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Source: The Unz Review
Marked for Death by a Reckless America? • 48m 
A few weeks ago I published an article noting that the State of Israel and the Zionist movement that gave rise to it have probably employed assassination as a tool of statecraft more heavily than any other political entity in recorded history. Indeed, their deadly activities had easily eclipsed those of the notorious Muslim sect that had terrorized the Middle East a thousand years ago and gave rise to that term.
The piece had been prompted by Israel’s sudden strike against Iran, capping its reputation as the greatest band of assassins known to history. Even as the Iranian government was intensely focused on the negotiations with America over its nuclear program, a sudden Israeli surprise attack successfully assassinated most of Iran’s highest military commanders, some of its political leaders, and nearly all of its most prominent nuclear scientists. I cannot recall any previous case in which a major country had ever had so large a fraction of its top military, political, and scientific leadership eliminated in that sort of illegal sneak attack.
Less than one year earlier, a series of missile exchanges between Israel and Iran had soon been followed by the death of hardline Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and his foreign minister in a highly-suspicious and never explained helicopter crash. Given subsequent events, I think we can safely assume that he, too, had died at the hands of the Israelis.
- Zionist Israel as the Assassination Nation
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 23, 2025 • 11,800 Words
Earlier this year, the declassification of a large batch of JFK Assassination files had prompted me to recapitulate and summarize many of my articles of the last half-dozen years on that landmark twentieth century event. I gathered together some of the very considerable evidence that the Israeli Mossad played the central role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 as well as the death of his younger brother Robert a few years later, probably the highest-profile political assassinations of the last one hundred years or more.
- How Israel Killed the Kennedys
Ron Unz and Mike Whitney • The Unz Review • March 24, 2025 • 11,500 Words
The most weighty and authoritative work on the long history of Israeli assassinations is surely Ronen Bergman’s 2018 volume Rise and Kill First, running 750 pages and including a thousand-odd source references, with many of the latter citing official documents never previously made available to journalists. By some estimates, this book documented nearly 3,000 such foreign political killings, a remarkable total for a small country then less than three generations old.
Although the Bergman book was certainly very comprehensive, it was produced under strict Israeli censorship, so the text quite understandably omitted almost any coverage of some of the highest-profile Zionist attacks on Western targets. For example, there was no mention of the unsuccessful but well-documented attempts to kill President Harry Truman, nor the assassination efforts aimed at British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the top members of his Cabinet.
Some of this latter coverage may be found in Thomas Suarez’s 2016 book State of Terror which I would recommend as a very useful supplementary work, though its focus is almost entirely limited to the activities of Zionist groups just prior to the establishment of Israel.
For a broader discussion of the history of Israeli assassinations and closely-related terrorist attacks, especially those targeting Westerners, one of the most useful compilations might be my own very long January 2020 article, providing extensive references to the underlying primary and secondary sources.
- American Pravda: Mossad Assassinations
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 27, 2020 • 27,300 Words
That 2020 article had actually been prompted by America’s own sudden assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, a shocking development that drew a great deal of media coverage at the time.
I had opened my long discussion by noting that over the last several centuries Western governments had almost totally abandoned the use of political assassinations against the leadership of major rival nations, regarding such actions as immoral and illegal.
For example, historian David Irving revealed that when one of Adolf Hitler’s aides suggested to him that an attempt be made to assassinate the Soviet military leadership during the bitter combat on the Eastern Front of World War II, the German Fuhrer immediately forbade any such practices as obvious violations of the laws of civilized warfare.
For most of American history, a similar attitude had prevailed, but I explained that this began to change over the last couple of decades, mostly in the wake of the 9/11 Attacks.
The 1914 terrorist assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, was certainly organized by fanatical elements of Serbian Intelligence, but the Serbian government fiercely denied its own complicity, and no major European power was ever directly implicated in the plot. The aftermath of the killing soon led to the outbreak of World War I, and although many millions died in the trenches over the next few years, it would have been completely unthinkable for one of the major belligerents to consider assassinating the leadership of another.
A century earlier, the Napoleonic Wars had raged across the entire continent of Europe for most of a generation, but I don’t recall reading of any governmental assassination plots during that era, let alone in the quite gentlemanly wars of the preceding 18th century when Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa disputed ownership of the wealthy province of Silesia by military means. I am hardly a specialist in modern European history, but after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War and regularized the rules of warfare, no assassination as high-profile as that of Gen. Soleimani comes to mind…
During our Revolutionary War, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and our other Founding Fathers fully recognized that if their effort failed, they would all be hanged as rebels by the British. However, I have never heard that they feared falling to an assassin’s blade, nor that King George III ever considered using such an underhanded means of attack. During the first century and more of our nation’s history, nearly all our presidents and other top political leaders traced their ancestry back to the British Isles, and political assassinations were exceptionally rare, with Abraham Lincoln’s death being one of the very few that comes to mind.
At the height of the Cold War, our CIA did involve itself in various secret assassination plots against Cuba’s Communist dictator Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders considered hostile to US interests. But when these facts later came out in the 1970s, they evoked such enormous outrage from the public and the media, that three consecutive American presidents—Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan—all issued successive Executive Orders absolutely prohibiting assassinations by the CIA or any other agent of the US government.
Although some cynics might claim that these public declarations represented mere window-dressing, a March 2018 book review in the New York Times strongly suggests otherwise. Kenneth M. Pollack spent years as a CIA analyst and National Security Council staffer, then went on to publish a number of influential books on foreign policy and military strategy over the last two decades. He had originally joined the CIA in 1988, and opens his review by declaring:
One of the very first things I was taught when I joined the CIA was that we do not conduct assassinations. It was drilled into new recruits over and over again.
Yet Pollack notes with dismay that over the last quarter-century, these once solid prohibitions have been steadily eaten away, with the process rapidly accelerating after the 9/11 attacks of 2001. The laws on our books may not have changed, but
Today, it seems that all that is left of this policy is a euphemism.
We don’t call them assassinations anymore. Now, they are “targeted killings,” most often performed by drone strike, and they have become America’s go-to weapon in the war on terror.
The Bush Administration had conducted 47 of these assassinations-by-another-name, while his successor Barack Obama, a constitutional scholar and Nobel Peace Prize winner, had raised his own total to 542. Not without justification, Pollack wonders whether assassination has become “a very effective drug, but [one that] treats only the symptom and so offers no cure.”
Thus over the last couple of decades the American government has followed a disturbing trajectory in its use of assassination as a tool of foreign policy, first restricting its application only to the most extreme circumstances, next targeting small numbers of high-profile “terrorists” hiding in rough terrain, then escalating those same killings to the many hundreds. And now under President Trump, the fateful step has been taken of America claiming the right to assassinate any world leader not to our liking whom we unilaterally declare worthy of death.
Pollack had made his career as a Clinton Democrat, and is best known for his 2002 book The Threatening Storm that strongly endorsed President Bush’s proposed invasion of Iraq and was enormously influential in producing bipartisan support for that ill-fated policy. I have no doubt that he is a committed supporter of Israel, and he probably falls into a category that I would loosely describe as “Left Neocon.”
But while reviewing a history of Israel’s own long use of assassination as a mainstay of its national security policy, he seems deeply disturbed that America might now be following along that same terrible path.
Pollock’s discussion of these facts came in his lengthy 2018 New York Times review of the Bergman book entitled “Learning From Israel’s Political Assassination Program,” and he greatly decried what many have called the “Israelization” of the American government and its military doctrine. President Donald Trump’s sudden public assassination of so high-profile a foreign leader as Gen. Soleimani came less than two years later and demonstrated that Pollock’s concerns were fully warranted and indeed even understated.
As my January 2020 article explained, nothing like this had ever previously happened in peacetime American history, and only very rarely even during wars.
The January 2nd American assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani of Iran was an event of enormous moment.
Gen. Soleimani had been the highest-ranking military figure in his nation of 80 million, and with a storied career of 30 years, one of the most universally popular and highly regarded. Most analysts ranked him second in influence only to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s elderly Supreme Leader, and there were widespread reports that he was being urged to run for the presidency in the 2021 elections.
The circumstances of his peacetime death were also quite remarkable. His vehicle was incinerated by the missile of an American Reaper drone near Iraq’s Baghdad international airport just after he had arrived there on a regular commercial flight for peace negotiations originally suggested by the American government.
Our major media hardly ignored the gravity of this sudden, unexpected killing of so high-ranking a political and military figure, and gave it enormous attention. A day or so later, the front page of my morning New York Times was almost entirely filled with coverage of the event and its implications, along with several inside pages devoted to the same topic. Later that same week, America’s national newspaper of record allocated more than one-third of all the pages of its front section to the same shocking story.
But even such copious coverage by teams of veteran journalists failed to provide the incident with its proper context and implications. Last year, the Trump Administration had declared the Iranian Revolutionary Guard “a terrorist organization,” drawing widespread criticism and even ridicule from national security experts appalled at the notion of classifying a major branch of Iran’s armed forces as “terrorists.” Gen. Soleimani was a top commander in that body, and this apparently provided the legal fig-leaf for his assassination in broad daylight while on a diplomatic peace mission.
- American Pravda: Mossad Assassinations
From the Peace of Westphalia to the Law of the Jungle
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 27, 2020 • 27,300 Words
Although Pollock provided some explanations for this shocking transformation in American doctrine, he failed to note what was arguably the most obvious factor. Over the last generation or two, the American government and American political life have been almost entirely captured by what scholars John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt called “The Israel Lobby” in their best-selling 2008 book of that title, and this political and ideological transformation has only further accelerated in the last couple of years, most recently reaching ridiculous, almost cartoonishly extreme levels.
For example, nearly every other country on earth regards Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as one of the worst war criminals in modern history, now under indictment by the International Criminal Court for his ongoing genocidal massacre of Gaza’s helpless two million civilians, with an international warrant issued for his arrest. But the American political system is almost entirely under the control of pro-Israel partisans so he was invited in 2024 to give an unprecedented fourth public address to a joint session of Congress, receiving an endless series of standing ovations by the trained barking seals of our national legislative body.
Over the last couple of generations, successful American politicians have increasingly been selected for their unswerving loyalty to the State of Israel and their admiration for all things Israeli, often describing themselves as committed Zionists, followers of a foreign nationalist movement.
As a notable example of this strange pattern, a Republican Gentile such as Rep. Brian Mast had not only volunteered for service in the Israeli military, but then proudly wore his foreign uniform while serving as an elected member of Congress. Perhaps partly as a consequence of this demonstration of his overriding loyalty to a foreign nation, in January he was named chairman of our powerful House Foreign Relations Committee.
In another bizarre twist, foreign students attending American universities have never been punished for denouncing or condemning America or the behavior of the American government, but under the Trump Administration they have been rounded up and deported if they criticized the foreign government of Israel.
So if Israel and the Zionist movement have spent the last one hundred years heavily relying upon political assassinations as a primary geopolitical tool, it is hardly surprising if American political leaders have now increasingly adopted the practice of their Israeli mentors and exemplars and done the same.
This trend was further accelerated by the complete capture of the foreign policy establishment of both of our major political parties by the militantly pro-Israel Neocons. Indeed, as I have noted, the term “Neocon” has largely dropped from usage during the last decade or so because the views and beliefs of almost everyone in DC establishment circles would now fall into that category, a tendency that extends across our entire political ecosphere of elected officials, staffers, think-tanks, and media outlets.
I believe that this new American emphasis on political assassinations has extremely dangerous consequences for the world, consequences that perhaps most analysts have failed to properly appreciate. Israel’s tendency to assassinate the political leaders of those countries it views as rivals or threats has naturally focused upon its own region. But when American leaders have adopted that same mind-set, their targets have obviously been different ones.
Israel’s sudden and largely successful decapitation strike against Iran had heavily relied upon the innovative use of drones. But just a couple of weeks earlier, a somewhat different but equally bold use of drones had been used to hit all of Russia’s interior airbases housing its strategic bomber fleet, successfully destroying quite a number of those nuclear-capable aircraft, one of the important legs of the country’s nuclear deterrent triad. Just before that, there was an attempt to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin with a swarm of drones when he visited the Kursk area on a helicopter tour of that region.
Although the Ukrainian government took full credit for these latter two attacks against Russia, it seems extremely unlikely that they would have undertaken such action without the full support and approval of their American and NATO paymasters, and indeed the Russians claimed to have hard evidence of such involvement. As I noted in an article, the Ukrainian government explained that the planning for the project had begun roughly eighteen months earlier, and that had been exactly the time when New Jersey and parts of the East Coast had reported a mysterious wave of very heavy drone activity, which our government later admitted was testing for a highly classified military project. I think that the very close match of timing was hardly likely to have been coincidental.
The size of Russia’s nuclear arsenal surpasses our own and its large suite of unstoppable hypersonic delivery systems has given it a measure of strategic superiority over America and our NATO allies on both the nuclear and conventional escalation ladders. So the very strong likelihood that America was intimately involved in an attack on Russia’s nuclear triad and an attempt to assassinate Russia’s president seems exceptionally reckless and dangerous behavior. In a recent article, I suggested that Russia should take prompt and forceful action to deter any such future attacks, but this has not yet happened:
- A Forceful Russian Response to NATO Recklessness
How a Deft Strategic Blow Could Shatter the Western Alliance
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 30, 2025 • 5,300 Words
A couple of years earlier, I published an article focusing on indications of earlier American attempts to kill President Putin. This came after our bipartisan political and media elites had begun vilifying the Russian leader as “another Hitler,” with leading media figures and top U.S. Senators loudly calling for his assassination. I noted that the Russians seemed concerned that such assassination efforts might even employ novel, biological means:
We should also recognize the reality that during the last seventy years America has maintained the world’s largest and best-funded biological warfare program, with our government spending many tens of billions of dollars on biowarfare/biodefense across those decades. And as I’ve discussed in a long article, there is even considerable evidence that we actually used those illegal weapons during the very difficult first year of the Korean War…
Soon after their invasion, the Russians publicly claimed that the U.S. had established a series of biolabs in Ukraine, which were preparing biological warfare attacks against their country. Last year one of their top generals declared that the global Covid epidemic was probably the result of a deliberate American biowarfare attack against China and Iran, echoing the accusations previously made by those countries.
Russian security concerns over our advanced biowarfare capabilities and the extreme recklessness with which we might employ them may explain the rather strange behavior of President Putin when he met in Moscow for talks with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz shortly before the outbreak of the Ukraine war.
At the time many observers were puzzled why in each case the two national leaders were seated at opposite ends of a very long table, with Putin blandly suggesting that the placement was meant to symbolize the vast distance separating Russia and NATO’s Western leaders. Perhaps that innocuous explanation was correct. But I think it far more likely that the Russians were actually concerned that the Western leaders meeting him might be the immunized carriers of a dangerous biological agent intended to infect their president.
- Assassinating Vladimir Putin?
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • May 15, 2023 • 3,800 Words
On the face of it, American attempts to assassinate Russia’s president would make little logical sense and these would obviously be extremely reckless and dangerous. But much the same could be said of American-orchestrated efforts to destroy Russia’s strategic nuclear bomber fleet, yet there seems very strong evidence that both these actions occurred. So we should seek to understand the logical framework, however irrational and unrealistic, under which such American decisions would be made.
I think an important insight may have been recently provided by Alistair Crooke, a former senior MI6 officer and Middle East peace negotiator, with a great deal of expertise and excellent sources in that latter region.
In an interview a couple of weeks ago, he claimed that America had been directly involved in the wave of Israeli assassinations against Iran’s leaders, taking such action despite the fact that we were currently in the midst of crucial nuclear negotiations with that country. Launching a massive assassination attack against the entire leadership of a country with whom you are currently negotiating is obviously an extremely destabilizing action, one that will hardly inspire confidence among other prospective negotiating partners and will surely long be remembered.
But according to Crooke, the logic behind such American action was the widespread belief that the hold of the Islamic Republic upon the 90 million people of that country was quite fragile, and that the successful assassination of most of the Iranian leaders would cause the collapse of the regime, much like the government of Syria had collapsed earlier this year after attacks by armed Islamicist forces based in Idlib. The American government was greatly disappointed when that wave of assassinations failed to trigger such a political collapse and instead redoubled popular support for the ruling regime.
Crooke suggested that Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been targeted for death as well, but unlike so many other senior Iranian officials they had been fortunate enough to survive. Indeed, not long afterward, President Trump repeatedly threatened to assassinate Ayatollah Khamenei unless he completely acceded to America’s demands regarding Iran’s nuclear program. Offhand, I can’t remember the last time a world leader has publicly threatened to assassinate one of his foreign counterparts in such fashion.
If Crooke’s analysis is correct, similarly mistaken reasoning might help to explain the likely American involvement in the attempt to assassinate Putin a few weeks earlier. Most of America’s political decisionmakers may have convinced themselves that the Russian regime was discredited, unpopular, and fragile, and that the sudden elimination of Russia’s president perhaps combined with a heavy blow to Russia’s nuclear retaliatory arsenal would cause its collapse.
Such an analysis might seem extremely implausible to most observers, but much of America’s leadership seems to exist in an unrealistic propaganda-bubble in which these notions have become widespread.
Consider, for example, estimates of Russian casualties in Ukraine. The Western-funded anti-Putin media outlet Mediazona has used its considerable resources to continually sweep the Russian Internet in order to compile a running total of verified Russian losses in the Ukraine war, and as of July 2025 had confirmed a total of over 120,000 Russian soldiers killed. This is likely somewhat of an underestimate given that at least some such deaths have escaped public notice, and such totals certainly represent heavy losses in a Russian population of around 140 million.
But our Neocon-dominated American government and its intelligence services have instead accepted without question totally outrageous figures apparently based upon the dishonest claims of Ukrainian propagandists. Back in February, Trump told reporters that Russia had already suffered 1.5 million casualties, an astonishing figure, and just a few days ago, he claimed that almost 20,000 additional Russians had been killed in the month of July alone.
As former CIA officer Larry Johnson noted, journalist Seymour Hersh reported that an intelligence official described for him a destroyed Russian military that had already suffered two million casualties:
“The total now is two million. Most importantly,” the official stressed, “was how this number was described. All the best trained regular Army troops, to be replaced by ignorant peasants. All the best mid-grade officers and NCOs dead. All modern armor and fighting vehicles. Junk. This is unsustainable.”
Two million Russian casualties would probably amount to more than 5% of that country’s entire population of military-age males, and such enormous losses could not possibly be kept concealed. Those figures are obviously delusional.
But if America’s political leaders and many of their military advisors accept such fantasies, they could easily convince themselves that a defeated Russia is now ripe for regime-change triggered by Putin’s assassination. They would obviously hope that the replacement might be a new government closely aligned with the West and subservient to its demands, much as had been the case during the 1990s.
Other Neocon analysts have proposed Russia’s dismemberment into several different much smaller states, none of which would be able to resist American pressure and domination, with various such proposed maps floating around.
Thus, America’s likely involvement in assassination efforts against the top leadership of both Iran and Russia was based upon our unrealistic assumptions regarding the weakness of the two regimes, and the belief that elimination of their top leaders would lead to a collapse. Moreover, in each case these attacks rather treacherously occurred in the midst of ongoing negotiations, over Iran’s nuclear program in one case and over Russian willingness to end the Ukraine war in the other. We should also remember that Trump’s earlier assassination of Gen. Soleimani occurred when that latter leader had been treacherously lured to Iraq for peace negotiations.
Unfortunately, countries that are totally delusional on some national security matters are much more likely to be equally delusional on others as well. I have recently discovered that important elements of the American foreign policy establishment have convinced themselves that the government of China is also fragile and weak, and possibly ripe for collapse if it were hit by one or more sharp shocks. A blogpost brought these strange and surprising notions to my attention a couple of weeks ago.
The blogger highlighted a major article in the New Yorker focusing on aspects of a likely future war between America and China, and suggesting that in some respects it might be analogous to the ongoing conflict between Israel and Gaza. Indeed, the subtitle even described Israel’s invasion of Gaza as “a dress rehearsal” for a future American war with China.
China has an enormous military, equipped with some of the world’s most highly-advanced weapons, and these include a full suite of the unstoppable hypersonic missiles that America has so far failed to successfully produce. So the belief that Israel’s ongoing slaughter of Gaza’s helpless, unarmed civilians holds any serious lessons for the course of a future American war with China seems rather strange reasoning indeed.
- What’s Legally Allowed in War
How U.S. military lawyers see Israel’s invasion of Gaza—and the public’s reaction to it—as a dress rehearsal for a potential conflict with a foreign power like China.
Colin Jones • The New Yorker • April 25, 2025 • 3,300 Words
The rather peculiar tone of that article may have been influenced by a very lengthy report published several months earlier by the Rand Corporation, whose title appeared to raise strong doubts about the military effectiveness of China’s armed forces.
- The Chinese Military’s Doubtful Combat Readiness
The People’s Liberation Army Remains Focused on Upholding Chinese Communist Party Rule, Not Preparing for War
Timothy R. Heath • The Rand Corporation • January 27, 2025 • 15,000 Words
However, after carefully reading that Rand study, I concluded that the title was somewhat misleading. The researcher correctly noted that China gave no indications of preparing to wage war against Taiwan, America, or any other country, and much unlike the U.S. had avoided involvement in any military conflicts for the last half-century. But lack of interest in starting wars is quite different than lack of military effectiveness if attacked or sufficiently provoked, and conflating the two probably reflected the ideological climate found at most American think-tanks based upon the influence of their funders.
Finally, the lengthiest and most astonishing think-tank report of all was published just a couple of weeks ago by the Hudson Institute, one of our most unswervingly Neocon research organizations. This book-length study argued that China’s Communist government might be ripe for collapse and casually suggested that American military forces should be prepared for deployment inside China in order to seize crucial military and technological facilities and then reconstruct the government of that enormous country after the downfall of its current regime.
- China After Communism
Preparing for a Post-CCP China
Miles Yu et al. • The Hudson Institute • July 16, 2025 • 65,000 Words
The blogger quoted a couple of the paragraphs from the executive summary of this remarkable document:
While the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has weathered crises before, a sudden regime collapse in China is not entirely unthinkable. Policymakers need to consider what might happen and what steps they would have to take if the world’s longest-ruling Communist dictatorship and second-largest economy collapses due to its domestic and international troubles.
With chapters written by experts in military affairs, intelligence, economics, human rights, transitional justice, and constitutional governance, this report examines the initial steps that should be taken in the immediate aftermath of the CCP regime’s collapse and the long-term trajectory China might take after a stabilization period. Drawing on historical analysis, strategic foresight, and domain-specific expertise, this anthology describes these challenges as an exercise in possibilities. The different chapters explore how a single-party system collapses in key sectors of the country and how political institutions transform, as well as China’s unique political, economic, and social situation. Taken together, they assess the daunting tasks of stabilizing a long-repressed country after it has collapsed, in addition to the forces shaping China’s future. In so doing, the authors hope to offer policy recommendations for managing the risks and opportunities of a transition.
Having carefully read the entire report, I found it just as astonishing as was suggested by those paragraphs.
Over the last half-century, China has certainly been the world’s most successful major country, experiencing perhaps the highest sustained rate of economic growth in all of human history and now possessing a real economy far larger than that of the U.S.
Indeed, if we exclude the service sector, whose statistics are easily subject to manipulation, China’s real productive economy is now actually larger than the combined total for America, the EU, and Japan, while certainly growing much more rapidly. Meanwhile, America has experienced decades of stagnation, with heavy financialization replacing our once enormous real industrial strength. Moreover, in many technological sectors, China has now become the world leader, and it is near the very top in most of the others.
Earlier this year I published a lengthy comparative analysis of China and America, whose conclusions were hardly favorable to the latter:
- American Pravda: China vs. America
A Comprehensive Review of the Economic, Technological, and Military Factors
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 13, 2025 • 14,100 Words
The following month I summarized much of this same material in a lengthy interview with Mike Whitney:
- Confucius, DeepSeek, and Why China Would Win a War with the United States
Mike Whitney Interview with Ron Unz
Ron Unz and Mike Whitney • The Unz Review • February 2, 2025 • 9,900 Words
One of the main authors of that Hudson Institute report was lawyer and conservative columnist Gordon G. Chang, probably best known as the author of the 2001 book The Coming Collapse of China, and a quarter-century of absolutely contrary real-life trends seems to have hardly changed any of his views.
The Hudson Institute is a leading DC think-tank, quite influential in mainstream political circles, and a report with five co-authors that runs 128 pages must surely carry considerable weight in establishment circles. So when it suggests that the Chinese government is fragile and might soon collapse, those policy makers hostile to China are likely to take such views quite seriously.
Suppose that a leading Chinese think-tank with close ties to the PRC government published a weighty report predicting that America might soon collapse, then went on to argue that Chinese military forces would need to be deployed in our own country to seize our key military and technological assets and also establish a new government organized along Chinese lines. I doubt that most American political leaders or ordinary citizens would view such Chinese proposals with total equanimity, and indeed the blogger quoted a shocked Western pro-China business executive who succinctly summarized some of the striking elements in that Hudson Institute research study:
…which provides detailed operational plans for inducing Chinese regime collapse through systematic information operations, financial warfare, and covert influence campaigns, followed by detailed protocols for U.S. post-collapse management including military occupation, territorial reorganization, and the installation of a political and cultural system vassalized to the U.S.
Rand and Hudson are two of our leading mainstream think-tanks and the New Yorker is one of our most prestigious media outlets. Taken together those major articles and reports could easily convince the ignorant and suggestible ideologues in our government that the Chinese military was weak and the Chinese government fragile and ripe for collapse.
If delusional beliefs regarding the fragility of the Iranian and Russian governments had already led to American assassination attempts against their top leadership, similar reasoning might easily result in targeting those of China as well, especially President Xi Jinping, widely regarded as the strongest Chinese leader in decades. And given all of the recent American assassination projects, the Chinese government might certainly have itself reached such conclusions.
China and Russia are the two leading members of the BRICS movement, which held its 17th summit last month in Brazil. The media noted that neither Russian President Putin nor Chinese President Xi attended in person, with the latter missing his first BRICS summit since he came to power 13 years ago.
Xi’s surprising absence caused some discussion in the media. I initially paid little attention to this issue, but then some commenter suggested an obvious explanation: Both Xi and Putin were concerned about the possible risk of American assassination.
Brazil is located within the Western Hemisphere, a region under full American military domination. Given the extremely reckless and unpredictable behavior of the American government, with President Trump having publicly threatened to assassinate Iran’s top leader just a couple of weeks earlier, both China and Russia may have believed that some risks should best be avoided.
Suppose an errant missile struck down an incoming presidential plane, with no conclusive means of proving the source, or an aircraft were destroyed by some more sophisticated methods. Over the years, Xi and Putin had both met on numerous occasions with Iranian President Raisi, with whom they had developed an excellent working relationship, and surely his 2024 death in a mysterious helicopter crash while returning from a foreign trip would have concentrated their minds.
Any such “conspiratorial” explanation has naturally been entirely avoided by the media. For example, a lengthy article late last month in the Wall Street Journal described how Xi had drastically reduced his foreign travel over the last year or so, noting that a China-EU summit originally set for Brussels was moved to Beijing after the Chinese explained that Xi had no plans to visit Europe. Since the end of 2024, Xi’s only foreign travels have been to Russia and to several countries in South-East Asia. Unlike Europe or Latin America, none of these countries nor the travel routes to reach them would be likely venues for serious American attempts at assassination.
When major countries develop a well-deserved reputation for assassinating the leaders of other major countries, often even doing so in the midst of international negotiations, such behavior may obviously have serious consequences. Back in 2017, President Xi was quite willing to visit Mar-a-Lago for face-to-face negotiations with President Trump, but I very much doubt the Chinese leader will be taking any trips to our own country in the foreseeable future.
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