Noxious Joe leaves Trump with the premixed ingredients of World War III and he’s heated the oven. Guest post by Robert Gore at straightlinelogic.com

Donald Trump has surely earned a place among history’s preeminent salesmen. The audacity of his hope was far greater than that of the quite conventional politician who preceded him in office. Billionaire businessman Trump ignored the punditry who dismissed his first candidacy, upended traditional political totems, went around the hostile mainstream media via social and alternative media, convinced millions that he was just the hand grenade Washington needed, survived two assassination attempts, and has now won his third presidential election.

Trump was born in 1946, during the four-year period, 1945 to 1949, when the U.S. was the sole superpower, with exclusive possession of nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb in 1949, and the U.S. was no longer the unrivaled master of the whole planet. Instead, it became the Leader of the Free World, a confederated empire. During the ensuing Cold War, the government employed propaganda, intelligence, skullduggery, and military might against Soviet satellites, nonaligned nations, and its own Free World allies to keep the world running the way it thought it should be run.

Trump was eligible for the draft in the middle of the Vietnam War, but like so many prominent proponents of empire, he avoided it. That’s too bad, because maybe if he had seen his buddies blown apart, villages and their inhabitants incinerated, or taken a bullet or shrapnel himself—perhaps came back without a leg—he might have questioned the whole notion of imperial greatness. Instead, he reveres the military and is always careful to show the expected respect to those individual service members, no longer conscripted, he could potentially order to their deaths.

He avoided not just Vietnam’s bullets and bombs, but its larger lessons. Invasion is the easy part; the problems begin with occupation. The home team has most of the advantages—local knowledge, support from the citizenry, and the ability to wage asymmetric warfare and espionage—particularly if it’s receiving overt or covert outside assistance.

It would be charitable, but woefully incorrect, to say the entire American establishment has learned nothing from Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and a host of smaller invasions. Endless war is a feature, not a bug of U.S. policy. Its tragic consequences are never visited upon those who promote and profit from it. Millions of lives have been disrupted and destroyed. At home, the consequences are borne by the wounded and dead, their families and friends, and the tax and debt enslaved who foot the bill.

This group provided much of Trump’s support (except for the dead, they vote Democrat), but while he occasionally poses as an adversary of those who profit, he actually embraces them. An adversary wouldn’t keep increasing military and intelligence spending, much of which even the lowest DOGE employee could identify as wasteful (if military and intelligence could ever be audited). Trump blissfully signed off on their budgets during his first term and has pledged to do so again. He’s of the “bang-bang” school of military greatness—if its shiny and makes lots of noise, it must be good, and hang the cost. Keep those F-35s coming.

Truth is the first casualty of war, fiscal sanity the second, and freedom the third. Rulers have always found it impossible to wage war without surveilling the population and tyrannizing those who oppose or expose the lunacy. The Trump administration indicted and pursued Julian Assange. Trump and Vance sponsor Peter Thiel personifies the American public-private surveillance complex. His companies’ technologies will come in handy during not just Trump’s wars, but for the deportation effort and the next “pandemic” as well.

Noxious Joe leaves Trump with the premixed ingredients of World War III and he’s heated the oven. In Ukraine, the U.S. and the rest of NATO are using local cannon fodder in defense of their inviolate rights to plop themselves on Russia’s doorstep, cross red lines with impunity, fire missiles into Russian territory, build bioweapons labs, money launder, and change regimes as necessary. The neocon plan was to arm and train Ukraine’s military; levy killer economic and financial sanctions on Russia; wage American-contractor enriching war; subjugate the Donbass; take back Crimea; drive Putin from office; splinter Russia into a thousand pieces, and take control of the entire region’s rich natural resources.

Has there ever been a neocon war that went according to plan? Most of them have never been in a war. Military analyst Mike Tyson’s summed up the situation well: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

Russia packs a wallop. Nobody wins a fight without taking some hits, but it has a cut over the eye while its opponent has been knocked to the mat repeatedly and is bleeding profusely. Ukraine should throw in the towel and Russia declared the winner in a technical knockout, but never underestimate the stupidity and cupidity in Ukraine’s corner.

The U.S.’s European toadies and co-warmongers take the prize in both. Without a peep of protest, its leaders accepted the U.S. knocking out Nord Stream pipelines and cheap Russian energy, which the U.S. thoughtfully replaced with much more expensive U.S. liquid natural gas. Consequently, the continent confronts a looming depression. To finish the boxing metaphor, the one sure winner from this match are its U.S. promoters, the military-industrial-intelligence complex.

Trump, the deal artist, wants to cut a deal with Putin to end the war. Not only is Russia well on the way to achieving the objectives of its Special Military Operation (SMO), but Putin regards the West as agreement incapable. The Minsk Agreements were dead letters as soon as they were signed. (Germany’s Angela Merkel later admitted that Russia’s counter-parties had no intention of living up to them; they were merely a pretext to allow Ukraine to build up its military capabilities.) Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019. Two months after the SMO began, Russia and Ukraine had reached a tentative deal, but the U.S. and Britain shot it down.

The peace trial balloons from both the Biden administration and the Trump camp have been ludicrous, although the proposed terms aren’t nearly as favorable to Ukraine as the rejected 2022 deal. Russia never gives you second chances. Once inaugurated, Trump has essentially two choices: capitulate or escalate. Neocons chant peace through strength—the U.S. just hasn’t been strong enough. Trump has blustered about escalating to deescalate, but Putin remains unperturbed. Neocon calculations were that if Putin got desperate enough, he’d take the whole conflict nuclear, giving them the global conflagration they’ve always wanted. And ha! ha! ha!, Putin would be blamed, if there was anybody left to assign blame.

Then Putin unveiled the hypersonic Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile, which can’t be stopped by Western antimissile systems, can bear multiple nuclear or nonnuclear warheads (6 warheads, each with 6 sub-warheads), but even with nonnuclear warheads inflicts pinpoint devastation without the radiation. Don’t bet that the always-dense neocons have figured out the obvious—Russia doesn’t have to escalate to nuclear. Unstoppable, nonnuclear Oreshniks can obliterate Europe and, when fired from eastern Russia, a good portion of the U.S. It would be the empire that would have to escalate to nuclear. Putin has announced that having successfully demonstrated the prototype, Russia will move to full-scale production. Your move, Donald.

On another front in the emerging world war, Putin’s got to be perturbed by what’s recently transpired in Syria. Perhaps the only way to convey the essence of that accursed country is through black satire. Oh, wait, that’s been done: Prime Deceit by Robert Gore, published in 2016 and aging remarkably well.

Enough plug, back to Syria. It’s part of the vast Asian, European, and African expanse military analyst Richard Maybury calls Chaostan, the perfect sobriquet. For many years Russia had been allied with Syria and maintained a naval base and an airbase there. In 2011, the U.S. launched a color revolution and tried to regime-change its leader, Bashar al-Assad, under cover of fighting terrorism. The U.S. actually ended up supporting both sides in various terrorist imbroglios (not, unfortunately, black satire), but until this year couldn’t dislodge Assad.

That changed on December 8 when Assad dislodged himself and fled to Russia. Now Islamist groups will fight over the spoils. Those groups will tussle with actors outside Syria who have their own designs—Turkey, Israel, the U.S., Russia, Iraq, Iran, and myriad Islamist groups, to name a few. What’s kind of clear now but could change in an instant is that Turkey, Israel, and the U.S. are the current winners, and Russia, Iran, and China the losers. This throws a monkey wrench in the latter group’s grand Belt and Road Initiative, and Russia’s continued occupation of its Syrian bases is an open question.

As a last act of his inglorious reign, Joe Biden could land on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier dressed in a military jumpsuit with a big banner saying Mission Accomplished draped behind him. Oh, wait, that’s been done, by George Walker Bush. That turned out to be the highpoint of his administration’s regime-change, nation-building effort in Iraq.

Trump, to his credit, apparently believes that December 8 may be the highpoint of the U.S.’s thirteen-year regime-change, nation building effort in Syria. He recently said that Syria is “not our fight.” The Middle East is the ultimate Chaostan tar baby, and making the region our fight has been disastrous. It may be a stroke of fortune for Russia and China if Russia is kicked out of Syria and the BRI is shelved. The region has been a graveyard for outsiders (and plenty of insiders). Trump should follow his instincts and run, not walk, away from it. Unfortunately, he’s weighted down by a massive millstone.

The State of Israel was established in Palestine in 1948. Since then, the Israelis have driven the Palestinians into ever smaller areas of the country and expanded Israel’s borders. Citing Biblical destiny, Zionists envision further expansion, a “Greater Israel” stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates that would incorporate parts of present day Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria, and all of Jordan and Lebanon. Even with God supposedly on their side, Benjamin Netanyahu and crew realize the job exceeds Israel’s capabilities. Wouldn’t it be nifty if they could enlist the U.S. in the effort, especially to help subjugate long-time adversary Iran?

Trump is so in the pocket of Israel that he collects pocket lint. So, too, are Congress, the military-industrial-intelligence complex, and NATO. Trump’s only expressed compunction about Israel’s ongoing displacement and slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank concerns its optics. They look rapacious and bloodthirsty—because they are—but there is no indication that Trump will reverse the Biden administration’s flow of weaponry and intelligence kit that makes them possible.

If the U.S. joins Israel in an attack on Iran, World War III will go full global. Russia and China have too much at stake economically and militarily to let Iran go the way of Syria. While it would make the Jewish lobby and the MII complex happy, it will dismay even hardcore Trumpists that their man is not the Bestower of Peace as advertised, but rather the Igniter of Armageddon, and many will abandon him.

More will as the enemy’s missiles sink U.S. aircraft carriers and take out U.S. military installations and cities. Good luck finding American “warriors” willing to fight and die for the Zionist cause, about which the younger generations are much less gung-ho than their elders. Conscription would be required. Chaos and global terrorism will plumb new depths.

If Trump wants to screw things up, he’s got more than enough on his plate right here in the good old U.S.A. America First is, after all, his theme. Assuming that he takes the oath of office on January 20—not, by any means, a sure thing—he will begin his second term. Unlike his first term, he will be hitting the ground running, having named his nominees for the major posts within his administration and outlined an agenda consistent with his campaign’s platform and promises.

Part 2 will be posted in the next few days