World War War III May Already Have Started in the Shadows

[misskit]

Britain's signals intelligence spy chief raised eyebrows this week with warnings that Russia is coordinating both cyberattacks and physical acts of sabotage against the West. There's evidence to back her claims—and the West may be returning the favor. Coming soon after FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that China is targeting American infrastructure, it looks like the world is not only fracturing once again, but that the hostile blocs are engaged in covert warfare.


Rumors of War


"We are increasingly concerned about growing links between the Russian intelligence services and proxy groups to conduct cyberattacks as well as suspected physical surveillance and sabotage operations," Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) Director Anne Keast-Butler told an audience at the United Kingdom government-sponsored CyberUK 2024 conference. "Before, Russia simply created the right environments for these groups to operate, but now they are nurturing and inspiring these non-state cyber actors in some cases seemingly coordinating physical attacks against the West."

Keast-Butler, whose agency is comparable to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), also called out China, Iran, and North Korea as cybersecurity dangers. But naming Russian officials as being behind "physical attacks" raises the stakes. Sadly, her claims are well-founded.


Sabotage, Espionage, and Other Mischief


"A 20-year-old British man has been charged with masterminding an arson plot against a Ukrainian-linked target in London for the benefit of the Russian state," CBS News reported last month. That wasn't an isolated incident.


"In April alone a clutch of alleged pro-Russian saboteurs were detained across the continent," The Economist noted May 12 in describing what it called a "shadow war" between East and West. "Germany arrested two German-Russian dual nationals on suspicion of plotting attacks on American military facilities and other targets on behalf of the GRU, Russia's military intelligence agency. Poland arrested a man who was preparing to pass the GRU information on Rzeszow airport, the most important hub for military aid to Ukraine. Britain charged several men over an earlier arson attack in March on a Ukrainian-owned logistics firm in London whose Spanish depot was also targeted."

The GCHQ chief's warnings coupled with reality on the ground are alarming in themselves. Worse, they come after FBI Director Christopher Wray issued similar cautions in April about China.


"The PRC [People's Republic of China] has made it clear that it considers every sector that makes our society run as fair game in its bid to dominate on the world stage, and that its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic and break America's will to resist," Wray told the Vanderbilt Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats in Nashville, Tennessee.


Wray clarified that, by "infrastructure," he meant "everything from water treatment facilities and energy grids to transportation and information technology."


If that doesn't make you want to check that your pantry is stocked and that the water filter and generator are in working order, nothing will.

A Game Both Sides Can Play


Of course, in war of any sort, the implication is that both sides are involved in conflict. Western intelligence officials are loud in their warnings about foreign threats, but less open regarding just what their own operatives might be doing in Russia, China, and elsewhere. Still, there's evidence that this is hardly a one-sided war, shadowy though it may be.


In June 2022, The New York Times reported that Ukraine's defensive efforts relied heavily on "a stealthy network of commandos and spies rushing to provide weapons, intelligence and training." In addition to Americans, the story noted, "commandos from other NATO countries, including Britain, France, Canada and Lithuania, also have been working inside Ukraine."


American journalist and combat veteran Jack Murphy goes further, claiming the CIA, working through an allied spy service "is responsible for many of the unexplained explosions and other mishaps that have befallen the Russian military industrial complex." The targets include "railway bridges, fuel depots and power plants," he adds.


And if you wonder who blew up Nord Stream 1 and 2, well, so do a lot of people. Russia was initially accused, but it didn't make a lot of sense for the country's forces to destroy pipelines that generated revenue and fed western dependence on Russian natural gas. Since then, Denmark and Sweden have closed inconclusive investigations, journalist Seymour Hersh blamed American officials, and a report by Der Spiegel and The Washington Post placed responsibility on a rogue Ukrainian military officer.


The Wider War Is Here


Taken all together, the warnings from Keast-Butler and Wray, as well as acts of sabotage and arrests of foreign agents suggest that fears of a wider war resulting from Russia's continuing invasion of Ukraine may miss the point; the war could already be here. People looking for tanks and troops are overlooking cyber intrusions, arson, bombings, and other low-level mayhem.

"Russia is definitely at war with the West," Oleksandr Danylyuk of the Royal United Services Institute, a British defense and security think tank, told NBC News earlier this week.


Russian officials seem to embrace that understanding, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov commenting in March that the invasion of Ukraine, originally referred to by the euphemism "special military operation," is now more serious. "It has become a war for us as the collective West more and more directly increases its level of involvement in the conflict," he said.


Fortunately, a shadow war of the sort around us is less destructive than open military conflict, especially when the hostilities involve nuclear-armed powers. It's far better that spies hack the email accounts of government officials, as happened in the case of a Russian cyberattack on Germany's ruling Social Democrats, than that cities burn. But civilians still must live with the consequences of combatants attempting to do each other harm—particularly when the harm is to infrastructure on which regular people rely.


So, welcome to the world of global shadow war. Try to not become collateral damage.

World War War III May Already Have Started—in the Shadows

[taxexile]

The West has yet to grasp we have moved fast into a world crisis that leads to war.

Xi explicitly links Putin’s aggression with China’s opportunity in Taiwan. We must join the dots as well

CHARLES MOORE
17 May 2024 • 6:30pm
Charles Moore



Isolationism is a good instinct but a bad policy. The difference between home and everywhere else is vital to the human psyche and to national existence. Logically, it leads to respect for others: they have their homes, too, so neither should interfere with the other.

Sometimes, though, others do interfere. When that happens, isolationist voices, like those Republican congressmen who held up aid to Ukraine for six months, say: “What’s it got to do with us?” Paradoxically, they make foreign interference more likely. Enemies are interfering now. Western public opinion and many Western governments still won’t face what it means. Rishi Sunak’s remarks this week about the coming insecurities were an attempt, somewhat policy-light, to do so.


Because we have been a global power for 300 years, Britain is well placed to take a large view of these efforts. We know that it is not only a matter of defending our own coast, but of sea-lanes, trade routes, air space, and now of cyber-space; also of diplomatic links, military alliances, common political and legal cultures, shared language and more.

For over a century, we have understood the concept of a “World Crisis” (the title of Churchill’s history of the Great War), and therefore of the need, in extremis, to fight world wars. Though the cost was terrible in both of them, we won.

A similar understanding of global threats led the West to fight the Cold War. Nowadays, as China, Russia and Iran become more menacing, some people say: “Oh, we mustn’t have another Cold War.” They are forgetting that it was so-called not because it was unfriendly (though it was), but because it avoided a hot war of fighting and killing. The Western victory in 1989 therefore seemed less dramatically glorious than in 1918 or 1945, but really it was much better.

Yet in that great year of 1989, a young KGB officer in East Germany, Vladimir Putin, watched with dismay and, it seems, vowed revenge. In China, the ruling Communist Party (CCP), frightened by the world’s new liberty virus, decided to massacre thousands of students in Tiananmen Square. The CCP was determined not to go the way of the Soviet Union.

Xi Jinping’s China has been more successful than Putin’s Russia in imposing its own dictatorial power across the world. His Belt and Road Initiative is a huge strategic network to alter the control of sea and land routes and therefore the flow of natural resources in China’s favour. He has been more comprehensive than Putin in corrupting Western elites, businesses, and universities. But the commonalities between the two are strong. Like Hitler, Putin and Xi have ransacked history to develop their own self-justifying theory of conquest.

Before invading Ukraine in 2022, Putin wrote a long essay (recently regurgitated on television to a credulous Tucker Carlson) asserting that Ukraine had never really existed at all. Xi’s “Thought” claims that Taiwan has always been part of “One China”.

Last year, he pointedly visited China’s National Archives to consult “The Great Qing Dynasty’s Complete Map of All Under Heaven”, which is taken to indicate that Taiwan and various Japanese islands were parts of the Chinese empire. In both countries, patriotism is being, almost literally, weaponised to justify nationalist/imperialist expansion.
(By the way, those Hamas supporters shouting “From the river to the sea” on London streets are attempting a similar historical trick – erasing the rights of another nation, Israel, to claim land as their own.)

The West let this happen. Putin several times tested our resolve to prevent the borders of Europe being changed by force – most notably in Crimea in 2014. He found it wanting and took his chance. He has still not been defeated and has freely rearmed.

Faced by the same sort of freedom-seeking threats as terrified the CCP in Tiananmen Square, Xi Jinping tore up the “One Country, Two Systems” Hong Kong treaty between China and Britain and brought the territory directly under Beijing’s tutelage. We rightly took refugees but wrongly accepted the fait accompli. Even today, some senior British judges sit on the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal though the rule of law has been razed all round them. This week, the security minister, Tom Tugendhat, was bold enough to criticise them for this.

In the case of Iran, particularly during Barack Obama’s US presidency, we were faced with nuclear proliferation. Instead of preventing it, we sought to manage it by a “comprehensive” agreement.

Perhaps, in all these cases, we longed to be considered warm rather than cold. If so, it has not worked. We fell into the 1970s “détente trap” which dangerously weakened US power against the Soviet Union.

We tend to restrain friend, not foe. President Joe Biden has the strange habit of supporting an ally – Ukraine, Israel – and then publicly telling it what it must not do, such as attacking Rafah or firing US-made missiles into Russia. “Red lines” are normally drawn to deter enemies: Biden employs them to deter friends. No wonder that, in Taiwan, mainland Chinese propaganda has a special phrase for the thought that America won’t, whatever it says, defend the place.

Of all the current threats to world peace, the case of Taiwan seems the most remote from British concerns. Some in the United States compound the danger by arguing that the West should divide its responsibilities, with America concentrating on China, leaving Ukraine and even the Middle East to Europe.

Surely the key to these problems is to connect them. This week, I heard the US sinologist Matt Pottinger speak at Policy Exchange in London. A former US Marine, he became deputy national security adviser to Donald Trump and somehow stayed the course. In his new book The Boiling Moat (it is ancient Chinese advice to fortify one’s border cities with “metal ramparts and boiling moats”), Pottinger points out that Xi explicitly links Russia’s aggression with China’s opportunity, assisted by a “weak” America and a “chaotic” Europe.

Xi, he argues, sees himself as the architect of a new order. As the Chinese leader departed Moscow after visiting Putin last year, he was captured on video telling his Russian counterpart: “Right now there are changes, the like of which we haven’t seen for 100 years, and we are the ones driving those changes together.” Xi sees world conquest as destiny.

The only remedies against this are the severe deterrents of overwhelming force and unbearable economic cost. The hard economic facts – hard, it must be emphasised, for both sides – are that 50 per cent of global maritime trade crosses the 100-mile strait between mainland China and Taiwan, so the world economy crashes if China attacks. The key US/Japanese military aim is to make it so difficult for Chinese forces to reach Taiwan’s beaches at all that they won’t dare try.

But the biggest point for the West to grasp is that we have moved fast into a world situation that leads to war. Until we understand that, we cannot prevent it.

The West has yet to grasp we have moved fast into a world crisis that leads to war

[bsnub]

WW3 has been underway for some time now.

[snakeeyes]

The Israeli cnuts has started all these conflicts , the Israeli cnuts have been waging war against the Palestines for 75 years and stole their land Palestine land , fook the Israeli cnuts the end is nigh

[taxexile]

^

they are gods chosen, you silly pikey.

in 100 years time the israelis will still be successful and thriving, unlike the pariah ragheads who will still be milking their imagined victimhood for all it is worth, arguing with anybody and everybody and fighting for scraps of food in a fetid desert wasteland of their own making.

[Seekingasylum]

With over two thousand years of fucking with whoever they met up with during their diaspora, the so-called identifiable ethnicity marking Jews out as a different tribe/species has been diluted to a degree that most Jews are simply a religious sect and nothing else.

The thing is, Israelis now number 10 million, one million of whom are fucking Russian cvunts.

It explains the Palestinian holocaust.

Once the Iranians go nuclear, then we’ll see some justice.

[bsnub]

Palestines

Another clown from Northern Ireland.

The Israeli cnuts has started all these conflicts , the Israeli cnuts have been waging war against the Palestines for 75 years and stole their land Palestine land

You are a complete fucking moron. Gaza was part of Egypt after WW2 until they decided to revoke passports and build a wall. Palestine has never existed as a nation, and the land belonged to the Jews hundreds of years before islam even existed.

It explains the Palestinian holocaust.

Another bottom feeder from North Ireland. Terrorists supporting terrorists. Go figure. There is no Holocaust you sick fucking lair.

Once the Iranians go nuclear, then we’ll see some justice.

What a fucking lowlife scumbag.

[taxexile]

its no good trying to argue with pikeys, in their blinkered world they are always right. better to leave them alone to drink their guinness and fiddle with their choirboys.

[malmomike77]

WW3 has been underway for some time now.

gizza clue?

[david44]

It almost started in my house when I suggested we have nightime air at 25 not 16 degrees, if I wanted to freeze I'd live in an igloo with Nell!

[malmomike77]

It almost started in my house when I suggested we have nightime air at 25 not 16 degrees, if I wanted to freeze I'd live in an igloo with Nell!

try stopping all Lakorn

[david44]

try stopping all Lakorn

Never indulge I leave all soapy matters to her indoors while I do serious work arguing with strangers on TD and herding the menagerie, if only I could teach a mongoose to open beer?

[bsnub]

I suggested we have nightime air at 25 not 16 degrees, if I wanted to freeze I'd live in an igloo with Nell!

Good lord, that is hot for sleeping. I side with your wife here, 16 degrees for me.

[Seekingasylum]

Israel is now the pariah state. The civilised world now knows they’re fucking nazi clones smelted in the furnace of their bigotry and prejudice.
Fuck ‘em.

[bsnub]

The civilised world now knows they’re fucking nazi clones smelted in the furnace of their bigotry and prejudice.
Fuck ‘em.

Only propagandized marxist lowlifes like you swallow that utter horseshit. You are a fucking buffoon.