Trump Between Cuba and Taiwan

Trump and his mediocre team of advisors never learn.

The United States got bogged down in the Vietnam War and suffered a humiliating defeat. It then did the same in Iraq and Afghanistan, with identical results. The chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces stationed in Kabul is one of the most embarrassing chapters in U.S. military history.

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Now it is attacking Iran, indiscriminately bombing military and civilian targets, and threatening to send the country back to the “Stone Age”, but Tehran’s response was devastating: it destroyed nearly all American military installations in the Gulf petro-monarchies and closed the Strait of Hormuz, causing a sharp rise in oil prices and throwing the global economy into turmoil.

According to information leaked from U.S. CENTCOM, there were between 40,000 and 50,000 troops at those bases. But as the Bible reflects the Middle East, or Western Asia -as it is now commonly referred to in an effort to avoid Eurocentric language bias- is a land rich in miracles and this led the White House to acknowledge a mere fourteen fatalities -a biblical miracle if ever there was one!- and some four hundred wounded soldiers as victims of such devastating attacks, figures that are utterly false and sooner or later will have to be corrected.

Unless, of course, that such a large military contingent had fled in panic at the first shots, seeking refuge in a friendly country in the region, or returned to the United States in disgrace.

Let us remember that the first casualty of wars is the truth, and the empire cannot be believed “even a tiny bit”, as Che rightly warned.

The destruction of the radar system installed by successive U.S. administrations at those bases coincided with a sudden and drastic change in weather conditions beginning in late April, when the endless and extreme drought that had plagued Iran for several years gave way to torrential rains across much of the country.

This rapid change would seem to confirm the Iranian authorities’ suspicions that U.S. and Israeli radars were guiding the movement of aircraft that were releasing substances capable of affecting cloud formation and, therefore, reducing rainfall.

The technique of “cloud seeding”, used to induce rainfall, is well known. But little or nothing was known about the effectiveness of certain substances in preventing rain. Now we know a little more: it is possible to generate and sustain a drought. Climate warfare has entered the scene.

Returning to the thread of our argument, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and now Iran are all milestones of predictable defeats, which leads one to wonder about the reasons behind the persistence of this “mistake.” Answer: because it is not a “mistake” but rather the relentless implementation of the business plan of the gigantic “military-industrial-IT” complex, whose profitability is fueled by the endless wars that the empire provokes and wages all around the world.

Profits that, let us not forget, are partly channeled into financing the political careers of national and state legislators, governors, and, of course, those who compete to become president of the United States.

It goes without saying that these politicians, with very few exceptions, know full well what they must do once they take office: foment wars in every corner of the globe and maintain this kind of perverse Keynesianism based on exorbitant military spending. Without the windfall profits from that fateful complex, private funding for political activity would dry up, and no one among the U.S. political class wants that to happen.

Trump has reiterated that once the U.S. victory in Iran is secured, he will “take control of Cuba almost immediately.” If he does so, he is heading toward another major political and military disaster, like the one Washington suffered at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961.

The winged cowards may bomb the island and cause extensive material damage to Cuban buildings and infrastructure, but to “take control” of that country military experts estimate that a force of some 220,000 troops would need to be deployed on the ground to maintain control and order after an invasion which will surely trigger a fierce struggle with Cuba’s FAR (Revolutionary Armed Forces) and the popular militias active even in the island’s smallest towns.

This move by Trump would also deal the final blow to the already shaky foundations of the dying “rules based world order” and usher in a kind of law of the jungle in which, under the Trump doctrine, any country could invade and seize another’s territory, kidnap their leaders and take control of their riches.

Beijing and Moscow have already warned of this danger and voiced their criticism of Trump’s ambitions. But someone should also tell that braggart from New York that if he were to launch a military invasion of Cuba, he would be handing the People’s Republic of China a golden opportunity to legitimize a similar operation aimed at forcibly reintegrating the strategically important rebel province of Taiwan.

If such a thing were to happen, how could Washington possibly condemn Beijing for forcibly reclaiming one of its own provinces when it tried to do the same thing -but to an independent country like Cuba?