 Empire to expand NATO in response to war caused by NATO expansion. Turkey's President Erdogan has officially withdrawn Ankara's objection to the addition of Finland and Sweden to NATO membership, with the three countries signing a trilateral memorandum at a NATO summit in Madrid. The removal of Erdogan's objection was reportedly obtained via significant Natset concessions from the other two nations, largely geared toward facilitating Turkey's ongoing conflict with regional Kurdish factions, and it removes the final obstacle to Finland and Sweden beginning the process of becoming NATO members. Finland's addition will more than double the size of NATO's direct border with Russia, a major national security concern for Moscow. Sweden and Finland moved rapidly to apply to NATO in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, reversing decades of security policy and opening the door for the alliance's ninth expansion since 1949, Axios reports. So the Western Empire will be expanding NATO again in response to a war that was predominantly caused by NATO expansion. Brilliant. At the same NATO summit, President Biden announced plans to ramp up U.S. military presence in Europe in response to the Ukraine war. Speaking with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, Biden said the U.S. will increase the number of U.S. Navy destroyers stationed at a naval base in Rota, Spain from four to six anti-war's Dave de Camp reports. The President said that this was the first of multiple announcements the U.S. and NATO will make at the summit on increasing their forces in Europe, steps being taken in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. This news comes out as a new CNN report tells us that the Biden administration does not believe Ukraine has any chance of winning this war, yet still won't encourage any kind of negotiated settlement to end the bloodshed from CNN. White House officials are losing confidence that Ukraine will ever be able to take back all of the land it has lost to Russia over the past four months of war, U.S. officials told CNN, even with the heavier and more sophisticated weaponry the U.S. and its allies plan to send. Advisors to President Biden have begun debating internally how and whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky should shift his definition of a Ukraine victory, adjusting for the possibility that his country has shrunk irreversibly. U.S. officials emphasized to CNN that this more pessimistic assessment does not mean the U.S. plans to pressure Ukraine into making any formal territorial concessions to Russia in order to end the war. This would confirm what I and many others have been saying since Russia invaded, that this proxy war is being waged, not with the intention of saving Ukrainian lives by delivering a swift defeat to Moscow, but with the intention of creating a costly, ruling military quagmire to weaken Russia on the world stage. This is further confirmed by a new Politico report that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has discouraged France's President Macron from facilitating a negotiated peace settlement between Moscow and Kiev, which would support an earlier report from Ukrainian media that Johnson has discouraged Ukraine's President Zelensky from such a settlement during his visit to Kiev in April. These revelations emerge in the wake of Western officials admitting that Ukraine is crawling with CIA personnel and special forces operatives from the U.S. and other NATO countries. As usual, it appears that the administration wants to have it both ways, assure the American people that it is being restrained and that we are not at war with the Russians, but doing everything but planting a U.S. soldier in a flag inside Ukraine, writes responsible state crafts carry Vlahos of this admission. The Russians may not see the distinction and consider this news as further evidence that their war is more with Washington and NATO than with Ukraine. The Empire is guided by so little wisdom in its reckless escalations against Russia that the U.S. Congress is now pushing expensive, ship-launched nuclear cruise missiles on its naval forces, even as the U.S. Navy tells them it doesn't want those weapons and has no use for them. Like, hey, just take the nukes anyway. What's the worst that could happen? We need to really start taking seriously the possibility that a nuclear weapon could detonate as a result of misunderstanding or malfunction amid the chaos and confusion of all these frenzied, foolish escalations and lead to an exchange which ends our entire world. The only sane course of action here is de-escalation and détente, and all the major players in these escalations are pointed in the exact opposite direction. This is so much more dangerous than most people are letting themselves consider. It's being sustained by psychological compartmentalization, emotional avoidance, and a profound lack of wisdom. As David S. DiMotta recently remarked, if our species does find a way to survive into the distant future, our descendants will look at right now as the near miss. They'll think, wow, that was close. How do we convince people in power to preserve that future?