The United States and its allies have sent tens of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Ukraine over the past nine months, ignoring Moscow’s warnings that the arms flow escalates the conflict, and results in the uncontrolled spread of Western weaponry to terrorists and criminal groups across the planet.
As chief sponsor to Kiev in the ongoing Ukrainian security crisis, Washington has the right to tell Kiev when enough is enough as far as US arms deliveries are concerned, and that time is right now, says staunch anti-interventionist and veteran paleo-conservative commentator Pat Buchanan.
Pointing to the $38 billion in new assistance requested by the Biden White House last month ahead of the convening of a new Congress where Republicans will control the House of Representatives, Buchanan, a former advisor to presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, asked what interest Americans have in granting the request, besides possibly igniting a war with Russia.
“The US ought not dictate to Kiev when it should move to the negotiating track to end this war. But we Americans do have, given our indispensable contributions to the Ukrainian war effort, the right to tell Kiev when we believe that the risks of further fighting exceed any potential gain for us; and, if Kiev is determined to fight on, to give notice that Ukraine will be doing so without any more US munitions,” Buchanan wrote in a recent op-ed.
“Great powers should never cede to lesser powers, unconnected to their vital interests, the capacity to drag them into unwanted wars,” Buchanan emphasized, pointing to the risks posed by Washington continuing to finance the Ukraine conflict with $38 billion in new aid, which would “virtually guarantee” that fighting continues into the spring, as the suffering of ordinary Ukrainians grows.
The commentator stressed that given the US’s decisive financial contribution to propping up the Kiev government, Americans “also need to have a voice” in saying when the conflict ends, and that for the US, the “greatest” interest lies not in who controls the Donbass, Kherson, or Central and Eastern Europe as a whole for that matter, but in avoiding being drawn directly into situation “that would put us on the escalator to a war with Russia, a world war and perhaps a nuclear war.”....more below
China has suspended several 2025 export controls on strategic materials — including rare earths, superhard materials, and lithium batteries – for a year. Is this a concession to the US, or a move in a far more complex game?
"The first aim of China’s export controls was to consolidate its leverage in negotiations. The second was to establish a long-term framework for managing such controls," says Yana Leksyutina, deputy director at the Institute of China and Contemporary Asia, Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS).
Сhina could activate this mechanism at any moment, and now everyone knows it’s a lever it holds, she explains to Sputnik.
Balancing the Mineral Market
"The moratorium on export bans to the US essentially resets the rare earth market to where it was previously," Jeff J. Brown, author of 'The China Trilogy' and founder of Seek Truth From Facts Foundation, tells Sputnik.
In the meantime, there will be a global rush by the US and its NATO allies to acquire as many rare earth ...
The Israeli regime has reportedly signed contracts worth millions of dollars in recent months to sway American public opinion as part of attempts to launder the occupying entity’s genocidal war crimes against Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip.
Israeli daily Haaretz reported on Friday that the multimillion-dollar campaign aimed to reshape US public opinion, both online and offline, through coordinated influence operations combining digital marketing, AI, geotagging, and religious messaging.
The contracts, signed between the Israeli regime and firms linked to US President Donald Trump, reveal a “hasbara [propaganda] campaign” and schemes to target millions of US churchgoers, deploy bots, hire influencers, and try to make ChatGPT more pro-Israel.
The largest contract, worth $6 million, was signed with Clock Tower X, owned by Trump’s former digital campaign chief Brad Parscale, to produce and distribute roughly 100 core pieces of pro-Israel content per month and thousands......
