Transcending the forever wars

Key Markets report for Friday, 20 Jun 2025

Once in a blue moon, I’ll prepare this report and forget to hit “SEND.” This happened yesterday so the report did not go out. Please accept my apologies. Yesterday’s report is below:

In 2012, Jake Sullivan informed the then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that in Syria, Al Qaeda “is on our side.” Today we know how Jake Sullivan knew that. He was in correspondence with Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s former Chief of Staff who had at that time set up a private consultancy named “Inter Mediate.” Powell was one of the key players behind the scenes who orchestrated the 2011-2016 civil war in Syria, aimed at overthrowing the government of Bashar al Assad. He informed Sullivan that Inter Mediate had organized “secret channels between insurgents and governments.”

“Working” Syria, Myanmar, Somalia, Yemen…

In the same exchange, Powell informed Sullivan that Inter Mediate worked “closely with FCO, NSC and SIS in London.” FCO is the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, NSC is the National Security Council and SIS is the Secret Intelligence Service. Powell also added that in addition to Syria, work had begun in Yemen, Somalia and Burma (Myanmar). The four countries have had interesting developments in common since 2012: they all experienced bloody insurgencies, large scale terrorist attacks, aggressions by Western proxy forces and bloody civil wars. Just in Syria, between 2012 and today, these attacks have produced over a million casualties.

Of course, all this “work” is being done behind the scenes and the terror networks that emerge to destabilize nations and commit widespread atrocities appear incomprehensible to us progressive, sophisticated people living in the West. A conspiracy theorist here or there may claim that the terrorists are in fact Western proxy forces, funded, trained and directed by our own intelligence “communities,” but such claims can’t be verified by the “reputable” sources, so most people are simply left with the impression that out there, in the jungle, the brown peoples are irrational, violent religious fanatics, and that all the bloodshed couldn’t possibly have anything to do with us.

Next up: the Balkans

The same was true some 30 years ago when wars were raging in the Balkans: even though people just like Jonathan Powell were deeply involved well before any shooting started, western media consistently reported that the violence stemmed from “centuries-old hatreds” of the hopelessly primitive Balkan tribes. Today, the empire is rigging the Balkans for more wars. British diplomats, intelligence operatives and dozens of non-government organizations have descended upon Bosnia and Herzegovina in their thousands, infiltrating Bosnian government and its agencies, particularly those in charge of state security, education and the media.

One of the contractors tasked with shaping public opinion among the Bosnian people is called Albany Associates which has already proven their effectiveness in Syria. Specifically, their job is to keep Bosnia and Herzegovina pro-Europe, pro-Britain and pro-Nato, and to suppress Russian influence in the country. As a testament to their effectiveness, today 60% of the Bosnian people believe that the greatest external threat to their nation is exactly Russia.

Unaware of Britain’s track record in Syria, Yemen, Myanmar, Somalia and many other places, the Director General of Bosnia’s Intelligence and Security Agency Osman Mehmedagic declared that London is a “longstanding friend” of Bosnia and Herzegovina and “all its citizens.” He thanked the British Ambassador Julian Reilly for UK’s “continuous support, … especially in the security sector.”

British military think tank RUSI (Royal United Services Institute) has designated Bosnia and Herzegovina as the inevitable frontline in the clash between the West and Russia, so perhaps it’s time to begin heating up those incomprehensible, “centuries-old hatreds” (nudge, nudge, wink, wink). When things get ugly, we’ll hear about the primitive, irrational Balkan peoples again and Western public will shrug, unaware of the ways all these wars come to be.

Determing causes and incentives

In all, if we scratch below the surface of almost any conflict in the world, we find the devious hand of the empire stirring the pot. Today, the culprits seem to be principally the British, but in the past the same patterns of events held true under all colonialist empires including the French, Belgians, Dutch, Venetians, Spanish, German or Portuguese. Divide and rule was the default approach and the “splendid little wars” between the irrational, violent brown peoples simply facilitated the colonialists’ conquests and dominance.

I believe it is worth exploring these historical truths because they can lead us to the principles that ultimately incentivize this devious behavior. Ultimately, and across centuries, the trail of breadcrumbs always and consistently leads to the money lending oligarchies and the financial systems they control. They and their governance models have been behind the Western civilization’s pathogenic march over centuries, and they are still the ultimate drivers of wars we experience today.

All the noise about Iran’s nuclear program, Saddam Hussein’s WMDs, Bashar al Assad gassing his own people, Muammar Ghaddafi being a madman, Slobodan Milosevic being a Hitler, Vladimir Putin also being a Hitler, etc. is just that: noise. These are always only pretexts to inflame conflicts required to gain colonial control of coveted resources and populations around the world and to justify Western intervention to the public.

Transcending the forever wars

For all the rest of us, the legitimate question is this: do we want to be permanently at war, so that a tiny segment of people in our society can plunder a colossal horad of other people’s wealth and then use it for their own devious ends? I think the answer is quite obvious. But to transcend this tragic interval of history, Western oligarchy’s influence will have to be quarantined somehow and the financial system they developed will have to be reformed so that the incentives that drive conquest, colonization and imperialism are forever removed.

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Today’s trading signals

With yesterday’s closing prices we have the following changes for the Key Markets portfolio: