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supersnoop

Colonel
Registered Member
BoraTas said:
Jokes aside one of the main reasons for the formation of Five Eyes was enabling legal spying on members' civilians. Most US and British agencies are banned from spying on their own countries'. With Five Eyes organisation, they can just ask another member to spy on their countries'.
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I always think it's crazy that the "Five Eyes Alliance" is bandied about as the guardians of freedom and democracy, while the terminology originated from what you mentioned, circumvention of laws to allow for spying on each other's citizens
 
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Fatty

Junior Member
Registered Member
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China needs to be careful when working with Russia from now on. Seriously they are so unbelievably compromised by the US. considering this is info on the CMC, they must have gotten the info from a high level Russian official or something.

Notice how literally every leak is some Russian source. Might be worth assuming that everything told to Russia may be compromised at this point.
 
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Biscuits

Colonel
Registered Member
Bellum_Romanum said:
I didn't know Poland was the ECONOMIC ENGINE of Europe? I wasn't aware that it was also Poland that made enormous sacrifice in BLOOD AND TREASURE to DEDEAT NAZI Germany? I wasn't aware that it was Poland that has contributed to the ideological and political foundation to the creation of the European Union?

Why are losers with big mouth countries in Eastern Europe become so demented and unhinged in their estimation or in this case gross overestimation of their non-existent power? Buying military ticket items from South Korea, America does not make Poland a most formidable military power within Europe and bet that as it may as James Carville once pointed out to Bill Clinton (during his 1992 presidential campaign running against a war hero President Bush that just beat the living daylights of Saddam's invading forces in Kuwait) IT'S ABOUT THE ECONOMY STUPID!!
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Well to be fair there's this other country in Europe that also didn't exactly contribute with blood or treasure to stop the nazis and they're still touted as a leader if not THE leader of Europe...
 
baykalov

baykalov

Senior Member
Registered Member
LMAO!

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The last month or so has been an active time in Chinese-western relations. Early March saw President Xi threaten the US with conflict unless Washington stopped trying to ‘suppress’ his country; shortly afterwards he flew to Moscow to reaffirm his ‘no-limits’ friendship with President Putin. Next, Taiwan’s President Tsai travelled to the US to meet with lawmakers there. In response, Beijing ordered massive military incursions into Taiwan’s sovereign waters, announced that it would be able to inspect Taiwanese shipping, and briefly cut off the island using ships and aircraft in what many took to be a dress-rehearsal for a blockade.

Into this maelstrom strode President Macron of France. Whilst returning from a three-day visit to China, he surprised western leaders by announcing that there was a ‘great risk’ of Europe becoming ‘caught up in crises that are not ours’. Rather than offering support to Washington and its allies over the increasingly fraught confrontation with Beijing, Macron proposed that the EU should not take its cue from America regarding conflict over Taiwan. Instead, he called for strategic autonomy for Europe, and for the EU to develop into a ‘third pole’ alongside China and the US.

Macron’s remarks have not gone down well with many in the West. In Germany, the former Chair of the Bundestag Foreign Affairs Committee Norbert Röttgen said that the French President had ‘managed to turn his China trip into a PR coup for Xi and a foreign policy disaster for Europe’, while an editorial in the Wall Street Journal accused him of undermining US and Japanese deterrence against China in the western Pacific.

Soundbites aside, there is a primary flaw to Macron’s vision. Whether he likes it or not, both the EU and France are fundamentally dependent on the US.

Economically, Europe is a major trade partner with America, is part of the dollar system, and receives more foreign direct investment from across the Atlantic than from anywhere else. Militarily, the last century has repeatedly shown how Europe is reliant on the US, right up to today in Ukraine.

What’s more, any move to break EU-US relations would be challenged by many of France’s European partners. Countries like Sweden and Lithuania have suffered from bullying by China, and would be far more inclined to take America’s side in any crisis over Taiwan.

Some have described Macron’s stance as akin to that taken by President Chirac when he opposed the US-led invasion of Iraq. But the situation today is very different to 2003. The China problem has become central to the American political agenda, with many in Washington seeing Beijing’s ambitions as an existential threat to US hegemony – something that was never the case with Saddam.

Taiwan has become a central, totemic part of this struggle. If China manages to forcefully reunite with the island, then this will be detrimental to America’s position in several ways. First, a victory for Beijing will overnight nullify America’s security guarantees. Why would Japan, or South Korea, or Australia, believe that the US could keep them safe if it couldn’t help Taiwan?

Second, the economic impact on western economies would be devastating, not least through the interruption to the semiconductor supply chain. Taiwan is vital to their manufacture, for example being responsible for 90 per cent of advanced microchips. If China – through blockade or invasion – stopped the flow of chips to western nations, then it would devastate their economies.

Perhaps the worry of economic disruption lies behind Macron’s words. By playing nice with Xi, maybe he hopes to keep France and Europe out of whatever conflict lies ahead, and so keep the chips and other raw materials flowing from the Far East.

But this is wishful thinking. If a move is made on Taiwan, then as a minimum the US, Japan, and the UK will sanction China. At that point, Washington will make it clear to the EU that, as an ally, it will be expected to follow suit, just as it did with Russia. In theory, France could stop Brussels from doing so, but it is hard to see America taking this lying down. And in a stand-off between the US and the EU, the Atlanticist states of Northern and Eastern Europe would find it difficult to side with France when they themselves have been so critical of China.

Macron is wrong on two counts. First, in thinking that Europe can stop its reliance on the US, at least in the short term. Many experts from both China and the West think that something might erupt over Taiwan within the next few years, and it is simply not feasible for the EU to divorce itself from America in that timeframe.

The French President’s second error is believing that his European neighbours want to move away from reliance on America in the first place, particularly with China waiting in the wings.

All Macron has done with his remarks is to muddy the waters. For someone so keen to avoid being dragged into conflict over Taiwan, he might have actually made this more likely: after his comments, some in Beijing may miscalculate that Europe is less likely to stand with America.

Rather than talking loftily of strategic autonomy, Macron should instead be focused on how best to prepare his country (and the EU) for the storm that looks increasingly likely to break. As the French President of all people should know, preparing for conflict is always better in the long run than opportunistic appeasement.
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emblem21

Major
Registered Member
Stryker said:
I must say, for all the dumb crap their politicians spew, the American policy makers (the actual behind the scenes people who formulate their policies) are quite aware and pragmatic. Their analysis on China and the distinction that sets it apart from the rest of the developing world is very on point.
I wouldn't be surprised if they weighed all pros and cons over and over and came to the conclusion that China's growth is just very unique and one of those impossible to achieve odds that no other developing country could reach nor any of the developed countries could contain or halt. Thereby they came to the conclusion that only a kinetic war against China with all their vassals in tow could stop it for good.
The date they planned it was probably around 2020 when China was strong enough to be scary but not strong enough to defeat the US in the Pacific. COVID as a bioweapon was designed to weaken China further before they came to deal the final death blow by direct military action. This could very well sync in with the heightened tensions in 2020 when China put all of her theater commands on high alert believing an attack by the US was imminent, requiring Milley to call either Gen Qu or Gen Wei to say that the US wouldn't launch an attack without informing China beforehand.
I think there were 2 reasons why they couldn't go forward with their plans, first and the most obvious one was they didn't count on the virus spreading and becoming a global pandemic requiring not only the US but all of their vassals along with the rest of the world to focus on dealing with it, including financial grants to their populations and purchasing medical equipments from China. Secondly, the test of FOBS that took place around that time which as per their own assessments "managed to circumnavigate the globe before releasing a Hypersonic vehicle which missed its intended targets by only a couple of metres." These events might have deterred them and gave China crucial time to get even more powerful by building even more J-20s and AWACs, sensors, ballistic and hypersonic missiles etc. Either the genie is out of the bag and they have accepted that they might have missed their chance to take China down forever or they will go back to the drawing board and try again a few years later, remains to be seen.
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Must have been an extreme miscalculation in regards to the Covid and there is proof that it may have been the case with Trump warning Israel about a pandemic one month before the crisis began. I believe God decided that the USA got too arrogant and too happy with their attempts to commit such a cowardly attempt at a genocide on all Chinese that he decided to teach the USA a lesson in equality and in the end the USA took the worse of it in every sense of the word and thus along with the trade war they tried to use against Chinese (which failed) and the withdrawal from Afghanistan to focus on China (which also failed) and now there attempts to basically do the same in Ukraine (which failed so much that they now have an adversary that is now trying to get back at them in a manner that is unthinkable before now) basically ensures that if the USA wanted to confront China because this all broke down, well now they are in very deep trouble. In the end something biblical is happening to the USA, which all of these train along with infrastructure disasters happening just this year alone should tip the USA leadership that there ungodly behavior is going to get them killed but given that the collective lot of them are older and less able then a few years ago. I think rather then any calculated action, the USA is mostly on auto pilot, trying anything that works and even this leak which might have been an attempt at disinformation and possibly an attempt to kick start a withdrawal of US aid to Ukraine to focus everything on China (I mean the TikTok saga has been conveniently cycles out of the news lately due to how unpopular the move is for this leak apparently, I mean does anyone notice this) is yet again doing more harm then good given how it’s actually causing friction with Allies at a time when this cannot be afforded. And this is only April, their is still plenty of time for Biden to f@ck things up and with all these disasters in the USA (I mean a fire that killed 18k cows at a dairy plant cannot be good right), somehow they might end up starving themselves to death well before they got anything ready
 
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