Going Ballistic and the Battle Box
What can rip the most profound hole in American politics? A bullet. This time, it missed the former President and presumptive Republican nominee, but it hit a very vulnerable spot in the American psyche, unleashing an uncontrollable torrent of distrust. There is no tourniquet for this. Make no mistake, the bullet that clipped The President ripped into the heart of public trust. This event will also make us even more blind to ever-moving geopolitics. Just as the experts missed the shooter, the experts are missing the warning shots being fired in the realm of geopolitics. There is an avalanche of events underway. Some say it’s too much to process. I say we are looking at the world as if in portrait mode on a smartphone. Sometimes, the landscape mode gives us a better view of reality. That’s what’s on offer here - a landscape view.
As soon as the bullet popped, everyone immediately reverted to their presumed scenarios. There are those who think President Biden was behind this (a la Nordstream II, where he said, “We will bring an end to it”). They quickly cite the comments The President made to hundreds of campaign donors on July 8th in which he said, “I have one job, and that’s to beat Donald Trump. I’m absolutely certain I’m the best person to be able to do that. So, we’re done talking about the debate; it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.” Maybe he’s more of a prophet than a President?
Then there are those who think President Trump staged this assassination attempt, citing the many strange circumstances. Why was there no secret service in the nearby building where the shooter took aim? How could the shooter possibly have missed a stationary target, given how accurate modern rifles are? Why did the police and Secret Service ignore the witnesses nearby who madly signaled that there was a shooter on the roof? Why did the Secret Service stand there in full sight of the shooter (or unknown accomplices) for so long before moving the President off the stage? No doubt there will be an extensive investigation into the event which calls into question the ballistics, the camera angles, the possibility of changed press reports and adjusted images. Meanwhile, Blackrock, the asset management firm that attracts conspiracy theories better than flytape, made a statement that the shooter had appeared in its advertisements. There is no doubt that the crowd will be digging into all this to find conspiratorial fodder.
The presumptive and possible nominees are now totally preoccupied with assassination risks. Biden is already in the midst of what he perceives to be character assignation. Trump now must fear another assassination attempt. This has thrown more attention onto Biden’s decision to keep depriving Robert Kennedy of Secret Service protection, even though he is polling highly. All this raises a serious question. What if both Trump and Biden were replaced? What if the country does not face a race between Trump, Biden, and Kennedy but between new faces? This is no longer a completely insane question. Like the old Soviet Union, modern Russia, and modern China, there is no obvious replacement for any of our political leaders in the US either. There are no successors. So, the world now faces the fact that we are in the midst of a global conflict (albeit still highly invisible to the man in the street) with leaders who are all vulnerable and none of whom have a clear line of succession.
You can be sure that both Russia and China get this and have been following all this with great care. What better time to engage in geopolitics than when the presumptive US Presidential nominees and American voters are totally preoccupied with assassination attempts?
So, following my article Geopolitical Avalanche, let’s look at what else is now happening across the geopolitical landscape.
I had mentioned in a previous Substack that US Special Forces had been deployed on Kinmen Island. These Taiwanese islands were previously known as Quemoy and Matsu and the US had refused for 70 years to defend them because these little islands are too close to China. Well, Taiwan is preparing to reopen these islands to tourism on July 27th “on a trial basis”, but the Chinese Coast Guard seized a Taiwanese fishing boat called the Dajinman No. 88 off of Kinmen earlier this month. A few days later, some 66 Chinese vessels surrounded Taiwan in “the biggest sortie this year.” That might be just a little noise, but it was accompanied by Chinese vessels showing up in the Aleutian Islands off of Alaska in the Bering Sea North of the Amukta Pass. This is an area some call the “doorway to the Arctic.” Finland, Canada, and the US just announced an “Ice Pact” that will theoretically lead to the construction of some 90 new icebreakers by the US, Canada, and Finland. This is a severe and direct threat to China since they have the best, fastest, and most numerous collection of icebreakers right now. At about the same time as this NATO announcement, Russia launched its