Definitely. Trotsky was a great military leader who had contributed significantly to the Red Army, but he was also a dangerous figure in peace time who would have put the entire Soviet nation building project at risk. The State had to “take care” of figures like this after the civil war before they could subvert the country from the inside.

The quotes were just random excerpts taken whenever I thought he got over-excited lol. I’m not going to transcribe a full hour of content. But he did give detailed anecdotes about his dealing with the neocons back in the day. Basically what he’s saying is that he’s heard the exact strategy being planned out at the Hudson Institute (the role would be taken over later by RAND Corporation) since the 1970s.

He is. Remember when he forced China into signing long-term LNG contract with US producers and touted it as some genius Art of the Deal move?

A couple years later the Ukraine war started and the LNG price shot through the roof, but the US producers were already locked into the price with Chinese importers, who then re-sold the LNG to Europe at high price for profit.

Trump is China’s highest ranking asset in America.

There is a reason why the oil and gas industry hates Trump lol, probably the first mass defection from the Republican Party thanks to Trump. Many oil investors who went all in during Obama’s Shale revolution in 2013-14 lost billions of dollars because he wanted to keep gasoline price low. It took Biden’s Ukraine war to restore America as the leading exporter of oil and gas again.

After being disappointed by US foreign policy for the last 63 times.

Russia has every incentive not to have a regional war started in the Middle East, and that includes not provoking Israel, for the simple reason that it does not want to fight in both fronts at the same time again.

This was the US imperialist strategy to collapse Russia back in 2015 under Obama - using the Shale revolution to crash the oil price to destroy Russia’s and Iran’s economies, then dragged Russia into fighting in Syria while it was already engaged in the Ukrainian civil war. They thought Russia would not survive fighting two fronts at the same time with all the economic sanctions thrown against it and crashing the oil price at the same time.

It was a very difficult period for Russia and consider it remarkable that Russia even managed to survive economically and politically. This threatens to be a much bigger conflict than that. You can see clearly why Russia doesn’t want to provoke another nuclear-armed state in the Middle East.

This is just a replay of 2015 when the US tried to sink Russia’s economy by dragging Russia into fighting two fronts at the same time: Ukraine and Syria. It’s exactly the same playbook.

Still too early to tell (with unforeseen blowbacks and all), but the most significant events over the past couple weeks outside of the Middle East, with the Fed lowering rate and China opening up its capital market to invite foreign investors to save its economy (the stock and property market, clearly the most important part of the economy), I think the US-China front will be stable for a while.

Meanwhile, the US will absolutely use this brief opportunity to screw the Middle East.

Europe was able to make a comeback after the dissolution of the USSR, because the Soviet industries were never financialized, and Western capitalists who came in and plundered the cheap assets were all able to make huge amount of finance capital off it that both the US and Europe were able to hyper-leap into the finance capital plane. This was how the European Union and the euro currency zone came about in the 1990s.

An analogy was how the defeat of the Southern semi-feudal slaveowning class by the Northern industrialists during the America Civil War enabled America to hyper-leap into the industrial capital plane, off of the huge amount of capital they consolidated from the plantation owners in the South.

The Industrial Revolution that kicked off in England and France in the 1800s revived the slave economy in the American South due to the huge amount of raw materials they suddenly needed for the textile industries (like cotton) and started to threaten the industrial North. That was the real reason for the American Civil War to end slavery by the Union.

So too did the collapse of the USSR and the plunder of its industrial assets revived the European ambition to compete with the US, but this time in the hyper-financial sphere.