Pepe Escobar
With Oreshnik now entering the picture, everywhere the Hegemon will try to harass China they will also have to face Russia.
When it comes to state of the art Russian weaponry, what the inestimable Ray McGovern defines as the MICIMATT - the whole Hegemonic complex - seems to dwell in perpetual stupor.
They had no clue about Kalibr, Sarmat, Khinzal, Zircon or Avangard before they were introduced. They had no clue about Oreshnik ('Hazel") before the 30-minute protocolar warning by the Russians, stating a missile test was coming, and it was not nuclear. The Americans assumed that would be just another ballistic missile test, as they happen routinely close to the Arctic.
Even President Putin didn't know Oreshnik was ready for its close-up until the last minute. And Kremlin spokesman Peskov confirmed that only an ultra-rarefied circle knew Oreshnik even existed.
In a nutshell: the MICIMATT only sees what Russia shows off - and when it happens. Call it a leak-proof vow of secrecy permeating the Russian military complex - which, by the way, is a massive state, nationalized company, with a few private components.
And that offers the Russian government, in practice, better engineering, better physics, better mathematics and better practical, final results than anything across the self-important collective West.
Oreshnik - a kinetic weapons system - is a certified game-changer when it comes to military technology and warfare in more ways than one: actually several. Simple physics tells us that by combining enough kinetic force and mass, utter devastation is guaranteed, comparable to a low-to-medium yield nuclear weapon. With the added benefit of no radiation.
Oreshnik is an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), under development by Russia (along with other systems) even before Trump 1.0 pulled the U.S. out of the INF treaty in 2019.
A few concise analyses have 𝕏 pointed out how Oreshnik can be fitted into intercontinental (italics mine) non-nuclear missiles. The Russians are being very diplomatic, not stressing that if Oreshnik is launched from the Russian Far East, it can easily reach most latitudes across the USA.
Moreover, applying Oreshnik tech to tactical missiles - Putin late last week said this is already happening - also changes the whole tactical domain.
The new game in town is Russia being capable of unleashing ultra-high-velocity kinetic weapons literally anywhere around the world - after warning civilians to abandon the area around the targets. And there's absolutely no defense against it, anywhere.
Nowhere to run, baby, nowhere to hide
It's quite predictable that the woke, arrogant/ignorant MICIMATT, as well as NATO and the whole, brainwashed collective West simply have no idea what just hit them, seemingly out of the blue.
To be concise: a system with the destructive power of a tactical nuclear weapon but carrying the precision of a top sniper's bullet.
Ergo, sitting duck billion-dollar aircraft carriers; the whole, 800-plus Empire of Bases; assorted underground bunkers; ICBM launch platforms; naval shipyards; not to mention NATO's HQ in Brussels, the Aegis Ashore base in Redzikowo (Poland), the NATO joint force center in the Netherlands, southern NATO command in Naples - all these immensely expensive assets are fair game for non-nuclear Oreshniks capable of reducing them to dust in a flash after flying for mere minutes at over Mach 10.
By now multitudes around the world are aware that Oreshnik may reach Berlin in 11 minutes and London in 19 minutes. Also that launched from southern Russia, Oreshnik may reach the U.S. air base in Qatar in 13 minutes; launched from Kamchatka in the Far East, it may reach Guam in 22 minutes; and launched from Chukotka, it may reach Minuteman III silos in Montana in 23 minutes.
To quote the epic 1960s Motown hit: "Nowhere to run, baby, nowhere to hide."
Graphic proof that the MICIMATT and NATO have absolutely no clue what hit them - and will hit them again - is the escalation dementia in effect even after Oreshnik's warheads reduced a missile factory in Dnipropetrovsk to smithereens. And even after Moscow made it quite clear that they don't need nuclear weapons to hit anything they want anywhere on Earth.
The MICIMATT plus NATO, in tandem, fired ATACMS twice against Kursk; released a P.R. trial balloon related to the suicidal possibility of sending nuclear weapons to Kiev; NATO warned businesses to enter a "wartime scenario"; NATO's armchair admiral Rob Bauer, a Dutch non-entity, advocated pre-emptive bombings of Russia; Le Petit Roi in France and the ghastly British PM re-started the gambit of "troop deployments" to Ukraine (Starmer later backed off); and last but not least, the Liver Sausage government in Germany started to draw plans to use metro stations as air raid shelters.
All this escalation paranoia sounds like a bunch of screaming kids playing in their dirty sandbox. Because for all practical purposes it is Russia which is now ruling the escalation game.
Breaking up Russia-China is hard to do
And that brings us to Trump 2.0.
The Deep State has already targeted Trump with a vicious war - a de facto pre-emptive counter-insurgency, even before he attempts to do anything practical regarding NATO's collapsing Project Ukraine.
His ideal off-ramp might be an Afghanistan-style exit, leaving all the burdens ahead to a basket of NATO chihuahuas. Still, that's not gonna happen.
Andrey Sushentsov is a program director of the Valdai Club and dean of MGIMO's school of International Relations. He's one of Russia's top analysts. Sushentsov released this pearl to TASS, among other things:
"Trump is considering ending the Ukrainian crisis, not out of any sympathy for Russia, but because he acknowledges that Ukraine has no realistic chance of winning. His goal is to preserve Ukraine as a tool for U.S. interests, focusing on freezing the conflict rather than resolving it. Consequently, under Trump, the long-term strategy of countering Russia will persist. The U.S. continues to benefit from the Ukrainian crisis, regardless of which administration is in power."
Sushentsov fully recognizes how "the U.S. state system is an inertial structure that resists decisions it deems contrary to American interests, so not all of Trump's ideas will come to fruition."
That's just one graphic illustration, among many, that Moscow harbors no illusions whatsoever about Trump 2.0. Putin's conditions for an attempt to solve the Ukraine riddle have been known at least since June: total Kiev withdrawal from Donbass and Novorossiya; no Ukraine in NATO; end of all 15,000+ Western sanctions; and a non-aligned, nuclear-free Ukraine.
That's it. Everything non-negotiable; otherwise the war will continue on the battlefields, the way Russia sees fit, until Ukraine's total surrender.
Evidently the Five Eyes - actually only 2 (U.S.-UK) - plus minion France, side by side with the most powerful silos inside the Deep State will continue to force Trump to double down on Project Ukraine, which is an essential part of the Forever Wars ethos.
The best he might be able to do is to divert attention from Project Ukraine by accommodating the Old Testament psychopathological genocidals in Tel Aviv, plus the Zio-con armada in D.C., in their obsession of forcing Washington to fight their war on Iran. Talk about a slight change of focus of the Forever Wars.
Tehran not only exports most of its energy to China but is an absolutely essential node of the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) as well as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI); that is, north-south and east-west crisscrossing Eurasia.
That would be the real war of choice - simultaneously against three BRICS (Russia, China, Iran). After all the American ruling class is already invested on a do-or-die Hybrid War against BRICS.
Still, the Trump 2.0/China face-off will be the fulcrum of the Hegemon's foreign policy starting January 20. Virtually all of Trump's appointments - as misguided as they may be - believe it is possible to break apart the Russia-China comprehensive strategic partnership and prevent China from buying energy from Iran.
There will be attempts to disrupt shipping lanes and supply lines - from the Maritime Silk Roads in the Indian Ocean rimland to the Northern Sea Route by the Arctic, including possible false flags along the INSTC.
But with Oreshnik now entering the picture, everywhere the Hegemon will try to harass China they will also have to face Russia. So the temptation to end Project Ukraine and NATO's encroachment on Russia's western borders will always be there in the back of Trump's mind, part of a "seduce Russia to undermine China" syndrome.
The problem for the Hegemon is that the interlocking BRICS/SCO-wide Russia-China-Iran strategic partnerships do have other - kinetic - ideas.