Trump met with Putin, then Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

First, on 19 January 2025, president-elect Trump said the US must get out of the Ukraine or the US economy would be destroyed. On 21 January 2025, President Trump said Russia must get out of the Ukraine or Russia would be destroyed (by the US? Trump didn't say).

Best guess: the men in dark suits and dark glasses had a little chat with Trump on 20 January, either president-elect Trump or President Trump, and said if he said or did the wrong thing, he'd be the next JFK.

We don't know any details about what Presidents Trump and Putin said to each other, but we do know that President Trump treated 'Snow White' Zelensky and the seven dwarf European leaders like their opinions were irrelevant.

The US are also sending a lot more weapons to the Ukraine and saying they will make Europe pay for all those weapons.

Meanwhile, US/UK/EU newspapers say the Russians are losing badly. The Russian economy, after Europe stopped buying Russian energy and providing Russians with European goodies for their economy, isn't in the top 10, maybe not even the top 50. 

The Western media all say that the war has been going very badly for the Russians. The Ukraine have the most advanced NATO weapons, while Russia are using WWII Soviet weapons that no longer worked, so they've been patched together using parts from Russian washing machines, so not only are the Russian weapons mostly useless, the Russians can't even wash their clothes. The Russian military have lost more than a million killed in action, while the Ukrainian military have lost about 50,000. Of course, the Russians have killed more than a million Ukrainians, but almost all were civilians. The Russians are now close to total defeat after which NATO plan to break Russia up into somewhere between 5 and 20 small, unarmed countries, all required to repay huge war reparations so all Russian energy and uranium and other resources will all go to NATO (mostly US) oiligarchs.

A number of people, all paid by the Russians with worthless rubles, have said the Russians are winning and the Russian economy, at PPP is 4th largest in the world. I checked, and PPP is a problem, other ratings put the Russian economy at PPP at #6. 

I heard someone say that Trump definitely deserves the Nobel Peace Prize after the Chinese and Indians are being forced to make peace by Trump's economic policies. Europe will not buy any Russian energy, but they will buy Indian energy, even if India get most of their energy resources from Russia. The US is trying to impose severe economic penalties on China and India, but penalising China is difficult since China produces things the US desperately needs, so the US have to trade with China on China's terms. India is not as strong economically, but China don't want to be alone fighting the US, so now they're supporting India. Peace between India and China after 75 years of war? Yes, Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize!

Some US maps of the war in Ukraine show that Russia was close to Kyiv in the first weeks of the 2022 war, but then were forced further and further back east, and are basically losing.

Actually, in 2014, when NATO and the Ukraine were going to block the Russian Navy from all sea access, Russia took the Crimea and demanded that the Donbas be an autonomous part of the Ukraine. France and Germany gave Russia the Minsk Accords, guaranteeing, they told the Russians, that the Russian language, religion, and ethnic Slavs would be safe in the Donbas, and told everyone else that, while the Russians weren't looking, the Donbas would be an Aryan region with no Russian language or churches or Slavs.

When Russian military reached the Crimea, the Ukrainian military defending Crimea said, 'Welcome, brothers,' and the Russians were made to feel at home (after all, the Crimea had been part of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Russia until 1954, and had not been too happy to be moved to the Soviet Socialist Republic os Ukraine). The the move back to Russia was welcomed by the Crimeans, and there was no fighting.  Of course, most of the officers of the Ukrainian military were Slavs in 2014.

While Russia weren't looking, i.e., from 2014 until 2021, the Ukrainian military got rid of the Slavic officers and replaced them with good Aryan officers. So, when Putin wrote Biden and NATO in 2021 saying that Russia could never allow the Ukraine to join NATO, he got the response that the Ukraine was definitely going to be part of NATO with a large nuclear arsenal and military bases and troops, and Russia had better do whatever NATO told them to do. So Putin ordered a totally unprovoked invasion of the Ukraine that managed to advance until they were near Kyiv, but then the Aryan-led Ukrainian military hit the Russians hard with NATO weapons, and the Russian military withdrew to areas near Russia. The Russian military had another big setback in late summer 2022, and the West wrote off the unprovoked Russian invasion as a complete failure that would soon result in a Russian surrender on NATO terms, a surrender NATO are still expecting will come very soon now, and the US/UK/EU newspapers assure us that Russia were very close to surrendering until Trump allowed Putin to land on US soil, where he should have been arrested as a war criminal, then the US president and the Russian dictator talked for a couple of hours and Trump let the war criminal leave the US, in clear violation of NATO law (just ask any of the top leaders in NATO, other than Trump).

And then he treated Snow White Zelensky and the seven European dwarfs like they didn't really matter, for all of which Trump has been condemned by all the neoliberal and neoconservative leaders in the US/UK/EU governments and media who know that it is essential that Russia be totally destroyed and broken up into a bunch of small, unarmed countries that must do whatever NATO tell them to do.

After all, they all know, and the media they control keep reiterating, that Russia is not the USSR, MI6 and the CIA, probably with help from Mossad have destroyed most if not all of the Russian nuclear arsenal, if it was even still operational, so this war should be quick and clean and leave NATO in total and complete charge of the entire world with no fuss and no muss, After all, in the US/UK/EU history books, the Aryans easily destroyed the Slavs in WWII, and the Slavs have only gotten weaker while the Aryans have gotten much stronger.

Also, we know that the Nazis killed more than six million Jews, which was the worst crime ever committed in the history of the world, while the swastika-waving Aryans in the Ukraine have a Jewish president, so they can't possibly be Nazis. (The Nazis also killed Slavs, but that just proves that there's a little good in the worst of men.)

The US Democrats would love to impeach and convict Trump and get a good president who would lead NATO to totally destroy Russia. The US Democrats don't have the votes now, but they're hoping to get those votes in the 2026 election so they can get rid of Trump in 2027, preferably in January.

For now, Trump will try to do enough of what those who really run the US and whose predecessors got rid of JFK demand, while trying to avoid doing too much of what they really want and starting WWIII.

The Problem of Anti-Semitism

 I was taught in Sunday School that all Jews are deicides, so good Christians must avoid them, but G_d gave them the 'Mark of Cain' so it is prohibited to kill them. 

Hitler wanted to deport all the European Jews to Palestine. As the Rev. Dr. Alexander Keith, a Scots Presbyterian, said in 1843, "Palestine is a land without a people for a people without a land." He has been misquoted as saying "Palestine is a land without any people for a people without any land," but that's wrong. He went to Palestine, saw a mixture of Palestinians and European Christians who went to live in the Holy Land and he figured that all Arabs are nomads, they live in tents, not houses, their camels and goats follow the grass, the Arabs follow the goats and camels, and they can go anywhere outside Palestine while the Jews are all sent to live in Palestine (the Christians living in the Holy Land could stay there, of course, at least the Protestant Christians).

Of course, in 1843 Palestine was still part of Ottoman Syria, so sending British Jews to live there could only be done with Ottoman permission until after WWI, when the Ottomans lost and the Ottoman Empire was mostly divided between the British and the French, with the British getting all of Palestine. The British had several declarations that Palestine would be only for Jews, maybe only for British Jews, but the final Balfour Declaration was that the Jews and Palestinians would share Palestine, forming a British colony with a mixture of colonials who did not get along and could not put up a unified front against British Imperial Rule.

The US had a law restricting Jewish immigration starting in 1921 (they took in a few Nobel Laureates and others with similar accomplishments, but not many), and the British said Palestine was only for British Jews. When Hitler said he wanted to deport all the European Jews to Palestine, the British said that the Royal Navy would prevent any Jews being deported from Europe, especially deported to British Palestine.

People who survived German Concentration Camps in the '30s said they were not death camps, just minimum security prisons. Some have used this to say the Nazi Concentration Camps didn't kill any Jews.

But in 1940, the war meant Germany had a shortage of food and limited the food sent to the concentration camps to feed the Jewish prisoners, so the Jewish prisoners started starving and, as their immune systems weakened, they began to develop contagious diseases and these diseases spread to the Concentration Camp staff and the townspeople. So the Nazis came up with the Final Solution: all the Jews unable to work must be mass executed and the bodies burned to stop the spread of disease. The Germans tried to hide the Holocaust, but they lost the war so the world found out about the Holocaust and the Allies hanged thousands of Germans for war crimes.

The US had concentration camps for Japanese, but the US won the war and the Japanese lost, so the American Concentration Camps were not war crimes. I met a former Japanese prisoner from one of the US Concentration Camps who said that the US only gave the camp enough food to feed the prisoners for three months and said it must last a year, and prisoners must never be allowed out of their cells, but the guards at his camp disobeyed orders, bought farm implements, seeds, and eggs with their own money, and let the prisoners farm the Concentration Camp, and they finished the food provided in three months then lived on what they grew and hatched. But that was just one US Concentration Camps, and I don't know what happened at the others, but even if the US had killed every Japanese prisoner, since the US won the war, that would not have been a war crime.

Ivy League professor Dave Collum says that FDR was responsible for the Holocaust of the Jews, because, if the US had sided with Germany against the Soviet Union, there never would have been a Holocaust. This is very likely to be true: Hitler did not want to kill the Jews, he just wanted them out of Europe, so if the US had allied with Germany, all the Jews who died in the Holocaust might have been saved. Or if the US decided to let Germany kill all the Jews, it would not have been a Holocaust, just a casualty of war.

But the official history of WWII is the pretty much the Holocaust and the US rescue of the Western European Jews, sending those who survived the Holocaust to Palestine. The Soviets mostly get written out of the history, since they didn't really contribute anything: the US single-handedly defeated the Axis, at least in the US history of WWII, which remains the official Western history, even if there might be a few minor discrepancies between the official Western history and what actually happened.

But we did have the Holocaust, Anti-Semitism is now a heinous crime, and it's been defined to include any criticism of Israel.

So anyone in the US/UK/EU who criticises Israel is guilty of a serious crime: Students can be expelled, immigrants with legal visas or even passports can be deported for committing a serious crime, citizens can be arrested and lose their jobs.

So, under the US/UK/EU definition, the Palestinians killed by Israel were trying to complete what Germany started and are guilty of genocide if they killed any Jews or attempted genocide if they didn't, so Israel acted strictly in self-defense. And anyone questioning this obvious fact is guilty of the serious crime of Anti-Semitism and will be severely punished. (And this includes Anti-Semitic Jews in the US/UK/EU who question anything that Israel does.)

WWIII anyone, or did Trump bring us 'Peace in Our Time'???

I read the Child's Version of Churchill's History as a boy, back in the '60s.

Churchill said, correctly, that it would have been very easy for the UK to have prevented WWII, bloodlessly, in '33: Germany had been completely disarmed in 1919, and the UK could have ordered that Germany could not rearm, and must pick a new Chancellor, one who would promise not to re-arm. Churchill said that he thundered against letting Germany re-arm in '33, but I can't find a single example of one of those speeches anywhere in the morgue. So it appears that Churchill, like the rest of the British leadership, was terrified of the USSR and wanted a lightly armed Germany to pose a slight resistance that would slow the Soviet attack down enough for the UK and France to get ready to defend against it.

In any case, the UK did nothing in '33, Germany elected Ad0lph and re-armed, and the UK and France became afraid of Germany in 1938, so both started working on their defences: for France, the Maginot Line, and for the UK, the radar shield, and both wanted time to prepare. 

So, in 1938, Chamberlain signed a (faux) Peace Treaty with Germany promising 'Peace in Our Time', Peace that did not last, and for which Churchill condemned Chamberlain, a condemnation that persists to this day. But the British radar shield saved the UK from the Luftwaffe attacks in '40 (the Maginot Line didn't do much for France, since the Wehrmacht figured out how to get around it).

But most of the British Expeditionary Force made their way back to the UK from Dunkirk, and Germany figured that an amphibious attack would be a disaster, so Germany used bombers, many of which were shot down thanks to the radar shield, and the UK managed to hold on until the US joined the war.

The Soviets got lots of materiel and Spam from the US to help them in their war effort, a contribution the US and USSR preferred not to remember: helping/being helped by the enemy.

But the Soviets fought at Leningrad and Stalingrad, and one can no longer see Leningrad or Stalingrad on any up-to-date map, so obviously, the Wehrmacht won, and had all of Eurasia until 1944 when the US marched in and single-handedly destroyed the Wehrmacht. At least that's the official US version, and that's the version that was in all the history books I had to read in High School. Along with the Churchill's lie that the UK could have easily defeated Germany in 1938 and Chamberlain giving Germany an extra year to prepare was the reason the UK lost in France in 1940. (Most likely, if the UK went to war in 1938, the BEF would have been defeated and captured in Czechoslovakia, not managed to get back to the UK to defend against an amphibious invasion, and with no radar shield, the Luftwaffe would have devastated the UK with bombing runs and not enough carrots for the RAF--Churchill always said the RAF knew when and where the Luftwaffe were coming because he fed them lots of carrots; Churchill's histories never mention the radar shield that Chamberlain completed shortly before the war began.)

So now we're back trying to figure out to stop the Soviet advance. The Russians may have changed their name from 'Soviets', but the Russians remain Russians, no matter what they call themselves, and all of Europe West of Russia are terrified that a Soviet attack is imminent, and that it can be easily stopped if they just act now, and act strongly.

WWII was the last war fought with only one nuclear power who bombed two civilian cities with no military significance, because they couldn't risk their nuclear bombs on any city with military significance that would be defended and might shoot the Enola Gay down. And the US hoped to teach the USSR a lesson: don't mess with anything west of the USSR. Only what actually happened was that everyone knew the basics of the atom bomb, that it required about 60 tonnes of uranium (mostly yellowcake, plus a little metallic uranium), and this was outrageously expensive and might not work.

After the Soviets saw that it did work, they immediately got 60 tonnes of uranium together, let it sit for 3 years producing plutonium, and in 1949, the USSR was the world's 2nd nuclear power.

J. Edgar Hoover was tasked with finding the spies that explained what uranium was to the ignorant Soviets who couldn't possible have figured this out by themselves, and arrested someone who was promised a prison sentence if he named one or more confederates, and the death penalty if he didn't. This went on until two Jews, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, refused to name anyone else, so both were executed in 1953.

France also figured out how to make a nuke, and the US helped the UK, so there were four nuclear powers.

Then the PRC, India, Pakistan, and the DPRK all developed public nukes, and one state probably has 'secret' nukes that everyone knows that they have.

Someone, probably MI6, with additional intelligence from the CIA and help from Mossad, managed to destroy a large part of the Russian nuclear force, so it looks like Russia is not the nuclear power that the USSR was, and can easily be defeated by a massive attack before they can launch any of their (probably no longer operational) nukes. So most of Europe west of Russia are all for a strategic stab at Russia to completely destroy Russia, break them up into somewhere between 5 and 20 small, unarmed countries, with all their resources handed over as war reparations, mostly to US oiligarchs (but with a little going to the UK, France, and other members of NATO).

What could possibly go wrong with such a brilliant plan????

The Israeli-American-Iranian War in the News

 I watched as John Mearsheimer, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen discussed the war between Iran and the US allied with Israel. They said that the Friday 13 June, 2025 attack by Israel early in the morning was a failure, and the Iranian response is destroying Israel.

This is pretty much the opposite of what I read in the news, where President Trump ordered Iran to show up at a meeting on Sunday, 15 June or they would face very serious consequences. They did not show up, so those deadly consequences happened. Two days before the meeting. When Israel attacked and destroyed all the Iranian anti-aircraft facilities and almost all of their missiles, killed all their top generals and nuclear scientists, and destroyed the computer that runs all their defence systems, leaving Iran completely vulnerable to further Israeli attacks.

When Iran managed to fire a very few drones at Israel, all were shot down by Israel's Iron Dome, so Iran can do absolutely no damage to Israel, and the Israeli attacks continue daily, and will continue until Iran surrender, or all of Iran are completely destroyed.

And President Trump has promised that the US will be joining Israel in about two weeks to take out all Iranian nuclear research facilities with US planes, completely invisible to Iranian air defences, using 'bunker-buster' bombs. If Iran tries to retaliate against the US, the US response will ensure the total destruction of Iran, and will kill all the Ayatollahs, since US intelligence know exactly where they all are and US bombs can easily kill them all. And US defence protection mean no American soldier's life can be threatened by Iran with their primitive weapons (most of which have already been destroyed by Israel).

Of course, John Mearsheimer, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen say everything in the establishment media, both the pro-Trump and the anti-Trump media which follow the same story about Israel's total success in their attacks on Iran and their impregnable defences against any Iranian retaliation are lies: most of the Iranian air defenses are still operational, so Israeli planes cannot fly over Iran, they can only fire rockets at Iran from outside the country, and those rockets do limited damage. Mossad spies set up systems identical to the ones they helped set up in Russia to destroy Russia's nuclear attack force, trucks with retractable roofs full of drones, and they had full knowledge of where all the generals and nuclear scientists lived (since this was public knowledge), so it was very easy, when Iran was not expecting an attack before Monday, 16 June 2025, to kill all those generals and scientists, but Iran replaced all the generals, got their defence computer working again, arrested many of the Mossad spies, and had the Ayatollahs hidden where Israeli jets and Mossad spies couldn't find them (the Ayatollahs' homes were all bombed, but the Ayatollahs were out for the night).

And they say Israel lie about stopping all the Iranian missiles, those missiles have done massive damage that Israel did not expect and cannot easily repair, and the missile attacks have been every day starting late Friday the 13th.

Iran say that every Israeli attack on Iran will be followed by an Iranian attack on Israel, and those attacks will do more and more damage to Israel, but will stop as soon as Israel stops attacking Iran.

But Israel have no intention of stopping before Iran are destroyed, unless they run out of ammunition, and the US plan to a) start helping the Israelis; and b) supply them with plenty of ammunition to keep shooting at Iran, and the US and Israel both say Iran have very few missiles left, so their illegal attacks on Israel will end very soon (under US/UK/EU/Israeli law, it is perfectly legal to bomb Iran, and totally illegal for anyone to bomb Israel) .

 Iran say, and John Mearsheimer, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen agree, that Iran have thousands of missiles left, and are producing many more to replace the ones they are firing at Israel, so those attacks on Israel will not only continue, but will get more and more deadly and damaging, and if the US join the war, will do far more damage to US forces than to Israel, since US forces have far less protection than Israel, should the US get into the war.

Net: I have no idea what to believe. But it is almost certain that far more damage has been done to Israel than  they admit, since all photographs and videos (and eyewitness statements) of Iranian damage are illegal in Israel and the Western establishment media.

What in the *&%! is Happening in the Middle East???

As just about everyone knows, June 10-12 the US and Israel told Iran they'd better show up for a very important meeting on Sunday, 15 June, or there would be serious consequences. The meeting was very, very important and Iran had better not miss it.

So, since it was Eid, Iran were celebrating Thursday and were in bed asleep at 3:00 am Friday when Israel struck a massive blow with US weapons. The US had been working hard with Israel to trick the Iranians into relaxing and not being on full alert.

After those few days of lies, the lies from Iran and Israel and the US have been pretty much non-stop. No one has a clue what is really happening.

We have lots of pictures, plus stories from reporters that aren't there, of tens of thousands of US weapons striking Iran, with fires, buildings partly destroyed where Iranian generals and university professors of physics lived and were killed along with their families and neighbours. We know that Mossad have a huge network of spies in Iran who told them where the generals and professors lived and called in to say they saw the generals go into their apartments to sleep, and announced that they killed, and Iran admitted, that many of their top generals and professors have been martyred in the Israeli strikes. We know those spies planted many drones in Iran in trucks with retractable roofs just like the ones used to destroy most of the Russian nuclear strike force, in an effort to remove all Russian nuclear fangs.

Israel and the US said the Iranian defences had been totally destroyed by that first strike, and this seems to have been true. Mossad had destroyed the electronic systems that controlled all Iranian defence and offence capabilities, so they expected the bombings to continue with no defensive threats to the Israeli Air Force that would be attacking Iran or any Iranian missiles able to fly at Israel, certainly not enough to penetrate the Iron Dome. We know Trump told the Iranians they had better surrender unconditionally or many, many Iranians would be killed. We know Israel said their strike on Friday, 13 June to surprise and destroy Iranian military capacity to defend themselves or attack Israel was a complete success: all the Iranian offensive missiles were destroyed along with the entire Iranian antiaircraft system.

Only a team of electronic experts from Russia raced to repair the damage and got those Iranian electronic systems working after about 10 hours, when they were expected to be out of service for the duration of the war, and (according to Russia) probably would have been out of service for weeks or months.

So, late Friday, Iran fired the first missiles at Israel.

How much damage was really done to Iran that first night, and all the following days and nights? We know lots of top Iranian officials and many civilians have been killed, Israel claims and Iran decries that much, but the total destruction of Iranian antiaircraft? Israel say not one plane has been shot down, while Iran say they've shot down three (but no pictures or any other evidence). And the near total destruction of all Iranian missiles? Obviously, not all, but do they have dozens, hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands left? No idea.

And the Iranian missiles fired at Israel? Genocide, of course, since at least thee Israelis have been killed, and the definition of genocide is killing all or part of any recognised ethnic-religious group, so killing three Israelis definitely fits the official, legal definition of genocide. Were more killed? Not sure. Was any damage done to Israelis offence or defence facilities? No idea. How many missiles actually got past the Iron Dome, Israel admits about three, while Iran claim many more.

So all we know now is that this war is likely to continue. Will the people really running the US send the US military to help Israel destroy Iran? No idea. Will Russia and/or the PRC take a bigger role, and will we know about it if they surreptitiously help Iran? No idea.

And absolutely no idea where this is going. 

WWIII anyone???

Cuban Missila Crisis???

 In 1962, I had to sleep on the floor. There was talk that the US was very close to having a massive fleet of nuclear bombs dropping all over the US. Obviously, the targets would include US military sites and all major cities, and we lived in a small town and had lots of relatives who lived in major cities, so they all came to our little town, too small and insignificant to be a target, and far from any possible target. They stayed at my father's house and my uncle's house and two of them got my bed and others got the spare beds and the couch and I had to sleep on the floor. For years, many Americans thought we'd been very close to complete nuclear destruction.

In fact, the Cuban Missile Crisis started in 1961 when the US put nuclear missiles in Turkey. The Soviets vehemently objected, and the US leadership basically said, 'So what can you do about it? Those missiles are staying in Turkey.'

So the evil Soviets, completely unprovoked, threatened to put nuclear missiles in Cuba, and the US were ready to nuke the Soviet Union to teach them that putting nuclear missiles in Cuba was a clear and flagrant violation of the Monroe Doctrine.

So President Kennedy made a fatal phone call to Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Kennedy said, 'I have to run for re-election and you don't, so if you'll say, "The USSR is taking all our missiles out of Cuba and will never put any missiles in Cuba," we'll take all our missiles out of Turkey, and you don't have to give us anything but your pretence that the US got everything and the USSR got nothing.' So Secretary Khrushchev agreed, since he thought he had nothing to lose. The US secretly removed all the missiles, with USSR inspectors verifying that there were no US missiles left in Turkey, and the US intelligence services were furious, as were the Soviet intelligence services.

The US intelligence services got rid of Kennedy in 1963, and the USSR intelligence services got rid of Khrushchev in 1964, as anyone who knew the intelligence services knew they would.

But there was never a crisis, there was never a real threat of nuclear war in 1962 because the US and USSR both had decent leaders who were able to defang the situation with no real threat (but they allowed ordinary people to think there had been a threat from which they had saved the world).

Khrushchev had to keep his victory secret, so USSR intelligence forces decided they had to get rid of him, and the US security forces could never forgive Kennedy for coming up with a serious loss that only looked like a great victory. 

(Of course, while the US had to remove all those missiles from Turkey, they moved them all to Türkiye, but they are no longer aimed at the USSR, now they're aimed at Russia.)

Great Power Pollitics: Indivisibility of Security

A Great Power can defend themselves. The Great Powers are never equal, but a nation defending themselves against an attack have a large logistical advantage, and to be a Great Power, one must, with this logistical advantage, be able to defeat any attack by another Great Power, so the weakest of the Great Powers must be able to defeat an attack by the strongest Great Power or they are not a Great Power.

Every Great Power are entitled to Indivisibility of Security, meaning no Great Power can increase their security at the expense of another Great Power. Such an increase in security at the expense of another Great Power would be an attack on the other Great Power, and a Great Power, by definition, can successfully resist such an attack.

Europe has been at war for most of the history we have of Europe, since they were never able to agree on who were and who were not a Great Power. Russia, in particular, have been very strong and very weak, and for the last two hundred years (that we know of) the Western Great Powers have wanted to defeat Russia and take some or all of the Russian resources, and have had differing degrees of success.

Napoleon attacked Russia with a military of 500,000. He returned to France in 1812 with a military of just 10,000 (and no longer being a Great Power, France were defeated, twice, by the UK after that visit to Moscow).

In the first part of the 20th Century, Japan, Germany, the US, UK, and France all managed to seize some Russian resources and Russia could do nothing and ended up dissolved and reformed as the Soviet Union.

Germany decided, in 1914, that they were strong enough to defeat the alliance of the UK, France, and Russia, and might have succeeded, but the US banks were sure that the UK and France were the only Great Powers in Europe, and loaned them lots of money to defeat Germany. Then, when it looked like the UK and France were sure to lose, the US joined them in their war against Germany to save the US banks, and Germany, while able to exhaust the UK and France, were themselves exhausted and unable to stand up to the US, UK, and French alliance.

In 1919, Germany were forced to sign the Treaty of Versailles, agreeing to hand all their gold over to the victors as war reparations and to completely disarm and agree never again to have a military.

But, not long after that, the UK and France decided that the Soviet Union were a serious threat and they needed an alliance with a moderately armed Germany to defeat the Soviet Union, so they allowed Germany to begin rearming in 1933.

Then, in 1938, five long years after the the UK and France decided that Germany needed to rearm, decided that Germany were getting too strong and must be defeated, but both were not ready, so the UK negotiated a peace treaty with Germany to give the UK and France time to prepare for war with Germany.

France and the UK wanted war in 1939, so they asked Poland to blockade East Prussia from the rest of Germany, an Act of War, and Germany responded by declaring war on Poland, which the UK, French, Polish Alliance meant justified the UK and France declaring war on Germany. Sadly, France and the UK were defeated in 1940, and Chamberlain, after his death, was blamed for not attacking Germany in 1938, since the UK desperately needed a scapegoat and Chamberlain, having died, could not defend himself.

After WWII, which the US claim to have won single-handedly, defeating Germany with their invasion of Europe in 1944 and Japan with two nukes in 1945, the USSR managed to keep all of Eastern Europe in the Warsaw Pact. The US and the rest of Western Europe hoped to defeat the USSR, but needed to beware of the USSR military with their nukes, obviously (to the US and Western Europe) stolen from the US.

In any case, the world noticed two Great Powers, the US and the USSR (the PRC proved they could defend themselves, the DPRK, and Vietnam from being overrun by the US, so they were probably a Great Power, but for most people, the US and USSR stuck out as Great Powers).

And then the USSR collapsed in 1991, the world had only one Great Power, everyone knew the US could (and did) destroy any nation they felt like destroying: Serbia so that NATO could establish a base against Russia in Kosovo, Afghanistan to destroy a weak nation as punishment for the September 2001 terrorist attack on the US (the attackers were renationalised as Afghans from 2001 until 2003, when they became not just Afghans but also Iraqis, Iranians, North Koreans, Syrians, Libyans, and Cubans, even though none of the attackers actually came from any of those nations, but the US was Global Hegemon, so if they renationalised the attackers, the re-nationalising stood). All the nations the US decided to blame for the 9/11 terrorist attack were attacked, some just with sanctions, some by sanctions and military attacks by the US and NATO.

This annoyed a lot of nations, but the US was obviously Global Hegemon, the only Great Power. The US could destroy any other nation, and no other nation could destroy the US, or effectively resist a US attack. So everyone accepted whatever the US did.

The handful of nuclear states knew that they could try using nukes against the US, but would probably do only limited damage while being utterly destroyed. And the US could inflict unbearable damage without nukes by stopping all international trade plus non-nuclear military attacks.

But times keeps a changin': now there are two or three nations that think they might be Great Powers.

Russia seemed to think they could defeat the US Proxy attack, but all the US/UK/EU news media assure us that the US/UK/EU proxy attack on Russia has just about destroyed Russia, which was no longer a Great Power, but has lost to a US/UK/EU armed Ukraine that have killed more than a million Russian troops, totally destroyed the Russian economy, left Putin in a precarious position, probably soon to be pushed out of the presidency. Russia thought they could take all of the Ukraine in three weeks, but have only a tiny sliver (which is still far too much) of the Ukraine after three years. So Russia have already been defeated, and it's just a question before that defeat turns to total destruction and reorganisation of Russia into a bunch of neutral, demilitarised states, all with governments bought and paid for by the US that all do whatever the US order them to do.

Of course, there are other news media that say the Russian military were never interested in quickly overrunning all of the Ukraine, but wanted to minimise Russian losses while maximising Ukrainian losses, especially of NATO weaponry, the goal being to demilitarise the Ukraine, and the Ukrainian losses have been vastly greater than the Russian losses, while the Russian economy has expanded in spite of all the US/UK/EU sanctions, including in weapons production, so the Ukraine are rapidly running out of NATO weapons and troops while the Russian military are very well supplied with a massive inventory of weaponry.

Of course, both the US/UK/EU news media and the other news media say they are the only news media telling the truth, the other news media with the opposite story are pure propaganda.

So, if one believes the US/UK/EU news media, Russia were never a Great Power and are now very close to total defeat, but if one believes the other news media, Russia are now very close to victory, meaning a Ukraine that will never dare try to join NATO and will obey Russian requirements about freedom for ethnic Russian that remain in whatever is left of the Ukraine after part reverts to Russia.

And then there are the PRC, no longer the nation with the largest population, but now the nation with the largest number of petrol-powered vehicles and the largest number of electric vehicles. And those are just filling the streets with people and goods moving about, that's not counting the military vehicles, of which they have the largest number on land, sea, and air.

PRC security is strange. The US agreed in 1972 that they would accept that Taiwan are just another PRC Province, but implemented what is called Strategic Ambiguity: the US say that Taiwan are just another PRC Province while acting as if Taiwan are an independent country. Taiwan have a person in the US with all the duties and responsibilities of an Ambassador residing in a building that serves all the functions of an Embassy, but the person has a title that is not Ambassador and the building has a name that is not Embassy.

And the PRC have accepted this since 1972. But will the PRC continue to accept this, and where does the PRC and US security stop with regard to Taiwan? No one has a clue.

Finally, there are Iran, with the US and Israel demanding total and unconditional surrender or total destruction, but no one knows if Iran are a Great Power or not, Can the US and Israel attack Iran without unacceptable losses? No one knows. The more cautious officials in the US strongly suggest that the US do not want to find out. The less cautious officials say the US must proceed to destroy Iran ASAP, which is not only without the slightest risk to the US or Israel, since Iran cannot respond by doing any real damage to the US or Israel, but that will also return all Iranian oil to the rightful owners: the US, and cut the PRC off from all that Iranian oil, so what are the US waiting for?

***

I have left out India, which have the economy that is now producing the 3rd largest amount of goods in the world, but because of low prices (for Indian citizens), is only producing the 4th largest amount measured by how much it is bought and sold for. And India make their military less obvious than Russia or the PRC. But they are likely to be a Great Power that mostly keep their heads down (except for war with Pakistan, one of the basic Indian-Pakistani traditions since independence being war with each other).

So India are a Great Power, but one that somehow manage to keep their security concerns (and their military) out of sight and out of mind.

(While fighting fairly obvious wars with Pakistan, India kept fighting a very obscure war with the PRC along the Line of Actual Control, lost somewhere up in the mountains, but India and the PRC proclaimed peace at a meeting in Kazan, Russia in October, 2024.)