American Glasnost, Stockholm Syndrome, Crossfire Cyclone and Missing Bitcoins?

It was eye-opening to be in Stockholm and Helsinki just as President Putin and President Trump met on a similar parallel in Alaska. It is no accident that the peace talks are happening in the High North. As I have long-argued, we are in a Hot War in Cold Places – space, the Arctic, the High North, and above and below the high seas. The war is not just in Ukraine. Spending time up here, one is constantly aware that those in the North care about Ukraine for one main reason. They think they are next. I was speaking at Helsinki Geoeconomics Week, where there were quite a few war-leaning Americans and Brits in the room with well-rehearsed and oddly repetitive ways of undermining President Trump’s authority. They were insistent that Ukraine must be fought to the bitter end. For them, nothing the President does has any merit or meaning. As I listened to them talk about creating military training academies for fifteen-year-olds in NATO countries, so they’d be “ready to fight in Ukraine in two to three years”, I realized that we are all suffering from a kind of collective Stockholm Syndrome, which makes it extremely difficult to comprehend or manage geopolitics these days. Plus, the location of conflict in geopolitics is not Ukraine, but a much larger geography – the Arctic and the High North. It’s also hard to understand that the weapons of warfare are no longer tanks and guns. They are things like narrative, the US Bitcoin Reserve, and stablecoins, as we shall see.

The Cleveland Clinic says, “Stockholm syndrome is a coping mechanism to a captive or abusive situation”. If you can’t escape a psychopathic abuser, you try to save yourself by insisting that this person is acting in your own best interests. “People with Stockholm syndrome form a psychological connection with their captors and begin sympathizing with them”. Who do I mean? I am talking about the American Imperial machine that is run by the American intelligence and foreign policy community and expressed through their influence and control over many diverse channels from direct influence over foreign politicians and policy makers to influence over narrative crafting. There is also the power to delete “disinfo” and shadow-ban alternative viewpoints. One problem with understanding this phenomenon is the total denial that it exists. A second problem is that different arms of the US government might be working against the state policy of the elected leadership. Another problem is the idea that personnel or divisions of the US government might be deploying the narrative/propaganda tools that have been successful in destabilizing and overthrowing governments abroad, against American citizens. Technically, this should be illegal – unwarranted surveillance and direct use of propaganda. The American Imperial machine started turning its propaganda and media weapons on America ever since the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 was reversed in 2013. Prior to that it was was perfectly ok and encouraged to deploy all tools of state power, including propaganda, censorship, covert tactics, and more against foreign regimes in order to achieve whatever the machine deemed to be in the American national interest (which might or might not coincide with the President or Congress’s definition of the American National Interest). That’s why USAID, for example, was created. Its purpose was to conduct activities abroad that Congress and the President were not likely to approve. These are the folks who have brought us many Green and Velvet Revolutions in recent years. One of those, it seems, was the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine, which the Mainstream Media is starting to acknowledge.

But, since 2013, some argue that these tools of state influence over narrative have been deployed against American citizens. Naturally, it is tough for any American to believe that they are subjected to the same tools of influence that are used against the Communist world. Who is the enemy after all? Hence, the rise of Stockholm Syndrome in the public policy arena. Surely I live in a country where the government is “by the people, for the people and of the people” as President Lincoln put it in The Gettysburg Address? Right? If not, it must be for a good reason. Right? Stockholm Syndrome?

This effort to silence alternative voices may have begun with such one-off cases. By, 2021, the approach became systematic and ingrained in both policy and law. Jen Easterly the then Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and former Special Assistant to President Obama, gave the game away when she said, “One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important.” The First Amendment right to free speech has been increasingly challenged by what Mike Benz calls the US government’s WMD, “Weapons of Mass Deletion” or now, perhaps we should also call it, “Weapons of Manufactured Data”. We are all finding that our cognitive infrastructure is under assault, bombarded by too much information to process, but also deeply competing views about what constitutes disinformation.

Where is the line between where America’s Imperial establishment clashes with civilian architecture? Does it matter that the CIA “briefs” the heads of every major American bank (and many non-American banks as well)? Does it matter if the Imperial establishment illicitly and secretly runs banks of its own? America has still never quite faced the stories of what really happened in the Iran-Contra scandal, with BCCI, and even Wirecard, and many other banking and finance scandals. What about having the intelligence community “brief” the New York Times so they get the Russiagate story straight? Newly declassified documents show that the very officials who were apparently fabricating the Russiagate allegations against President Trump were briefing the NYTs, which then won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on what turns out to be an intelligence operation against a sitting President. Now we can see that American elections were designated as “critical infrastructure” on January 6^th in 2017, under the Obama Administration, thus giving the authorities a free hand to censor and silence all points of view that cut across the official government position. The timeline is especially shocking. President Trump was certified as President at 1:41pm. At 5:59 pm that same day, the Department of Homeland Security designated US federal elections as “critical infrastructure,” and thus a strange era began that almost requires Americans to engage in Stockholm Syndrome because acknowledging this would otherwise require us to do something about the profound breach of the Constitution.

It’s summertime. Nobody wants to deal with this. It’s like a person stuck in a relationship where one party is taking all your money, removing all your friends from your life, and telling you this is all in your best interests. How many times have we heard, “but he loves me” in such situations? Now, imagine how international officials respond to this exact situation. Your closest defense ally, the centerpiece of NATO, has American establishment officials you’ve known forever telling you, “Trust me, don’t listen to The President, he won’t last, Russia gate/rape trial/tax fraud/sex scandals/etc.”? Imagine your situation when the President survives all such assaults (all the court cases) and all the intelligence narrative ops as well?

Imagine the shock to the world when the Head of the CIA, the ODNI, and others in the Cabinet and Congress are fast-pushing to haul up the leadership of the Imperial Machine in front of cameras and prosecutors. How is the world to react to subpoenas and warrants for arrest being issued to two former US Presidents, President Obama, President Clinton, and to Senator Clinton, the recent former Head of the CIA John Brennan, the recent former Heads of the FBI Robert Mueller (who can’t because he in an Alzheimer facility now) and James Comey, the former Head of the NSA James Clapper, and Senator Adam Schiff (to start with). The allegation is that they all fabricated evidence that led to conflicts: Russiagate, but also the WMD story that led to the war in Iraq, and the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine. Further, some, especially Senator Schiff, will be investigated not just for fabricating information and then classifying it to hide the tracks but also for leaking genuinely classified information.

We have to face the true situation. A proper war has broken out between the American President and the American Imperial Machine. NATO members, European nations, and American allies and opponents alike are now effectively caught in the crossfire of this internal conflict. The rest of the world is still loyal to its long-time handlers who have firmly planted a particular view of the President: rapist, autocrat, Nazi.

All this is especially destabilizing for the current power structures abroad because their own citizens seem to be leaning toward replacing their leadership. The populism that the establishment was trying to fight in the US is now rolling out globally. The world’s voters are increasingly becoming Trumpers. As CNBC reports, “Far Right populists top polls in Germany, France and Britain for the first time”. Now, the same Establishment vs Anti-Establishment war we see in the US is rolling out globally. Crossfire Hurricane, the disinfo campaign against a sitting American President, is fast becoming a Category 5 Crossfire Cyclone for the rest of the world.

When analyzing what happened between Putin and Trump in Alaska, one has to understand this outright civil war that is now underway in the US and the Stockholm Syndrome that accompanies it. It is tough for Americans and America's allies to believe the President, partly because the campaign against him has been so successful and partly because he consistently says things that are brutally offensive to so many.

To understand the situation, we must step away from the current crossfire. This fight between the Establishment and the President has been around since well before World War II. Eisenhower warned us of the Military Industrial Complex. John F Kennedy tried to contain what we now call The Deep State and paid the ultimate price for that (as is increasingly apparent from the recently (finally) declassified documents show). Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter tried in their own ways, too. Nixon found himself entangled in Watergate. Carter was somehow not able to conclude his peace deal and hostage swap with Iran before the election because Ronald Reagan’s team did a side deal with Iran, asking them to wait till the deal could be Reagan’s. The Establishment view is that Presidents come and go, but intelligence and foreign policy professionals stay, and they know better. The rest of the world is used to interfacing with the US through these enduring connections. The President can’t compete with a State Department, USAID, or Institute for Peace professional or Harvard expert whom you, as a foreign President, Prime Minister, Cabinet Minister, or embassy official or government staffer, have known for decades (and who has actively cultivated you, perhaps without you ever clocking it for decades). These are the folks who conducted guerrilla warfare against Communism during the Cold War, and against Russia and China for the past two decades, and who turned all the tools of that warfare against populism in the US and Europe. These are the people who have been running cancel culture since World War II. If you disagree, they’ll cancel you, whether as a person, a company, or a country, whether by destroying the government or by destroying the reputation of an individual. Those who collaborate with the American Imperium usually have no idea that there is a file in Washington, DC on them. But, after all, these days, as we know from Assange and Snowden, there is a file, a data file, on everybody, even on American citizens.

So, to Ukraine. We now have a highly complex situation where much of the original