Matthew Ehret
Despite the reality, smaller minds obviously see space as merely a extension of the fixed rules of imperial geopolitics that have been used for millenia to keep human beings locked like rats in a cage managed by oligarchs, Matt Ehret writes.
75 years ago, Winston Churchill delivered a speech in Fulton Missouri announcing a new Iron Curtain that had descended upon the world with the free capitalist nations united under an Anglo-American alliance on the one side and authoritarian states organized under the control of the Kremlin. In the speech which put the nail into the coffin of FDR's vision of a US-Russian-Chinese alliance of win-win cooperation, Churchill announced that:
"Neither the sure prevention of war, nor the continuous rise of world organization will be gained without what I have called the fraternal association of the English speaking peoples. This means a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States."
In the wake of this announcement, new mechanisms and operational procedures were brought online from the creation of the CIA after a purge of military intelligence which began with the dissolution of the OSS, to the establishment of a new security doctrine under NSC-75: 'A Report to the NSC by the Executive Secretary on British Military Commitments' which tied America's destiny to the preservation of British territorial possessions to keep independent-minded nations from falling under Soviet influence.
The rules of game theory were thus elevated from perverse thoughts floating around the paranoid minds of statisticians like Oscar Morganstern, John Nash and John von Neumann, to governing levers defining international military policy in an age of intrigue, coups, espionage and assassinations. This system of controls would guarantee a peace shaped not by cooperation or the pursuit of large scale goals as FDR announced in his Four Freedoms speech of 1941, but rather by the terror of mutually assured annihilation. This geopolitical perversion of "peace" necessitated isolated arrays of small wars, hot and economic alike in the pursuit of an overall balance. This is a game that would only function to the degree that all players acted like selfish short sighted opportunists incapable of thinking outside the terms of the game itself.
As I outlined in my previous article, despite the darkness and bipolarity of the Cold War, efforts were made to break humanity free of the rigged game by connecting our economic sphere of influence to the infinite expanses of space. Sadly every time new revolutionary advances were made by saner forces among all sides of the Iron Curtain, those advances were soon sabotaged as humanity was pulled back into the closed-system geopolitical cage like the lab rats which certain influential Malthusians and technocrats wished to believe we were.
The Anglo-American Special Relationship in Space
Today, Churchill's ghost has come to haunt the world once more as the vicious terms of the Cold War rules of conduct are again being forcefully revived under the priests of the "rules based international order" that have obsessively made it clear that they will not tolerate the existence of a multilateral system of governance challenging their perceived right to total hegemony.
The first sign of Churchill's re-emergence was seen in June 10, 2021 as Biden and Boris Johnson signed the 'New Atlantic Charter' in London which re-committed both nations to their Cold Warrior identities in defense of NATO, the Rules Based Order, Open Society and democracy. The New Charter said that both nations "affirm our shared responsibility for maintaining our collective security and international stability and resilience against the full spectrum of modern threats, including cyber threats."
On July 29, another joint US-UK alliance was solidified in the form of a statement published on the Telegraph by General James H. Dickenson (head of US Space Force) and Vice Marshall Paul Godfrey (the head of the UK's new Space Command that went into operation the same day). The title of the statement read: 'We Need a Special Relationship for Space' and opened with a tribute to Churchill's Iron Curtain speech where the duo stated: "Today, Churchill's words are more resonant and relevant than ever as we look to adversaries threatening us not just from Earth but from space."
Citing Russia explicitly and China implicitly as new threats to world peace which must be combatted in the new domain of space, the duo outlines the danger of space based warfare which threatens to takedown the entire western infrastructure system saying:
"Satellite constellations in low-earth orbit link almost every aspect of our daily lives whether it's our transport networks, banking systems, mobile phones, the internet or television. Almost anything, or anyone, who is on the move benefits from the positioning, navigation and timing capabilities of our Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). Militarily, space-based assets are critical for communication, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and navigation."
Describing the apocalyptic effects of the takedown of the GNSS, which neither China or Russia are reliant upon having built their own alternative systems of GPS, the space duo said: "It would be a day of market volatility, of local blackouts, of delayed journeys and of malfunctioning emergency services. It would be a day of chaos... Make no mistake, our potential adversaries are working hard to make this nightmare a reality."
There is undoubtedly an element of truth in these statements, since both China and Russia have been forced in recent years to respond to military encirclement of their nations by the expansion of new defensive military capabilities which involve space-based warfare including potentially new ICBM Silos in China, new anti-satellite weapons and powerful Peresvet laser trucks designed to blind any offensive attack.
However, it is important to recall that neither China nor Russia are the instigators of this new military agenda, nor are they acting on an offensive program. In fact, in recent years, both nations have only offered olive branches of cooperation in the face of aggressive policies which speak sweetly of freedom publicly while making every effort to destabilize target nations through asymmetric warfare, terror financing, economic warfare and outright military encirclement.
Additionally, these remarks could also be seen as a form of predictive programming as they echo earlier statements made by General Mark Milley who warned of a "new Pearl Harbor in space" when he said on December 3, 2020 that "there's an argument to be made and many have made it in various unclassified writings that a country might try to seek a first move or advantage, for example to blind the United States... the Next Pearl Harbor could happen in space". Milley pointed out that space warfare could takedown "the internet and electricity grids".
Hold in mind that the World Economic Forum's Cyber Polygon cyberwar game scenario exercises unfolded on July 9, 2021 with a specific focus on the takedown of western electricity grids, internet, medical and telecommunications support systems and banking systems. The WEF's Klaus Schwab had referred to the "frightening scenario of a comprehensive cyberattack [that] could bring a complete halt to the power supply, transportation, hospital services, our society as a whole... the COVID-19 crisis would be seen in this respect as a small disturbance in comparison to a major cyber attack".
Anyone who paid attention to Event 201 should not be surprised to feel goosebumps emerge at this point.
The New York Times lost no time before amplifying the fear fest writing such evidence-free articles as " Russians Who Pose Electrion Threat Have Hacked Nuclear Plants and Power Grids". Meanwhile on July 29, 2021, Biden revived the petard that China and Russia were responsible for cyberattacks on American companies and infrastructure warning of a shooting war, saying: "I think it's more than likely we're going to end up, if we end up in a war - a real shooting war with a major power - it's going to be as a consequence of a cyberbreach of great consequence."
The new US-UK space-based special relationship professes to expand upon the Five Eyes dominated Combined Space Operations (which involve the USA, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand as well as France and Germany), and also the Olympic Defender exercises which featured US-UK collaboration on space-based warfare scenarios in 2020. The US and UK are joined by Japan which announced its own Space Operations Squadron in May 2020 and by working directly with the Anglo-American alliance, has managed to circumvent the post WW2 ban on acquiring a military program.
Space remains a trans geopolitical domain of new undiscovered principles that shape our weather systems, ice ages, the activation/de-activation of viruses and even the forces of evolution of living systems. Returning to a paradigm driven by creative discoveries in space would not only animate the best of humanity's powers of creative reason, but also increase our standards of excellence in all fields to solve real problems and achieve real goals that not only serves to accomplish concrete tasks, but which offers the densest array of technological breakthroughs that we know will feed back into our earth-based economy in unimaginable ways. It is a fact that there is hardly a single branch of human activity from medicine, mining, chemistry, industrial production, telecommunications, or even entertainment that wasn't revolutionized from the original space program put into motion by President Kennedy nearly 60 years ago.
Chinese and Russian policy makers have emphasized their desires to use this domain as the foundation for mutual cooperation between all nations in the defense of earth against asteroid threats, the development of new resources on the Moon, Mars and other celestial bodies. At different times, sane forces within Europe, and NASA have echoed this call for a new era of cooperation as outlined in the original spirit of the Artemis Accords and western opposition to the absurd block on US-Chinese space cooperation put into law with the 2011 Wolf Act.
However, despite this reality, smaller minds obviously see space as merely a extension of the fixed rules of imperial geopolitics that have been used for millenia to keep human beings locked like rats in a cage managed by oligarchs. Where the maritime choke points of yesterday took the form of the straights of Malacca, the Bosporous, or Panama Canal, today's heirs to this Hobbesian worldview that animated Churchill's life, are only capable of seeing space as yet another choke point in the Great Game.
The author can be reached on his Substack.