Atlantic Resolve is not a mutual defense pact, but it's threatening to become one. I assert that we have been fighting world war 3 for a long time. The operational phase, so to speak, began in 2001 when the US secured vital military bases in Afghanistan and Iraq. This operation -- falsely identified as the 'War on Terror' -- has been waged since then to take out critical Chinese and Russian allies: Libya, Syria and eventually Iran and Lebanon. These places are important geopolitically: e.g., Assad was a strategic cockblocker of a gas pipeline that was to run from Qatar to Europe, Gaddafi wanted to establish a north African union that traded oil with its own non-US currency, and so on.

In fact the idea to destroy Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria was laid out in explicit detail in a report called 'Rebuilding America's Defenses' published in 2000 by an organization called the Project for a New American Century. The report said that they would need a 'pearl harbor-like' event to justify so many wars against so many countries, but Dick Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld (who were signatories of this document) apparently got what they needed on September 11, 2001. It is worth reading in its entirety for gems such as this one:

Advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century

General Wesley Clark alluded to these plans in an interview with DemocracyNow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RC1Mepk_Sw

What's going on in Ukraine and eastern Europe is an escalation and expansion of this operation, to be sure. But it started long before in the late 90s when countries like Poland joined NATO and effectively encircled the bear. You never corner the bear. George F. Kennan (the so-called father of containment policy) understood this basic principle of realpolitik:

'I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,'' said Mr. Kennan from his Princeton home. ''I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs.''

'What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was,'' added Mr. Kennan, who was present at the creation of NATO and whose anonymous 1947 article in the journal Foreign Affairs, signed ''X,'' defined America's cold-war containment policy for 40 years. ''I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don't people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.

''And Russia's democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we've just signed up to defend from Russia,'' said Mr. Kennan, who joined the State Department in 1926 and was U.S. Ambassador to Moscow in 1952. ''It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are -- but this is just wrong.''

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/02/opinion/foreign-affairs-now-a-word-from-x.html

But you could say that we're currently in the brinkmanship phase of world war 3. The Russians and Chinese have gathered their friends and decided that they have waited long enough, it's time to push back. Realistically this could go one for another 5-10 years, but probably no longer than 2020 after major pipeline infrastructure between Russia and China comes online. By that point there will be some kind of confrontation.

Yes -- The Russians took Crimea without hesitation because they needed to protect the black sea fleet. I suppose the Obama administration expected them to just strip down their flagship fleet and sell the scraps back to their new NATO neighbor.

But the rest of Ukraine is flatland, perfect for rolling through with combined arms -- tanks, troops, artillery. The Russians know this because that's how the Germans blitzkrieg'd them in Operation Barbarossa, by going through Poland and Ukraine.

So I've been very impressed with Putin's patience and temperance. The degree of NATO provocation is extreme. I expected him to roll into Kiev months ago, but he's being smart by seeking a resolution through the UN security council without taking his eyes off of the real battlefield... Syria.

Why do they need Crimea for access to the black sea? It looks like the Russian border along the black sea is pretty big even without Crimea.

It's a strategic port and one of the few deepwater ports available to accommodate the Russian fleet in the Black Sea. It would be suicide to keep your most prized fleet in the Black Sea without control of Crimea.

Just wondering about Syria. What are your reasons for calling it "the real battlefield"?

Not trying to argue the point, I'm interested in this sort of thing. With all the efforts to take down the Assad regime, it looks like some other people think Syria is important as well.

Simply because Ukraine has no real strategic value to the Americans. They initiated the coup in order to drag the Russians into a quagmire in their own backyard, so that they could escalate the crisis in Syria and hopefully remove Assad while the Russians were distracted.

I just read this to my wife.

I never read anything to my wife.

Well said.

Dude, I dare you to read her all seventeen volumes of The Tale of the Thousand Nights and a Night, translated by Sir Richard Burton, published in 1895. Well, maybe the first ten volumes only.

You will thank me later.

Already ahead of you. Makes her horny.

Can I watch?

I never thought of WWIII happening as we speak and this being an operational phase. What I wonder though, and maybe it's grasping for optimism, is whether or not nuclear power countries would be involved in direct military operations in what might be and will be viewed as WWIII so to speak in the future.

Nuclear weapons changes the landscape or things, and while it is scary to think of them being set off, I like to believe all world leaders are material hedonist, who understand that setting off nukes could potentially end the world.

In this scenario, I could almost see Russia China US, etc. directly supporting countries without nukes in direct confrontation with one another without directly declaring war themselves. We are already seeing inklings of such examples, with Russia support for rebels in Ukraine and NATO supporting the government. Syria, Libya, etc. These world powers may even send their own soldiers, commandos, and intelligence officers to directly fight, (and again we have seen this happen too) but all done in a systematic and uninvolved manner in which no war is declared.

Potentially, Russia, China, and the US would only attack one another if they were invaded by another nuclear powered country. This is what makes the Pakstan/India conflict all the more frightening as they border one another, have massive militaries, and nukes. The world is lucky for the most part that the big superpowers exist within their own spheres away from each other's borders.

Edit: Pretty much the DIFFERENCE between now and WWI is that there are nuclear weapons. That changes everything.

I think what we will see is huge, huge false flags blaming one of Israel's enemies that the US must now go steal their resources so the criminal elite can fatten their pockets more.

Is the Sykes-Picot Agreement at all relevant here?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes–Picot_Agreement

The West dividing up the Middle East, along with Russia. Although this time is not Russia getting in the way of the Wests expansion and total takeover and control of the Middle East? Seems like the map you made is just a massive game of Chess coming to fruition. Allying, circling the wagons of sorts against Russia to get them out of the way to move forward with the Agreement that was set almost a century ago? I could be babbling. Hopefully something constructive is taken from that though.

Are you intentionally referencing Brzezinski's book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives

I wasn't. Just what I've pieced together from reading history. Take all of the micro happenings of the past, link them together and the macro becomes easier to read. Have you read that book?

The Grand Chessboard is effectively a manual for American foreign policy, but you have to understand that Brzezinski is cloaking a plan for a New World Order in geopolitical language. Otherwise you'll have finished reading that book believing that it really is a good idea to leave American military bases everywhere and work toward fracturing the Russian state into three distinct geographical parts.

Yes. It's actually a really good read if you want to understand what's going on in the world right now. It basically posits that control of Eurasia is critical, and that pivoting from Ukraine is the vital step to continued US hegemony.

2020 is also Al Qaeda's projected date for the USA to collapse by (they are on schedule with their plan)

So, in '07, there was a panic in which the nation's biggest banks collapsed, threatening regional banks with insolvency, and the nation's biggest financier had to guarantee the deal. This is known as the Panic of 1907, and it has these similarities in common with the Financial Crisis of 2007-08, as well as the Great Recession. What I'm getting at here is that history tends to repeat itself, and in this case it's not because of some mystical coincidence, but it's inherent in the design of the system.

I believe that it is due to remarkably regular Boom-and-Bust cycles of the economy. The American economy in particular, due to a gaping lack of regulation, lacks structural integrity. American markets, due to systemic over-leveraging, over-respond to shifts in the global economy, throwing off balance of the whole system. It's as though your body is the global economy, and America is the head, but America weighs 100 lbs (or 50 kilos, whatever, it's a metaphor.)
After 1907, Americans tried to regulate the banks, but there was a ludicrous amount of regulatory capture (essentially a conflict of interest in which big banks and regulators are hand-in-hand fucking the people). Because of the inability of American finance to regulate itself, and the lack of willingness of the regulators to actually step in, the Great Depression soon came.

The pope has said the current conflicts actually amount to a "piecemeal World War." So, if you subscribe to his thinking, we're already in WWIII, just the early stages.

What we're looking at for the next 10-15 years, just based on history: we'll see the final filigree of this New Gilded Age, and inequality will get much worse worldwide. Shit will hit the fan, full-out fascist regimes will come in, and we'll go to full-scale world war.

So, that said, let's look at some important differences. Turkey is not the Ottoman Empire, far from it. The presence of ISIS, however, will be a catalyst to change the Middle East. Someone, some nation, will eventually be forced to take on ISIS directly. If they win, they will control the former ISIS territory. The US has proven that a non-Islamic state cannot control people in that part of the world, so it will need to be an Islamic country, or a set of Islamic countries, who take control. The likely candidates are Turkey, who is basically the modern capital of the Islamic world; and Iran, which consists of the modern semi-fascist theocratic remnants of the Persian empire. The US (by which I mean TPTB, the intelligence agencies and the moneyed class, as well as our close ally Israel) doesn't want anyone in that region to gain too much sway, and Uncle Sam certainly doesn't want a coalition of Arab states coming together to fight a common enemy (because then they would just turn around and attack Israel on the way home, or so Israeli politicians think.)

If you think that people can't starve in the streets in 2015, remember that there are megadroughts on their way. Food costs will skyrocket, and we could face shortages that will shock people.

Finally, there is a huge difference in scale. The world economy is so much larger, so much more integrated, so much more powerful, that a Great Depression today would wreak much more havoc than it did a hundred years ago. China, India, South America, these are just some of the major players that hardly factored in previous world wars. Well, now they've arrived, and they're gonna play hard.

These are just my thoughts, I know it's a wall of text, but I love to kick the ball around talking about this shit.

I hate to say you're right magnora, but it's quite scary to see the parallels and note that the American public is as unaware now as they were so many years ago.

But we (miraculously) did stop an attack on Syria last year....

Yep. And then a year of beheadings later, we're a chemical weapon attack away from boots on the ground...

I think the beheadings were faked, but geez I think they burnt the shit outta that Jordanian dude.

I don't think we can do boots on the ground anymore. Such bad PR.

But wait a sec--isn't ISIS our real boots on the ground??????

I only say so due to what Tom Bowman said on NPR to so many people yesterday morning:

MASROUR BARZANI: We have liberated thousands of square kilometers. Now it's time for the Iraqi army to advance from the south toward Mosul. And that is the key. Mosul has to be completely isolated for any effective assault and, let's say, guaranteed operation.

SHAPIRO: And he told me, I wish I could tell you the Iraqi army is ready for that, but it's not.

INSKEEP: Really, Tom Bowman? They're not ready after years of training by U.S. troops?

BOWMAN: Well, the U.S. has pretty much cherry picked the Iraqi forces that will take part in this operation. And the officer we spoke with yesterday said, listen, they're getting better all the time. But of course, you know, that's questionable. This is an army that basically fell apart last year once the Islamic State started attacking. But with this Mosul operation, one of the things is even if they're not the best, they will have the benefit of having U.S. airstrikes and U.S. surveillance. But are they ready? That's still a question.

INSKEEP: Would U.S. troops have to be involved on the ground?

BOWMAN: That hasn't been resolved yet. There is talk of having some U.S. troops on the ground, such as air controllers to call in airstrikes, some Green Berets to steal their spine - but again, no decisions yet. But people I talk with say expect some U.S. troops on the ground.

Full transcript here:

NPR

Oh man that's tough news.

Of course any "casualties" are tragic, but do we really need dead american teenagers over this?

Russia helped us prove that Kerry lied.

Hey, the assessment you are making does have real world historical parallels to the build up to WWI.

Your geopolitical assessments are also accurate, but I have witnessed this militiary posturing from Russia and Europe every five years or so and many of the present conditions are similar to these situations since the Cold War has ended.

What is concerning to me though are the military buildup and pacts that are being conducted in the Russian Caucas and Middle East. I could go more into it at a later time. Take a look less at Europe and more at Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Syria and Libya.

Good points. The countries you listed are also strategic points regarding LNG pipelines once the dust settles in whatever conflict arises from this (I hope it's peaked but I doubt it).

Pacts are being created all over, and many are leaving the Western players behind. It is antagonizing to the US, but officials have only to blame their own policy.

China and Russia continue to seek better economic ties with the Southern Hemisphere.

If the war in Mexico keeps going as it is, Russian or Chinese money could flow into the Mexican Civil Defense groups, seeing as the US has chosen the Cartels.

The nations of the Southern Hemisphere are becoming world players. Their emerging markets are ready for foreign investment via infrastructure.

Now that is an interesting geopolitical theory. The cartels do run rampant through Mexico, and it already has been theorized and confirmed that facets of the American government are highly involved in the cartels and are supporting them for whatever may be their own intentions.

Just as Iran, Hezbollah and the Syrian government are funding Civil Defense groups throughout Syria to offset the terrorist threats, I can see this feasibly happening in Mexico.

Brazil, India, and South Africa are growing world powers that can really set off the balance of American hegemony.

It's a worldwide powder keg

More like pre ww2 with the financial component which had ravaged, and promised to further consume nations. Each player had prepared for the war just prior to the official beggining in 38 to raise themselves out of the crash of 29. The derivatives bubble is threatening to contract and spill over to other markets recently. I've been following new work orders being issued for new military gear in north america. Quite a rise in munitions and vehicle production the past two years.

btw, excellent map, really useful for analysis.

There is a difference though.

The internet. It's now harder and harder to convince the masses (although sometimes I feel like it didn't change much).

Everyone can see and report bullshit, I find it very unlikely that a world war of the same scale is ever going to happen. A LOT of people now have friends all over the globe and would refuse to fight each other.

It will be specialized units against other specialized units. It will be soldiers with no access to the internet, highly brainwashed... it won't be entire populations mobilizing (except for North Korea)

It's weird though – now, more than ever, people understand that the lies are lies, but there is less will to do anything about it.

The first times Australia joined in with the Iraq wars, there were huge protests against it. This time? Almost nothing. Something's changed, but I'm not sure what.

Notice anything different in the tapwater? Metalic aftertaste?

It all started when the twin towers where bought down.

I think what's intersting is its a combination of lead up to both wars..in addition to above, we have massive appeasement, major nations on the verge of default and bankruptcy, and an "invading" threat....we've had a number of events that have eerie similarities...Malaysia airlines and the Lusitania...a culture of fear based on religious beliefs, where Muslims have become the new "Jews" to fear as taught to us by Uncle Adolph...Isreal and Iran swearing to wipe each other off the face of the earth..krystalnacht and Hebdo, Denmark?...

There seems to have been quite a few inciting incidents that I'm surprised didn't really start the the fire..but we are getting close to a boiling point...it's amazinzg what we haven't learned from history..I'm not sure why we as a civilization are so blind to not only history but logical thinking...but we haven't. I only hope we survive it

Regardless of what will happen..the bear will put its paw down, like it always has.

Threeworldwars.com

Are you intentionally referencing Brzezinski's book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives