Russia has warned the U.S. that the Russian and Syrian militaries are prepared to launch an offensive on the U.S.-controlled Al-Tanf military base in Syria.

From MPN News:

DAMASCUS, SYRIA — As things in Syria seem poised to heat up dramatically in the coming weeks, CNN has reported that Russia has warned the U.S. that the Russian and Syrian militaries are prepared to launch an offensive on the Al-Tanf military base in Syria, an installation that has been controlled by the U.S. military since 2016.

According to U.S. defense officials who spoke to CNN, Russia has warned the U.S. military twice within the last week alone that its forces, as well as those of the Syrian military, are poised to launch an attack on the base’s “deconfliction zone.” The deconfliction zone is a 34-mile (55-kilometer) radius around the base that the U.S. has unilaterally enforced even though it is not internationally recognized. In the past, the U.S. has attacked the Syrian military and allied forces that have approached the deconfliction zone, which the U.S. later justified as an act of “self-defense.“

Quotes from defense officials included in CNN’s report make it clear that such claims of “self-defense” would likely be used again if the U.S.’ presence in al-Tanf or the deconfliction zone is challenged. One official told CNN that “we have absolutely advised them [Russia] to stay out of al-Tanf. We are postured to respond,” while another stated that “if attacked, the United States will not hesitate to use necessary and proportionate force to defend U.S., coalition, or partner forces.”

It is these “partner forces” that would be the focus of a future Syrian-Russian military campaign in the area, as the recent warnings from the Russian military regarding a potential future offensive centered around concerns that “militants,” including terrorists, are present throughout the area protected by the U.S. Such charges are not new as, earlier this year, Russian Deputy Minister of Defense Alexander Fomin accused the U.S. of willingly creating a “reserve for terrorists” in the area surrounding al-Tanf.

However, the U.S. has long maintained that it uses the site to train “partner forces” that are engaged in fighting Daesh (ISIS) terrorists. The name of the rebel militia at the base is Maghaweir Al-Thawra, formerly the New Syrian Army, which is funded and equipped by the CIA and trained by U.S Special Operations Forces for military operations in the Deir Ez-Zor province. That province is largely occupied by the other U.S. military proxy, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

Though the U.S.-trained “partner forces” in al-Tanf were originally trained to counter Daesh, this objective has since shifted to one of countering Iran’s military presence within Syria, as Iranian military officials have acted as advisors to the Syrian military over the course of the conflict…

Continue reading at MPN News…

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From the Economic Times:

MOSCOW: President Vladimir Putin on Thursday promised to strengthen the army and supply it with new generation weapons, as he travelled to watch Russia’s biggest war games since the fall of the Soviet Union.

The Vostok-2018 (East-2018) drills taking place in eastern Siberia close to the border with China involve 300,000 Russian troops as well as joint exercises with the Chinese army.

“This is the first time our army and fleet have undergone such a difficult and large-scale test,” Putin said in comments published on the Kremlin website…

Continue reading at the Economic Times…

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From the Military Times:

President Donald Trump said the U.S. is considering a permanent military presence in Poland, something the Eastern European country has sought for more than a decade.

Speaking to reporters at the White House after he met with Polish President Andrzej Duda, Trump said, “Poland is willing to make a very major contribution to the United States to come in and have a presence in Poland. If they’re willing to do that, it’s something we will certainly talk about.”

Poland has openly courted a permanent U.S. present since President George W. Bush was in office, and that administration had considered the possibility of using one of Poland’s military bases as part of its missile defense system and locating ground-based interceptors there. Those talks eventually fell through.

Continue reading at the Military Times…

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RUSSIA conducted a massive nuclear weapons test yesterday, involving both naval and air forces at both ends of the country in a dramatic warning to potential rivals, as tensions with the West remain high.

The tests were conducted by ships from Russia’s North and Pacific fleets, as well as the long-range bombers from the Russian Air Force.

Four different targets were hit in Russia and neighbouring Kazakhstan, where the Russian military maintains a major presence.

Ballistic missiles were fired from nuclear submarines in both the Barents Sea, to the north of Russia, and the Sea of Okhotsk in the Pacific.

Cruise missiles were also tested by long-range strategic bombers.

The aircraft deployed included Tu-95MS, Tu-22M3 and Tu-160 bombers, all of which came into service during the Soviet era…

Continue reading at Express…

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From Bill Bonner, Editor, Bill Bonner’s Diary:

WATERFORD, IRELAND – Alleluia!

We join with all Americans today in breathing a sigh of relief; justice is being done.

The bad guys are being hunted down. Our pristine democracy – in its pure white, unblemished, unsullied, and unbelievable gown – is being protected.

Finally, at least one of our foreign enemies has been nabbed by the gendarmes and will soon be railroaded by the courts; others will surely follow.

The perp is Russian national Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova. The feds claim she is responsible for overseeing the funds for a Russian conspiracy to meddle in U.S. elections.

And now, too, Donald Trump and Mike Pence are after the Chinese, who – as we just learned last week – are also trying to subvert the will and wisdom of the American people.

More on both of those stories in a minute…

Chinese Meddling

We’re back in Ireland after a week in Bermuda. It wasn’t a vacation. Instead, we got together with old friends… and the whole team of researchers and analysts who work with our Legacy Research Group.

We also met TV personalities Glenn Beck and John Stossel, and listened to two days of speeches and panel discussions.

We gave you a version of our speech on Friday, as we had prepared it. But as we listened to the other speakers, we revised and rewrote… to address the issues raised by other speakers.

And as we revised, we began to see more clearly how the pieces fit together. More about that tomorrow… along with our takeaways on cryptocurrencies, pot stocks, gold, commodities, and much more…

But today, we begin the week by looking at the latest news. From Reuters:

U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday accused China of seeking to meddle in the Nov. 6 U.S. congressional elections, saying Beijing did not want his Republican Party to do well because of his pugnacious stance on trade.

Yes, America’s president says China’s got it in for him. No details were offered, however.

We were left to wonder how the Chinese might meddle… Would they send out fake news? Or true stories?

Or was the whole “Chinese meddling” idea a form of fake news itself, intended to… well… meddle with the next election results?

The whole idea of interfering with the U.S. elections takes our breath away. Every clown on the planet interferes. One writes a letter to the editor. Another posts something silly on the internet. A third makes a campaign contribution.

Fantasy, prevarication, and confusion – that’s what elections are all about!

And while the experts have been unable to find any traces of Chinese meddling, in the case of Russian meddling, they say they have more smoking guns than at the Battle of Gettysburg.

Information Warfare

Millions of dollars have been spent on the Russian meddling meme. Millions of hours of research, investigation, and testimony… and billions of hours of the public’s most limited resource – its time – have been invested in the issue.

And on Friday, the federales finally collared a Russian woman, a U.S. resident – the above-mentioned Khusyaynova. The papers summarized the charges against her as – are you ready for this? – “information warfare.”

What exactly is information warfare? A capital crime? A misdemeanor?

Is it when you drop propaganda from bombers? Or is it like Radio Free Europe, where you send messages to citizens of other countries to try to give them a second opinion?

Frankly, we didn’t know there was a law against it. Au contraire, we thought it was protected by the First Amendment.

Nevertheless, Reuters reports that the G-men grabbed the desperado and are preparing to perp-walk her right to jail:

Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova, 44, became the first person charged with a crime for attempting to interfere in the 2018 U.S. elections, according to a government official with knowledge of the investigation.

Biggest Interferer

Maybe the crime busters got the wrong person. As near as we can tell, the biggest interferer – apart from the candidates and the political parties themselves – is casino mogul and Israeli citizen Sheldon Adelson.

The Huffington Post put Adelson’s spending on the 2012 race at $150 million. And Bloomberg reports that Adelson is responsible for donating more than $100 million to this year’s midterms alone.

The money keeps flowing… from the poor punters putting their quarters in Adelson’s Las Vegas slot machines to the rich politicos inside the Beltway.

Compared to the money Adelson spends, the Russkies’ budget (reported to be $10 million for all of 2018) is pathetic.

And the papers reported over the weekend that between them, Republicans and Democrats have on-hand some $623 million more to spend on this year’s midterm races – every penny fully intending to upset the results.

It was as if the Internal Revenue Service announced a crackdown on Wall Street tax evasion… and arrested a kid with a lemonade stand on nearby Beaver Street just to let everyone know it was serious.

And here, we stand up in support of what is right, fair, and virtuous. That is, we stand with the meddlers. If Adelson and other meddlers want to spend their money getting some pliant jackass elected – well, that’s the American way!

Nom de Plume

But the Russians are wasting their money. According to the press reports, they used “fake personas on social media to stoke arguments about race and other contentious issues.”

Whoa!

But wait… When did it become a crime to use a nom de plume? And how is stirring up controversy different from what shock jocks, provocateurs, telephone callers, presidential candidates, and practically everyone else does?

But let’s look more closely… Maybe we’ll see what this is all about.

More from Reuters:

Using social media and other avenues, the Russians are waging “information warfare against the United States,” to sow distrust in the political system, according to the complaint…

The complaint included Facebook and Twitter posts that were both critical of Republicans and supportive of President Donald Trump. One post in March, for example, suggested Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for his negotiations with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un aimed at denuclearization.

Well… whoa, again! Are they serious about this? A Nobel Peace Prize for The Donald may be absurd. But it’s hardly illegal.

As for spreading distrust, even we, in our own small way here at the Diary, try to do it every day. That is, we try to connect the dots, revealing the public spectacle of D.C. and Wall Street; readers can draw their own conclusions.

But we’re no match for the president. He’s the master of sowing discord and distrust. Other members of Congress aren’t bad, either.

Lyin’ Ted? Pocahontas?

Two years ago, “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz called Trump a “sniveling coward.” Now, they’re campaigning together.

And what about Pocahontas? Elizabeth Warren says she took a DNA test to “restore trust in government.”

Neither the Russians nor the Chinese will do better than that.

Regards,

Bill

Crux note: Bill Bonner is the author of The Bill Bonner Letter – a monthly newsletter. To learn more about The Bill Bonner Letter, and to get access to Bill’s newest research,  go right here.

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By Rikard Jozwiak at Radio Free Europe:

BRUSSELS – NATO has launched its largest military exercise since the collapse of the Soviet Union, mustering tens of thousands of troops in what the head of the Western alliance called a “strong display” of its capability, unity, and resolve at a time of growing danger in Europe.

The main phase of the exercise Trident Juncture – involving military forces from all 29 NATO allies, plus partners Finland and Sweden, and stretching from the North Atlantic to the Baltic Sea – began in Norway on October 25 and was scheduled to run for two weeks.

“This is an important day because Trident Juncture is NATO’s biggest exercise since the end of the Cold War,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said ahead of the drills.

The exercise is drawing criticism from Moscow amid persistent tension between NATO and Russia, which seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and backs separatists in an ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine but accuses the alliance of provocative behavior near its borders.

Another source of discord is what NATO says is Russia’s deployment of a missile that violates a key U.S.-Russian nuclear arms treaty and could potentially be used to target alliance members in Europe.

“Trident Juncture sends a clear message to our nations and to any potential adversary: NATO does not seek confrontation, but we stand ready to defend all allies against any threat,” Stoltenberg told a news conference on October 24.

The exercise “is a strong display of our capabilities and our resolve to work together,” he said.

Without mentioning Russia by name, he said that “Europe’s security environment has significantly deteriorated” in recent years and that NATO has responded with the biggest adaptation of our collective defense since the end of the Cold War. Trident Juncture demonstrates that adaptation.”

“Trident Juncture will include around 65 ships, 250 aircraft, 10,000 vehicles, and 50,000 personnel,” Stoltenberg said of the exercise, which will run in two phases.

“It is ambitious and it is demanding,” he said.

The live-field exercise is set to run from from October 25 to November 7, while a command post exercise is to follow between November 14-23.

Moscow has frequently said that it views NATO’s enlargement to include former Warsaw Pact countries and the Baltic states since the 1991 Soviet collapse as provocative, and Russia and NATO have repeatedly accused each other of aggressive action repeatedly in recent years.

Russia held large military exercises called Zapad-2017 (West-2017) in September 2017 in its western regions jointly with Belarus, which also borders several NATO countries, and last month conducted massive drills across its central and eastern regions.

The Defense Ministry said the weeklong Vostok-2018 (East-2018) war games involved some 300,000 personnel – twice as many as the biggest Soviet maneuvers of the Cold War era.

Speaking at a joint panel of the Russian and Belarusian defense ministries in Minsk on October 24, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that “the scale of [NATO] operational and combat training near our borders is expanding, its intensity is growing. The bloc’s member states are practicing the objectives of conducting offensive combat actions.”

Despite criticizing the NATO exercise, Russia has accepted an invitation to send observers to Norway, a move that Stoltenberg welcomed in the name of transparency.

“As long as they behave professionally and avoid dangerous situations and behavior, I don’t think that’s a problem at all that they monitor the exercise,” the NATO chief said.

Describing the exercise, Stoltenberg said the personnel will be split into “South Forces” and “North Forces” that will “take turns playing the role of the fictitious aggressor and the NATO defending forces. The exercise will test our readiness to restore the sovereignty of an ally – in this case Norway – after an act of armed aggression.

“This scenario is fictitious but the lessons we learn will be real,” he said.

Norway shares a short border with Russia in the Arctic.

Copyright (c) 2018. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.

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From CNBC:

Central banks around the world have upped their spending on gold to the highest level in almost three years, according to the World Gold Council (WGC).

More than 148 metric tons of gold were bought by the national banks in the three months to the end of September, a rise of 22 percent on the same period last year.

Using the current spot price of $1,223 per troy ounce, the gold purchases by the banks added up to a $5.82 billion spending splurge on the precious metal.

Russia’s central bank led the buying, purchasing more than 92 tons of gold. This marked the country’s biggest quarterly net purchase on records that stretch back to 1993.

In May this year, the Russian central bank’s First Deputy Governor Dmitry Tulin told lawmakers in the lower house of parliament that gold was “a 100 percent guarantee from legal and political risks”…

Continue reading at CNBC…

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From Daniel McAdams and the Ron Paul Institute:

Why does it seem like each time Presidents Trump and Putin look like they might start communicating there is a “crisis” that threatens war? Are the neocons manipulating things? The latest dust-up between Ukrainian gunships and the Russian military in the Kerch Strait comes just as Trump and Putin are set to meet on the sidelines of the upcoming G-20 Summit meeting. Coincidence? Tune in to today’s Liberty Report:

Reprinted with permission.

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From The Crux editorial staff:

Secretary of Defense James Mattis resigned Thursday, December 20, after President Donald Trump announced his plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria.

Mattis is the 35th notable resignation or termination since Trump took office in 2017.

Read his resignation letter below:

Dear Mr. President:

I have been privileged to serve as our country’s 26th Secretary of Defense which has allowed me to serve alongside our men and women of the Department in defense of our citizens and our ideals.

I am proud of the progress that has been made over the past two years on some of the key goals articulated in our National Defense Strategy: putting the Department on a more sound budgetary footing, improving readiness and lethality in our forces, and reforming the Department’s business practices for greater performance. Our troops continue to provide the capabilities needed to prevail in conflict and sustain strong U.S. global influence.

One core belief I have always held is that our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships. While the US remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies. Like you, I have said from the beginning that the armed forces of the United States should not be the policeman of the world. Instead, we must use all tools of American power to provide for the common defense, including providing effective leadership to our alliances. NATO’s 29 democracies demonstrated that strength in their commitment to fighting alongside us following the 9-11 attack on America. The Defeat-ISIS coalition of 74 nations is further proof.

Similarly, I believe we must be resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours. It is clear that China and Russia, for example, want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model – gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions – to promote their own interests at the expense of their neighbors, America and our allies. That is why we must use all the tools of American power to provide for the common defense.

My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues. We must do everything possible to advance an international order that is most conducive to our security, prosperity, and values, and we are strengthened in this effort by the solidarity of our alliances.

Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position. The end date for my tenure is February 28, 2019, a date that should allow sufficient time for a successor to be nominated and confirmed as well as to make sure the Department’s interests are properly articulated and protected at upcoming events to include Congressional posture hearings and the NATO Defense Ministerial meeting in February. Further, that a full transition to a new Secretary of Defense occurs well in advance of the transition of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in September in order to ensure stability Within the Department.

I pledge my full effort to a smooth transition that ensures the needs and interests of the 2.15 million Service Members and 732,079 DoD civilians receive undistracted attention of the Department at all times so that they can fulfill their critical, round-the-clock mission to protect the American people.

I very much appreciate this opportunity to serve the nation and our men and women in uniform.

James N. Mattis

From Quartz:

Russia conducted a hypersonic weapons test today, and Vladimir Putin is clearly excited about it. Speaking from a defense ministry control room after watching a live feed of the demonstration, the Russian president boasted to his military leaders that the intercontinental, nuclear-capable weapon is “invulnerable to intercept by any existing and prospective missile defense means of the potential adversary.”

What’s more, the Avangard system, as it’s called, will be deployed to Russia’s armed forces in 2019. “It’s a big moment in the life of the armed forces and in the life of the country. Russia has obtained a new type of strategic weapon,” Putin said.

Hypersonic weapons are highly maneuverable, allowing them to easily evade missile defense systems. US military leaders have conceded the point. In late March, John Hyten, commander of US Strategic Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “We don’t have any defense that could deny the employment of such a weapon against us.”

Continue reading at Quartz…

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