not sure what the hell is in the water in Warsaw but liberal/conservative Poles genuinely seem to have some kind of death wish. they truly will never forgive the Russians for saving them and much of their population from dying in fascist death camps. preventing that from occurring was the real atrocity for them
I think the reason why liberals get so stoked about singular Russian Ls like various ships getting hit is because they tend to let their imagination run away with it - like, "Oh, now we've demonstrated that it's possible to almost/actually sink a ship with just a few drones and missiles! Extrapolate that to the rest of the Russian fleet and by this time next year, they'll have no ships left at all!"
the problem is, of course, that it makes at least two key assumptions: a) that this thing you just destroyed/damaged is actually important/critical to the Russian strategy, and b) that the Russians are totally incapable of learning lessons from it and improving; essentially an End Of History brainworm.
likewise, when we saw not that long ago that Ansarallah was mere seconds away from hitting a US warship before the last line of defence stopped it, we weren't like "Ah, dang. Well, that sucks, that means that Ansarallah can't actually hit US ships," we actually drew the opposite conclusion, that it was only a matter of time before Ansarallah hits a US warship. Were we wrong for drawing that conclusion? I think we would all agree that US naval power is indeed a genuinely important, even critical, part of American global military strategy, especially when including the aircraft carriers, but are we right to suggest that the US is totally incapable of improving? I think we have this discussion at least once a week on this site, about whether the US is in terminal and steep decline with no possible way out or if it can gently glide and manage a gradually falling empire without facing any enormous Ls, and even make temporary rebounds before China once again pressures them. so the answer to that question will determine the answer to the question of "Is the first section after the foreword accurate?"
Escobar, to me, represents the most optimistic possible position for somebody on the pro-Russia, pro-Palestine side of geopolitics. You have the doomers on one side and Escobar on the other, and... it's too cliche (and really just not even correct) to say that the truth is somewhere in the middle, and you do actually have to do the work of reading and analyzing shit to know which pole ongoing events are closer to, but you can at least be damn sure that things aren't going any better than he depicts them.
For the reason you've given now (and in the past) he's not somebody I actively follow and I don't put much actual value in his opinions beyond what I stated above. He's a slightly better and more learned version of Scott Ritter.
Israeli army morale plummets over 'lasting victory' in Gaza
by The Cradle.
A growing number of Israeli service members, from senior commanders to rank-and-file soldiers, are expressing doubts that a “lasting victory” against the Palestinian resistance in Gaza is an achievable goal, according to interviews conducted by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). “Fighting the enemy is like a game of whack-a-mole,” an Israeli reservist fighting with the 98th Division in Gaza's southern city of Khan Younis told the US daily. He said many soldiers believe the government lacks a plan and wonder what their efforts are for. “It will be very hard to destroy Hamas.”
Nearly five months after Tel Aviv launched its campaign of genocide in Gaza with the stated aim to “destroy Hamas,” the Israeli army has destroyed most of the enclave's buildings and infrastructure, killing tens of thousands of civilians in the process, but is nowhere near eradicating the resistance. Furthermore, the WSJ cites Qatari sources as saying Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar recently told officials from the Palestinian group in Doha: “Don’t worry, we have the Israelis right where we want them.”
The message reportedly added that the Qassam Brigades "were doing fine" and stood at the ready to confront Israel's planned invasion of the southernmost city of Rafah, where over one million displaced Palestinians are taking refuge. Despite Israeli claims of having killed “12,000 Hamas fighters” since October, the Qassam Brigades and the Quds Brigades – the military wings of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), respectively – have continued to fiercely confront the invading troops across the entirety of the Gaza Strip. The WSJ highlights that, after a two-week ceasefire in November, the Palestinian resistance markedly switched its strategy to confront Israeli forces, moving away from large-scale firefights to small-scale ambushes and “zero distance” attacks that have caused great pain to Tel Aviv.
Israel claims only 242 soldiers have lost their lives in Gaza since the start of the ground invasion, plus an extra 300 during Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October. However, in December, Hebrew media revealed that hospital records contradicted the army's claims about the number of casualties, as Tel Aviv was reportedly undercounting by half. Moreover, the official numbers of wounded only included soldiers in the army, excluding wounded security personnel such as special reconnaissance fighters and members of SWAT units, the police, Border Police, Shin Bet, and emergency and rescue units like Magen David Adom. “The human losses announced by the security establishment are usually binding on hundreds of media institutions, and these are allowed to work basically according to this rule. The death toll always comes from one source, and no one questions it," The Cradle’s Palestine Correspondent reported last year.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not backed away from his promise of “total victory” against the Palestinian resistance, ignoring global calls to stop the mass murder of civilians in Gaza. His recently-revealed “day after” plan for Gaza stipulates that Israel will maintain freedom to carry out military and security operations across the strip indefinitely. Netanyahu also seeks to oversee the total demilitarization of Gaza – excluding weapons "necessary to maintain public order" – and has plans for a "deradicalization" of Gaza's civil, religious, educational, and welfare institutions. Nevertheless, the WSJ reports that many within the military believe the government’s “reluctance to flesh out a plan for who should govern Gaza after Hamas is leaving a political vacuum that could help Hamas to grow back.”
The Axis of Asymmetry takes on the 'rules-based order'
Foreword:
World War III is here, playing out asymmetrically in military, financial, and institutional battlefields, and the fight is an existential one. The western Hegemon, in truth, is at war against international law, and only 'kinetic military action' can bring it to heel.
by Pepe Escobar at The Cradle.
The Axis of Asymmetry is in full swing. These are the state and non-state actors employing asymmetrical moves on the global chessboard to sideline the US-led western rules-based order. And its vanguard is the Yemeni resistance movement Ansarallah. Ansarallah is absolutely relentless. They have downed a $30 million MQ-9 Reaper drone with just a $10k indigenous missile. They are the first in the Global South ever to use anti-ship ballistic missiles against Israel-bound and/or -protecting commercial and US Navy ships. For all practical purposes, Ansarallah is at war with no less than the US Navy. Ansarallah has captured one of the US Navy's ultra-sophisticated autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV), the $1.3 million Remus 600, a torpedo-shaped underwater drone able to carry a massive payload of sensors. Next stop: reverse engineering in Iran? The Global South eagerly awaits, ready to pay in currencies bypassing the US dollar.
All of the above – a maritime 21st-century remix of the Ho Chi Minh trail during the Vietnam War – spells out that the Hegemon may not even qualify as a paper tiger, but rather as a paper leech.
Lula tells it as the Global South sees it
Into the Big Picture – linked to the relentless ongoing genocide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza – steps a true leader of the Global South, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula spoke in the name of Brazil, Latin America, Africa, BRICS 10, and the overwhelming majority of the Global South when he cut to the chase and defined the Gaza tragedy for what it is: a genocide. No wonder the Zionist tentacles across the Global North – plus its Global South vassals – went bonkers. The genocidals in Tel Aviv declared Lula as persona non grata in Israel. Yet Lula did not assassinate 29,000+ Palestinians – the overwhelming majority of whom were women and children. History will be unforgiving: it’s the genocidals that will eventually be judged as personae non grata to all of humanity.
What Lula said represented BRICS 10 in action: this was obviously cleared before with Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and, of course, the African Union. Lula spoke in Addis Ababa, and Ethiopia is now a BRICS 10 member. The Brazilian president was extremely smart in timing his Gaza fact-check to be on the table during the G20 meeting of Foreign Ministers in Rio. Way beyond BRICS 10, what’s happening in Gaza is a consensus among the non-Western G20 partners – who are actually a majority. No one, though, should expect any serious follow-up inside a divided G20. The heart of the matter remains in the facts on the ground.
Yemen’s fight for “our people” in Gaza is a matter of humanistic, moral, and religious solidarity – these are foundational tenets of the rising eastern "civilizational" powers, both domestically and in international affairs. This convergence of principles has now created a direct link – extrapolating to the moral and spiritual spheres – between the Axis of Resistance in West Asia and the Slavic Axis of Resistance in Donbass. Extreme attention should be paid to the timescale. The Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) forces and Russia have spent two hard-fought years in Novorossiya just to arrive at the stage where it becomes clear – based on the battlefield and cumulative facts on the ground – that “negotiations” mean only the terms of Kiev’s surrender.
In contrast, the job of the Axis of Resistance in West Asia has not even started. It’s fair to argue that its strength and full sovereign involvement have not been deployed yet (think Hezbollah and Iran). Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, with his proverbial subtlety, has hinted there’s, in fact, nothing to negotiate on Palestine. And if there would be a return to any borders, these would be the 1948 borders. The Axis of Resistance understands that the whole Zionist Project is unlawful and immoral. But the question remains how to throw it, in practice, into the dustbin of History? Possible – avowedly optimistic – scenarios ahead would include Hezbollah taking possession of the Galilee as a step toward the eventual retaking of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Yet the fact remains that even a united Palestine does not have the military capability to reconquer stolen Palestinian lands.
So the questions posed by the overwhelming majority of the Global South that stands with Lula may be: Who else, apart from Ansarallah, Hezbollah, Hashd al-Shaabi, will join the Axis of Asymmetry in the fight for Palestine? Who would be willing to come to the Holy Land and die? (After all, in Donbass, it’s only Russians and Russophones who are dying for historically Russian lands) And that brings us to the way towards the endgame: only a West Asian Special Military Operation (SMO), to the bitter end, will settle the Palestinian tragedy. A translation of what happens across the Slavic Axis of Resistance: “Those who refuse to negotiate with Lavrov, deal with Shoigu.”
The menu, the table, and the guests
That out-of-his-depth closet neocon, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, let the cat out of the bag when he actually defined his much cherished “rules-based international order”: “If you're not on the table, you are on the menu.” Following his own hegemonic logic, it’s clear that Russia and the US/NATO are on the table while Ukraine is on the menu. What about the Red Sea? The Houthis defending Palestine against US–UK–Israel are clearly on the table, while Western vassals supporting Israel in a maritime way are clearly on the menu. And that’s the problem: the Hegemon – or, in Chinese scholarly terminology, “the crusaders” – have lost the power to place the name cards on the table. The main reason for this authority collapse is the build-up of serious international meetings sponsored by the Russia–China strategic partnership during the past two years since the start of the SMO. It’s all about sequential planning, with long-term targets clearly outlined. Only civilizational states can do that – not plutocratic neoliberal casinos.
Negotiating with the Hegemon is impossible because the Hegemon itself prevents negotiations (see the serial blocking of ceasefire resolutions at the UN). Additionally, the Hegemon excels in instrumentalizing its client elites across the Global South via threats or kompromat: see the hysterical reaction of Brazilian mainstream media to Lula’s verdict on Gaza. What Russia is showing the Global South, two years after the start of the SMO, is that the only path to teach a lesson to the Hegemon has to be kinetic, or “military-technical.” The problem is no nation-state can compare to nuclear/hypersonic/military superpower Russia, in which 7.5 percent of the government’s budget is dedicated to military production. Russia is and will remain on a permanent war footing until Hegemon’s elites come to their senses – and that may never happen.
Meanwhile, West Asia's Axis of Resistance is watching and learning, day after day. It’s always crucial to keep in mind that for all the resistance movements across the Global South – and that also includes, for instance, West Africans against French neo-colonialism – the geopolitical fault lines could not be starker. It's a matter of the collective West versus Islam; the collective West versus Russia; and sooner rather than later, a substantial part of the West, even reluctantly, versus China. The fact is we are already immersed in a World War that is both existential and civilizational. As we stand at the crossroads, there is a bifurcation: either escalation towards overt “kinetic military action,” or a multiplication of Hybrid Wars across several latitudes.
So it’s up to the Axis of Asymmetry, cool, calm, and collected, to forge the underground corridors, passages, and trails capable of undermining and subverting the US-led, unipolar, rules-based international order.
How it started:
How it's going:
You can really tell how afraid and pissed off Israel is getting about losing this war, my god
not much to do other than wait for the Israelis to start going on the offensive against Hezbollah, but they still seem too scared to try anything serious. other than that, it's just watching Hamas do the same strategy of attrition against Israel as Russia is doing against Ukraine
#1 We need China to step up and actualy take an active role if we want the world to actualy get better, transactional and billateral relations will not work in a world divided by a clear anti-communist block. If China needs allies they actually need to stand up and show they'll defend these alliances beyond token gestures. Everything happening around certain BRICS countries and their relation with Palestine is also a major pain, a huge embarrassing contradiction that needs to be resolved or else China will never be global leader for any sort of leftist/communist movement.
Yeah, I agree, now and the years to come will be the moment when the rubber hits the road on how serious China actually is about all the words they're spouting about multipolarity and so on. If China doesn't step up then it doesn't mean the end of the world and a thousand more years of American Empire, it just means that the periphery is more-or-less on its own when it comes to anything more than passive economic development and trade facilitated by China and friends, which is a frightening prospect given that debts are the worst they've ever been but the empire is also looking real wobbly too, so pessimism isn't warranted
time travel anomaly has been fixed
It's one of those conflicts where you look at the supporting countries for each side and get an increasingly befuddled look on your face, so yeah
Heavy losses inflict ‘dramatic manpower crisis’ on Israel
by The Cradle.
In all, the military situation still appears to be in Palestine's favour, which is quite remarkable given that we've been in this conflict for 5 months now. The bloody mathematics of attrition is playing out in both Ukraine and Israel.