Authored by Karen Siegemund and Bradley A. Thayer via American Greatness,
As the Russo-Ukrainian war continues, Americans may blame Russian leader Vladimir Putin for starting "World War III." It is correct that World War III has started, but its cause is the People's Republic of China (PRC), not Russia.
The war did not start with Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 or with the appeasement of Russia in the years before Putin's foolish aggression. It started with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The
CCP has been at war with the U.S. since coming to power in 1949 and has employed many fronts in this war to undermine America and the West. The CCP's May 2019 declaration of "People's War" against the U.S. was CCP leader Xi Jinping's call for a maximal effort against America. Not coincidentally, the COVID-19 outbreak soon followed. The CCP lied about COVID's origins, refused to share information with the world, and used Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), as its willing accomplice. Another front is CCP election interference. President Trump has revealed the CCP's interference in the 2020 U.S. presidential election in an effort to secure President Joe Biden's victory. Biden's open borders allowed many hundreds of thousands of military-age Chinese men into the United States - prepositioning a force to strike against the American people in their homeland. The sustained chemical warfare attack that is fentanyl is another avenue of attack, destroying American lives and families. The CCP's success at buying American and European politicians and journalists to serve as its agents of influence is yet another, as is TikTok.
Putin is not the source of World War III. Putin is, in the scheme of World War III, a secondary player. It is Xi who is driving World War III. It seems that the common denominator for every manifestation of this global crisis, whether overt or covert, foreign or domestic, is that Xi Jinping and his CCP have either inspired or enabled them - or at least, stand to be the principal beneficiaries. Consequently, while some call this World War III, one might consider a more apt name to be "World War Xi."
It was Xi who gave the green light to Putin to invade Ukraine when they met in early February 2022. Xi and Putin have met over 11 times since then, most recently in Bishkek, and on each occasion, Xi has evinced strong, public support for Putin's war. While the Russo-Ukrainian war is not yet resolved - it has lasted longer than World War I - it already has a clear winner: the PRC. The PRC provides great assistance to Russia - diplomatic, economic, and "dual-use" military aid - all of which is important to sustain Russia's war. Beijing is receiving a prodigious return that is helping Xi win World War III.
First, by sustaining the war, the PRC occupies the U.S. and so diverts attention from its aggressive acts and preparations for war over Taiwan, which might include attacks against the U.S. itself. The U.S. intelligence community and military have only so much bandwidth, and the conflicts in Iran, Ukraine, and elsewhere in the Middle East are filling it. In addition, U.S. stockpiles are drained by the conflict in Iran and aid to Ukraine, including Patriot, ATACMS, and other missiles, and 155mm artillery rounds, all of which reduce the ability of the U.S. military to fight a high-intensity war with the PRC. In turn, a reduced U.S. arsenal hurts U.S. conventional deterrence in key theaters, like the western Pacific and Taiwan.
Second, the war cements Putin's dependence on the PRC. Putin is Xi's myrmidon, the supplicant in the relationship. Truly, Putin is Xi's useful idiot. Xi drafted Putin to serve in his anti-Western alliance, which costs Putin his autonomy. Xi's ultimate ambition is to overthrow U.S. power and position in the world and shackle the world to the PRC's tyrannical ambitions. Putin's interest would have been better served by emerging as the tertius gaudens of the conflict between the U.S. and the PRC. Now that he has tied Russia's interests to the PRC, he will walk the path Xi requires of him. That requires Russia to accept diminished influence when Russia's interests conflict with the PRC, such as in Central Asia, and to serve as an instrument of distraction for the U.S. and its NATO allies while China expands its military power and strategic ambitions. Putin must fear that once he has served his usefulness, Xi may overthrow him.
Third, Putin also serves as a lightning rod, attracting the world's animus and attention for his acts while Xi's genocide in Xinjiang remains too often unremarked and in the background. The PRC's preparations for war against Taiwan and its increasingly coercive measures against the Philippines also do not receive the attention they deserve.
Fourth, as a result of the Ukraine war, Xi has secured his northern flank. Russian conventional and nuclear military power is now a tool to be employed in conjunction with or apart from the PRC's military - but to serve Beijing's interests. The U.S. has a "multiple front" war problem with which it must contend.
Moreover, Xi has secured his western flank in Central Asia. The Central Asian states perceive Russia as a threat due to the invasion of Ukraine and see Moscow as the junior partner in the Sino-Russian relationship. For Xi, this is a remarkable occurrence at the same time that China is committing genocide against Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang or East Turkistan. The PRC's western flank is as secure as it has been in recent years. With two flanks secure and Xi's ability to project power expanding, it is no surprise that Xi is aggressing on the PRC's southern and eastern flanks.
The bottom line is that the Russo-Ukrainian war greatly benefits the PRC. As the PRC gains in military might, this hurts the ability of the U.S. to defend its national security interests elsewhere, including in the western Pacific. In turn, this weakens the ability of the U.S. to deter aggression against Taiwan, the Philippines, and other states, as well as the ability to fight a war with the PRC, should deterrence fail.
The costs of the Russo-Ukrainian war are high in every respect. While Moscow may eke out a Pyrrhic victory, the true winner of the war is Beijing. The war continues because Xi wants it to, and his aid allows Putin to pursue his folly.
With its strategic position strengthened and its power projection capabilities expanding, the PRC is putting in place the conditions necessary for aggression. The U.S. and its allies should expect China to center its belligerency on its southern and eastern flanks. This aggression might be kinetic - indeed, at some point it will be so - against India on Beijing's southern flank, against Taiwan on the eastern, and possibly even against Japan and the U.S. But the PRC will continue to employ all the tools of statecraft to bring its might to bear to cause the change it wants. Thus, the world should expect diplomatic, ideological, and economic pressure to be employed by the PRC against them, while Beijing also seeks to undermine the governments of India, Taiwan, Japan, and the U.S. We should also anticipate the continued expansion of the PRC's domestic influence in those countries through the use of the PRC's United Front Work Department to subvert them and other overt and covert efforts.
It is a new world. Soviet dominance over the PRC during the Cold War is now reversed. In World War III, the PRC calls the shots because of Putin's strategic idiocy. Having the PRC's northern and western flanks secured is a key step toward Xi's greater belligerence. The CCP is employing many tools in this war, and the American people need to recognize the avenues of attack.
The U.S., its allies, and its partners must move beyond anticipating aggression to recognizing its certainty and the reality of World War Xi.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of ZeroHedge.
Tyler Durden Thu, 09/10/2026 - 23:25Authored by Jeremy Lott via The Epoch Times,
The terror attacks 25 years ago this week had enduring costs for America's commercial aviation sector.
Today's domestic fliers are on balance worse off for it, with higher costs, fewer choices, and more delays.
That's because, on Sept. 11, 2001, men who were part of the al Qaeda Islamist terror network bought tickets and boarded four passenger planes out of Boston, northern Virginia, and Newark, New Jersey.
Once airborne, the 19 terrorists hijacked those planes and managed to fly two of them into the World Trade Center towers and one into the Pentagon.
The remaining plane, United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco, was brought down by a revolt of passengers and crew who had pieced together what was happening with the other planes.
The Boeing 757 crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, instead of its intended target, which the National Park Service identified as the U.S. Capitol.
At the World Trade Center, more than 2,700 people died that day.
When Flight 93 went down in Pennsylvania, all 44 people, including seven crew members and 33 passengers, including the four hijackers, died on impact.
At the Pentagon, where American Airlines Flight 77 from Washington Dulles Airport to Los Angeles crashed, 189 people died, including 125 people in the building, six airline crew members, 53 passengers, plus the five hijackers.
Airlines in the RedFor the airlines, the financial impact was awful and bordered on existential.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded all flights for several days. Once the planes were cleared for takeoff, many would-be passengers were jittery about being airborne. After all, they had just watched domestic planes slam into skyscrapers on their television sets, over and over.
These planes had long been seen as mechanical marvels that shortened long trips and brought the world closer together. The al Qaeda hijackings turned them instead into visible instruments of previously unimaginable destruction on U.S. soil.
Looking back at that day, the International Air Transport Association did not sugarcoat it.
"On September 11, 2001, the world changed forever," Willie Walsh, former director general of the air travel trade group, said in a fact sheet for the 20th anniversary of the day.
"Those of us old enough to understand what was happening at the time still remember where we were when we heard the horrific news. Indeed, for many, it probably still feels like yesterday."
The attacks were not only "assaults on the United States of America," as far as the world of aviation was concerned. Those weaponized planes were also aimed straight at the "global air transportation system - a facilitator of peace and freedom," he said.
Financial fallout from the attacks was swift and severe. Revenues and profits nosedived.
U.S. passenger airlines had posted profits of $2.2 billion in 2000. They lost $8 billion in 2001, and revenues did not climb back to 2000 levels until 2004.
Those losses contributed to the bankruptcies of several air carriers, most notably US Airways and United Airlines in 2002. United stayed aloft, but US Airways eventually was absorbed by American Airlines.
Airport Security CostsAn act of Congress created the Transportation Security Administration, popularly known as the TSA, in November 2001 to help address security concerns. The TSA took over screening at most airports.
The Aviation and Transportation Security Act also greatly expanded a previously existing air marshals program to put many more armed, hidden officers on flights to thwart future would-be hijackers.
Costs for U.S. fliers grew higher, in part to pay for the new, slower airport security. U.S. taxpayers are paying for it as well. The amount spent on the TSA has varied from year to year. At present, the yearly price tag is in the $11 billion range.
Gary Leff, proprietor of the popular View from the Wing website, is not happy about that.
"It's not clear what we've gotten spending over $10 billion annually," he told The Epoch Times.
TSA oversaw the formalization of what some critics have called security theater, with belts and shoes off, liquids limited in size, passengers subjected to various scanning devices, and lots and lots of plastic tubs.
Bill McGee, a senior fellow for aviation at the American Economic Liberties Project, says he still believes that TSA security beats the alternative.
"It's really easy to beat up on the TSA, and I've done it quite often myself. In fact, there's an entire chapter on TSA criticism in my book 'Attention All Passengers,'" he told The Epoch Times.
At the same time, he said, it's important to remember "what airline and airport security was like prior to 9/11," when "security was the responsibility of the airlines, and it was often non-existent."
"I think we can all agree that the airlines' efforts in outsourcing airport security on 9/11 was a spectacular failure," McGee said, adding that TSA's existence indicates "that aviation security is taken seriously enough that it's the responsibility of the federal government."
He said he would not want to have such a "vital function that is so intrinsic to national security be outsourced to the lowest bidders again."
Where TSA Can ImproveYet there are downsides to having the TSA as it is currently organized. Instead of scrapping the agency, however, McGee suggested, "Let's think instead about how Congress can fix the TSA for all of us."
The federal government funds the TSA. When government shutdowns happen, as they do periodically, this creates problems for airport screening. TSA still functions during government shutdowns but not well.
Agents go unpaid, sometimes for long stretches. They have a statutory guarantee of back pay once the government is funded again. Yet overtime is discouraged, and absenteeism rises. This leads to longer screening times and missed flights.
That is what happened during the 76-day partial government shutdown of agencies under the Department of Homeland Security earlier this year.
Ha Nguyen McNeill, acting TSA administrator, testified in late March that the "cost of coming to work [was] becoming more untenable for the workforce." The agency's daily call-out rates had increased from 4 percent to 11 percent and at some airports were greater than 50 percent.
This reduced screening capacity was hiking wait times to "over four and a half hours at certain airports, raising major security risks and missed flights for passengers," McNeill said in prepared remarks.
In contrast, a handful of airports participate in the Screening Partnership Program. This allows private contractors to do the screening, under TSA regulations and nominal supervision, with a different line of funding.
The largest airport in the program is San Francisco International Airport (SFO). At roughly the same time that McNeill was sounding the alarm before Congress, the airport was reassuring fliers that they could enjoy their spring break travels.
"While we've seen and heard about the long security checkpoint lines over the last few weeks at major airports around the country, SFO is NOT experiencing this issue," the airport announced on social media.
During the partial government shutdown, the airport's screener-contractors were "being paid without interruption," and screening was "operating as usual."
The San Francisco airport regularly posts its security checkpoint wait times. For Sept. 6, waits ran between one and nine minutes for general boarding and between zero and four minutes for fliers with TSA PreCheck authorization.
The San Francisco example illustrates the gap between what TSA might be and what it actually is, Leff said. "Instead of regulating security provided by others," he said, the screening agency "largely regulates itself, which has led to a lack of accountability."
For instance, border agencies frequently operate what are called red teams, whose job it is to try to get contraband through a checkpoint.
TSA ran red teams for years. They found that TSA screeners are very bad at catching items that have been flagged as dangerous.
"After a series of embarrassing disclosures about their failure rates detecting dangerous items at checkpoints [with] failure rates over 90 percent a decade ago, they simply stopped releasing information on their effectiveness publicly," Leff said.
As the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11 approaches, Leff said that the response to the attacks has had bad effects for both fliers and would-be fliers.
"For travel, it's meant that trips take longer. That means fewer trips by air than there'd otherwise be. It likely means more car trips, which are far less safe, and more loss of life as a result. But we never examine second- and third-order effects," he said.
Last year, 64 people on commercial airlines died in the United States. All of the deaths came when an Army Black Hawk helicopter collided with a small commuter plane over the Potomac River near Reagan National Airport on Jan. 29. Three people in the helicopter also died.
Over that same period, 36,640 traffic fatalities were reported on American roads.
Progress and InnovationFormer International Air Transport Association boss Walsh saw one bright spot at American airports in the first 20 years following Sept. 11.
He thought that TSA PreCheck, where frequent fliers trade more information about themselves and a small fee for expedited screening, was worth celebrating.
Walsh acknowledged that "extraordinary measures" were probably necessary to get things flying again, post Sept. 11, but he made the case that the need for many of these measures had long-since passed.
Future American airport security could "move beyond the one-size-fits-all, rules-based model that still ... governs passenger security screening" and establish "firm deadlines" to sunset unnecessarily stringent rules, he said. These changes would make sure that "what we are doing is relevant."
James Fallows is a journalist, a small craft pilot and the author of several books, including a few on aviation.
"Free Flight: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel," was the original title of one of those books, published only months before Sept. 11, 2001.
Fallows saw the beginnings of something new taking shape. He observed smaller craft playing a bigger role in transportation and thought that would grow into a somewhat decentralized air-taxi system in the future.
The Epoch Times asked him about how the terror attacks had affected that development, and how he sized up its prospects today.
"So much has changed in the 25 years since the 9/11 attacks," Fallows said. For several years, "dramatically tightened security rules limited private air travel of all sorts."
However, that was not the whole story.
"The increasing congestion of airlines, and the ongoing progress in aircraft and engine design, has led to steady growth in private jet travel - for those who can afford it."
The next step is to bring that experience to more people. Many companies are working to create an "air taxi model" that people of modest means can afford to hail, Fallows said.
Tyler Durden Thu, 09/10/2026 - 22:35The global diesel market - already trading at record prices - is set to further tighten in the coming months and keep fuel prices high, raising the prices of all goods and threatening the inflation targets of the central banks.
Industry officials, who gathered at the APPEC petroleum conference in Singapore this week, warned that the market has not seen the worst of the diesel crisis yet. Analysts say the real stress in oil markets is in the diesel market right now, OilPrice reported.
Global fuel markets are very tight and inflexible, despite the higher crude oil flows out of the Persian Gulf in recent weeks, Russell Hardy, chief executive of the world's biggest independent oil trader, Vitol Group, said on Tuesday.
“We're still not running enough refining capacity to prevent those draws, and we keep eating into the surplus that exists around the world,” Hardy said at the event, as carried by Bloomberg.
Despite the uptick in flows from the Strait of Hormuz, only 1 million barrels per day (bpd) out of an estimated 10 million bpd outbound flows are refined products, the rest is crude.
Refinery capacity is constrained in the Middle East, due to Iranian strikes on refineries and the trickle of fuel flows through Hormuz.
Moreover, refinery capacity in Russia is also severely restricted by nearly-daily Ukrainian drone strikes at Russian refineries, while Russia has banned diesel exports until at least the end of September.
Refineries in the United States and elsewhere have been running at maximum capacity this summer, having delayed maintenance. But they are unlikely to continue operating at these elevated utilization rates for much longer.
If the global refining system can sustain these processing rates until the end of this year, “it is going to be an achievement,” Shaikh Khaled Ahmad Al Sabah, managing director for international marketing at Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC), told Bloomberg.
“I think we’re going to see a very difficult winter coming in Northwest Europe,” the executive said. “This is only the beginning.”
Tyler Durden Thu, 09/10/2026 - 22:10