Thread: Trump orders rapid withdrawal from Syria in apparent reversal

It's hard for me to imagine that generals especially top generals could be upset over a President's decision to withdraw troops from Syria where we should have never been to begin with and Afghanistan after 17 years. What happened to that beautiful forest of WWII Generals who not only wanted to win and win fast, they wanted to come home, and wanted the troops who worked under them to come home. I DO NOT GET OUR ARMED FORCES LEADERSHIP.

EIGHT YEARS OF O'VOMIT LEADERSHIP AND TORE DOWN OUR MILITARY AND GAVE PINK SLIPS TO THE BEST IS HOW.

Originally Posted by Beezer

EIGHT YEARS OF O'VOMIT LEADERSHIP AND TORE DOWN OUR MILITARY AND GAVE PINK SLIPS TO THE BEST IS HOW.

It didn't help that Obama, McCain and Hillary were ISIS Warlords arming the shit out of TERRORISTS

Originally Posted by Beezer

EIGHT YEARS OF O'VOMIT LEADERSHIP AND TORE DOWN OUR MILITARY AND GAVE PINK SLIPS TO THE BEST IS HOW.

Oh .... so the good ones got fired or demoted or held static at levels that would eventually force them to quit or retire. Well, that sure explains THAT!

Yes, the traitor in chief...Barry Sotero gave out Pink Slips. Then let the gays and illegals join. Depleted the budget.

Drew the "red line" in the sand...but he is color blind...was really a "YELLOW LINE"...wink, wink

Then look at Yemen, Benghazi, and all the other corrupt shit Obama and Hillary did.

The pallets of CASH to Iran.

The Fast and Furious! Nothing done.

Pay to Play...good grief...the list of corruption against this country is long.

They need to go to GITMO.

McCain, Mattis, Graham, these old war mongers need to retire. We need to get game on, get in...bomb the crap out of them...then get out! PERIOD!

These wars are a joke, PC, and let's tell the enemy every move. LOL

KEEP SELLING ALL THOSE WEAPONS TO THOSE BARBARIANS YOU MORONS...SELL THEM NOTHING AND GET OUT OF THERE!

Is U.S. Geopolitical Strategy Experiencing A Monumental Shift?

Thu, 12/20/2018 - 21:05
49 SHARES
Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

The defining question about global order for this generation is whether China and the United States can escape Thucydides’s Trap. The Greek historian’s metaphor reminds us of the attendant dangers when a rising power rivals a ruling power - as Athens challenged Sparta in ancient Greece, or as Germany did Britain a century ago. Most such contests have ended badly, often for both nations, a team of mine at the Harvard Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs has concluded after analyzing the historical record. In 12 of 16 cases over the past 500 years, the result was war. When the parties avoided war, it required huge, painful adjustments in attitudes and actions on the part not just of the challenger but also the challenged.
– From Graham Allison’s article: The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?

For the past two years, my geopolitical assumption has been that the Trump administration would more or less continue along with the reckless, shortsighted, and disastrous neocon/neoliberal interventionist foreign policy of the past two decades focused on undeclared regime change and proxy wars across the world, especially the Middle East. Given his strange obsession with Iran, I figured he’d start a conflict there and that this conflict would end up a bigger disaster than Iraq.
I assumed this mistake would coincide with continued massive deficits, a unwieldy debt load and most likely a recession. In turn, I believed this would lead to an embarrassing and chaotic unraveling of the U.S. empire. At that point, other nations like China would opportunistically take advantage of the huge power vacuum left over.
Based on a variety of events over the past few months, I’m no longer convinced this is how it’s going to unfold.




First, the article published by Bloomberg back in October, The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies, really grabbed my attention. If you haven’t read it, I strongly suggest you go do that, as I was immediately blown away by the implications. To summarize, the story purports that 17 sources in both government and the corporate world claim Chinese spies inserted a malicious microchip into Supermicro servers and that this affected nearly 30 companies, including tech behemoths Amazon and Apple. Equally incendiary, the article reported that Amazon and Apple knew about it, but never let the public know. Apple, Amazon and others vehemently denied the Bloomberg story, and we still don’t know the truth. As I noted at the time:

Michael Krieger @LibertyBlitz

· Oct 4, 2018
Replying to @LibertyBlitz
Bottom line, someone is lying. Either the 17 sources Bloomberg has completely invented a story, or Amazon and Apple are both lying about a genuinely huge national security story and the roles they played in it.

Michael Krieger @LibertyBlitz

In other words, we've got a seriously ****ed up situation on our hands because one of these things must be true. Someone is lying and lying BIG.

9
1:01 PM - Oct 4, 2018

Either China really did compromise hardware and U.S. tech giants are actively covering it up, or unnamed sources invented a story to make China look nefarious in order to up the ante in the growing dispute between the two nations. We still can’t be sure which one is true, but the end result is pretty much the same. Greatly increased tensions with China.
While I knew the Bloomberg story had wide-ranging implications, it wasn’t enough to make me seriously consider a distinct geopolitical forecast.
Then came the second major event, which was the arrest of Wanzhou Meng, the CFO of China’s telecom giant Huawei earlier this month. Importantly, she’s much more than just an executive at a giant Chinese company, she’s “the daughter of the telecom giant’s founder, Ren Zhengfei. An ex-officer with the People’s Liberation Army, Ren is one of the country’s most revered business figures.”
It’s also worth mentioning that she was arrested while Trump was sitting down to dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the G20 summit. I can’t even imagine the level of anger this must have caused on the part of the Chinese. This made me realize that the “trade war” is just a prelude to a much bigger confrontation.
Moving along, yesterday we learned of a sudden plan to withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria. I want to make it clear we don’t know if this is just talk or will actually happen (for a skeptical take see this), but if it does occur, it will make it increasingly likely that U.S. foreign policy has undergone a massive and monumentally significant shift. A shift away from failed regime change boondoggles in far flung areas of the world Americans don’t care about, to a very major and probably long-lasting confrontation with China itself.
If this is in fact the case, it’s impossible to overstate its significance.
In my view, such a shift would signal that the U.S. has acknowledged the unipolar imperial world completely dominated by America is over and unrecoverable, and therefore resources will shift away from the silly dream of full spectrum global dominance into a managed retreat. A managed retreat would be considered preferable since it could be done on U.S. terms as opposed to having the terms forced upon it. In other words, it would be a proactive foreign policy based on reality, rather than a reactive one forced upon it by circumstances.
This isn’t to say any of this will be good or pleasant, but from the realpolitik perspective of those preoccupied with U.S. power in a post unipolar world, it’s the most likely move. A realization that wars in the Middle East achieve no long-term objectives for the U.S. may finally have occurred. They just weaken the country, get the public annoyed and waste enormous amounts of money that could be spent elsewhere. Meanwhile, other countries just sit back and wait for America to fall over so they can pick up the pieces. Finally, it’d be almost impossible to sell the public on another major conflict in the Middle East. Selling the public on China as an adversary will be much easier.
Today we saw further evidence of things heating up, as Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray announced the unsealing of an indictment against two accused Chinese hackers. As Ben Hunt of Epsilon Theory observed.

Ben Hunt ✔ @EpsilonTheory

This is what you do to solidify domestic public opinion before waging a war, trade or otherwise.
CBS News ✔ @CBSNews

"Today's charges mark an important step in revealing to the world China's continued practice of stealing commercial data," Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein says. https://cbsn.ws/2Bvad0e


Then there’s the ongoing crash in financial markets. Many people think this is just the market reacting to interest rate hikes in the midst of an economic slowdown and a realization that corporate profits have peaked. While that’s undoubtably a big part of it, I think there’s more.
I think gold is the real canary in the coal mine, and gold is starting to signal serious problems on the geopolitical front. I’ve noticed for a few weeks that gold had started to trade strong, in sharp contrast to the past seven years. While it reversed and went lower after the hawkish Jay Powell did his thing yesterday, it did something unexpected today. As the stock market continued to plunge, gold reversed all its losses and closed at a new near-term high. Gold is seeing beyond the simple economic issues and into the geopolitical realm in my opinion.
But what is gold telling us? I think it may be confirming the thesis outlined above. Which is that U.S. foreign policy is pivoting away from aimless wars all over the place in order to sustain the impossible dream of unipolar empire, and toward a more singular goal focused on preventing China from dominating the globe in the decades ahead. If successful, the coming multi-polar world may be characterized by a bifurcated global economy, as outlined in a very interesting piece from Strategic Culture, America’s Technology and Sanctions War Will End, by Bifurcating the Global Economy.



Video at the tweet

51
12:14 PM - Dec 20, 2018
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Michael Krieger @LibertyBlitz
· 14h

I believe financial markets are at the early stages of pricing in a major and prolonged confrontation between the U.S. and China.

More on this in an upcoming post.

Michael Krieger @LibertyBlitz


Globalization as we have all known it is dead and buried and it isn't coming back. The future global economy will look completely different and will likely be far more balkanized.

11
12:09 PM - Dec 20, 2018

Of course, there’s no way to know if I’m right about any of this. Just because it looks this way today doesn’t mean it will play out that way in the future. Nevertheless, I’ve now seen enough to seriously consider that we may be entering an entirely new geopolitical environment dominated by vastly increased tensions between the U.S. and China. If so, it will likely last a lot longer than you think as leaders in both China in the U.S. will be looking for a scapegoat as their crony, financialized economies struggle under unpayable debt and unimaginable levels of corruption.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...numental-shift

Trump Orders Major Afghan Drawdown: 7,000 Troops To Return Home In Coming Weeks

TRUMPS NEEDS TO ORDER THEIR REFUGEES ARE SENT BACK!

SET A WEEKLY QUOTA AND SEND THEM HOME TO REUNITE WITH FAMILY AND REBUILD WITHOUT OUR MONEY!!!

Mitch McConnell piles on to Defense Secretary James Mattis' rebuke of Trump

SARAH GRAY
Dec 21st 2018 5:31AM

• Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican of Kentucky, issued a strong statement following the resignation of Defense Secretary James Mattis, saying he is "particularly distressed that he is resigning due to sharp differences with the president on these and other key aspects of America’s global leadership."
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• His statement echoes Mattis' resignation letter, which stresses the importance of maintaining US alliances.
• 
  
• President Donald Trump's decision to pull troops out of Syria — which analysts say is a boon for our adversaries, Russia, ISIS, Iran, and the Syrian regime — was reportedly the last straw for Secretary Mattis.
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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican of Kentucky, issued a strong statement following the resignation of Defense Secretary James Mattis, saying he is "particularly distressed that he is resigning due to sharp differences with the president on these and other key aspects of America’s global leadership."

His statement echoes Mattis' resignation letter when stressing the importance of maintaining US alliances.

"I believe it’s essential that the United States maintain and strengthen the post-World War II alliances that have been carefully built by leaders in both parties," McConnell said in his statement. "We must also maintain a clear-eyed understanding of our friends and foes, and recognize that nations like Russia are among the latter."

In Mattis' resignation letter he said, "while the US remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies."

Like McConnell, Mattis also name-checked Russia: "It is clear that China and Russia, for example, want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model gaining veto authority over other nations' economic, diplomatic, and security decisions to promote their own interests at the expense of their neighbors, America and our allies."

Trump's decision to pull troops out of Syria — which analysts say is a boon for US adversaries, Russia, ISIS, Iran, and the Syrian regime — was reportedly the last straw for Secretary Mattis. Kurds in Syria, US allies in Syria, are furious about the withdrawal, as they fear a Turkish incursion.

"So I was sorry to learn that Secretary Mattis, who shares those clear principles, will soon depart the administration," McConnell continued.

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2018/12/21/mitch-mcconnell-piles-on-to-defense-secretary-james-mattis-rebuke-of-trump/23624398/