@GiletsJaunes "Curieux", le chômage de masse commence en 1980, peu après les chocs pétroliers, comme si le chômage avait été le sacrifice nécessaire avec la baisse des taux d’intérêts pour éviter l'implosion de l'économie. Grace au chômage, nous avons de la Croissance
The Skripals were poisoned by Novichok, a deadly nerve agent that kills in seconds, after which they drove into Salisbury city centre, had a beer, went shopping, had a meal in a pizzeria and went for a walk.
Only then did they fall ill but miraculously became the first people ever to recover and survive Novichok poisoning.
The official story is a load of codswallop.
China: The West Has Failed to Understand That It Is About Competitiveness, Not Force
In recent years, the West has been attempting to contain its global decline through sanctions and other punitive measures against China.
Beijing has responded to these moves successfully and, more importantly, has been working to project an image of peaceful power that advances geopolitically through economic and cooperative means.
On one front against China, the United States suffered a boomerang effect: severe sanctions on Chinese technology ended up damaging the profits of American companies that supply components to China.
The reality is that the U.S. economy remains heavily dependent on inputs produced in China, including critical raw materials such as rare earths, and American restrictions have only worsened supply problems for these materials.
The attempt to stall the Chinese economy through embargoes, such as the one on chips, was another failure.
The Chinese simply poured massive investments into their own chip industry, sharply reducing their dependence on the United States and Europe, which lost market share in the process.
Until 2019, China imported almost all of its advanced chips from the U.S., Europe, and Taiwan. The embargo only accelerated China’s chip industry.
Beijing surprised the world by developing its own 7nm and 5nm chips and by dominating global production of automotive chips. The success of technologies such as DeepSeek’s AI further demonstrated that the Western blockade had failed.
The outlook is that China will soon be able to mass-produce 3nm and 2nm chips using lithography machines made entirely on Chinese soil.
This means the country will no longer depend on any components, software, or equipment from the United States or Europe to manufacture the fastest smartphones and supercomputers on the planet.
Chinese AI chips are expected to soon match or surpass the efficiency of Nvidia’s American chips. With significantly lower production costs, China will become the main supplier of AI infrastructure to Global South countries, sidelining U.S. companies from that market.
In addition, by 2029 China is projected to control roughly 60% to 70% of the global mature-node chip market.
Europe and the United States will find themselves hostage to Chinese production to keep their own industries running. Any new round of Western sanctions could trigger an industrial blackout across the West.
Europe faces the same problem and has already retreated on several attempts to punish or commercially isolate China. The technical term used in Brussels for this European approach is de-risking, a softer alternative to the decoupling, favored by the United States.
The European Union suffers from severe political paralysis and practical setbacks because it depends far more on Chinese trade than the Americans do. Whenever Europe tries to impose harsh sanctions, Beijing generates what is known as the freezing effect, prompting European leaders to back down.
One only has to recall the case in which the Dutch government, under U.S. pressure, attempted to use its leverage over semiconductor technology to corner Beijing. In October 2025, the Netherlands invoked national security laws to seize control of Nexperia and remove Chinese leadership from the company. Beijing rejected the expropriation. Days later, China blocked all exports from Nexperia’s factories located on Chinese territory.
The cutoff instantly paralyzed global automakers’ supply chains. Companies such as Volkswagen and Honda warned that their plants in Germany and Mexico would run out of parts within days.
Faced with industrial panic in Europe, in November 2025 the Dutch economy minister publicly reversed course, suspending the takeover order as a goodwill gesture to persuade China to resume chip exports.
Full Article:
https://t.co/bDpksgYm6e
There’s no overstating how extraordinary this Atlantic article is, given the author and the outlet.
As a reminder Bob Kagan is:
- The co-founder of Project for the New American Century, probably the single most imperialist Think Tank in Washington (which is quite a feat)
- A man who spent his entire life advocating for American military interventions, especially in the Middle East, and a vocal advocate of the Iraq war. He started advocating for intervention in Iraq before 9/11, which speaks for itself...
- The husband of Victoria Nuland, an extremely hawkish former senior U.S. official (a key architect of U.S. policy in Ukraine, with the consequences we all witness today)
- The brother of Frederick Kagan, one of the key architects of the Iraq surge
In other words, we ain’t exactly looking at some sort of anti-imperialist peacenik. This is quite literally the guy Dick Cheney called when he needed a pep talk.
And the man is writing in The Atlantic, the most reliably pro-war mainstream media outlet in the U.S. (also quite a feat).
So when HE writes that the U.S. “suffered a total defeat” in Iran that has no precedent in U.S. history and can “neither be repaired nor ignored,” it’s the functional equivalent of Ronald McDonald telling you the burgers aren’t great: it means the burgers really, really aren't great.
Extraordinarily (and somewhat worryingly, for me), his arguments for why this is such a defeat are virtually the same as those I laid out in my article “The First Multipolar War” last month (https://t.co/tbnOpdYqux).
Here they are 👇
1) Vietnam/Afghanistan were survivable, this isn't
He agrees that this war - and the U.S. defeat - is fundamentally different in nature from previous U.S. interventions.
Where I wrote that the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan didn’t change the equation much in terms of power dynamics (“in the grand scheme of things, the giant walked away with little more than a bruised ego”), Kagan writes that “the defeats in Vietnam and Afghanistan were costly but did not do lasting damage to America's overall position in the world.”
And when I wrote that “it’s painfully obvious that the Iran war is of a qualitatively different nature” from these, he writes that “defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character.”
Same point.
2) Iran will never relinquish Hormuz and uses it as selective leverage
When I wrote that Iran has turned “freedom of navigation” on its head by establishing “a permission-based regime” through the Strait of Hormuz, Kagan arrives at the same conclusion: “Iran will be able not only to demand tolls for passage, but to limit transit to those nations with which it has good relations.”
He also agrees that “Iran has no interest in returning to the status quo ante,” when I myself cited Iran’s parliament speaker Ghalibaf in my article, saying: “The Strait of Hormuz situation won’t return to its pre-war status.” Same point and virtually the same words.
3) Gulf states will have to accommodate Iran
He agrees that most Gulf states will have no choice but to accommodate Iran, effectively making Iran into a, if not THE, dominant regional power.
Kagan writes “the United States will have proved itself a paper tiger, forcing the Gulf and other Arab states to accommodate Iran.”
On my end, I wrote that “the Gulf monarchies will eventually have to choose between two security propositions. One where they stay aligned with a distant superpower that [can’t protect them]. The other proposition being: make peace with the regional power that just proved it can hit [them] whenever it wants.” Which is not much of a choice…
4) Military impossibility to reopen Hormuz
Kagan writes that “if the United States with its mighty Navy can't or won't open the strait, no coalition of forces with just a fraction of the Americans' capability will be able to, either.”
On my end, in my article I cited Germany’s defense minister Boris Pistorius: “What does Trump expect a handful of European frigates to do that the powerful US Navy cannot?”
The exact same argument.
5) Global chain reaction
Kagan agrees that this is a global strategic failure that fundamentally changes the U.S.’s position in the world. As he puts it: “America's once-dominant position in the Gulf is just the first of many casualties… America's allies in East Asia and Europe must wonder about American staying power in the event of future conflicts.”
You’ll have guessed it, I wrote essentially the same thing: “Think about what it says if you’re Saudi Arabia, quietly watching your American-built defenses fail to protect your own refineries. Or any European country now facing the worst energy shock since 1973, caused not by your enemy but by your ally, and realizing that said ‘ally,’ supposedly in charge of ‘protecting’ you, couldn’t even protect Israel’s most strategic sites - when it’s the country with which it’s joined at the hip. I’m not even speaking about China or Russia who are seeing their worldview being validated on almost every axis simultaneously.”
6) Weapons stocks depleted, credibility shattered
Kagan: “just a few weeks of war with a second-rank power have reduced American weapons stocks to perilously low levels, with no quick remedy in sight.”
Me: “America’s most advanced weapons systems are much more vulnerable than previously thought - not theoretically, but in actual combat.”
Kagan: “America's allies… must wonder about American staying power in the event of future conflicts.”
Me: “The U.S. security guarantee has been empirically falsified in real time.”
-----------
So, yup, Bob Kagan and I agree on nearly everything. I need a shower 🤢
Reassuringly though, we still differ on a few fundamental aspects.
First of all, arguably the most important one, the moral aspect. In typical neocon fashion, his article contains not a word about the human cost of this war - not the 165 schoolgirls, not the devastation inflicted on Iranians during 37 days of bombing, not the toll this war is taking on the entire world through its devastating economic consequences (the economic devastation on ordinary people worldwide is referenced only as a political problem for Trump). For him, this is purely a strategic chess problem, morality and people don’t figure in his mental map.
For me, the moral bankruptcy of this war isn't separate from the strategic failure - it is the strategic failure. Much like Gaza can only be a failure because of its sheer abjectness.
Secondly, there is not an instant of reflection in the article on how we got there. Which is unsurprising because he personally, alongside his wife, his brother, and every co-signatory of every PNAC letter, spent a generation pushing for exactly this kind of confrontation. The man spend 30 years advocating for military dominance in the Middle East and hostility towards Iran, thereby forging them as an adversary and facilitating this very war that he now says has “checkmated” America.
I know introspection has never been the neocon forte but at some point you have to stop setting houses on fire and then writing op-eds about how surprising the smoke is.
Last but not least, we differ on what should be done. This is the funniest part of Kagan’s article - showing that the man is decidedly beyond salvation. On one hand he calls this a “checkmate” by Iran, and a U.S. defeat that can “neither be repaired nor ignored,” yet an the other hand his solution for it is… surprise, surprise… a bigger war still!
He writes that what’s to be done is “engage in a full-scale ground and naval war to remove the current Iranian regime, and then to occupy Iran until a new government can take hold.”
The arsonist's solution to the fire is a bigger fire ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
For my end, this was the conclusion of my previous article:
"There is almost a Greek tragedy quality to U.S. actions lately where every move taken to escape one’s fate becomes the mechanism that delivers it. The U.S. went to war to reassert dominance - and proved it could no longer dominate. It demanded allies send warships - and revealed it had no real allies. It waged forty years of maximum pressure to break Iran before this moment came - and instead forged the very adversary now capable of meeting it. It started the war in part to have additional leverage over China - and handed the world the spectacle of begging China for help. The prophecy was multipolarity. Every American action to prevent it reveals it instead."
I wouldn’t change a word. The only thing that's changed since I wrote it is that even the arsonists now smell the smoke.
Src for the Atlantic article: https://t.co/ItED9WS9Kn
Rabbi Dovid Feldman:
“we are here to bring the Jewish voice in support of having Israel accountable for these crimes taking place in Gaza and Palestine. What is going on this genocide is unacceptable. This is against humanity and Jewish people. We are embarrassed”
@GeromanAT Guys, remember what a projection is in psychiatry
The expression, outside, of your inner conflict
The only ones here who have no idea about where they are heading are the americans
🚨 World Press Freedom Day: a testimony from Gaza journalist Fadi Al-Wahidi.
Shot on October 9, 2024 in Jabalia refugee camp while covering the war for Al Jazeera, he was clearly marked as press when he was struck in the neck by Israeli fire. The attack left him paralyzed.
Colleagues who were calling out to him were killed.
Despite a life-threatening spinal injury, his evacuation was delayed for months amid repeated denied transfer requests, until he was finally evacuated on February 10, 2025 to Cairo and then Qatar for treatment.
“There is no press freedom… my injury is the proof. But my voice is still here.”
There is no justification for this whatsoever. And it certainly isn’t ’antisemitic’ to call out the atrocities inflicted on Palestinians. And it’s been going on for decades.