vastly underestimated the way they would fight back against any attempts to expose their graft. The corruption and Satanism that prevails in everything that DC touches proved stronger, more cunning and more aggressive than Trump's circle.

Instead of protecting his people, Trump allowed himself to be surrounded by the Republican wing of the NeoLibcon Uniparty aka the Blob. The likes of Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Jim Mattis, General Mark Miley and many many others. Colonel (USA ret) Douglas MacGregor, a military advisor to Trump who later became an outspoken critic of the Ukraine War, noted that when he asked Trump why he allowed such creatures into his cabinet, Trump brazenly answered that their inclinations did not matter because he, that is Trump, was the sole decision maker. This shows either blind arrogance to the nature of the federal leviathan or incompetence in leadership. The U.S. government will never be the Trump Organization no matter what Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy promise in terms of laying off half the federal work force.

The Link Between Maintaining the Syria Forever War Occupation and Preparing to Fight Russia in Ukraine

Indeed, the creatures that surrounded Trump simply ignored or twisted any of his wishes and did as they pleased, and multiple firings including Trump's first chief of staff John Kelly did not stop the Blob from calling the shots, including the DoD and Joint Chiefs ignoring Trump's call for a U.S. withdrawal from Syria. The deep statists sabotaged any attempts at resetting relations with Russia, successfully championed the arming of Ukrainian forces (VSU in Russian) including the Waffen SS wannabes of the Azov Regiment that Congress officially banned funding. Their explicit goal as expressed by Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) another neocon 'Trump booster' during his visit to the Donbass front lines weeks before Trump took office in January 2017, was to enable Ukraine to wage an offensive war. Not only against the pro-Russian Donetsk and Lugansk breakaway republics, but also against Crimea which would entail attacks on pre-2014 Russian territory. Intent on making the world less dangerous, Trump's first term instead set it on the edge of World War III.

The Trump Admin 2.0 'Dream Team' Includes Marco Rubio

Now Trump has returned to office surrounded by a new set of people, who have supposedly learned from the mistakes of Trump's first term. These new faces include Elon Musk, Vice President J.D. Vance, Director of National Intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard, Health and Human Services Secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But in an interview with Joe Rogan, Trump stated that his former CIA Director Mike Pompeo, someone Tucker Carlson had correctly characterized as a boastful war criminal, was a nice guy who did a good job at Langley.

Even though Trump tweeted that Pompeo and his former UN Ambassador the neocon Nikki Haley would not be returning to his second Administration, his former GOP primary opponent 'Lil Marco Rubio was selected to be Secretary of State. Rubio has been a staunch supporter of the Biden Administration's 'as long as it takes' policy on arming Ukraine. Until appointments are made, all possibilities, including a new betrayal of Trump's broad anti-war coalition of supporters, is possible. Washington is nothing if not the land of compromise and selling out of principles.

Judge Andrew Napolitano famously said on his show: “The curse of American politics is that no matter whom you vote for, you get John McCain”.

Trump Exposes the 'Not Agreement Capable' State of America's Eurovassals

Then there is the separate theme of American allies or rather vassals in Europe and beyond, including some of the South Korean political elite that keep seeing phantom NKPA brigades attacking the Ukrainian Army's frontlines in Russia's soon to be de-occupied Kursk Oblast. If Trump is truly intent on exiting Project Ukraine, the revanchist Germans, French and rabidly Russophobic Brits surely aren't ready to let go so easily. For the ruling elites of the vassal EU and its enslaved entities, leaving Project Ukraine, that is, admitting that it's been a colossal failure much greater than NATO's defeat in Afghanistan, would be catastrophic.

These people cannot simply let go of Project Ukraine, unlike the US, they do not have an ocean between them and Russia to cut and run behind. The crab trap that is Project Ukraine has proven an inviting bed for them indeed, and they have fully settled into it. Worse, it's not just about their financial, political and emotional commitments to a lost cause, or in the case of some weaselly EU politicians, buying time to generate a dolstosslegende that blames NATO's defeat on Trump and his MAGA voters.

While Not Representative of the Silent/Intimidated Majority in Germany, German Revanchism Against Russia is Raisng its Face 80 Years Later

No, there are darker forces at work besides Rheinmetall raking in war bucks or euros. Including almost 80 years of previously repressed racialized hatred of Russia and Russians in general rather than just Vladimir Putin. There is a deep inter-generational hatred embedded in some of the hardcore Russophobes DNA and one that owns their souls as much as the Devil can own the soul of a mortal. These people cannot imagine sitting down to negotiate with Russia, much less admit that Russia could have its own point of view. To these people, their only option is to stand above a defeated Russia, their hoofs on her throat, dictating terms. They seem to forget that there's always been a flip side to that coin, which is the second option of laying dead or defeated at Russia’s feet, like their ancestors did in Napoleon's Grande Armée or Hitler’s Wehrmacht.

Germany's political class reacted to Trump's re-election with single expletive headlines in part, because they never thought Germans could be defeated by Russians again, and secondly they dreaded explaining to their people that they destroyed their livelihoods to fill some crazed Drang Noch Osten fantasy of destroying Russia and feasting on her natural resource-rich carcass for generations. Even the political corpse of Olaf Scholz will not bring closure to this issue of German revanchism, as an even bigger CDU warmonger in ex-Blackrock bankster Joachim-Friedrich Merz can come to power (especially after the Alternative for Deutschland party gets banned).

Merz has already promised an escalation using German Taurus cruise missiles, which senior Luftwaffe officers were caught on tape last spring admitting would require direct German hands-on military support for the Ukrainians to fire at Crimea. However, trying to draw Russia into direct combat with a German military which would surely lose on the Ukrainian battlefield, is simply a pretext for a bigger European war or one BIG WW3, one that Trump will be hard pressed to escape.

Old Colonial Powers the UK and France Make Their Ukraine Gambits

To that end, both Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer are pushing the senile lame duck Joe Biden to expand the war through long-range missiles, before Trump can take office. In other words, delivering a fait accompli to the Oval Office on January 20, 2025.

All of this is a long form way of saying Trump’s touted instant peace initiative appears dead on arrival. Moscow does not need a ceasefire on the current front lines because it's winning, albeit at some cost in scores of daily combat deaths and scores more Russian wounded. Ukraine which is losing hundreds if not a thousand soldiers KIA/WIA/MIA every day, cannot accept Trump's deal. Not without catastrophic loss of face in front of the Ukrainian die hard nationalists signaling the fall of the Zelensky wartime dictatorship. A contingency for which the General Valerii Zaluzhnyi is being groomed in England as Zelensky's replacement.

The former Ukrainian Foreign Minister whom Zelensky fired, Dmytro Kuleba, has warned in the Rothschild-owned publication The Economist this week that Ukraine could collapse into civil war if forced to swallow Trump's ceasefire in place terms. This came on the heels of the British paper The Times hinting that Ukraine could rapidly build plutonium nuclear bombs for some sort of Kiev version of The Samson Option. Nevermind that Russia has vowed to destroy any Ukrainian nuke or dirty bomb with unstoppable precision hypersonic missile strikes, and that Russia’s new nuclear doctrine signals potentially nuking any country that would aid any non-nuclear power including Kiev by tearing up the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in order to strike Russia.

Then there's the military problem of Washington and London having basically drained the arsenals of their Eurovassal allies for Ukraine. The UK itself is rapidly sinking into second world nation status, without adequate industrial output to replace the Cold War through GWOT armored vehicle and especially artillery cannon stocks it’s burned waging war against Russia. If Trump's team were to accuse Putin of rejecting a reasonable peace deal and escalate, then they'd have to drain the active duty arsenals of the U.S. Army and French Army to do keep doing so, thereby crippling readiness to fight a second Korean War or any other major contingency / theater operation. Even the haughty Brits have admitted they're running low on Storm Shadow missiles and the entire peacetime strength of the British Army could be comfortably seated inside Wembley Stadium. As for the Bundeswehr’s stocks, they’ve already sent almost all the artillery and air defense they and their Dutch and Scandinavian limitrophes have to send. But then again, those massive deficits between Western military boasting and reality will be covered in a separate article focused on the military/industrial balance of power, which heavily favors Russia and her North Korean, Iranian and Chinese allies.

A New Territorial Settlement in Eastern Europe Will Prove Much Harder Than Many Russian 'Telegram Warriors' Think

Even if we return to this topic of how to negotiate a peace settlement with a neutralized, rump Ukraine, there's the related question of whether NATO would cite the Russian Army's westward advance to justify placing cruise missiles in Poland and Romania. This issue is inseparable from whether Russians would ever accept any NATO country--primarily the Poles, but also the Slovaks and Hungarians--reclaiming parts of their Volyn and TransCarpathian historic territories from the western Ukraine, a 'solution' to the problem of a defeated but revanchist Ukrainian nationalist heartland many 'Telegram Warriors' in Russia have implied will be a piece of cake. But it won't be that easy.

NATO losing face much less accepting a partition tacitly or explicitly agreed between Russia and its Visegrad member states, accompanied by a Russian settlement with Romania over Moldova (known as Bessarabia during World War II) and Transnistria, would release Washington's current death grip on the European Continent. It could very well spell the doom and dissolution of the 'world's most powerful military alliance', particularly given Turkey's own grievances against Western support for the Kurds and growing economic integration with the BRICS+.

The NeoLibcon Blob's hatred of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán or his elected successor would reach new heights if Russia, in the event of a Kiev regime collapse, were to share a de facto if not de jure Trans-Carpathian border with Hungary. The Montenegrin Serb who produces a Substack called Black Mountain Analysis has written about the geo-economics of freight trains loaded with China's One Belt and Road goods trundling from the Heihe-Blagoveshchensk bridge over the Amur River all the way to the Hungarian heart of Europe and on to Serbia. Dread of this potential tsunami of political change is in part, why so much of the 'Atlanticist' media from Germany to the UK have described Trump's boasts that he will impose a hasty peace deal between the Russians and Ukrainians as a serious rather than idle threat to the present order.

We have to admit that this claim is partially true, in the sense that Trump exposes that the true loyalty of all these Euro-vassals is to the globalist oligarchy, not to the temporary occupant of the White House. Trump performs a somewhat useful role of not only exposing where the true loyalties of so many lie, but also how little actual power over the permanent bureaucracy the 'world's most powerful man' can have. Trump has definitely shifted the foreign policy Overton Window far enough toward 'isolationism', that we can expect his cabinet nominees especially GWOT veteran and former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard to be hectored by Senators pompously invoking the 'post-World War II rules-based order'. Which is neither about any rules except those set in Washington or London and does not resemble any kind of order, but a demonic cacophony.

Let's Be Honest: The Israel Lobby Helped Bring Trump Back to the White House and They Expect a Big Return on Their Investment

Finally, there is the Israeli-Iranian missile, drone and proxy war, which stretches from the Iranian heartland to the Levant and 1,200 miles south of Tel Aviv along the Gulf of Aden and Yemeni coast of the Arabian Peninsula. With the coming of Trump, there is no reason to believe that this war will cool off for a nano-second, quite the contrary; it is bound to escalate to some sort of crescendo. To begin with, in Israel there are religious zealots in power, who have become indispensable supporters of Netanyahu's government. Multiple rabbis were reading prayers and blessings on live television in Israel as the vote count was coming in on November 5th. AIPAC and the broader Israel Lobby spent bigly on these elections and they are expecting a bipartisan return on their investment.

To a large portion of Israeli society, Trump's amazing Israel Lobby-boosted comeback, the greatest political comeback in U.S. history, is a divinely ordained guarantee of American direct involvement in their war. That is, Americans going to war on Israel's behalf with Iran and Iranian backed groups like the Lebanese and Iraqi Hezbollah and the Houthis. The Israeli hardliners feel emboldened to do and say whatever they want as they push their now declared agenda (see the interview the Israeli Minister of Finance saying Israel should not only rebuild settlements in Gaza but annex Lebanese territory as well)--the Arab claims that the blue stripes of the Israeli flag represent territorial aspirations to the Nile and Euphrates don't look so paranoid now, do they?

Iran is Digging in for a Long Siege/Mideast War of Attrition

On the other side of the Persian Gulf, the Iranian leadership now sees that there is zero chance for peace. They have denied any role in the recent attempts on Trump's life and disavowed future revenge on him for the killing of the IRGC General Qasem Soleimani, but they've heard Trump’s boasts that he stands ready to strike them harder than they've ever been struck before. The Iranians have watched Washington cultivate any and all radical groups such as the Balochistan and MEK insurgencies aiming at ethnic separatism and civil war inside Iran. They understand that they now have nothing to lose and they've proven that they can unleash salvoes of ballistic and cruise missiles that can easily overwhelm Israel's overhyped Iron Dome air defenses. The IRGC have proven since the retaliatory missile strikes on Al Asad Air Base in Iraq and more recently Operations True Promise I and II that they can launch up to several hundred missiles an hour at Israel, and strike the bases housing thousands of American service men and women across the Middle East.

As our publisher James Smith says, 21st century warfare--especially peer or near-peer war--is not just about how much punishment your country's economic sanctions, armed forces, or cyber attackers can dish out, but how much pain your society is prepared to absorb. Russia is not going to fight for Iran as it would for a treaty ally if North Korea is attacked, but it's certainly helping Iran rapidly upgrade its already-formidable integrated air defense and electronic warfare systems. One IRGC spokesman let it slip in a video widely circulating with English subtitles on Telegram that the Iranians are operating not only the older export model of Russia's S300, but also the latest Russian S400 AD complexes.

Words carry weight, and even when spoke for internal consumption, they are heard thousands of miles away and will exert an influence on foreign decisions and affairs. An uttered word cannot be taken back, no matter how much the Western politicos would like to believe otherwise, and Trump has uttered many a belligerent word over the past years while claiming to be the peace candidate. Now we are left to observe what consequences these uttered words will bring to the world before and after the inauguration on January 20th, 2025.