Probes arrive to find planet’s dominant species already on track to destroy itself
(Originally published April 17 in “What in the World“) China’s defense minister, Gen. Li Shangfu, met Sunday in Moscow with Russian President Vladimir Putin, pledging greater military cooperation.
The meeting comes as Russia completes training pilots in Belarus how to drop the tactical nuclear bombs Putin said last month he’s sending there. Putin said the weapons would remain under Russian control, not Belorussian. But 10 Belorussian warplanes were modified to carry them.
Putin justified the move as no different than the longstanding U.S. deployment of nuclear weapons in Europe. The U.S. has for decades had B-61 nuclear bombs stored at airbases in Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. Washington stirred controversy last October by saying it would respond to Putin’s growing threat by upgrading them to more accurate B-61-12s, which can be dropped by either bombers or fighter jets.
Li’s Moscow meeting doesn’t bode well for China’s role as peace broker in Russia’s conflict with Ukraine and will fuel speculation in the West that Beijing is ready to throw down with Putin for a final, Apocalyptic death match for control of humanity. It comes less than a month after China’s President Xi Jinping flew to Moscow flogging a peace plan that seems to have evaporated. And while China’s foreign minister had spoken with Ukraine’s, Xi’s promised phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky still hasn’t taken place.
If Xi was preparing to make some grand gesture vis-a-vis world peace, now would be a great time to make it. Otherwise, what little trust China still has internationally may evaporate and it will continue to slip into Washington’s Thucydides trap. China needs to either reach across the table to the West, or scoot at least a little further away from Moscow on the issue of Ukraine. Otherwise, Washington will be waiting for it to prove it right on its alleged plans to send lethal military aid to Russia, at which point the world will be at virtual war.
Washington may already have its smoking gun. The trove of U.S. top-secret documents allegedly leaked online by 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira revealed that U.S. authorities believed in late-February that Beijing had already approved some arms shipments to Russia provided they were disguised as civilian products. Whether this is separate, however, from the DJI drone parts that Politico reported were sold to Russia and that may have ended up being used by Russian troops in Ukraine is unclear. The documents also revealed that U.S. intelligence believed Beijing was waiting only for a significant attack by Ukraine inside Russian territory using U.S. or NATO weaponry to justify shipping weapons to Moscow. Fears of just such a Ukrainian attack are behind Biden’s hesitation to send Kyiv more advanced weaponry, including F-15s, attack drones and long-range missiles.
Just to recap, the Teixeira documents also revealed that the U.S. has been spying on South Korea and other allies, that the U.S. has already inserted troops in Ukraine despite President Joe Biden’s promises not to, and that Ukraine’s air-defense systems are in a dangerously precarious state that could be a prelude to Russia’s air force re-entering the war.
India fears China may be behind what appears to be a military buildup of facilities on Myanmar’s Great Coco island. Great Coco occupies a strategic location between the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea, just north of India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands. An Indian official told The Wall Street Journal that Chinese engineers and military personnel had been spotted on Great Coco.
China has for years been building deep-water ports in Myanmar that would link it to Myanmar’s offshore gas fields and give China a short-cut around the Malacca Strait and the U.S. military presence in the South China Sea, where China has also been fortifying reefs and atolls to assert its territorial claims. Great Coco would join a necklace of ports and bases China is establishing along the maritime trade route between it and Europe, including a purported naval base in Cambodia, a port in Sri Lanka, a naval base in Djibouti and a secret military installation at a port on of its companies operates in Abu Dhabi. Long-reported efforts to build bases in Myanmar, however, have still proved largely unfounded.
U.S. preparations for war continue apace, meanwhile. The U.S. Air Force will pay Raytheon $320 million to produce 1,500 new GBU-53/B “StormBreaker” bombs for its fighter jets. The Stormbreaker, as the name implies, allows fighter jets to strike targets in adverse weather and will be affixed to F-15s and F-35s. The bombs guide themselves to their targets using a combination of GPS, laser, and infrared guidance.
Washington may need to prepare for a much more sophisticated enemy than China, however. The Pentagon official in charge of investigating increasing encounters between U.S. aircraft and UFOs that seem to be able to defy the laws of physics published a paper last month speculating that the UFOs could be alien probes. Sean Kirkpatrick, head of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, and Harvard professor Avi Loeb wrote that the objects could be sent by an alien mothership. Where’s the mothership? The authors speculate that the asteroid ‘Oumuamua (Hawaiian for “scout”), which cruised through our solar system in 2017, may have been one.
If the probes are here to determine strategies for taking over the planet, their first reports after observing human affairs will probably be that they need only bide their time. The humans are on track to destroy themselves without any intervention.