[su_spoiler title=”Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise. ” open=”yes” style=”fancy” icon=”arrow-circle-1″]
Oliver Boyd-Barrett
| Traducir—Translate! | [gtranslate] |
| Make fonts bigger>>> | [wpavefrsz-resizer] |
Trump and Hegseth: Who are they trying to fool?
Trump is Biden
|
Oct 13, 2025 Russia-Ukraine |
Today, the conflict is escalating. Trump is not ruling out the sending of Tomahawk missiles and an announcement tomorrow may confirm that he is going to authorise this. Zelenskiy, who spoke with Trump last Sunday, is pushing Trump to do so. The purpose is to hit more of Russia’s energy production facilities than Ukraine can currently hit with its drones and missiles. Some people argue that the Tomahawk is not a realistic practicality because it requires launching from very cumbersome Typhoon systems that the US currently has stationed in the Philippines, pointed at China. Typhon systems do not exist in large numbers. There is another launch system, simpler, used by the US Marine Corps that gives long range (2500km), although the Corp has given up on it. Nemesis, an anti-ship missile launch system has been preferred. Several such launchers firing simultaneously and periodically, together with drones and other missiles, could do significant damage well within Russian territory.
Could such systems be built in large numbers? Probably not. The West makes only very small numbers of such missiles, but their use would raise the cost to Russia of continuing the fight, especially given that the US has been helping Ukraine to hit Russian energy facilities for quite some time. Intelligence from the US for this purpose has been crucial. This has cut Russian oil refining by a fifth (on certain days), pushed up domestic prices, reduced exports, and caused queues at gasoline stations. When the US President was pretending to mediate the conflict back in July and invited Putin to Anchorage, he had already given the orders for these attacks all across Russia. Berletic seems to assume that Putin would have known this and that it was why the Anchorage meeting was unproductive. Yet even before then, in the second month of the Trump administration, Pete Hegseth was telling European powers what the US was going to do to exacerbate the conflict, including getting European troops into Ukraine to “freeze” the conflict, sending European troops into Ukraine to implement this “freeze”, and getting Europe to invest in rebuilding Ukrainian weapons stockpiles. He was also talking about driving down energy prices, coupled with more effective enforcement of energy sanctions, and targeting Russian energy production through US intelligence support to Ukraine.
Berletic notes how the CIA in 2014 took over and restructured and rebuilt Ukrainian intelligence agencies which continues today via 12 CIA-supported intelligence centers in Ukraine; plus a unit to reverse engineer and reconstruct Russian weaponry; involvement in anti-Russian espionage activity in countries with which Russia is a friend, and participation in Ukrainian assassination campaigns. Since 2022, the conflict has been commanded in Weisbaden by US generals. US generals oversaw the overall strategy, approving and even selecting battlefield targets. The campaign against Russian refineries is mainly a CIA operation to cripple the Russian economy and obfuscating what is going on by inviting Putin to “peace” talks. This is not negotiation in good faith.
Despite Trump’s apparent acceptance of Putin’s argument in Anchorage that to try to contain the conflict by means of some kind of “freeze the conflict” strategy is not in Russia’s interest and not feasible, Trump seems to have returned to that goal in his desire to reorient to China, and have Europe fill the void left by the US in Ukraine. Everything the US has tried to do to Russia is being executed against China, using Taiwan as a battering ram against China as Ukraine was used as a battering ram against Russia, including stealing and attriting Chinese assets (such as the harrassment of Huawei, the forced dispossession of Tik-Tok from China’s control, the attempt to take control of the Chinese owned Dutch chip-maker, Nexperia, the imposition of more tariffs on China in supposed retribution for Chinese control of rare earth supplies to the US).
We will see much more of this. US foreign policy prioritizes US hegemony throughout the world, and can be predicted from policy papers such as the 2019 RAND report, Extending Russia, and another, 2018, Naval policy paper announcing the beginning of a campaign to remove obstacles to US capacity to implement a blockade against China. This is “shaping the battlefield,” involving control over the Strait of Malacca, the coasts of the Philippines, Taiwan and Japan, and the bombing of a crucial energy pipeline in Myanmar, and multiple regime-change operations against countries friendly with China around China’s periphery, all this operating against China’s Belt and Road initiative which is China’s response to the US threat. The idea is to impede energy and weapons related trade with China, using the US advantage of its global network of military bases.
This campaign for the preservation of US hegemony is the existential enemy of movements towards a multipolar world.
Subscribe to Empire, Communication and NATO Wars
BEFORE you leave, PLEASE pay attention to this alert.
[t4b-ticker id=”1″]
[/su_spoiler]
Print this article [bws_pdfprint display=’print’]
[su_note note_color=”#f1efef” radius=”0″]The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post, although, if we publish them, we obviously find them noteworthy and valuable. [/su_note]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License •
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
