Keeping It Real: Reminders About The Dictators’ Club
The Dictators’ Club uses force, corruption, subversion, degradation, reeducation camps, unjust prosecutions, assassinations, and systematic lies to try to destroy opponents, dismantle free nations, and wage gray and open warfare to realize their expansionist plans. They are not likely to change unless they have to do so. Reminder on the Nature of Today’s Autocrat Regimes…
China’s Interest in Saudi Arabian Investment in Iran
China’s diplomatic aid mending Saudi-Iranian relations in the Middle East sees Saudi Arabia immediately offering investment in Iran in the name of Saudi Arabia’s self-interest in regional stability. Yet Saudi Arabia’s investment in Iran would bolster the Iranian regime’s capability to perpetuate repression of its own people, continue as Russia’s chief overt weapons supplier, and…
Russia’s Military Movements on Ukraine
Strategically it is best to see Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine in the context of his intelligence apparatus’s 20-year gray war of psychological, emotional, and political influence against targeted populations in the West. Among strategic objectives leading-up to the invasion of Ukraine Putin pursued a range of combined objectives to avenge the end of…
The “Pravitel” Prerogative
Putin’s chosen prerogative as the presumed “pravitel” (правитель) over Russia trends in extinguishing the lives of generations of young and middle aged Russian and Ukrainian men on the outdated delusion that the prize of expansive imperial buffer territory is worth all the lives he can spend. I have heard arguments from academics and Russian friends that all…
Appease Putin and Lose Freedom
Putin kindled then started wars against Chechnya, Georgia, and Ukraine seeking one thing: Imperialist control over two continents. His nationalists have told us so, and Putin has embraced their warmongering extremism and called it patriotism. And Putin has embraced something much deeper than that: Chinese imperial interest and interference in Russia’s fundamental economic survival. That…
Update: Turkey
In late August 2022, Haluk Bayraktar, the CEO of Bayraktar drone company Baykar, reportedly pledged that the company would not sell its drones to Russia “no matter how much money we are offered.” This, while expressly continuing to sell them to Kyiv in solidarity with Ukraine. Yet in March, Turkish Deputy Foreign Minister Yavuz Selim Kiran…
Turkey playing both sides with decided preference for autocracy
One would think Putin would have yanked S-400 contracts with Turkey, angered by Ankara’s Bayraktar combat drone deals with Kyiv. He has not. Instead, he is pursuing a Bayraktar drone plant in Russia to use the combat drones against Ukraine. If a conflict with NATO broke out Putin would not want S-400’s operational over Turkish…
Might NATO Aggressively Employ Anti-Bombardment & War Machine Countermeasures as Humanitarian Aid to Ukraine?
2022 Introduction: The following is a short position piece written under the auspices of Stratpass Corporation in February 2015 after the Crimean takeover by Russia. It proposes Transnational Anti-Weapon, Anti-War Machine, & Anti-Bombardment Aid Problem The Russian military expansion into Crimea, Ukraine, and Europe (EN1) warrants a new NATO conventional deterrence doctrine for the 21st Century, especially…