Posted originally on Aug 8, 2026 by Martin Armstrong |
Categories:Armstrong in the Media
Category Blogger Martin Armstrong
The Unwinnable Iran War
Posted originally on Aug 8, 2026 by Martin Armstrong |
I have reported that Trump was mislead into this unwinnable war with Iran, which has been planning for it since 1979. They had amassed the largest stockpile of balistic missiles and understood the way to fight Israel was to overwhelm their dome defense. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is going to run for reelection in October. However, I would not put it past him to pull a Zelensky to retain power. He has implied that he may be considering taking unilateral action to prolong a costly and unwinnable war with Iran, even as Washington and Tehran appear to be close to an interim deal to open the Strait of Hormuz. Trump keeps trying to exit and Netanyahu tries to keep the US in to fund his war.
Iran’s investment in ballistic missiles was a deliberate strategic choice, made in the context of its long-standing tensions with the U.S. and Israel. This decision was driven by the understanding that the way to defeat Israel was to overwhelm its defense and that would take a vast supply to compel Israel to eventually run out of missiles.
There is no evidence that Netanyahu has EVER pursued a peace agreement with Iran. Instead, his decades-long career has been defined by consistent, vocal, and active opposition to diplomatic engagement with Tehran, favoring military and economic pressure to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. I have stated many times that the primary directive of a Neocon is to reject any communication with a deemed enemy. There is NEVER a desire of peace. With both sides at each other’s throats, there is no solution militarily. Netanyahu is a threat to Israel the same as Zelensky is a threat to Ukraine. Neither consider the civilians who are killed in the process.
Nonetheless, the shekel reached its weakest point in modern history in May 2002, when the exchange rate hit 4.916 ILS per 1 USD. Since that peak, the currency has generally strengthened. By 2025, the average annual exchange rate was around 3.77 ILS/USD, and in 2026 it has traded significantly lower (stronger shekel), around 2.80-3.00 ILS/USD. This has been driven in part due to the High-Tech and Foreign Investment factors (Capital Flow). Israel has a powerful high-tech sector that attracts massive foreign investment. A significant portion of this investment comes from the US, creating constant demand for shekels.
Then there is the “Nasdaq Effect” and Institutional Hedging. Israeli pension funds and institutional investors hold vast portfolios of US stocks, particularly in technology. To manage currency risk, they engage in “hedging” thereby selling dollars and buying shekels. When US markets, especially the tech-heavy Nasdaq, rise, the value of these portfolios increases, prompting them to buy even more shekels to rebalance their currency exposure. This creates strong, self-reinforcing demand for the local currency.
The Bank of Israel has maintained relatively high interest rates to control inflation. It has been these higher interest rates that have made shekel-denominated assets more attractive to investors, increasing demand for the currency.
The prospects for war introduce geopolitics and that has introduced the “Risk Premium.” The shekel’s trajectory has often been influenced by geopolitics. For instance, the ceasefire following the October 2023 conflicts reduced the “Risk Premium” on Israeli assets, encouraging capital to return and supporting the shekel. However, our computer is warning that renewed geopolitical tensions, such as an escalation with Iran, could cause a sudden “flight to safety” and weaken the shekel.
Consequently, these factors have combined to strength the the shekel for 24 years overall. The Bank of Israel has historically intervened to smooth out extreme volatility, but it appears to be refraining from actively trying to reverse the structural trend of a strong shekel, preferring to let market forces play out. This is where we see things are starting to shift in 2027 and it appears we can see a major shift in trend post-2028.
Netanyahu’s Opposition to the 2015 Nuclear Deal
Netanyahu was vehemently opposed to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated by the Obama administration in 2015. In what was seen as a direct challenge to the U.S. president, Netanyahu accepted an invitation from congressional Republicans to address a joint session of Congress, where he publicly argued the deal would not block Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon but would instead pave the way for it . He spent years campaigning against the agreement and welcomed President Trump’s decision to withdraw from it in 2018 .
Rejection of Any Diplomacy & Advocating Confrontation & Destruction of Iran
The evidence shows that Netanyahu’s strategy has consistently been to advocate for maximum pressure and military action over negotiation. In a video after launching a joint war with the U.S. against Iran in 2025, Netanyahu stated the attack “allows us to do what I have been hoping to do for 40 years.” His fixation on Iran as an existential threat has always been his central theme of his political identity.
He reportedly convinced President Trump to rejoin the conflict in June 2025, framing it as a chance to achieve what past administrations had not. As recently as July 2026, Netanyahu expressed skepticism about a potential deal with Iran and opposes any peace deal. When President Trump began negotiating a peace agreement with Iran in 2026, reports indicate Netanyahu actively tried to prevent it. It was reported that Netanyahu planned massive strikes on Iranian energy and infrastructure to derail negotiations but was stopped by President Trump. While Netanyahu did not publicly criticize the deal, admitting to “disagreements” with Trump , he acknowledged he could not stop it from being signed.
Netanyahu’s approach has consistently been one of opposition to diplomatic engagement and a preference for confronting Iran through military and economic pressure. Iran is well aware of this personal animosity and had built an enormous arsenal of balistic missiles. This strategy resulted in Iran holding what is described as the largest ballistic missile stockpile in the Middle East, with estimates ranging from 2,500 to 6,000 missiles of various types.
Preparation for Conflict
Beyond the buildup, there is clear evidence that Iran prepared a military plan for a potential U.S. or Israeli attack. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) stated that a military action plan was approved by the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to be executed in the event of an attack. This suggests a high level of preparation for a scenario that ultimately came to pass. Military experts also affirmed that Iran had made significant preparations for a potential conflict with the U.S. and Israel.
This US-Iran war that broke out on February 28 put Iran’s massive missile stockpile to the test. While initial strikes damaged the arsenal, Iran’s ability to preserve and potentially rebuild its capabilities is a major part of the story. U.S. sources initially claimed that up to one-third of the arsenal was destroyed early in the conflict. However, subsequent U.S. intelligence assessments indicated that Iran retained about 70% of its prewar missile stockpile. Reports suggest that Iran used a truce to restore access to damaged underground facilities and may have replenished its stockpile with Russian-made missiles.
Despite significant strikes on its infrastructure, Iran is assessed to have regained operational access to the vast majority of its underground missile sites along the strategic Strait of Hormuz. This indicates that while the war has taken a toll, Iran’s underlying missile infrastructure has proven resilient.
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In short, Iran’s massive missile buildup appears to be the product of a long-term definitive strategy to prepare for the possibility of a major war with the US and Israel. While the available information does not state the buildup was a plan for the specific war, the presence of a pre-approved military response plan and the subsequent use of these missiles in the conflict demonstrates a clear and sustained level of preparation.
WILL CHINA & RUSSIA STAND SILENT IS ISRAEL SEEK TOTAL DESTRUCTION OF IRAN?
China and Russia have not indicated they would allow Israel to “totally destroy” Iran. On the contrary, they have actively opposed the military strikes and are calling for a ceasefire and a return to diplomatic negotiations. Allowing the “total destruction” of Iran would fundamentally contradict China and Russia’s stated policies. Their actions are aimed at preventing further escalation, which suggests they would not only NOT allow such a scenario but would actively work against it through diplomatic channels. As the Shanghai municipal government’s information office stated, claims that China has “abandoned Iran” are “narratives that not only distort the facts.”
From a realistic perspective, there is NO WAY either Russia or China would allow Netanyahu’s end-game to become reality. It seems that Netanyahu has the same delusions as Zelensky who seeks the destruction of Russia with comments from military leaders pronouncing Moscow will fall. There is absolutely no indication that either Zelensky or Netanyahu will succeed in their end game hgoals.
UNWINNABLE War
While this war has killed about 250 military leaders with the Ayatollah, these tactical gains have not translated into political outcomes. The Iranian regime has not fractured, and its nuclear program has not been dismantled, only set back. Iran has also opened a second front through Hezbollah in Lebanon, sustaining the conflict and then there are the Houthis who have declared a naval blockade against Saudi shipping and have followed through with attacks on oil tankers, effectively creating a crisis for one of the world’s most important shipping lanes.
Iran is built for a prolonged, attritional fight, a lesson reinforced by its experience in the Iran-Iraq War. It has employed a strategy of horizontal escalation, extending the conflict into the economic and political domains where time favors the side absorbing pain. This includes disrupting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, which has collapsed shipping to roughly 5% of pre-war levels, and targeting the energy infrastructure of Gulf states to create global economic pressure. This dynamic gives Tehran significant leverage, as the economic costs of the war are a major incentive for the US to seek a ceasefire. As I have said, every war game played had Iran taking the Strait of Hormuz. All I can assume is that the plane was Netanyahu’s with the assumption of killing the Ayatollah would end the war in one day like Venezuela. Trump was ill-advised and the question is who escorted Netanyahu into the Situation Room to sell this war to Trump.
This has simply become a War Without End! Without a clear, shared definition of victory between the US and Israel, the war continues without a decisive conclusion in sight. The conflict is settling into a pattern of strikes, pauses, and negotiations that prevent collapse but lead to no final resolution. A war fought without a clear objective and exit strategy, described by an “anti-Powell Doctrine,” risks becoming a “forever war” as the Neocons engaged in with Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. At least the Korean War was instigated by the North invading the South.
The question of whether the war is “winnable” cannot be answered with a simple yes or no. From a military standpoint, the coalition can achieve tactical victories. However, if the benchmark is forcing Iran into submission or achieving regime change, the evidence points toward a conflict that is unwinnable. Because Iran requires only survival to claim its own victory, the war appears to be a conflict where decisive victory is unattainable.
The Nuclear Option
Netanyahu has not publicly discussed this option deploying tactical nuclear weapons against Iran. However, there remain concerns given his relentless animosity toward Iran. Israel’s nuclear capability is widely believed to be tied to the “Samson Option” doctrine, which is a last-resort deterrent meant only for an existential threat to the state’s survival. The conflict with Iran, has often been characterized as an existential threat to Israel that he has claims goes to the survival of Israel. The problem that he faces is that a tactical nuclear strike might NOT even fully destroy Iran’s deeply buried nuclear facilities. Israel already possesses a range of advanced conventional weapons, including bunker-buster bombs, which could achieve similar objectives without the immense risks of nuclear escalation. President Trump, has publicly dismissed the possibility of an Israeli nuclear strike, stating, “Israel wouldn’t do that.” However, even the USA would resort to that option if confronted with the inevitable loss in a major war with anyone.
I have been often asked about if Robert Maxwell, Epstein’s girlfriend’s father, stole US nuclear secrets and handed them to Israel. The allegations linking Robert Maxwell to a series of intelligence-related activities involving Israel began with claims of Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli intelligence officer. I cannot speak definitively to this allegation. What I do know is that he was part of the “club” and that he agreed that Israel would recognize the coup against Gorbachev in return to allow the Jews in Russia to flee to Israel. I have maintained that nobody wants really to investigate WHY Epstein was engaging in his scheme ising girls to implicate powerful people. I believe they keep the focus on the girls as the victim and avoid the WHY because that leads to an operation nobody wants to expose.
The Countries That Will Pay for the UN Tax Experiment
Posted originally on Aug 7, 2026 by Martin Armstrong |
A United Nations proposal would replace the current system of taxing each multinational subsidiary separately with a global unitary tax system. A corporation’s worldwide profits would first be combined into one total and then divided among countries according to a formula measuring where it employs workers and where its customers purchase goods and services. Each country would apply its own corporate tax rate to the portion assigned to it, regardless of where the company legally reported the profit.
Tax Justice Network estimates that this reallocation would produce an additional $500 billion in annual corporate tax revenue worldwide. It would be redistributed among governments, creating major winners while stripping revenue from countries whose economies currently benefit from corporate headquarters, intellectual property, financial services, or low-tax structures.
Ireland would suffer one of the largest losses, surrendering an estimated $11.15 billion annually, or 81.9% of the multinational corporate tax revenue measured by the study. Hong Kong would lose $9.37 billion, or 75.7%; Singapore $8 billion, or 69.2%; Switzerland $5.43 billion, or 42%; the Netherlands $3.16 billion, or 28.4%; and Malta $3.04 billion. Bermuda would lose $489 million, the British Virgin Islands $496 million, Puerto Rico $547 million, Jersey $510 million, and Mauritius $152 million.
These jurisdictions currently tax profits that multinational corporations book within their borders despite having relatively little employment or customer activity there. The UN formula would disregard where those profits are legally reported and redistribute them toward countries where the company’s workers and customers are located.
The UN claims some of these jurisdictions could theoretically recover the lost revenue by taxing their smaller remaining profit base at much higher rates. The study estimates that the Netherlands would need an effective rate of roughly 29% to 33%, compared with its present estimated rate of 13.6%. Switzerland would need approximately 20% to 25%, up from 10.4%, while Singapore would need between 25% and 37%, up from 9.2%.
Those numbers become absurd for economies heavily dependent on profit booking. Ireland would require an effective rate between 68% and 94% to replace the revenue it loses under the various formulas. The Cayman Islands could require between 28% and 162%, while the British Virgin Islands could require anything from 9% to 643%. That is an admission that these jurisdictions could not recover their losses through ordinary taxation without destroying the economic model the UN intends to dismantle.
However, the losers are not limited to traditional tax havens. Japan would lose an estimated $34.09 billion per year, equal to 27.1% of the multinational corporate tax revenue included in the study. Denmark would lose approximately $1.8 billion, or 31.9%, while Saudi Arabia would lose $1.77 billion, or 17.9%.
The report classifies these three as “headquarters-bias” countries. Their multinational corporations report an unusually large share of global profits in the country where the parent company is headquartered, even though much of their employment and sales occurs abroad. Under the UN formula, some of that profit would be exported to foreign governments.
Japan’s result may reflect the concentration of research, intellectual property, engineering, and other high-value functions at Japanese parent companies. Yet the formula gives equal weight to employee headcount and customer location, meaning it may fail to recognize where a product was invented, financed, designed, or developed. A country could spend decades building an advanced industrial and technological base only to be told that much of the resulting profit belongs to whichever foreign country purchased the finished product.
To preserve its existing revenue, Japan would need to increase its effective corporate tax rate from approximately 30.5% to somewhere between 36.3% and 42.6%, depending on the allocation formula. Denmark would need to raise its rate from around 15% to between 25.3% and 38.8%. Saudi Arabia would need to increase its 20% effective rate to between 22.7% and 26%.
Denmark’s projected loss may be influenced by its large shipping industry and tonnage-tax regime. The report notes that $29 billion of A.P. Moller-Maersk’s $30.2 billion in 2022 pretax profit was subject to Danish or foreign tonnage taxation, producing an effective tax rate of only 3%. The proposed formula would allocate more of that profit to countries connected to Maersk’s workers and customers rather than allowing Denmark to retain the advantage of hosting the corporate headquarters.
New Zealand is also projected to lose about $220 million annually, Macao $975 million, Eswatini $22 million, and several smaller island jurisdictions would lose meaningful shares of their present corporate revenue. Some estimates for the smallest jurisdictions are based on thin reporting data and must be treated cautiously, but the direction is clear. This is a redistribution of national taxing rights, not a magical creation of $500 billion from nowhere.
The report attempts to dismiss these losses by telling tax-haven nations to abandon their present economic models, increase their tax rates, invest in education and infrastructure, and diversify into other industries. That is an extraordinary display of bureaucratic arrogance. Unelected organizations are effectively telling sovereign nations that their tax policies, competitive advantages, and development strategies are unacceptable and must be replaced by a model designed in New York.
Globalist institutions do not view countries as independent societies with different resources, cultures, needs, and economic strategies. They view the world as an administrative spreadsheet. If Ireland, Singapore, Switzerland, or a small Caribbean nation loses a major source of revenue, that is treated as an acceptable adjustment so long as the global model produces the desired aggregate result.
This is precisely how these organizations operate. The OECD, IMF, European Union, and United Nations always claim that another layer of coordination will produce fairness, stability, and efficiency. What actually appears is another permanent bureaucracy with committees, reporting mandates, enforcement mechanisms, technical standards, review conferences, and dispute panels.
The treaty language proposed by the Global Alliance for Tax Justice would empower a Conference of the Parties to assess the allocation of taxing rights across all forms of taxation with cross-border effects and adopt additional measures it considers appropriate. It also calls for an international system based on consolidated global profits, an agreed allocation formula, regular reviews, sector-specific rules, and an “effective global minimum corporate tax rate.”
The proposal explicitly says the convention should cover “all types of taxes with transboundary effects.” Once established, the bureaucracy could move into wealth taxes, digital taxes, environmental taxes, financial-transaction taxes, and the taxation of individuals deemed internationally mobile.
These global organizations protect bureaucracy before sovereignty because bureaucracy is their product. They do not produce goods, discover medicine, grow food, or create wealth. They produce regulations, standards, frameworks, and reporting requirements that justify larger budgets and greater authority. Every disagreement becomes evidence that the world needs more coordination, and every failure becomes an excuse to expand the institution that designed the failed policy.
Japan, Ireland, Singapore, Switzerland, Denmark, and the other losing jurisdictions will not be incidental casualties. Their tax bases are being deliberately redistributed under a formula they may not control. The global bureaucracy calls this fairness because it evaluates success by the amount of money transferred into government hands, not by whether individual nations retain the right to govern themselves.
Polls Show Europe Wants War
Posted Aug 7, 2026 by Martin Armstrong |
The latest polling from Europe exposes the hypocrisy behind the entire war campaign. Europeans have been frightened into supporting larger military budgets, common European debt, weapons for Ukraine, and an EU defense structure, but when they are asked whether they would personally pick up a rifle, the enthusiasm suddenly disappears. They support war in theory as long as Ukrainians, professional soldiers, or somebody else’s children are forced to die for it.
The European Council on Foreign Relations surveyed 19,481 adults across 15 European countries in May 2026. The results were presented under the absurdly triumphant title “Europeans are ready to defend themselves,” yet the underlying figures tell a far more complicated story. Europeans may be prepared to borrow money and purchase weapons, but most are not prepared to bear the physical cost of the policies they endorse.
The EU’s Spring 2026 Eurobarometer found that 81% support a common European defense and security policy, while 76% believe Russia’s invasion of Ukraine threatens EU security. Another 76% said the EU should continue supporting Ukraine until a “just and lasting peace” is achieved. Those phrases are deliberately vague.
When the questions become personal, the numbers collapse. A recent cross-NATO study involving more than 31,000 respondents found that only 27% of Germans, 25% of Italians, 30% of the Dutch, and 33% of Hungarians and Czechs were willing to fight for their own countries. Sweden reached 66%, Finland 64%, Norway 61%, Lithuania 52%, and Poland 49%, which reflects the enormous geographical and cultural differences that Brussels pretends do not exist.
The ECFR polling likewise found that only about 38% of Europeans said they would personally fight if their country were attacked. Germany fell to just 29%. Asked whether their troops should defend a Baltic NATO member from a Russian attack, support averaged only 39%, while 43% opposed deployment. Sweden and Denmark reached roughly 60% to 62%, but opposition overwhelmed support in Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Hungary, and Romania.
This is the fundamental weakness in NATO’s political theater. Article 5 is presented as an automatic suicide pact, but the treaty does not cause populations to acquire the will to fight merely because politicians sign communiqués. Governments may order troops into battle, yet no alliance can manufacture morale through press conferences.
An admittedly non-representative Euronews online poll received nearly 10,000 responses to the question, “Would you fight for the EU’s borders?” Approximately 75% said no, only 19% said yes, and the remainder were uncertain. A Forsa poll in Germany found that only 16% would “definitely” take up arms if Germany were attacked. Another 22% said they probably would, while 59% said they probably or definitely would not. Among women, unwillingness reached 72%. Yet other polls found majorities supporting some form of military conscription. In other words, many Germans support a draft because they assume it will fall on someone else.
The financial polling exposes the same cowardice. The 2026 ECFR survey found that 47% supported collective European borrowing to finance defense. Support reached 59% in Portugal, 56% in Denmark, 55% in the Netherlands, and 53% in Spain. Borrowing is naturally popular because politicians pretend no one must pay for it.
When respondents were asked whether they would accept cuts to domestic public spending to fund defense, opposition surged to 63% in Italy, 59% in Austria, 56% in Germany, 54% in Spain, and 52% in Denmark. Europeans want the weapons, but they do not want lower pensions, reduced welfare, higher taxes, or fewer government services. They want war financed through debt so the bill can be concealed and transferred to the next generation.
Italy remains the clearest exception. In the May 2026 ECFR poll, 58% of Italians opposed additional military spending while only 28% supported it. Italy also recorded one of the lowest levels of willingness to fight, at roughly 25%. The Italian public understands that a nation carrying enormous public debt cannot borrow its way into another foreign war without eventually destroying its domestic economy.
European voters still view Ukraine favorably, but they do not want direct military responsibility. The ECFR survey found majorities opposed sending national troops into Ukraine even after a peace agreement, including in Germany, France, and Poland. Support for international peacekeeping deployments was weak, reaching only 18% in Denmark, 17% in Finland, 15% in Spain and Portugal, and 11% in Britain under the relevant polling formulation.
They call Ukraine an ally and demand that it continue fighting, but they refuse to send their own sons and daughters. This is precisely the arrangement European leaders prefer. Ukrainians supply the bodies, European taxpayers supply the money, defense contractors receive the contracts, and politicians receive a permanent foreign enemy to blame for every domestic failure.
Russia Prepares Children for War
Posted originally on Aug 7, 2026 by Martin Armstrong |
Russia is now doubling the military content imposed on school children. Beginning September 1, military instruction in the compulsory course called “Fundamentals of Security and Defense of the Motherland” will rise from 20% to 50% of teaching time for students in grades six through eleven. The Russian government is converting the classroom into a military recruitment center.
The program reportedly includes drone operation, engineering instruction, military camps, and preparation for future service. Occupation authorities in Donetsk have approved a ten-year plan extending through 2036, while vocational students in occupied Kherson are being taught to operate, maintain, and repair drones. In occupied Luhansk, children are being absorbed into cadet groups, political organizations, and so-called patriotic movements designed to replace their identity with loyalty to Moscow.
Critics who say I only condemn Zelensky and Europe have not been reading my work closely. EVERY GOVERNMENT IS CORRUPT. Few truly care about future generations. The masses are the disposable great unwashed to be used as their overlords see fit. Granted, many leaders are worse than others, but no one in government is “the good guy” when we are dealing with war. I do believe Putin attempted to extend the olive branch and end this conflict numerous times over, but that is simply impossible since the Western decision-makers believe this conflict can save their nations from the sovereign debt crisis. They are WRONG but there is too much tied into Ukraine at this point for the war to simply end. Kids will learn how to murder their fellow human because that is the world they will be raised in and the skills necessary to propel the machine. At the same time, this will not be a forever indefinite war. The world will not look the same once it is over.
Now the Kremlin is manufacturing a permanent mobilization reserve. The Eastern Human Rights Group warned that the objective is to shape children in both “skills and worldview,” and the inclusion of girls substantially expands the state’s potential manpower pool. A senior Russian lawmaker has even proposed beginning mandatory military training in the fifth grade, demonstrating how far the government is prepared to reach into childhood.
By 2036, many of today’s Kremlin officials will be retired or dead, while the children conditioned in their classrooms will be old enough to fight the next war. Believe me, the Russian oligarchs who want to replace Putin are ready to take this conflict to the next level. This is the ancient crime of government repeated once again—the old create the conflict, conceal their failures beneath patriotism, and send the young to settle the account in blood.
Categories:War
THE WATER WARS HAVE BEGUN
Posted originally on Aug 6, 2026 by Martin Armstrong |
The World Economic Forum has openly proclaimed 2026 the “Year of Water” and has introduced what it calls “Blue Davos,” bringing freshwater, ocean policy, food security, investment, and the so-called blue economy together beneath one institutional umbrella. The Forum states that its annual meeting will concentrate on “freshwater access and management, blue food security and ocean protection.” Those words may sound harmless to anyone who has never studied how political power actually expands, but management always means that someone will decide who receives a resource, how much they may use, what price they must pay, and under what conditions access may be withdrawn.
Why has water suddenly become the great global priority? Why are the same organizations that lectured the world about carbon now speaking about basin-level partnerships, water finance, private-sector participation, international agreements, and scalable systems of allocation? The Forum itself says that “the complexity of the water crisis demands these ideas are scaled up, and fast.” Whenever unelected organizations insist that an alleged crisis requires policies to be scaled rapidly, the public should immediately ask who will acquire the power, who will provide the capital, and who will control the infrastructure after the emergency has passed.
The appearance of Peter Brabeck-Letmathe in this story is not some invention of social media. Brabeck, the former chief executive and chairman of Nestlé, previously chaired the 2030 Water Resources Group and served for years within the World Economic Forum’s leadership. When Klaus Schwab resigned in April 2025, the Forum’s board unanimously appointed Brabeck as interim chairman. He stepped down in August 2025, so it would be false to claim that he remains the current head, but the symbolism was extraordinary.
This thinking treats water as an asset to be measured, priced, financed, traded, and allocated through partnerships between governments and multinational corporations. They will describe this as resilience, sustainability, and efficient management, but history demonstrates that every system of centralized allocation eventually produces political preferences.
Bill Gates has also warned about the possibility of a sixth mass extinction due to water shortages. Gates did not say that an imminent mass extinction would be caused specifically by water shortages. Writing about Elizabeth Kolbert’s work, he stated that human activity was “leading to the sixth mass extinction in the Earth’s history,” adding, “Think of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs—only this time the cataclysm is man-made.”
The political class understands that water is different from every other commodity. People can reduce their use of gasoline, postpone the purchase of a car, turn down the thermostat, or survive without the latest technology, but nobody can opt out of water. Whoever controls its allocation possesses authority over agriculture, manufacturing, housing, food, population movement, and life itself. Oil shaped twentieth-century geopolitics because industrial economies depended upon it, but water will shape the coming era because civilization cannot exist without it at any price.
Artificial intelligence has now supplied the perfect justification for expanding this apparatus. Data centers require enormous quantities of electricity, while certain cooling systems consume water directly through evaporation. Other estimates include the water used to generate electricity and manufacture semiconductors, which means that public claims about AI’s water consumption often combine entirely different categories. There is a tremendous difference between water withdrawn, water circulated, water discharged, and water actually consumed, yet the headlines rarely explain these distinctions because frightening totals are politically more useful than transparent accounting.
The man in the video above owns a company, Enseva, and he holds 12 patents on designing and building data centers without using water. Cooling designs vary, closed systems can recirculate water, dry cooling can sharply reduce consumption, and facilities in different climates cannot be compared honestly through a single universal estimate. Are the authorities measuring the actual requirements of particular facilities, or are projected AI demands being used to justify infrastructure, restrictions, and allocation powers that extend far beyond AI?
Crucial question that I am not too afraid to ask: Are they hoarding and storing water?
Every proposed data center should disclose its expected withdrawals, actual consumption, water source, cooling design, discharge volume, electricity-related water footprint, drought contingency plan, and contractual priority during shortages. If officials cannot provide those numbers, they have no legitimate basis for demanding that households, farms, or small businesses surrender access in the name of technological progress.
The water wars will not necessarily begin with soldiers marching toward a river. They will begin through permits, compulsory meters, emergency declarations, tiered pricing, groundwater restrictions, digital monitoring, and public-private agreements that few citizens will ever read. They will appear as administrative decisions made by experts who insist that no alternative exists, while governments blame climate change, corporations blame AI, and international organizations demand that authority be centralized before the crisis becomes worse.
The shift from green to blue is not merely a change in environmental branding. It represents the movement of political attention and investment capital toward the most indispensable resource on Earth. Once water becomes fully financialized and access is integrated into centralized systems of permission, the government will no longer need to confiscate property directly because it will possess something far more powerful—the ability to determine whether that property may receive water.
The next great struggle will be presented as conservation against waste, science against ignorance, and collective survival against selfish individual use. Yet beneath the slogans will remain the oldest political question in civilization: who decides? If the public waits until that decision has been transferred permanently to an alliance of bureaucrats, financiers, and multinational corporations, the water wars will already have been lost before most people even realized they had begun.
Denmark Is Drafting Its Youth for Europe’s Manufactured War
Posted originally onAug 6, 2026 by Martin Armstrong |
Reuters reports that 1,600 Danish recruits began an expanded 11-month term of military service on August 3, up from only four months under the previous system. Denmark has extended conscription to women, plans to increase the annual intake from roughly 5,000 to 7,500 by 2033, and will send conscripts to Greenland for the first time. Europe is not preparing for peace. It is preparing an entire generation for a war its political class refuses to prevent.
The new Danish program requires five months of basic training followed by six months of operational service. New tracks include drone warfare, and more than 100 conscripts will be sent to Greenland to assume military duties previously performed by professional soldiers. The government calls this security. I call it the gradual conversion of ordinary citizens into military assets for politicians who have spent years escalating every dispute they could have negotiated.
Denmark still uses volunteers before filling vacancies through a lottery, but a lottery backed by state coercion is still conscription. Every healthy man and woman who turns 18 enters a system that can seize nearly one year of life because politicians in Copenhagen, Brussels, and NATO have decided that Russia represents a permanent threat. When voluntary recruitment no longer supplies enough bodies, the meaning of “service” will become much clearer.
Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen says Denmark is prepared to defend every inch of NATO territory, “including our own.” That statement also refers to Greenland, where Trump’s repeated demands for American control have created a separate confrontation. Denmark is therefore invoking both Russia and the United States to justify a military expansion that began with Ukraine and now extends into the Arctic.
The Danes are told that Moscow may eventually attack NATO, although Russia has struggled for years to achieve limited territorial objectives in Ukraine. Russia has neither the manpower nor the economic incentive to occupy Europe. Invading a NATO member would also trigger a confrontation with an alliance possessing vastly greater combined resources and nuclear weapons. The story that Russian tanks are preparing to roll from Ukraine through Denmark is political propaganda designed to frighten the public into surrendering money and children.
Denmark says it has supplied approximately €9.7 billion in military support and €1.1 billion in civilian assistance to Ukraine, excluding its indirect contributions through the European Union. Its national Ukraine Fund allocated DKK 60.4 billion, or roughly €8.1 billion, for military support between 2023 and 2028. Copenhagen then announced a 30th military package worth another DKK 4.4 billion, approximately $672 million, in June 2026.
This is an enormous commitment for a country with only about six million people. Denmark has provided F-16 aircraft, artillery, tanks, missiles, drones, air-defense equipment, ammunition, training, and direct financing for Ukrainian weapons production. It pioneered the so-called Danish model under which outside governments pay Ukrainian companies to manufacture weapons for Kyiv.
Military and security spending has risen to roughly 3.5% of Danish GDP in 2026. Denmark created a DKK 50 billion fund, about $7 billion, to accelerate military purchases and has already aligned itself with NATO’s march toward a broader 5% defense-and-security objective. Before the Ukraine conflict, NATO’s European members spent far less, but fear has become the most effective budgetary weapon invented by government.
The Danish budget surplus is already projected to fall from 2.9% of GDP in 2025 to 0.9% in 2026 and 0.5% in 2027. The European Commission explicitly attributes that deterioration partly to greater defense spending and support for Ukraine. Even a fiscally stronger country is being pulled toward the same war economy consuming the rest of Europe.
The debt problem explains why Brussels embraces militarization with such enthusiasm. Governments that cannot win public support for unlimited borrowing can always manufacture an emergency. Climate was used to justify joint programs, subsidies, taxation, and centralized authority. COVID was used to suspend fiscal restraints and expand government power. Now Russia is being used to place defense spending beyond normal budget limitations.
Germany changed its constitutional fiscal rules to permit enormous military borrowing. The European Union proposed a €2 trillion seven-year budget containing €131 billion for militarization, five times the previous defense allocation. Brussels created loan schemes for weapons, while NATO members committed themselves to spending targets that will redirect trillions into defense contractors and government-controlled projects.
NATO was expected to spend around $1.59 trillion in 2025, with Canada and Europe accounting for approximately $608 billion. The June 2025 Hague commitment to move toward 5% of GDP by 2035 will require a staggering transfer of capital from the productive economy into the military establishment. Europe cannot find money to reduce taxes, restore cheap energy, or revive industry, but it always discovers another billion for weapons and Ukraine.
The draft is the human side of that transfer. First, they take the taxpayer’s income. Then they borrow against the taxpayer’s future. Finally, when the professional military cannot meet the politicians’ ambitions, they take the taxpayer’s children. The state consumes capital and labor to defend a strategy that the public was never allowed to vote upon honestly.
They will sell Denmark’s program as equality because women are now subject to the same coercion as men. Equality does not transform state compulsion into liberty. A government violating everyone equally is still violating everyone. True equality would permit every adult to decide whether a foreign geopolitical project is worth sacrificing eleven months, a career, a family, or eventually a life.
The Old Are Volunteering the Young for War
Posted originally on Aug 6, 2026 by Martin Armstrong |
According to the European Council on Foreign Relations, support for mandatory military service reached 62% in France, 53% in Germany, and 51% in Poland. Yet the most revealing numbers appear when the German results are divided by age, because net opposition among those aged 18 to 29 reached 46%, while net support among respondents over 70 stood at 49%.
The people safely beyond military age are volunteering the young for war. They will not receive the draft notice, undergo the medical examination, surrender their careers, or be ordered into a trench. They will watch the war on television while congratulating themselves for supporting “national service,” as if clicking yes in a poll were an act of personal courage.
There is something profoundly immoral about demanding a sacrifice that you will never be required to make. If those over 70 believe so passionately in military service, governments can create senior battalions and hand them the rifles first. Let the politicians, retired bureaucrats, television commentators, and comfortable academics who preach war demonstrate their convictions personally before they conscript an 18-year-old who wants nothing to do with their geopolitical fantasies.
Europe’s political class speaks endlessly about democracy, yet conscription is the state claiming ownership over the individual. It declares that your body, your time, and perhaps your life belong to the government whenever politicians decide that their diplomatic failures require fresh blood. They call this “service” because admitting that it is involuntary servitude would reveal the policy for what it actually is.
The contradiction becomes even more obscene when the same governments that neglected their militaries, mismanaged their economies, destroyed affordable energy, and antagonized foreign powers suddenly lecture the young about duty. These politicians created the crisis, accumulated the debt, dismantled Europe’s industrial base, and refused every opportunity for serious diplomacy. Their solution is now to seize a generation that had no voice in those decisions and force it to pay the bill.
Young Europeans understand precisely what is being demanded of them. They are being told that they must sacrifice their freedom to preserve a political order that has saddled them with unaffordable housing, stagnant wages, deteriorating public services, crushing taxation, and mountains of sovereign debt. The establishment has offered them no future, yet it suddenly insists that they must be prepared to die defending it.
Politicians carefully disguise conscription as a matter of shared responsibility, but the burden will never be shared equally. The children of the politically connected will find administrative positions, medical exemptions, university deferments, or comfortable assignments far from the front. It has always been the working class that supplies the bodies while the ruling class supplies the speeches.
Modern warfare makes this deception even more grotesque. These young people would not be marching through fields in some romantic nineteenth-century campaign. They could be tracked by satellites, hunted by drones, targeted by precision missiles, and killed by an operator sitting hundreds of miles away. Those advocating conscription are discussing human beings as replaceable military inventory while pretending that the word “duty” somehow sanitizes the transaction.
Europe’s aging political establishment cannot manufacture patriotism by decree. Patriotism must be earned through competent government, legitimate institutions, and a nation that respects the rights of its citizens. A government that treats young people as taxable assets in peacetime and disposable assets in wartime should not be surprised when they refuse to participate.
The young are not cowards for rejecting conscription, nor do elderly voters become courageous by supporting it. Courage means accepting danger yourself; hypocrisy means assigning that danger to someone else. Until the loudest advocates of war are willing to stand at the front of the recruitment line, their demands for sacrifice are merely the politics of cowardice dressed in the flag.
Neocon & Their Lies
Posted originally on Aug 6, 2026 by Martin Armstrong |
QUESTION: Do you mind if I ask something personal? It’s clear the neoconservatives aren’t fond of you, and I imagine the feeling is mutual. Since I know you’ve met quite a few of them face-to-face, was there a particular moment or encounter that personally struck a nerve with you?
EJ
ANSWER: That is an interesting question. Aside from being misled that I initially believed they were economic conservatives, I came to see their disregard for human life and history. I lost high school friends in Vietnam. Others in Iraq. My family has fought in every American war. My cousin still has the musket from the Armstrong who fought in the American Revolution. There’s a profound difference between defending your homeland and being sent to war on false pretenses to satisfy some deranged political theory of world domination.
The Vietnam veterans I’ve known are among the most anguished. They carry the weight of knowing, even today, that they were sent to fight for a lie. Neoconservatism, at its core, tends to elevate ideological and strategic goals above the human toll of warfare. That’s certainly a point of fierce political disagreement, but if you look at the ideology, its history, and how it’s played out, it becomes clearer why so many see it that way—and why that perspective feels deeply personal to those of us who’ve lost people along the way. From Project Northwoods willing to kill American civilians just to blame it on Cuba to justify a war to assassinatinge JFK because he sought peace with the USSR.
This ideology’s roots goes back to the debunked political theory of Trotskyite ideology of the early 20th Century. This is a reference to the fact that many early neoconservatives were former LEFTISTS who became disillusioned with liberalism and the counterculture of the 1960s . Irving Kristol was a disillusioned liberal who became a foundational figure of neoconservatism. While he held a deep concern for the survival of Israel and wrote about it in those terms, there has always been a debate if he and other were covertly just wanted war to protect Israel in the direct sense.
Irving Kristol remained sympathetic to the goals of the New Deal and the Great Society, but he grew skeptical of government planning and what he saw as the vague idealism of left-wing ideologues. He rejected the conservative anti-New Deal stance of Barry Goldwater in 1964, but also distrusted the radical dissent of the counterculture. While he is credited with this dogmatic view, I knew his son and even helped him start his magazine the Weekly Standard taking the back page to kick off his venture.
I came to understand that I was wrong. Bill was not about economic conservatism. This was all about geopolitical war and indeed to support Israel. I had discussions about how taking down Saddam Husein in Iraq and then others was necessary to bring peace to the Middle East. This dogmatic view concerned me. Bill Kristol was so anti-Trump because he was against war that he killed his own magazine with his Neocon views. Bill Kristol, the prominent neoconservative commentator and founder of The Weekly Standard, did endorse Kamala Harris for president in the 2024 election along with Dick Cheney. This proved their movement was never about economics.
The Neocon ideology is characterized by a strong endorsement of military instruments to promote what is viewed as the U.S. national interest, a concept scholars describe as a mix of “assertive nationalism” and “militarism.” The belief is that American military might should be used to spread democracy and freedom, even by force and without international cooperation if necessary. I disagreed since I believed that the very usurpation of power to effectively create a coup of American foreign policy was taking place before my eyes during Bush Jr’s administration.
This was all justified by a powerful sense of American exceptionalism and a moralistic view of the world, dividing it into allies and adversaries I came to see was a reaction to Khrushchev’s (1953-1964) “we will bury you” boast of November 18th, 1956 spoken at the Polish Embassy. That boast was standard Communist view that recessions and depression was a flaw of Capitalism and this Marxism would eliminate that.
The Neocon stated goal became more radical after Irving to justify using U.S. power to create a world of democracies, which, in their view, are inherently more peaceful. Being a student of political systems, we ourselves did not live under a democracy. I saw a usurpation of power through UNELECTED means to achieve a fake goal of morality that allowed them to look at themselves in the mirror as righteous rather than usurpers seeking to create peace by killing all your enemies.
What I write about is not conspiracy theory. For whatever reason, I seem to have ended up in the middle of so many things, which is why they are so determined to try to prevent people from listening to me.
The Gold Paradox
Posted originally on Aug 5, 2026 by Martin Armstrong |
This is an important report discussing the real implications of Gold and why it is NOT a hedge against inflation or against transitory geopolitical events. This goes into the real driving forces behind gold and it also includes silver. This is the PARADOX how gold has declined with rising oil and geopolitics that all comes back to what do you believe. This includes projections into 2032.
Centinel2012 