The United States should pull a page from the Cold War playbook and drive Russia to spend money in a tit-for-tat power game that its smaller economy can’t support, a think tank said in a recent study.

The West can exploit factors that are making Russia more vulnerable, such as economic sanctions, fuel prices falling below peak levels, an aging population and increasing authoritarianism under President Vladimir Putin, Rand Corp. said in the report. However, it also urged caution with ventures that could provoke Moscow.

The U.S. should fund operations with the secondary aim of unsettling Russia and diverting it to less-threatening pursuits that deplete its coffers, said the Rand report, titled “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia.”

“Such cost-imposing options could place new burdens on Russia — ideally heavier burdens than would be imposed on the United States for pursuing those options,” Rand said.

The U.S. outpacing Moscow in military spending is often credited in part with causing the Soviet empire to collapse. Rand doesn’t recommend provoking Russia into a Cold War-sized arms race.

Instead, the report gives a list of operations the U.S. could fund, from military to political to economic.

 

read more:

https://www.stripes.com/news/europe/how-the-us-could-push-russia-s-defense-spending-to-the-brink-1.579897

 

The traditional gun, rust bucket and the bomb diplomatic tools...

 

The Department of Defense’s enduring mission is to provide combat-credible military forces needed to deter war and protect the security of our nation. Should deterrence fail, the Joint Force is prepared to win. Reinforcing America’s traditional tools of diplomacy, the Department provides military options to ensure the President and our diplomats negotiate from a position of strength. 

Read more:

https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-S...

 

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US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, was slated to meet with German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, as well as German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas for talks in Berlin on Tuesday.

The US State Department said in a statement that a scheduled meeting between US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been cancelled.

The authorities added that the talks had to be postponed citing "pressing issues". However, the official body did not specify the reasons for calling off the meeting or provide any further details.     

READ MORE: US Slams Nord Stream 2 as Russia's ‘Geopolitical Weapon' in Fresh Rant

According to the State Department, Pompeo "looks forward to being in Berlin soon" to participate in the "important set of meetings" that had been scheduled.    

There have been no immediate comments about the meeting's postponement from Merkel or Maas.  

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/europe/201905071074778365-pompeo-merkel-cancelle...

 

Pompeo is a dinosaur still searching for his own extinction... meanwhile:

idiots

 

 

Read from top.

 

A US aircraft carrier group and bomber task force were deployed to the Middle East after a tip-off on a “credible threat” from Iran, which came, conveniently vague and timely, from Israeli spy agency Mossad, it has been reported.

At an April 15 meeting in Washington, Israeli National Security Council chief Meir Ben-Shabbat passed along a warning to US National Security Advisor John Bolton, senior Israeli officials told Axios. The information Bolton received was left vague: the attack could hit a US target in the Persian Gulf, or maybe Saudi Arabia, or maybe the UAE.

“It is still unclear to us what the Iranians are trying to do and how they are planning to do it,” one of the senior officials said, but added it was “clear” that an unspecified event would take place sometime in the future, which would have unstated consequences.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/458536-mossad-tip-iran-intelligence/

 

Iran controls all the oil export through the Strait of Hormuz, where the deepwater is in Iranian waters. The US has sent their massive fleet to prevent Iranians exercising their rights to prevent shipping through the strait, while preventing iranian shipping oil. Another "intimidation" tactic.

 

Note that a small fleet of unmanned subs or radio-guided fast dinghies could actually sink half the US fleet, but Iran has been restrained unlike the USA.

The US is abusing its power in lifting a ban on lawsuits against the Cuban government, according to Spanish Foreign Minister Josep Borrell. He also lashed out at Washington’s “cowboy” intervention threats against Venezuela.

Borrell roasted US President Donald Trump’s administration policies in Latin America during a TV interview on Wednesday. He was particularly fired up about Washington’s decision last month to begin enforcing the 1996 Helms-Burton act, which essentially allows Cuban-Americans to sue the Cuban government over property confiscated during the 1959 Socialist revolution.

“This is further proof of a lack of cooperation on the part of the US administration,” Borrell said, adding that Spain opposes the measure and considers it “an abuse of power.”

This is going to open a legal battle, we will go to the WTO [World Trade Organization].

The US is taking the controversial step in order to put pressure on Havana over their alleged role in assisting the embattled Venezuelan government during a coup attempt by opposition forces backed by Washington.

Read more

https://www.rt.com/news/458723-spain-us-cowboy-abusing-venezuela/

 

 

Read from top.

 

 

See also:

tell him he's dreaming...

The psychos run the show…

Reality is too close for comfort. We need to fantasise. Many shows on TV “explore” (bastardise) reality far more than theatre in shakespeare’s time ever did — but the dead old bard's work is still relevant. On average, leaders have been psychos by having had the guts and hypocritical fortitude to run our stylistic life — at family, tribal, communal, city and country level, in war and peace — mostly in wars. 

Presently Trump tries to conquer the world like the other American psychos before him. As mentioned on this site, about 4 per cent of men and about one per cent of women can be defined as psychopaths. And sociopaths (learned psychopaths) tend to concentrate in the higher echelons of leadership. Mind you, for various self-defence mechanism, most humans — most of us — have the ability to become sociopaths to various degrees, depending on circumstances. But for many sociopaths and psychopaths life is a game of power — at which ever level they choose, though often they don’t stop until being “masters of the world".

On a scale of one to ten, artists are unlikely to become sociopaths. Politicians are most likely to become sociopaths. At this level, most journalists trying to be “balanced” are usually becoming ignorant and wittingly or not, turn into “sociopaths’ helpers. The least likely sociopaths are in the scientific community, though some scientists can be sociopathic or even psychopathic. People become unhelpful to others via various means, including violence and psychological manipulations.

I know such generalisations should not be made, but events tend to tell otherwise. When a Mike Pompeo tells troops that LYING is not only an option but a duty for the CIA, one should ring church bells. Actually church bells lie, even when they toll for the dead. The dead are dedd. They aren’t going to church-bell blessed heaven.

When "democracy” came along, we hoped to get rid of the scourge of the psychos — kings, emperors, despots — who had run our affairs, yet we missed the boat. We replaced them with an illusion of choice. At the last US Presidential election, voters were faced with voting for a male psycho or a sociopathic female.
So what makes us submit to this present crap?… Of all the world leaders, from the USA to China, the least psychopathic is Putin. Donald Trump is the worst. Hillary would have been as bad as a psychopathic trollop. Both parties, the GOP and the DNC choose the strongest sociopaths as their leaders. 
The choices were crap, and many voters did not vote because they knew this. So what do we do? Live comfortably, revolt and replace the bad crop with another deceiving bad crop who promise the moon? Have we reached maximum psycho speed?

The common good has been under threat since we reached critical destruction of the planet. It would not matter much if our generallsimo psychopaths were not pushing for this destruction they don’t care about, while selling us the notion of comforts for their own profits and glories.

Thus the important part is to care — and hammer the notion of caring for the planet on our front door like the 56 or whatever number dictums from Martin Luther. The more front door, hopefully the less damage the psychos will do, but this is not guaranteed. We all know the story of the one bad apple in a basket… When this rotten character runs the show, we need to resist and carry on living while minimising our footprints at all levels… Let’s carry on caring...

GL

Read from top.
See also: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-05/abc-raided-by-australian-federal-police-afghan-files-stories/11181162

John Bolton’s claims that Russia and other states were behind reports of friction in the Trump administration are ‘totally absurd,’ the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson has said.

“We have substantial reason to believe that North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, Russia, and China have made a decision to — and you can see it publicly — to try to sow disinformation about the administration and to say that the president and his advisers are divided, and things like that,” the White House national security advisor said during a Wall Street Journal event in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday.

Sharing more of his wisdom, Bolton claimed that “the stenographers of these regimes in the American press immediately pick it up.”

“Seriously?” Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, exclaimed as she responded to Bolton in a Facebook post. The man’s words were so “inconceivable” that she had “to read them over three times” to believe that he actually said them.

Doubling down, Zakharova joked that with such level of rhetoric, Bolton could “publicly acknowledge that the US media is owned by Russian oligarchs; that Trump’s Twitter account is run by ‘a troll factory’ and that [Russian] pranksters Vovan and Lexus were actually speaking with Bolton’s voice at the WSJ event.”

The Trump administration shouldn’t be too worried about the reports on the discord between the president and his team as “it’s a sign that there’s democracy in the country,” she wrote.

“Aren’t these the values Washington is so eagerly defending?”

She also raised the instances of when the differences between Trump and his advisers were brought to the public eye and could not be denied.

 

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/461701-zakharova-bolton-trump-disinformation/