Doubling-down on Delusion to Avert a Return to an Old International Order
The war moves to the trans-atlantic deep state
Published: 2025-03-04
Update: Added Helmer and two Indian senior military officers discussing the current Ukraine situation. Helmer provides the current Russian military strategy for reclaimation of the missing land in the 4 oblasts, which explains the lack of attack on Pokrovsk.
Introduction
Documentation of the delusion being displayed in European capitals begins, amusing and frightening though it is, after considering Alastair Crooke's suggestion for the political thought behind US President Trump's second administration. To that will be added independent analysis of the White House meetings last week, which will bring us to the circus in London.
MAGA II’s political project was symbolized in the speech which US Vice President Vance delivered to European political and military leaders, and technocrats, at the Munich Security Conference a fortnight ago. Crooke's characterization of the project draws from US lawyer Robert Barnes' ideas expressed on The Duran (see sources).
It is clear now that the Trump blitzkrieg across the American Administrative State could not have been mounted unless carefully pre-planned and prepared over the last four years.
Leading U.S. constitutional lawyer, Jonathan Turley, and other lawyers say that the Orders were well drafted legally.
[Crooke]
On top of instructing US administrative officers, their purpose is to draw legal challenge and through US courts re-establish a US constitutional interpretation known as the Unitary Executive. The target is the deep state which Team Trump believes is vulnerable via Article II of the US Constitution.
Section IV states:
The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.
which places all officers, including the President, at risk of removal for the described list of offenses, including 'misdemeanors'. To this, one adds Section III, which describes the appointment of officers.
Apart from high officers specified in Section III, which require Congressional approval, for the rest the president:
shall commission all the officers of the United States
Trump officially requires the courts to pull the "Your Fired" gun, but given the level of lies to Congress which remain unpunished, officers of the deep state must be rather concerned.
The Backstory with Barnes
Crooke brings in Barnes for the back story, the motivation behind tearing down the deep state, one conspiring group of officers at a time:
Lawyer Robert Barnes essentially says that the ‘blitzkrieg’ was “exceptionally well-planned” and had been discussed in Trump circles since late 2020. The latter team had emerged from within a generational and cultural shift in the U.S.. This latter had given rise to a Libertarian/Populist wing with working class roots who often had served in the military, yet had come to despise the Neo-con lies (especially those of 9/11) that brought endless wars. They were animated more by the old John Adams adage that ‘America should not go abroad in search of monsters to slay’.
In short, they were not part of the WASP ‘Anglo’ world; they came from a different Culture that harked back to the theme of America as Republic, not as Empire. This is what you see with Vance and Hegseth – a reversion to the Republican precept that the U.S. should not become involved in European wars. Ukraine is not America’s war.
[Crooke again]
A natural question is how did these revolutionaries, who are employing Article II rather than violence for their reconstruction of the US state, get inside the deep state's OODA Loop (to use Ritter's phrase)? Crooke suggests that the technocratic state were caught off guard, the officers of the revolution "are not drawn from the preeminent Anglo-sphere, but rather from a strand of society that was offended by the Iraq war and which blames the ‘Anglo-sphere’ for ‘ruining’ America."
With this understanding, the topic of Vance's speech to the Munich Security Conference was not foreign policy. It was essentially a campaign speech from the just run US presidential election. Retrospectively, it was the other half of Trump's instruction to Zelensky when he left the Oval Office, without the private meeting in which Trump would have informed him of his ‘path to peace’. Instead, he got the summary in public:
"Come back when you're ready for peace."
Vance's instruction was:
that European conservative libertarians should emulate Trump and act to slough-off their ‘Administrative States’, and recover control over executive power. Tear down the firewalls, he advised.
Why? Because he likely views the ‘Brussels’ Technocratic State as nothing other than a pure offshoot to the American Deep State – and therefore very likely to try to torpedo and sink Trump’s initiative to normalise relations with Moscow.
[Crooke]
The Oval Office
The reason for Zelensky’s visit was not the “Minerals Deal”, wrote Stephen Bryen, but to brief him on the Putin negotiations and to gain his support. Because the Green Goblin decided to litigate the policy on national television, the private meeting was scuppered and the trident wearing actor exited none the wiser.
Meanwhile,
Sergei Shoigu, the former Russian Defense Minister who now heads the Security Council of the Russian Federation, who was on an Asian tour, was diverted to Beijing at the request of Russian president Putin. There he met with Chinese Foreign Minister Foreign Minister Wang Yi and afterwards with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
As a matter of protocol it is unusual for the President of a country to meet with a second-echelon official, but it seems Shoigu was bringing an important message to Xi. We know that Shoigu's meeting was a follow-up to a phone conversation between Xi and Putin a day earlier in which Xi praised the Russians for "positive efforts to defuse" the war in Ukraine.
There was no official or semi-official read-out of the Shoigu meetings. ...
It is important to emphasize that Putin would not have diverted Shoigu to Beijing unless he wanted to make clear that all the talk in the US and Europe that Trump was looking to divide Russia from China was not discussed in any way with the United States, and that Putin wanted it to be crystal clear he was sticking with China. The choice of the head of the Security Council and the urgent way the meeting was arranged, indicates the importance of the conversation between Shoigu and Xi.
But the urgently arranged conversation was also an important indicator that progress in peace talks on Ukraine and, possibly on European security, was moving fast.
Bryen’s core deduction was the speed of the discussions between the US and Russia.
Agreeing with Bryen's analysis of last week's European visits to the White House, M. K. Bhadrakumar reviewed Russian Federation President Putin's remarks to at the Board of the Federal Security Service (collegium of Russia’s top foreign intelligence officials).
Putin began by saying that the world and the international situation are changing rapidly and “the first contacts with the new US administration inspire certain hopes.”
He said: “There is a reciprocal commitment [with Trump] to work to restore interstate relations and to gradually address the enormous amount of systemic and strategic problems in the global architecture which once provoked the crises in Ukraine and other regions… Importantly, our partners demonstrate pragmatism and a realistic vision of things, and have abandoned numerous stereotypes, the so-called rules, and messianic, ideological clichés of their predecessors.”
Putin estimated that conditions exist for a dialogue “on bringing a fundamental solution to Ukraine crisis,… a dialogue on creating a system that will truly ensure a balanced and mutual consideration of interests, an indivisible European and global security system for the long term, where the security of some countries cannot be ensured at the expense or to the detriment of the security of other countries, definitely not Russia.”
However, Putin also flagged that sections [of] Western elites “are still committed to maintaining instability in the world, and these forces will try to disrupt or to compromise the newly resumed dialogue” and, hence it is vital that “every possibility offered by dialogue and special services to thwart such attempts” needs to be leveraged.
A risk of ignoring John Adams' advice and "going abroad in search of monsters" is having one's national politics dictated by international commitments. Even more dangerous is having one's administration infested with officers serving a supra-national agenda, who in modern parlance are called "globalists". One of the most dangerous classes amongst them are intelligence operations officers.
Patrick Lawrence [cited a few articles back] issued the same warning when he doubted Trump's ability:
to wage war against operatives whose perverse savvy in the methods of subterfuge is well-tested and well-proven.
Where should one look to find those 'still committed to maintaining instability in the world'?
Bhadrakumar pointed to a very interesting development which began during the week of White House meetings.
Liesyl Franz, deputy assistant secretary for international cybersecurity at the state department, said in a speech last week before a United Nations working group on cyber security that the US was concerned by threats perpetrated by some states but only named China and Iran, with no mention of Russia in her remarks. ...
“It’s incomprehensible to give a speech about threats in cyberspace and not mention Russia and it’s delusional to think this will turn Russia and the FSB (the Russian security agency) into our friends,” said James Lewis, a veteran cyber expert formerly of the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington.
[A source at CISA] said analysts at the agency were verbally informed that they were not to follow or report on Russian threats, even though this had previously been a main focus for the agency.
This was followed by US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth telling US Cyber Command to also point their digital guns elsewhere:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered U.S. Cyber Command to halt offensive operations against Russia
[NYT]
M.K.B continued with:
Equally, reports have appeared that Putin has given similar instructions restraining the Russian agencies.
What lends enchantment to the view is that many of the US’ most sophisticated operations against Russia are run out of Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, the storied intelligence agency that broke the Enigma codes in World War II. Suffice to say, the US seems to be cutting itself free from longstanding joint operations with Britain directed against Russia.
We have a presidential order for US cyber operators to stop playing with their friends across the pond.
MKB concluded offering the Gary Powers incident on May 1st, 1960, which:
trigger[ed] a diplomatic crisis that caused the collapse of a summit conference in Paris between then US president Dwight Eisenhower and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev — and the sudden death of the two leaders’ closely nurtured dream of détente.
An analogical situation exists today. Both Washington and Moscow are conscious of it. The need for such a veil of secrecy around the high level dialogue between the Kremlin and the White House is self-evident. There are too many detractors in the collective West who won’t settle for anything short of a Russian defeat in Ukraine and would rather keep the war going.
The source which MKB linked for the Power’s incident is from the US National Park Service. It included all of the subtle switcheroos by the CIA and noted the very dubious choice of timing for the the U-2 flight by Powers. I highly recommend it.
The Russian FSB just spoiled an assassination attempt on Putin’s confessor (priest). The covert operatives are warming up.
Bring on the Clowns
We can finally address the delusional European leadership. Starry-eyed Starmer declared a "coalition of the willing" which will, if anything, trigger the Trump administration as it rolls us all the way back to Iraq, 2003.
It is pure fantasy. Britain's one armored division has no armor — it was gifted to Ukraine and lies burnt out on the fields of Novorossiya. Europe's rapid reaction force amounts to 20 to 30 thousand and would be wiped out in a couple of weeks, or less, if the Russians got mad and the trip-wires were collected in Iskander sized groups.
The EuroClowns have locked themselves off from their natural trading partner with 16 rounds of economic sanctions and are charging like lemmings at 25% tariffs from Trump. All of their smoke and mirrors about "loans to Ukraine" being repaid by the interest of impounded Russian foreign reserves are soon to be blown away. Europe is being led by the blind into a canyon of economic misery. The next show from the circus is set for Thursday 6th. Craig Murray suggests we should laugh at them.
Trump has just paused all military aid to Ukraine, EuroClowns.
Come back when you're ready for peace.
The US is pivoting to the Pacific, whether you like it or not.
or support this work via Buy Me A Coffee or Patreon.
Sources
America as Republic, not as Empire - Europe's "Sound and Fury" after Jaw-Dropping Pivots in U.S. Policy; Alastair Crooke; The Unz Review; 2025-02-26
Reality confronts the Euro ruling-strata - 'Through the tear in the fantasy bubble, they see their own demise'; Alastair Crooke; The Unz Review; 2025-03-04
“Taking Away Everything We Have”: Democrats and Unions Launch an Existential Fight Over Buyouts; Jonathan Turley ; Archive.today; 2025-02-17
US puts firewall to protect Ukraine deal with Russia; M. K. Bhadrakumar; Indian Punchline; 2025-03-03
Ukraine, Diplomacy & War; Craig Murray; Consortium News; 2025-03-04
Hegseth Orders Pentagon to Stop Offensive Cyberoperations Against Russia; NYT; Archive.today; 2025-03-03
Trump administration retreats in fight against Russian cyber threats; The Guardian; Archive.today; 2025-03-01
Eisenhower and the U-2 Spy Plane Incident; U.S. National Park Service; Archive.today; 2025-03-03
Russia-US Peace Deal on Ukraine at an Advanced Stage; Stephen Bryen; Weapons and Strategy; 2025-02-28
The Shoot Out at the White House; Stephen Bryen; Weapons and Strategy; 2025-02-28
Planned assassination attempt against Metropolitan Tikhon foiled by Russias FSB; News from Fakti.bg; Archive.today; 2025-03-03
Metropolitan Tikhon is regarded as Putin's confessor, and killing him could potentially derail any peace deal.
Trump Pauses All Military Aid to Ukraine; Dave DeCamp; Antiwar; 2025-03-03
Trump Pulls the Plug on Further Aid to Ukraine; Larry C. Johnson; SONAR21; 2025-03-04
Putin's Praise Of Trump's Approach To Peace Talks Sends A Message To All Of Russia's Supporters; Andrew Korybko; Natylie's Place: Understanding Russia; 2025-03-02
Trump and the viable road to peace in Ukraine; Jack F. Matlock Jr.; Responsible Statecraft; 2025-03-03
The EU Carnival Brings Same Old Road-Show to Town; Simplicius; Simplicius The Thinker; 2025-03-03
Starmer's Summit Gives Birth To A Mouse - It's Stillborn.; b.; Moon of Alabama; 2025-03-03
Treasury Secretary: Ukraine Minerals Deal Not on Table After Zelensky 'Blew It Up'; Dave DeCamp; Antiwar; 2025-03-02
Trump Slams Zelensky for Saying End of Ukraine War Is 'Very, Very Far Away'; Dave DeCamp; Antiwar; 2025-03-03
Sen. Graham Calls Out Zelensky for Lack of Elections in Ukraine; Dave DeCamp; Antiwar; 2025-03-03
Putin's Praise Of Trump's Approach To Peace Talks Sends A Message To All Of Russia's Supporters; Andrew Korybko; Natylie's Place: Understanding Russia; 2025-03-02
Ready Reckoner For President Donald Trump'S Ukraine War Fighting, War Funding Numbers (Lies); John Helmer; Dances with Bears; 2025-03-03
Wipeout in Washington; YesXorNo; YesXorNo; 2025-03-02
Operation Vendetta: The Deep State; YesXorNo; 2025-02-20
The Seth Rich Story: Hacking the Media and Suppressing a Leak; YesXorNo; YesXorNo; 2023-12-26
An oldie but a goodie — for those who’d like to review some of the details behind the RussiaGate hoax.
Russia-US rapprochement begins in Saudi Arabia w/ Robert Barnes (Live); Christoforou and Mercouris; The Duran; 2025-02-18
A Negotiating Matrix For Peace In Ukraine / Mr John Helmer/ Brig Arun Sahgal / Lt Gen Pr Shankar; GUNNERS SHOT; 2025-03-04
Culture
Copyleft: CC0
Excellent synthesis and interpretation of the state of affairs here!
Out of this civil war, between the neocon faction vs the Monroevian faction, of the US oligarchy, suspect it will only get more bloody metaphorically speaking.
Because in the Trump camp are also neocons like Musk and Bezos and Theil. So there will be fractures there.
And the European figureheads installed by the neocons are going to keep tumbling like dominoes. Metz is one and he won’t last long unless he changes camp. But it’s worth looking at the last of upcoming elections over the next 12 months neocon-aligned European governments will fall, replaced by Trump-friendly ones.
The worst part is the Scandinavians have all lost their minds, and especially among their elite classes they are actually ramping up the war talk instead of embrace peace. It’s like none of them have looked at Ukraine and asked themselves as frontline states in a neocon induced conflict. WTF would they want to end up like THAT.
It sounds encouraging, though I'm not bying it!
By now it should be clear to all that we're dealing with a party which time and again has proved itself to be incapable (unwilling would be the more correct qualification, having "might makes right" mixed with perfidious ancestral genes that make up its "shining beacon on a hill" hubristic mentality) of honoring its own concluded agreements and treaties.