Guernica, Pablo Picasso
"Gunning Up"
From the corner of our eyes... we see more than just financial
threats. All over the world, nations are ‘gunning up.’
Our guess is that they will soon be gunning for each other.
by Bill Bonner
"Bomb, bomb, bomb...
Bomb, bomb Iran."
- Based on "Barbara-Ann" by The Regents,
and used by Sen. John McCain and others.
"We keep watch on the money. But from the corner of our eyes... we see more than just financial threats. All over the world, nations are ‘gunning up.’ Our guess is that they will soon be gunning for each other. So, today... we go back to the roots of our newsletter industry... to the days when intrepid writers provided ideas and opinions that mainstream media didn’t want to publish and the public didn’t want to hear.
Patrick Maitland, the 17th Earl of Lauderdale, was a pioneer in the newsletter genre. In 1937, he established the Fleet Street Letter in London. Then, when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from the Munich Conference with Hitler, he announced that there would be ‘peace in our time.’ And the newspapers and radio stations spread the good news. But Maitland wasn’t so sure. He set out for Europe to talk to other sources. And when he came back, he had a distinctly different message. Peace was a comforting illusion, he told readers; brace yourselves... gird your loins... for war.
We regret that today we bring a similar message. War is coming. Get ready for WWForever. First, let’s check with public sources. Then, we’ll tell you what we think is going on. Bloomberg tells us that the Ukraine war has already ‘escalated’: "Putin Is Already Escalating His War on the West."
Biden shouldn’t worry about giving Ukraine long-range missiles when Russia is upping its sabotage in Western Europe and aid to terrorists in the Middle East. Since the war in Ukraine started, avoiding escalation - a leap into a larger, more globally consuming conflict - has been US President Joe Biden’s abiding preoccupation. But nearly three years in, the reality is that the war has already sprawled and escalated, just not quite in the ways many observers might expect.
And here’s Reuters: "China 'firmly supports' Lebanon in safeguarding its security." "China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi told Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib on Monday that China firmly supported Lebanon in safeguarding its sovereignty and security and strongly condemned violations after Israel's large scale airstrike.
Israel's military said it launched airstrikes against Hezbollah sites in Lebanon on Monday, which Lebanese authorities said had killed 492 people and sent tens of thousands fleeing Wang said no matter how the situation changes, China would continue to stand on the "side of justice and on the side of Arab brothers, including Lebanon."
On one side is ‘the West’ - NATO/Europeanized nations led by the US, with frontiers in the Ukraine and Israel. On the other side, the Muslim, Asian, Slavic and African bloc is slowly congealing. Giving the two sides a quick up and down glance, we see that the West has the wealth and technology. The East has more people...more output…and faster economic growth. Broadly, the West has the edge in firepower. The East leads in manpower.
The mainstream media serves up the ‘news’ in a form that the public finds easiest to swallow. So, the West is portrayed as fighting for ‘freedom and democracy’ against the evildoers of the East. But even Donald Trump is not that simpleminded. LA Times: "Trump claims Ukraine is 'dead' and dismisses its defense against Putin's invasion, touts prowess of Russia. Trump painted Ukraine as a country in ruins outside its capital, Kyiv, short on soldiers and losing population to war deaths and neighboring countries. He questioned whether the country has any bargaining chips left to negotiate an end to the war.
"Any deal - the worst deal - would’ve been better than what we have now," Trump said. "If they made a bad deal it would’ve been much better. They would’ve given up a little bit and everybody would be living and every building would be built and every tower would be aging for another 2,000 years.” This led a group calling itself Republicans Against Trump to denounce him as a ‘despicable traitor.’ But Trump is like a badly-written novel. Almost everything he says is foolish or fiction; but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some truth in it.
The average Ukrainian probably would have been a lot better off if Zelensky had settled up with Putin back in May 2022, when both were reportedly ready to end the war. So would the average Russian and the average American. But UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson flew to Kiev. His mission? To stop the peace talks. The West didn’t want the war to stop. Why not? More to come..."
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