Low NATO Ballistic Stockpiles

Note that the NYT sticks to the pretense that these weapons are fired by Ukraine on its own, whereas we know that NATO operatives and data are absolutely essential for their deployment.

Since Russia retaliated against the first uses of ATACMS in November with a demonstration firing of its new Oreshnik missile, which is said to be nuclear-equivalent without actually being nuclear, Russia appears to be avoiding further escalation as it waits to see what is going to happen when president-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated in less than a month’s time.

NYT sources such as NATO’s Admiral Rob Bauer claim that ATACMS missiles have been very effective, although in my view there is little hard evidence to support this view and it is obvious to all analysts that US and European ballistic missiles have had no effect whatsoever on reversing Russia’s steady progress towards achieving its major war aims.

As the NYT admits, no weapon has been a silver bullet or anything remotely like it. The article also cites “Western officials” as making the preposterous and silly claim that “Ukraine has relied too much on help from the West and hasn’t done enough to bolster its own war effort, especially in mobilizing enough troops,” and that it has not exercised prudent care in the number and choice of targets. It is abundantly clear to all responsible analysts that Ukraine, with firm backing from NATO, has provoked and fought the war on NATO insistence that it will provide all the weapons Ukraine would need to win. But the NYT is preparing the way for the US and the collective West to blame Ukraine for their own insanity.

Further, the NYT is now saying that the Biden decision to send 190-mile range ATACMS was taken, not in November, but in the spring of 2024 as Ukraine was being pressured by the West to resume its failed 2023 offensive, a resumption that began with a failed Ukrainian mission to establish a foothold east of the Dnieper in Krynky, Kherson region.

At this time, the US shipped Ukraine as many as 500 missiles from Pentagon stockpiles. Other sources indicate that a total number of around 3,800 ATACMS missiles have been produced since the weapon’s introduction in 1991 up to the time when production ceased in 2007 (a replacement is still in development) of which many were exported, leaving the Pentagon with a total of around 2,000 earlier this year. In other words the Biden administration in the spring of 2024 shipped to Ukraine some 25% of its remaining stock of medium range ballistic missiles. The Biden administration then encountered stiff Pentagon resistance to using them, so they were fired instead at Russian targets in eastern Ukraine and Crimea.

Why did the Pentagon lift its resistance to the use of ATACMS in November? I am not sure that we know. The pretext given was the supposed involvement, still to be proven (as all such claims are coming from Ukraine and the US), of troops from North Korea in fighting in Kursk - totally irrelevant to the issue of ballistic missiles anyway, given (1) that even if such troops were being used, they were being used on Russian territory to strike back on an invading force, and (2) close engagement in the conflict of NATO countries that are not even formally party to the war and, especially, (3) the prominent role of the UK in helping plan the Kursk operation.

Russian Gas Factor

Ukraine is now beginning to receive US LNG via Greece, something that will likely intensify. In the event that the supply of Russian gas to those European countries that have been exempted from EU sanctions imposed in 2022 on taking pipeline supplies from Russia, is now cut off then they too will have to transition at speed to the new and much more expensive US LNG supply. This will create severe economic problems for all, including Ukraine, since if Russia loses its European market, it has little incentive to continue to supply Ukraine, an enemy whose energy system Russia is constantly trying to destroy in any case. The US has benefitted from the energy crisis to which it contributed in a major way by sabotaging Nord Stream, as Biden promised he would at the eve of the conflict, since it has weakened the entirety of Europe. A sudden increase in demand for US LNG will push up US LNG prices still further, and it will also put pressure on domestic prices for gas in the US itself.

The situation may be another factor pushing Ukraine towards some kind of settlement.

Who Could Possibly Have Imagined? Two Weeks Later, Utterly Predictable Chaos in Syria

It is already becoming patently clear that HTS is a poorly disciplined force of religious fanatics and opportunists in which the Collective West has foolishly invested its trust and over which Turkiye has insufficient control. Turkiye faces the triple embarrassment of a terrorist force it cannot control, a country to which the millions of Syrian refugees in southern Turkey still fear to return, and an escalation of combat between Turkish and Kurdish forces in northern Syria which may yet involve an intra-NATO conflict between Turkey and the US.

After two churches and a patriarchate were reportedly attacked, on December 18, in Hama, central Syria, masked and armed men set fire to a giant Christmas tree in the Christian-populated city of al-Suqaylabiyah on Tuesday. Those who tried to extinguish the tree and prevent the attack were reportedly threatened at gunpoint.

The circulation of a video on social media showing the burning of the Christmas tree in al-Suqaylabiyah sparked outrage among Christian and other communities across Syria.

Christians in Hama, Damascus and Homs took to the streets carrying crosses and protesting jihadist groups in solidarity with the people of Suqaylabiyah. The protesters formed long convoys of vehicles and demanded that minority-populated areas be cleared of jihadists.

Hundreds of people took to the streets in the Bab Tuma neighborhood of Damascus, chanting “Protect the rights of Christians.”

Andrew Bahi, a priest living in Damascus, told DPA (German Press Agency) that “We have the right to be afraid. Over the years, the [Christian-dominated] neighborhoods of eastern Damascus have been hit by hundreds of shells and we endured in our homes, but now the atmosphere remains ambiguous. There is a conflict and contradiction between words and actions.”

Samer Elias said, “Everyone chanted demanding the protection of Christians in Syria.”

The leader of the new regime, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani (Ahmed al-Shara’a), claimed that those who burned the Christmas tree were foreign fighters and would be punished. But these and similar statements lack credibility in the face of increasing harassment and attacks by jihadist gangs.

A day after these demonstrations, protests took place in Tartus, Latakia, Hama and Homs after a video went viral of a December 5 attack on an Alawite shrine in Aleppo that houses the tomb of Hussein bin Himden al-Hasibi, considered an historical leader of the Arab Alawites. In a video allegedly made by jihadists, five civilians responsible for maintaining the shrine are killed and the shrine is set on fire during the attack. The jihadists then pose on the bodies of the mausoleum servants they killed.

Government officials appointed by the HTS have tried to appease the angry masses by saying that the attack on the shrine was not new, but took place during the capture of Aleppo in early December.

Euronews reported that the killing of three Alawite judges and an officer who served under the Assad regime in Hama on Tuesday also contributed to spark mass protests in Homs, Hama, Tartous and Latakia on Wednesday.

According to the London-based anti-Assad Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), HTS forces killed an Alawite demonstrator during a protest in Homs, further escalating tensions. Following these incidents, a curfew was announced in the city.

The official SANA news agency announced that the HTS government launched an operation against pro-Assad forces in the countryside of Tartus. During the operation, 14 security officials from the new Interior Ministry were reportedly killed.

Alawite sheikh Ali Dareer, who lives in a predominantly Alawite neighborhood in Damascus, told Reuters: “Thousands of people are filled with resentment, anxiety, and their dignity is offended,” before adding that “However, we must remain committed to peace.”

He said that homes had been vandalised and people beaten because of their religious identity, despite HTS promises the sect would be treated with respect.

Dareer then described an incident that allegedly took place on Thursday, when people were reportedly taken off a bus and beaten because they were Alawites.

These remarks underscore the tense atmosphere in the community and the danger that the new al-Qaeda-linked ruling forces could exacerbate sectarian tensions.

In the face of the repressive policies of the HTS regime, the imperialist and regional powers that brought it to power have largely remained silent. Instead, they are doing their best to eliminate Iran’s influence in Syria, plunder its resources and increase their influence in the country.

Washington lifted its bounty on al-Jolani, paving the way for a rapprochement with the new regime. Representatives of France and Britain also met with HTS officials in Damascus. The NATO powers and their allies are trying to use HTS, which they still consider a terrorist group on paper, as a tool for their geostrategic interests.

While the US and Israel have severely crippled Syria’s military infrastructure through intensive air strikes and sought to create a compliant puppet regime in Damascus, the Israeli army has expanded its occupation and influence in the country.

As Turkey seeks to suppress Kurdish forces in northern Syria and increase its influence in the country, it has turned to more open relations with HTS. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan pledged military and logistical support to the new regime, while Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan became the highest-ranking NATO official ever to visit Damascus, embracing al-Jolani. The HTS leader also pledged a “strategic relationship” with Turkey.

Houthi Hypersonic

The Economist reports today that Israeli soldiers ordered some 350 patients and staff to evacuate from Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza before torching sections of the medical facility. Israel’s army said that the hospital had served as a “Hamas terrorist stronghold”. Earlier, dozens of Palestinians were killed in an Israeli strike in the area.

Fusion Energy and the Future of the World

“Towards the end of 2025 Commonwealth Fusion, a company spun-out from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will open the first fusion reactor designed to operate at near-commercial scale. Known as a tokamak, the machine has a doughnut-shaped reaction vessel surrounded by powerful electromagnets which confine and heat a plasma of deuterium and tritium. The resulting reaction liberates helium, neutrons—and a lot of energy.

Commonwealth Fusion hopes to reach “q>1”, the point where a reactor releases more energy than is put into it, in early 2026. But even if it doesn’t succeed, the firm is not the only one pursuing fusion with private funding. Some startups are testing more exotic approaches than tokamaks, until now the tried-and-trusted fusion design. If Commonwealth Fusion fails to deliver, many others are lining up behind it”.

Boyd-Barrett Conversation with Kevin Barrett

New readers should know that my Substack posts are dedicated to surveillance of matters related to a central premise, and that premise, put at its simplest, is that the collective West, made ever more desperate and ruthless because of its unsustainable debt load, is attempting to beat back the multiple forces of multipolarity. It is currently doing this on three main fronts: against Russia over the proxy excuse of defending Ukraine; against Iran over the proxy excuse of defending Israel; against China over the proxy excuse of defending Taiwan. But there is no limit to the number of fronts that the West will entertain.

The main objective of Zelenskiy and crew, and that of their main patrons, the Biden Administration and its enthusiastic choir of former European imperialists - so far as I am able to read it - has been to escalate the conflict in the hope of imposing setbacks to Russia that would then make Russia more pliable to pressure to negotiate and to negotiate from a standpoint more favorable to Ukraine than the actual conditions of the battlefield would otherwise warrant. These conditions would, at the very least, enable Saint Everlasting-Peace Donald Trump, on the very day of his glorious Resurrection, to claim that Russia had made significant concessions and that Ukraine had won the war because Satanic Putin had never conquered the entirety of Ukraine, or of Europe or of the World - none of those things, in fact that he has never said he wanted to do anyhow.

It’s not over until the fat lady sings, as they say, but it is not looking as though the Biden strategy of escalate to de-escalate has worked. They tried ATACMS and Storm Shadow attacks on Russia. That didn’t really achieve any significant result, but rther it provoked Russia into putting on an Oreshnik demonsration to remind those who know anything about anything that the main purpose of the US military-industrial complex is not to win wars but to siphon public money into the private pockets of the Raytheons, General Dynamics and Lockheed Martins, motivating them to sell their non-competitative stuff at the highest possible prices in semi-monopolistic markets.

On the actual battlefields, Russian forces have continued their steady advance along almost all fronts, at a pace and magnitude to guarantee the exertion of the maximum attritional force on the enemy. Most if not all Ukrainian counteroffensives have been stalled or reversed, including, it would seem, the latest Ukrainian venture from Kamianski towards the Russian-held Zapporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant. And why? Well, God only knows; the chances that it can still produce electricity seem slim. Further south, a large concentration of some 130,000 Russian troops are available for what appears to be a gathering Russian offensive across the Dnieper to recover Kherson, which it took and later abandoned in 2022.

In Kursk, the area still held by Ukraine is only a third of what it was in the original stages of the invasion of Russian territory. The original force of 55,000 (whose purpose, Russia says, was to attack the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant) is now down to around 10,000 in Sudzha and 12,000 reserves in Sumy. These are the pummelled victims, we are led to believe - by a campaign of dubious propaganda designed to compel a very unwilling South Korea to get more involved in the war (which it doesn’t and, at the expense, so far, of two impeached presidents, won’t) - of a force of 10,000 North Korean troops whose actual physical presence in the area seems to be very hard for anyone to verify. Russia claims that Ukraine has lost some 30,000 men in Kursk.

Russians are making significant advances in North Kupyansk where they have established a significant and growing foothold on the west bank of the Oskill and from which they will likely advance on Kupyansk itself and then down to Lyman. Russian attempts on Siversk are meeting with significant pushback, still, from Ukrainian forces. But the tide of war in Chasiv Yar is finally turning against Ukraine, while in the areas of Povchansk, Kurakhove, Toretsk and Velyka Novoselivka are gradually but surely being absorbed into Russian territory.

There is gathering evidence of a possibiity that the new pro-Western government of Moldova will stage some form of attack, possibly on its power station, against the secessionist pro-Russian area of Transnistria.

A lot of noise from the Trump campaign suggests significant, even sincere hope and expectation that Orange Man Bad will indeed clear up the mess on his first day. The real chances of that happening seem about as believable as the likelihood that this writer will win the billion dollar lottery when he doesn’t even buy the tickets. All recent comments from Putin, Lavrov and other senior Russian statesmen suggest, instead, that Russia has absolutey no patience for proposed solutions that do not involve total and perpetual Ukrainian neutrality, that do not formally recognize the four oblasts of the Istanbul agreement, along with Crimea, as irrevocably and perpetually a part of Russia, that think it’s OK for Putin to negotiate with an illegitimate Ukrainian counterpart, and do not start from an Istanbul Plus negotiating platform, a concept which, if Ukraine doesn’t make very fast speed, might well extend to include as Russian the oblasts of Kharkiv, Odessa and Kiev, along with Dnipro and Zapporizhzhia.

The latest gambit - Ukraine and its sponsors always prefer public relations spectaculars over real warfare, if they can get away with it - appears, first of all, to conjure up charges that Chinese and Russian ships in the Baltic Sea have been sabotaging cable links between Finland and Estonia. This seems unconvincing. It is not at all clear to me that the architecture of international communication is any longer vulnerable to specific geographical attacks: modern systems are deliberately designed with sufficient redundancy to render such attempts moot. Nor does it seem sensible for ships of any nationality to engage in that kind of behavior in a semi-closed sea dominated by NATO powers which can and have actually detained such ships for interrogation and investigation. It also seems unlikely that ships would be able, confidently and accurately, to use their anchors as tools with which to sabotage these cables.

What seems a good deal more likely, however, given what NATO Secretary General, the former Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte, has had to say on the matter, is that the alleged and possiby non-existent sabotage attacks will be used as a pretext for, as he says, strenghening NATO presence in the Baltic or, in other words, blockading Saint Petersburg and reducing Russian use of the Baltic to transport its oil and gas by means of Russia’s “shadow fleet” (i.e. ships that evade NATO sanctions by not insuring in London) to European and other destinations. This pattern of escalation of attacks on what we can call the infrastructure of Russian trade is a relatively new factor, but one whose efficacy seems questionable in view of Russia’s demonstrated capacity to walk around these artificial barriers to what was once, back in the 1990s. the West’s pride and joy namely, globalization.

The strategy of creating pretexts based on stories about sabotaged cables goes hand in hand with what appears to have been a sequences of six or so attacks in the Mediterranean and in the Black Sea on Russian cargo ships or ships - tankers - appearing to be carrying Russian oil and gas. This is tantamount to a NordStream-style pipeline sabotage attack to make it as difficult as possible for Russia to surmount Western pressure to reverse the astonishing ingenuity Russia has shown in turning this and other such Western tactics to its own advantage.

But it also represents what Mike Whitney, in an article this week in Global Research, has argued will likely be an escalation in Western attacks on the trading infrastructures of its key enemies, those who oppose a “globalism” that camoflauges continuing US supremacy. These are in evidence, he argues, not just in the case of Western attempts to contain and cripple Russia, but also in the vortex of new (and old) forces at play in Syria that have consequences for the futures of Russia, Iran and China. Whitney writes about the role of the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) which has been a constituent part of the forces of HTS.

The recent HTS invasion and toppling of the Syrian government of Bashir al-Assad has been backed principally by Turkey, with support from the US and NATO but whose members have very little organic connection to Syria other than their enforced sojourn in Idlib (following an 2018 agreement between Syria, Russia and Turkey). The invasion received help from Ukraine military intelligence organization GUR, almost certainly with CIA knowledge.

TIP includes many jihadist fighters recruited from the 12 million strong Uyghur communities of Xinjiang province in north western China and which, like many other Sunni jihadi movements, receives funding from and is manipulated by Western powers for the purpose of achieving Western covert policy ambitions (often related to the development of secessionist movements, and regime-change operations). Note in passing that the current population of the Uyghurs has grown from only five million some forty years ago, one among many reasons why fabricated Western charges of a Chinese genocide of the Uyghur population are utter nonsense. This all comes back to the Brzezinski insight thst Eurasia is the globe’s largest continent, boasting two of the world’s most advnced and economically productive regions, about 75% of global population, most of the world’s physical wealth, accounting for 60% of global GNP, and 75% of the world’s known energy resources.

There were 20,000 Uyghur jihadis in Idlib. TIP was founded in 1988 and received CIA help from its earliest days. The founder of the so-called '“East Turkestan” government-in-exile, Yusuf Turani, lives in Virginia with other senior leaders of the movement. The World Uyghur Congress (WUC) was founded in 2004 by Erkin Alptekin, a former adviser to the CIA.

Mainly based in Pakistan, Whitney argues that the (TIP/WUC) movement is being primed by Western intelligence as a tool for aggressions against China’s highly effective Belt and Road initiative and its forerunner, the China-Europe Freight Train (CEFT) network of 82 routes that connect 100 cities in China to 200 cities across Europe and dozens of others in central, eastern and southeastern Asia. Russia accounts for 37% of all “CEFTS.” Because some European companies are now avoiding Russian routes, Russia is boosting the “Middle Corridor” alternative route from the Black Sea and the Caucasus to the Central Asian steppe, a pattern that follows the route of the ancient Silk Road. TIP members were among the foreign fighters receiving CIA and ISI (Pakistani intelligence) training in camps in Afghanistan in 2001. One target for TIP terrorism would be the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, another would be the Middle Corridor.

Whitney’s analysis is a useful reminder to remain mindful of the broadest possible geopolitical implications of local conflicts. An article by Edward Luttwak contrasts the amazing period of stability in Syria achieved by Hafez and Bashir Assad over forty years, against the volatility from 1948 to 1971, when the country went through 17 presidents (of whom three presided over the United Arab Republic formed by Syria in conjunction with Egypt 1958-1964), and the volatility we are almost bound to witness following the Turkish-HTS invasion in 2024 as Alawites, Arab Christians, Druze, Kurds, Armenian, Ismaili and Shia jostle for safety from a Sunni jihadi government, an invading force from Israel, a continuing Turkish presence in the northwest and Turkish armed forces at war with the Kurdish SDF, a sustained Kurdish enclave with US support in the north east, and Iraqi Shi’ite militia on eastern borders.

Israel retains a presence in southern Lebanon; there have been numerous violations by Israel of the ceasefire agreement reached just weeks ago between Israel, the government of Lebanon and Hezbollah. Israel has occupied all of the Golan Heights and moved through a UN buffer zone to take numerous further settlements in southern Syria, establishing a presence within twenty miles of Damascus. It is poised to initiate a massive strike of some kind on Iran; whether it does will depend to a considerable extent on whether it can secure a US commitment to support its agression and on its intelligence concerning advanced weaponry, perhaps including hypersonic missiles that are operative in Iran, a likelihood that will be boosted if we receive confirmation, as currently anticipated, of the long-delayed signing of the Russian-Iranian mutual defense treaty. Recent reports of crippling energy shortages in Iran signal a possibly grave weakness, as does continuing evidence of a major split in Tehran between those forces that wish to put an end to the Zionist threat once and for all (and who would want the protection of a nuclear shield to achieve it), and those who think they can buy off US support for Israel with some of renewed deal involving the abandonment of any kind of nuclear weaponry capability in return for reduced Western sanctrions.

Is Israel already in grave danger of over-extending itself? It has still to resolve the future of Gaza where it is deliberately engineering the deaths of tens of thousands more Palestinians through the bombing of residential blocs, and the denial to Palestinians of physical safety, food, and medicine. The official tally of the Gaza Health Ministry is 45,000 Palestinian deaths but, as the prestigious British medical journal, The Lancet, calculated back in July, when you take account of those who die as a result of malnutrition, lack of sanitary conditions, absence of medical facilities, then the real number is much closer to 200,000, a number that will only have increased in the period since the Lancet calculation. Contributing significantly to the genocide, as a recent New York Times investigation has shown, were IDF instructions to its forces that a killing of twenty civilians for every single Hamas combatant was acceptable (a ratio that in some instances increased to 100) and that for many aerial attacks it was permissible for up to 500 civilians be killed for every military target, guidlines that were interpreted by many commanders as quotas rather than upper limits.