War
with Everyone, Including Ourselves
By
J.B. Shurk www.americanthinker.com
You
can’t fight what you can’t see. So allow me to ask a blunt question:
How blind are we?
Talk
of war is everywhere. A good number of military academics would tell
you that WWIII began sometime between the 9/11 Islamic terror attacks and
President Obama’s decision to use the international banking system to freeze
out nations deemed insufficiently compliant with the West’s brand of
“globalism.” The more that Washington, London, and Brussels have
insisted that the “rules-based international order” empowers Western officials
to confiscate foreign assets or disrupt normal currency transactions whenever
target nations refuse to do what Western officials demand, the faster that
adversaries such as China and Russia have worked to build financial
institutions beyond the West’s control.
The
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan involved numerous players who called neither
country home. Islamic militants came from Africa, Europe, Asia, and
across the Middle East. Arms brokers from China, Russia, and South
American narco-states made money from the prolonged conflicts. After
the Taliban effectively ended heroin production in Afghanistan, opium poppy
cultivation spiked with the arrival of American troops. Since 2001,
Afghanistan has dominated the global market for illicit drugs, supplying more
than 90% of the world’s heroin.
A
lot of that heroin made its way back into the United States. At the
same time, the pharmaceutical industry hooked millions of Americans on
legalized opioids. Stepping in to take advantage of Americans’
growing addiction to illegal heroin and legal pain medications, China partnered
with Central and South American cartels to flood fentanyl into the
country. China sees the drug-trade as a way to weaken American
society while establishing both alliances and smuggling routes that allow its
soldiers to penetrate the American heartland.
Nobody
knows exactly how many illegal aliens from China now operate in the United
States, but they are certainly doing more than just quietly spying on rural
military bases. Every time a core industrial factory or food
production warehouse explodes, prudent people should wonder whether the
incident was an accident or an act of sabotage. Every time a
cellular phone network gets hacked or a financial institution acknowledges the
theft of millions of consumer records, Americans should understand those events
as forms of hybrid warfare. With human traffickers assisting the
covert movements of America’s most formidable enemies, hybrid warfare can turn
into kinetic warfare quickly.
President
Trump and Secretary of War Hegseth are hunting drug boats in international
waters. Killing narco-terrorists who kill Americans with fentanyl
seems reasonable. But what else is going on? Venezuela
holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves — more than the
United States, Mexico, and Canada combined — and has natural resources worth
roughly fifteen trillion dollars. When
Marxist-socialist Hugo Chávez “nationalized” Venezuela’s most important industries at the
beginning of the century, he stole hundreds of billions of dollars in
infrastructure from American companies. Do you think there might be
a few people in Washington who believe it’s time to collect damages plus interest?
Speaking
of “interest,” ever since Venezuela swung hard toward Chávez’s
economy-crippling socialism, Russia and China have increased their presence on
America’s southern porch. Offering Venezuela scientific expertise
and infrastructure in exchange for cheap energy and space for their espionage
and military forces, Russia and China have greatly expanded their surveillance
powers and lethal capabilities around the Caribbean these last two
decades. Should the West’s proxy war in Ukraine transform into a
head-to-head conflict between Russia and the United States, it will become
imperative for America to control everything from the Florida Keys to northern
South America. Should China follow through on its threats to invade
Taiwan, it will simultaneously use its Venezuelan assets, alliances with
narco-terrorists, and hibernating Chinese agents already inside the United
States to attack critical American infrastructure and sow chaos. Any
prudent military planner seeking either to prevent or win WWIII knows that
American forces must box out adversaries already staging operations in or near
Venezuela.
The
Venezuelan government has also spent the last twenty-five years cultivating
ties with Hezbollah and other Iran-backed terrorist groups. Islamic
terrorists and Venezuela’s narco-terrorists have long shared intel, weapons
systems, logistical expertise, banking resources, and both real and counterfeit
documents to advance non-competing interests. An interesting report recently republished on ZeroHedge notes that
the U.S. military began blowing up Venezuelan drug boats within weeks of
launching attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities. There is credible
evidence to suggest that Iran has been attempting to use Venezuela’s smuggling
networks to infiltrate the U.S. with terrorist operatives. What
looks like a “war on drugs” may very well be a war on Islamic
terrorists. Either way, control over Venezuela becomes critical for
American national security.
The
Trump administration has made no secret of its intentions to reestablish
dominant control over the Western Hemisphere and batten down the hatches of
Fortress America. It has designated North and South American drug
cartels “Foreign Terrorist Organizations” and is going after Mexican and
Canadian financial institutions that assist Chinese fentanyl sales and
narco-terrorist money laundering. President Trump seeks to project
American power as far north as Greenland and as far south as the Panama
Canal. He is reorienting trade relations with Canada and Mexico in
an effort to wean both nations’ economic reliance upon China. The
president’s message is clear: America must secure the hemisphere before ongoing
hostilities with foreign adversaries metastasize from hybrid forms of economic
warfare into overt forms of violent war.
While
America works to secure its borders and local neighborhood, Western authorities
continue to vilify Russia for attempting to do the same with regard to
Ukraine. For thirty years, Ukraine has been widely ridiculed within
Europe’s elite political circles as being irredeemably corrupt. Ever
since the Western-backed coup d’état in 2014 and Russia’s
renewed interest in Ukraine’s Russian-speaking Eastern territories, those same
elite political circles have hailed Ukraine’s authoritarian government as
Europe’s frontline in the “defense of democracy.” It does not seem
to matter to the Europeans that Ukraine has all but banned political dissent,
free speech, and religious freedom or that Ukraine’s “President” Zelenskyy has
remained in office eighteen months beyond the end of his elected
term. Europeans and Americans in favor of prolonging the war in
Ukraine insist that military dictatorship is the sine qua non of
“democracy” and that dissent is “Russian disinformation.”
For
fifteen years, “Russian disinformation” has been the greatest fear of American
and European politicians. Powerful Western authorities worry so much
about Russia’s almost supernatural ability to steer public opinion that they
have decided to “save democracy” by killing free speech. The corporate news media —
revealing themselves to be subservient cogs of Western governments — have
marshaled their resources to censor public dissent and brand anti-Establishment
viewpoints as “Russian propaganda.”
Across
the West nobody knows what’s real anymore. Western governments
accuse their geopolitical enemies of using social media platforms to engage in
information warfare. At the same time, Western governments direct
information warfare against their own citizens. Antifa terrorists
riot against capitalism while Western capitalists bankroll Antifa’s mayhem. Big
Pharma makes money by making sure everyone is sick. Big Tech defends
free speech while censoring online accounts. Big Banks defend free
markets while offshoring industries and inflating paper
currencies. Western politicians divide the world between
“democracies” and “dictatorships,” while monitoring all electronic
communications and pushing for “vaccine” passports, digital IDs, facial
recognition, mass surveillance, and central bank digital
currencies.
Are
we at war with foreign nations, or are our own nations at war with
us? Both seem to be true. That sure makes it difficult to
see what we’re fighting. Perhaps that’s the point. Shake
us until we’re dizzy and confused and parade us into our jail cells as we
proclaim our allegiance to the “coalition of the willing.” Subjugation
is a deadly cocktail of fear and chaos.
