➡ Russia has a technological military advantage over the U.S. with its hypersonic missiles. A summit was held in Anchorage, Alaska, on the 80th anniversary of the end of the Pacific War, a date deliberately chosen by Russia. The summit focused on economics and other issues, not the war in Ukraine. Despite Ukraine’s recent large drone attack, Russia is winning on the battlefield and is not expected to concede any of their goals to the U.S.

➡ The article discusses the current state of military power, focusing on the United States, Europe, and Russia. It highlights that despite the US’s reputation for military supremacy, recent events have exposed its limitations, including a lack of sufficient weaponry and the inability to keep up with the pace of modern warfare. The article also mentions the growing alliance between China and Russia, which poses a significant challenge to the US. Lastly, it touches on the potential for diplomacy to play a larger role in future conflicts due to these military limitations.

➡ Russia is not focused on gaining land in Ukraine, but rather on weakening Ukraine and NATO through a war of attrition. The future of NATO is uncertain, with some believing it may no longer be relevant.

Hello, my name is Edmond demarche. I’m the editor of the Trends Journal. I’m here with Larry Johnson. He’s the former CIA analyst and head author at Sonar21. Larry, thank you for joining me on such a busy day. Yeah. In geopolitics. I appreciate you joining, joining the Trend Journal. Nothing, nothing going on. You know, the world’s bored. I, you know, I had some questions I wanted to ask you right off the bat, but I came across this on, on X and I wanted to hear your opinion. This is Mark Halpert. Today this question, serious question. What’s the percent chance that the United States arrests Putin today? That’s what I’m looking for.

Dan. Will the United States what’s the percent chance they arrest him as a war criminal? Zero, Sean. Zero. Okay, when it happens, we’ll, we’ll post this moment and I’ll just say before you take your questions we two way tonight is, is on the 2028. Do you do disagree? Do you disagree? Oh, no, I think they’re going to arrest him. I think they’re going to arrest, I think that’s the whole thing is this is to trick him to come into the US and going to arrest him. He’s a war criminal. That he is. But yeah, and so let’s see.

But we may do a. So, so he was serious. He thought that Putin’s going to be arrested in Alaska. What would you say the probability of Putin being arrested in Alaska is? Zero. And Alpern’s a moron. You know, you want to talk about war criminals, Donald Trump aiding and facilitating the deaths of over 60,000 Palestinian civilians, that’s a war crime. You know, Vladimir Putin’s not a war criminal. That’s outrageous. But this is the problem. Do you know where this all started, this hatred of Putin? Because finally I dug into it. I went back using all the various AI search engines and I’d ask the question, what was the press coverage of Vladimir Putin in 1999? What was it in 2000? What was it in 2001? What was it in 2002? It changed all those years.

Positive, generally positive, upbeat. Hey, Putin’s a good guy. It changed in March of 2003. Can you guess why in March 2003? I’ll give you, give you a hint. Mission accomplished. Okay. Putin opposed the invasion of Iraq. And because Putin opposed the evasion of Iraq, that’s when the whole media covered. That’s when the CIA unleashed this propaganda campaign portraying Putin as a murderer, as a criminal, as a tyrant, as, as A, you know, all this crap, and it’s been unrelenting since then. But when you step back and look at it objectively, you know, who is it that helped fund isis? Russia or the United States? That would be the United States, the very terrorists we claimed that we were fighting.

Yet from 1999 on, we funded elements of Al Qaeda who had been the, that we’d funded in Afghanistan so they’d carry out a terrorist war in Russia. So what I’m saying is this, there’s this entire propaganda infrastructure that has been directed at the American public to poison the minds, to portray Vladimir Putin as the ultimate evil and that there’s no way we can talk to him. Absolutely no way. Well, you know, why the United States wouldn’t arrest Putin under an ICC warrant? Because the United States itself does not recognize the icc. In fact, we’ve got arrest warrants out for members of the icc.

I mean, I mean, damn, how can Halperin be so ignorant and imbecile? You know, he pretends to be a smart guy. It’s just, you know, these are not, you know, these are not hidden behind secret CIA codes and written in Arabic or Sanskrit. You know, this, this is readily available to people if they just do a little reading. That’s. Speaking of reading, I’m going to go to something you wrote in your Last post on Sonar21. You wrote, if Trump ends the meeting with Putin and walks away, Putin and his delegation will have no doubts that the diplomatic opening to the US Is dead.

I hope that does not happen. I suspect that President Trump is looking forward to holding a press conference accompanied by Putin. There will be questions from the US and you mentioned the time. So do you think this is a make or break moment in your opinion? Do you think that this is something that’s. I know, I think, I think this thing was pre cooked, pre packaged. I think we’ve been, I think Trump is engaged in a master class of deception and misdirection. Over the course of the last four weeks, I don’t know exactly at what point private talks between State Department with Marco Rubio and the Russian Foreign Ministry where it actually started, but it’s been ongoing.

And, you know, a lot of this has been, I would call theater to distract the neocons and the deep state where they really thought Trump was going to really crack down on Russia. They got 50 days. Remember the 50 day limit? Then like five days later, Trump changed it to 10 days. Well, what happened? I think one of the reasons that that was motivated was a combination of Progress that were actually being made in the private talks as well as intel showing that the Russians were making very rapid advances against the Ukrainian positions in the western part of Donetsk.

So then Trump, remember he set a deadline, you know, last Friday, bone crushing sanctions, severe punishment for Russia. What happened? Nothing. Trump didn’t do it. The only thing he did was the day before. While Witkoff is in Russia meeting in Moscow, meeting with Putin, Trump signs an executive order declaring Russia is a national security threat. And because it’s a national security threat, therefore we got a levy tariffs on India. What you don’t do, you don’t do anything to Russia, but you levy tariffs on India. And all that did was piss off the Indians big time to the point that they, they canceled a purchase of F35s.

Hey, remember those jets we’re going to buy from you? Screw you, keep them. They canceled another aircraft series of multi million dollar aircraft purchase. They canceled a meeting with Pete Hegseth with their defense Minister and with the F35. Sorry to get in here, but I’m going to forget with F35s. Do you think it had something to do with that dog fight that they had with Pakistan when the Chinese jets performed better than the US jets according to analysis. Potentially. But, but you know, they took up, took, you know, this was their opportunity to punch back. Yeah.

And then Modi and I said, tongue in cheek, this was actually Trump’s secret plan to win the Nobel Peace Prize because of his action against India. And, you know, using Russia’s excuse, punishing India with terrorists. India’s motive means, hey, I’m going, I’m going to China to meet with Xi Jinping and we’re going to start opening flights between our two countries. Hey, Trump brought India and China closer together. If that doesn’t merit a Nobel Peace Prize, I don’t know what does. So we Trump’s policy and his diplomacy towards Russia has been very strange, or at least on the surface.

It’s been one minute. When he first started his term, he really seemed like he was icing Zelensky out. He had that one Oval Office meeting with Zelensky and that was a disaster in the eyes of pro Ukraine hawks in Washington. Even Lindsey Graham said something like, hey, you need to show the President some respect. Then it seemed like he did a complete 180 and he started to accuse Putin of being the aggressor. And just before this meeting that he’s having now in Alaska, he repositioned nuclear subs. He was talking to, as you mentioned, about the secondary Sanctions.

Well, let’s, let’s halt you there. Yeah, he said he repositioned nuclear subs. The reality, they’re already there. I mean, he was, that was just bombasted and that was an empty threat because the subs are always there. And Russia, and that’s why Russia didn’t react. They go, you know, that’s like saying, watch out, Eddie, tomorrow you’re going to see this yellow orange thing come up in the east. Don’t be afraid, though. And you’re going, the sun. Yeah, I know. It comes up every day. What are the. So everyone, everyone’s watching this meeting with Trump and Putin and they’re reading everything.

If you, if you’re checking out social media, I don’t know if you’re gauging it right now or in the past 20 minutes and they’re saying, oh, Trump was applauding Putin on the red carpet. One thing I saw that I thought was interesting was this. I’d like to hear your opinion on Trump’s decision or someone’s decision to do this while Trump’s walking with Putin and on the right department. So they did a B2 bomber flyby while they’re walking past us F22s on the tarmac. Is that, what is that some kind of us? Yeah, yeah, we’re reflecting our muscles.

And all Putin was going to say was, hey, have you seen that new nuclear powered cruise missile we just launched this week that stays aloft for months and carries a nuclear warhead? Pretty cool, huh? Oh, and did you see the directed energy weapon that we attached to a drone that’s now shooting drones out with lasers last week? So, you know, Putin, Putin walks as a man who has a decided technological military advantage over the United States because Russia right now has fielded four variants of a hypersonic missile, not a ballistic missile, a missile that travels in excess of Mach 6 and you can maneuver.

The United States reportedly has one. They claim it’s been tested, but I’ve actually, I know one of the individuals involved in the management of that program and he’s not quite as ebullient in his calculations about how well it’s doing. So this is what we saw there though, was this meeting. We’re led to believe that as a result of Witkoff meeting last Thursday that the decided, oh, let’s, let’s pull together a summit and we’ll have to figure out where we’re going to do it. And they didn’t decide until Monday it was going to be Anchorage, Alaska. Eddie, why do you think they picked the 15th of August to hold this summit, have no idea.

15 of August is the 80th anniversary of the end of the war in the Pacific. On August 6, 1945, or August 7, Russia invaded Manchuria, began destroying the Japanese army. And it was after that, because the Japanese had been counting on Russia to intercede, to come up with a negotiated settlement to the war, when they saw that the then Soviet Union had intervened on the side of the United States, that’s what was going to lead. That’s what led to the surrender, not the nuclear bombs. You’ve got Douglas MacArthur, Dwight David Eisenhower, Hap Arnold and even Curtis LeMay all were on record at the time saying the Japanese would have surrendered without the atomic bombs because of the Russian intervention.

So this was, this date was not arbitrary. They didn’t just get lucky. It was deliberately selected by the Russians. And this date was selected well in advance, I suspect. Actually, Witkoff’s meeting with Putin was not to persuade him to have this meeting, but actually to firm up details about this meeting. Because when you look at the compositions of the two delegations, there’s not a single person on either delegation that’s competent to discuss the war in Ukraine, the United States. You know, nobody from Department of Defense or the Joint Chiefs. The only one the Russians have is their Minister of Defense, Beluosov.

But again, he’s a technocrat. He knows how to. How to make the planes and trains run on time, but he has. Knows nothing of strategy, General Staff doctrine, nothing of the logistics of the war on the ground. So this is all this is all about economics and some other issues. This really has little to do with Ukraine. Sergey Lavrov, the head diplomat from Russia, arrived at the talks wearing a CCC sweatshirt. He was trolling. It was even a diplomat of that stature, he would troll like that. Seems, you know, is that not beneath him? Oh, no, he’s got a great sense of humor.

You know, you may or may not be aware, I met with him along with Judge Napolitano, Mario Nefall and me. So just the three of us with Mr. Lavrov, that was in March, and then I was with him again on stage in June. So. Love Ross. Got a great sense of humor. And, and, and, you know, he reads. He reads and follows the Western press. He knows what’s going to jerk their chain. Oh, my God. But, you know, the whole war, the whole Ukraine war, we were told that you don’t want to approach the table from.

You want to approach the table from a position of power, and that was what we’ve heard the entire time. We’re going to finally talk with Putin. Ukraine’s going to talk with Putin when they’re in the driver’s seat, when they could impose their own will on the Russians. That didn’t happen. Ukraine launched a very large drone attack recently. I think it was last night or the other night. But Russia’s winning on the battlefield, according to a lot of analysis. So when nothing’s really changed, why would Russia ever concede any of their goals to the US Why would they give up anything? Well, they’re not.

They’re not going to concede anything. So Russia has been very consistent starting in June 14th of 2024 and laying out what its current demands are. Now, these demands have evolved. You know, in 2022, in March, the Ukrainians, actually the Russians, launched the special military operation to pressure Ukraine to come to the negotiating table. They did. And Lavrov told me in that meeting that we had in March that the initial document that Russia was negotiating on had been brought to the table by Ukraine, not by Russia. And Russia at the time was willing to sign off on an agreement that would have left the Donbas, Donetsk and Luhansk, those two oblasts still under the control of the Ukrainian government.

United States and Britain told Zelensky, hell no, back out of the deal, cancel it, walk away. Zelensky did. And so then the Russians turned to their second, the fallback strategy. And that entailed holding elections in September that gave the four oblasts, donets, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, the opportunity to choose whether or not they wanted to be part of Russia again. They all voted yes, over 80%, overwhelming majorities. So that made those four, plus Crimea now officially part of Russia. So now this is Russian territory. And there have been some crazy reports in the west that, suggesting that Russia might give up some of those Russia.

Putin could no more negotiate away Kherson or Zaporizhzhia than Donald Trump could go to Putin and say, hey, you know what? I’m gonna. How about we give you back Alaska? Couldn’t happen. Because Alaska is part, is constitutionally part of the United States. And you can’t remove it. He can’t succeed it. And the same, same applies there. So Russia, right now, they’re negotiating from a position of strength. They’ve. They’ve then expanded the demands. The last message to the Ukrainians was, come to the table. Here’s the current deal. Withdraw your forces from our territory. Those five oblasts that we talked former oblasts Get NATO the hell out of your country, sit down and do an election, and then we’ll talk and we’ll.

We’ll settle this peacefully. Otherwise, if you don’t do that, then wherever Russian soldiers are, we will take that territory, too. And they’re already in Dnipropetrovsk, which is just to the west of Donetsk and just to the north of Zaporizhzhia. They’re in Sumy, which is north of Dnipropetrovsk. They’re in Kharkiv, and Russia is fully prepared. They would keep thinking, oh, their economies in the toilet. Oh, they’re losing too many men. No, they’re not. This is all Western propaganda. And because, unfortunately, even our intelligence agencies believe it, they’re miscalculating Russia’s ability to fight this thing to the end.

And so either the United States comes in and says, okay, yeah, Russia will work with you on those terms. Because, you know, if Trump comes to Putin, the dances, you got to talk to Ukraine, and Putin’s going to say, donnie, what are you talking about, buddy? We’ve talked to him three times in the last three months. We’ve already, we got open negotiations with them. We’re talking. They just don’t like what we’re saying. But, you know, we’ve asked them to come back with some proposals, and they refuse. So maybe if you’ve got any influence with them, encourage them to get back.

Says, we can negotiate an end to this. So, you know, Putin’s. Putin will be cool. He’ll play the high road. And all this expectation being pumped out in Western media that, oh, there’s going to be some movement, you know, Putin better heal because he doesn’t have options. Trump’s. It’s all good. Lord, if Trump, if everything worked out well during this meeting today, and Putin and Trump see eye to eye, and they. They strike this agreement, or at least the framework of an agreement. Yeah. And so the eu or at least the three main countries out of Europe, you have the uk France and Germany, they issued a statement over the weekend saying that there will be no territory swaps without Ukraine’s input.

And Zelensky agreed with that, and he said they’re not parting with any territory. Yeah. So if. Let’s say this is. Let’s say this goes really well today with Trump and Putin, how big of a hurdle is that for this to actually be implemented? Given that Germany and these countries and Zelinsky don’t seem on board to give up, to give any land, what are they going to do? About it. Would they, would they keep pumping Ukraine with their own funding? Could they even do they don’t, they don’t they give them money, they don’t have weapons to give them.

I mean, you know, the deal right now is, oh, I mean, name me one weapon system that Europe could give Ukraine that’s going to make a difference on the battlefield. There’s not, not a single one that, I mean, that’s, that’s the point here. That’s the problem they face is that Europe, they’re like, where do you live out of, you’re out in California, right? Yeah, I’m in Los Angeles. Okay, so I’m in Florida. Now, in contrast to Los Angeles, in Florida, one of the requirements, apart from having to get shirts like this when you move into the state is, is that they issue these little bitty yappy dogs and only grown men are allowed to walk those dogs.

That’s Europe. Europe are these inconsequential little dogs with no teeth, lots of noise, some bark, no bite. Because they could issue threats all day long. What, what are they going to do? They, they don’t have. Their industries are stalled. In fact, Germany is de industrializing as we speak. Their economies are growing at like 0.5% if that right now. Their armies are shrinking. They don’t have ample weapons packages. In fact, they got to buy some stuff from the United States and you know, they’re going to buy Patriot missile batteries. Yes, great, man, we’ll sell those to you.

They’ll be ready in seven years. And what do they produce, like 11 of them each year or something? Well, yeah, so the launchers, I think it’s like 10 to, between 10 to 20 launchers a year. Each launcher can fire up to 16 missiles. And on the missile production front, we produce between 550 and 700, depending upon the particular variant. Well, when you realize that you fire at least two and more often four of those missiles, which each of them costs upwards around $7 million a piece. So that’s 28. If you fire four, that’s 28 million. You fire four of those against an incoming missile or drone.

Well, when Russia’s firing 500 drones and missiles a day, do the math, they say, okay, that means we need 2,000. We produce 550. So we’re going to use up four years worth of missiles in one day. We saw that. Didn’t we see that happen recently in with Iran, Israel and the US Is now we’re short missiles ourselves. Yeah, because we also had the thaad, you know, the, the Terrain, High Altitude Area Defense System. We only make 50 of those a year. The missiles, and they go for $13 million a pop. So what? What this war has exposed is the United States with all of its chest thumping, that, oh, we’re the greatest, we’re the best, we’ve.

Hey, look at our B2 bombers fly over you. Woohoo. Well, how did we do in the Red Sea against the Houthis, man? We, we forced them to capitulate, or so we were told. And, and I’ve always said I wish Monty Python guys were still back in their prime because they’d be great at doing the skit. You know, you’d have three Houthi guys sitting, dressed up and, and they’re watching the television, they hear this from Donald Trump that the Houthis that capitulate, one goes, capitulate. Did you capitulate? I didn’t capitulate. Did you know. And so they kept firing the missiles.

The US had to get the hell out of there because we were afraid of losing a ship, an aircraft carrier. So this entire mythology of U. S Military supremacy has been destroyed by the combination of the war in Ukraine and then U. S Performance both in the Red Sea and in supporting Israel. All of a sudden our magic systems, they don’t work and our factories can’t produce enough to keep up with the pace of modern warfare. To the point that the Secretary General of the United of NATO, ruta, he admitted earlier this year that Russia produces more missiles, artillery shells in three months than the United States and all of NATO do in a year.

Could this be a good thing as far as diplomacy goes in the US that we’ll have to actually focus more on diplomacy since we don’t have the artillery and weapons to confront Russia, for example, for any long extended war. And it’s also interesting, I just thought of this. It’s interesting that China hasn’t done anything with Taiwan during all this because we’re, they’re, not, they’re not going to, I mean, China, China, historically the last country that they attacked in response to the actions of Vietnam against Cambodia was in 1979 when they attacked Vietnam and they got beat.

So China’s China, while they have lots of personnel, they have lots of ships, they have lots of planes, lots of drones, they’re really not an accomplished military power. They have some great technology, but, but, you know, so they don’t need to go conquer Taiwan. It will fall under their influence eventually because as we as President Nixon agreed back in 1972, 53 years ago, recognized Taiwan was part of China. And it’s only 10 years ago under Barack Obama that we started changing that said, nope, nope, we’re changing that deal. Well, Chinese have never agreed to change it.

So, you know, they’ll keep plugging on. But what we’ve accomplished over the course of the last three and a half years is bring China and Russia together in an alliance that they’ve never historically had. And it’s political, it’s diplomatic, it’s military, and it’s economic. It is not one dimensional, it’s multidimensional. And together they represent a power that we simply cannot match. Back to the summit in Russia or in Alaska, did you think the Russians respect Donald Trump? Do you think that they like Donald Trump or does that not even matter? No, I actually, Putin, I think, genuinely likes Trump.

He understands what he’s dealing with. He understands that he’s dealing with a very insecure guy. You know, a friend of mine who’s met with Trump on multiple occasions, not in public. You know, these are, you know, the sort of behind the closed door meetings. He just said, you know, Trump is, he’s that kid who growing up always got picked last to be on, you know, the baseball team or the football team or the basketball team. Well, that gives you a complex of inferiority. And Trump also desperately wants to be liked. So, you know, Putin’s, this is the fourth meeting Putin’s had with him since 2017.

And you know, I think Putin understands him and recognizes that at, at heart, Trump actually probably really does want to seek a peaceful deal. I think he may have even communicated to Putin that he would have to say and do some things that would appear to be bellicose. You know, for example, in mid July, when he redeployed nuclear, the B61 12 nuclear bombs to six NATO bases, including Lake and Heath in England, that didn’t elicit much of a reaction, sort of a shrug from Russia. But so I think, I think Trump was doing things like that in order to disarm these war hawks that really want to go to war with Russia and to make him think at least, well, the others, you know, Trump’s going to adopt a tough stance.

Meanwhile, they’ve actually been working behind the scenes to come up with some agreements, or at least the fleshing out the outlines, the skeleton of agreements that will be ultimately followed up and negotiated again in, in Russia, whether that takes place in Moscow or St. Petersburg or Sochi, you know, who knows? But, you know, I think that’s on the table. And Trump has actually Been hinting at that, but, but I come back to, when you look at the composition of these two delegations, they’re not staffed or equipped to deal with the, the particulars of the military campaign underway in Ukraine.

It is, they are equipped to deal with other issues. If, if I’m with Larry Johnson, everyone go to sonar 21 to get his, his updates. It’s a great read, Larry. I, I promise I wouldn’t keep you too long. I have one more question. Sure. If we were to, if we had a crystal ball, and no one likes to play these guessing games, but he had a crystal ball. A week from now, are we closer to an end of the Ukraine war or are we at the, are we at status quo or are we worse off? What you think regardless of what happens at these talks, the, the, we’re still closer to the end of the war.

In a week, Ukraine has run out of manpower. And despite the claims of a variety of US Generals insisting that, oh, Ukraine’s hanging on, oh, they’re, you know, Russia’s weak, Russia can’t beat them. You know, I find it just the ultimate irony that a bunch of US generals, Jack Keane included, that carried out a 21, take that back 20, 22 year campaign in Afghanistan where we, the United States, with all of these Generals, David Petraeus, etc. Failed to defeat the Taliban, failed. Got run out of the country by the Taliban, by people, did not have an air force, people that did not have rotary wing aircraft like helicopters, people that didn’t have tanks and artillery until we gave them to them what we left behind.

Despite the United States having every sophisticated military advantage in the world. We got our ass kicked. Yeah, we killed a lot of civilians. Yeah, we killed a lot of so called Mujahideen people defending their homes, their villages. Oh, big tough Americans. But at the end of the day, we could not take and hold Afghanistan. We failed. Yet here we’re watching Russia, who, you know, they’ve been building their army up over the last three and a half years. They’re now at 1.3 million. They got 600,000 soldiers deployed along a 1200 mile long line of contact and they’re steadily, every day moving the Ukrainians backwards.

Yeah, well, it’s not 10 kilometers, it’s only 1 kilometer. They’re going backwards. Doesn’t matter because Russia’s goal is not taking territory. And that’s what the west still doesn’t get. They’re engaged in a war of attrition. They’re bleeding Ukraine dry and indirectly bleeding NATO. So that neither can pose a threat to Russia. That’s where this is headed. What’s the future of NATO after this? Do you think it. Is NATO going to still be even relevant? NATO is Sean Penn in the movie with Susan Sarandon called Dead Men Walking. Yeah. It’s done. Its goose is cooked. It has no future.

Well, on that note, Larry Johnson, thank you so much for joining the Trench Journal today on such a busy day. We appreciate your insight. Always. Hey, thanks for the invite. I appreciate it as well.
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