Greg Oudin

[Greg Oudin @The_Real_Sonic]

@GeromanAT Defend their Europe allies like they defended their Middle-east allies 😁 ?

[Greg Oudin @The_Real_Sonic]

@OlgaBazova @GeromanAT He wanted more followers 😏😅

[Amélie Ismaïli @ame_ism]

🧵THREAD — Les "ingérences russes"

Alors que la "menace" des "campagnes de déstabilisation russe" est utilisée par le Gouvernement pour faire passer des lois qui visent à censurer, réprimer et geler les comptes bancaires de toutes personnes suspectées d'y participer (même de façon indirecte) par l'Exécutif à l'approche des présidentielles;
Et alors que les partis d'oppositions (RN et LFI) sont plongés dans l'aveuglement sur les objectifs RÉELS de ces projets de lois, il est temps de rappeler quelles sont les opinions qui sont systématiquement visées derrière l'accusation "d'ingérences russes".

On rappellera que l'accusation (non-prouvée) d'ingérence russe a conduit à l'annulation des élections en Roumanie et à l'interdiction du candidat qui était arrivé en tête de se représenter ; que cette accusation a conduit à une censure massive de citoyens américains aux Etats-Unis, ainsi qu'à la censure d'informations factuelles (l'ordinateur de Hunter Biden).

Cette accusation n'est donc pas anecdotique. Elle implique des risques bien réelles sur la Liberté d'expression et la démocratie.

Voici donc, pour ceux qui auraient la mémoire courte, la liste de tous les groupes de citoyens français qui ont été accusés de participer à une "ingérence russe" ⤵️

[Greg Oudin @The_Real_Sonic]

@Insolentiae Take that, Putin 🙃 !

[Alan MacLeod @AlanRMacLeod]

Being the first recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize to bomb another Peace Prize winner (Doctors Without Borders, Afghanistan)

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This is properly insane: quite literally the worst example of censorship I've ever heard of anywhere.

I checked the actual ruling (which you can see here: https://t.co/dBKFWZ2ZWm) and, to be clear, it isn't just censorship in the conventional sense - blocking access to a website or removing content from platforms - this is the criminalization of information relayed by private citizens, with prison sentences attached.

And the most insane aspect if that it does NOT matter if the information relayed is accurate or not. It just matters that it originates from RT or other media outlets banned in the EU.

In other words, truth isn't a defense anymore in the EU, it literally doesn't matter. It's purely based on the identity of the speaker.

The ruling is actually explicit about this: the regulation, quoted by the Court says that the prohibition applies to "any content," and they draw no distinction based on what the content actually says. If it originates from banned outlets, it's banned.

It is, quite simply, a complete unraveling of the entire post-Enlightenment legal and philosophical project where entire generations of Europeans fought to move from "who says it" to "is it true" as the operative question.

Think about the absurdity of it: if RT publishes a video saying the sky is blue and you share it on a publicly accessible website in the EU, you'd fall within the scope of this ruling, making you liable to criminal prosecution.

Completely and utterly absurd. But that's the EU today for you 🤷

[Alan MacLeod @AlanRMacLeod]

"For nearly 250 years, America promoted freedom and equality abroad"

[Danielle Ryan @itsdaniryan]

No, John.

I do want Russian literature, music, ballet and art. I do want the scientific and engineering legacy that helped shape modern physics, medicine and space exploration.

I want people to see what I’ve seen: Moscow and St. Petersburg - two of Europe’s biggest and most beautiful cities.

I want them to stand on the shores of Lake Baikal, and walk the forests and shorelines of the Solovetsky Islands.

I want them to experience the Winter Palace and Peterhof.

I want them to visit Ganina Yama, Yasnaya Polyana, and the Ivolginsky Datsan, and to hike to the rock formations of Stolby Nature Reserve.

I want them to cross the Russky Bridge in Vladivostok, and walk out to the Tokarevsky Lighthouse at low tide.

I want them to take the Trans-Siberian Railway across the largest country on Earth, or ride the Krasnaya Strela overnight.

I want to be friendly with our most natural European partner and ally.

What makes you so afraid of that, John?

[Greg Oudin @The_Real_Sonic]

@OlgaBazova All these bots paid by the last European check 🙃

[Mel @Villgecrazylady]

TL;DR: Concentration camps. The US is going to help Israel build and run concentration camps in Gaza.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

So what is in "The Deal with Islamic Republic of Iran"?

If you're confused, it's normal: the US and Iran already publicly disagree on what they agreed to, and it's not even a "deal": just a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that sets the terms for negotiating the actual deal within the next 60 days.

We do, however, know a few things:

1) Israel is actively trying to undermine the deal - for instance by striking Beirut yesterday Sunday.

Israeli media say that the deal is causing "profound concern among Israeli officials," that "Israel, despite having started the war alongside the US, was not involved in the negotiations," and that "the deal do[es] not achieve the goals of the war that were set out by the US and Israel" (https://t.co/hMqvezz08J).

That last part is clear: the very existence of this MOU proves the objectives of the war were not met, as they certainly didn't include the US negotiating an exit with an undefeated Iran while Israel is freaking out about it on the sidelines.

2) We know, because both parties and Pakistan (the mediator) confirmed it, that a finalized MOU does exist and that it's due to be formally signed on Friday in Switzerland by JD Vance and maybe Trump himself (Vance told Fox News: “I certainly plan to be there, but it’s possible the president himself could be there” https://t.co/sTmdfAv7DS)

3) We know Trump ordered the US naval blockade to be lifted (supposedly today, Monday)

4) The Strait of Hormuz will reopen on the Iranian side (though both parties publicly spun the terms differently - Trump says "toll-free," Iran's FM Araghchi says with "service fees")

5) The war would end on all fronts including Lebanon - both sides used this exact phrase. Israel, obviously, is trying hard to spoil this.

6) Some form of sanctions relief is included - Iran speaks of "termination of all sanctions" (https://t.co/3v7Xa3n9lv) and a senior US official confirmed the structure is "Iran would earn economic rewards each time it met a set of US demands"

7) The MOU apparently does not agree on anything wrt nuclear, just that it will be discussed during the 60-day negotiation window, with Iran maintaining its current nuclear status quo in the meantime

8) In fact I suspect the MOU defers most things truly contested - like nuclear - to later negotiations while resolving in the immediate only the problems the war itself created: stop shooting, reopen the strait (under updated Iranian rules), and lift the blockade.

Which means that, most likely, this "deal" is - at this stage - less a deal than an acknowledgement of the new status quo reached in the war. It differs from the April 5 ceasefire in that, this time, the US is lifting all coercion it introduced in the war - including the naval blockade it imposed on April 13.

So in effect the war had two phases of failed coercion (military, then economic with the blockade), and the MOU formalizes the failure of both.

In exchange what the US is getting is a conversation about its initial stated war objectives (like nuclear), which it will now have to pursue after having proven it cannot impose them by force.

Needless to say, you don't get better terms at the table after showing you couldn't get them on the battlefield 🤷

[KUTUB @KUTUBProduction]

Israel flattened Beirut in 1982.

No Hamas. No Hezbollah. No October 7 to point to then.

Just 17,000 dead Lebanese and Palestinian civilians.

Even US president then Ronald Reagan, who armed Israel, called Begin furious after seeing a photo of a 7-month-old baby with its arms blown off and said “It is a holocaust”.

They killed so many innocent people that the survivors had no choice but to pick up weapons.

Then Israel had the audacity to keep using “Self-Defense” excuse every decade.

Israel didn’t stumble into endless war. Israel built it. Brick by brick.

Own it.

[Greg Oudin @The_Real_Sonic]

@GeromanAT Since 2022 🤭

[Manlet King ☩ @TheManlet_King]

This is a map on why video games take up 5x the space they did 15 years ago just to look *slightly* more detailed.

[Kim Dotcom @KimDotcom]

Breaking

Palantir was allegedly hacked. An AI agent was used to gain super-user access and here”s what the hackers allegedly found:

Peter Thiel and Alex Karp commit mass surveillance of world leaders and titans of industry on a massive scale.

They have thousands of hours of transcribed and searchable conversations of Donald Trump, JD Vance and Elon Musk.

They have backdoored the devices, cars and jets of world leaders and accumulated the biggest archive of blackmail material.

Palantir is creating nuclear and bio weapon capabilities for Ukraine and is working closely with the CIA to defeat Russia. They believe they are one year away. They plan to achieve this by keeping Russia busy with meaningless peace negotiations.

Palantir is responsible of the majority of Palestinian deaths in Gaza. They have developed the AI targeting for Israel.

Palantir is an arm of the CIA and all data from international clients is copied into a CIA spy cloud.

Palantir has become the most dangerous company in the world. If you work there you have the right to know that this is what Palentir AI is used for, without your knowledge.

The Palentir data the hackers allegedly gathered will be given to Russia and/or China. I was chosen as a trusted partner for this publication. I’m not involved in the Palentir hack and I don’t know the hackers. But I do know that the hack happened.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Never has it been clearer that the U.S. is a plutocracy.

And ironically a plutocracy that doesn't even represent the interests of its own oligarchs, but those of a foreign ethno-religious state.

Interestingly, Massie was one of the only congressmen with a genuine engineering background: he studied at MIT and founded a pioneering haptic interface company from scratch that obtained 24 patents.

"China is run by engineers. America is run by lawyers" -> well, look what happens when an engineer tries politics in the U.S....

[Greg Oudin @The_Real_Sonic]

@GeromanAT Using force to secure negotiations 👌

[Greg Oudin @The_Real_Sonic]

@DD_Geopolitics @GeromanAT I wish them the same luck they had when they overthrew Iranian government 🙏

[Paweł Wargan @pawelwargan]

The EU claims that the “Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939” enabled WWII. It omits ten crucial facts:

- The Soviet Union was not even among the first ten countries to enter into treaties and non-aggression pacts with Nazi Germany. In 1939 alone, Lithuania, Romania, Denmark, Italy, Estonia and Latvia all signed non-aggression pacts with Hitler. Poland entered into one as far back as 1934.

- The Soviet Union tried to form an anti-fascist alliance throughout the 1930s, and was repeatedly rebuffed by European powers.

- Despite that, the Soviet Union was the most powerful bulwark against fascism before the war. The International Brigades in Spain represent the most concrete example of organised antifascist military resistance before Hitler’s invasion of Poland. These Brigades were led by communist parties armed by the Soviet Union, who were abandoned by Western “democracies” and their policies of "non-intervention” which simply left German and Italian intervention uncontested.

- In that same tradition, Stalin offered to send one million troops to deter Hitler’s aggression during the 1938 Sudetenland crisis. Poland and Romania objected, while France and Britain decided to pursue appeasement. That appeasement aimed in part at ensuring that Germany’s energies were directed eastwards, against communism.

- The Soviet Union was the primary target of German imperialism. The USSR’s leadership was aware of this from the early 1930s — and Germany’s leadership did not hide the fact. Hitler had repeatedly promised that Germany would be the “bulwark" of the West against “Bolshevism”, a position that found broad sympathies among the Western ruling classes. Auschwitz was first built to house Soviet POWs, 3.5 million of whom were exterminated during the war.

- Nazi Germany was simply the turning inwards of Western European colonialism. It was in modern-day Namibia that Germany’s Imperial Chancery recorded perhaps the first use of the term Konzentrationslager — the concentration camp — to describe an instrument of mass extermination.

- Adolf Hitler drew particular inspiration from the US settler-colonial model. He remarked approvingly how the US settlers had “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand and now keep the modest remnants under observation in a cage”. He sent jurists to study the US Jim Crow laws, which formed the basis of the infamous Nuremberg Laws.

- The Red Army liberated Auschwitz, then liberated Europe. If not for the US, which moved quickly to suffocate the rising communist movements on the continent, we might have seen socialism rise at least in Greece, Italy, France and, eventually, Portugal.

- After the war, West Germany quickly reneged on the Potsdam Agreement, filled its security services with former Nazis. NATO, also filled with former Nazis, was founded to wage war on socialism and anti-colonial struggles. In the process it resuscitated the Wehrmacht and paved the way for the German revanchism we are seeing today.

- As a result, we have endured decades of US-led imperial hegemony, whose effects are a dying planet and tens of millions of lives stolen by imperialist wars and sanctions alone. That hegemony has absorbed and expanded the historical mission of fascism, carrying it forward into a new century. Gaza is the clearest expression of that process today — but it is by no means the only one.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

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