Iveta Cherneva: The US National Security Establishment needs a Paradigm Shift. Now.

Iveta Cherneva is an Amazon best-selling author, political commentator and human rights activist. Her latest book is "Trump, European security and Turkey". Cherneva's career includes Congress and the UN; she was a top finalist for UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of speech in 2020. Iveta's opinions appear in Euronews, New York Times, Salon, The Guardian, Jurist, Washington Examiner, Modern Diplomacy, Emerging Europe, EurActiv, The Fletcher Forum, LSE, Daily Express. She comments on TV and radio for Euronews, DW, Voice of America and others.

If you can sense one trend over the past weeks is that war is in the air, both on the Ukraine and the Taiwan fronts. That brings the world to a brink of war, and it seems like the US military establishment is interested in connecting the dots. They have been waiting for this for a long time.

US Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, said this week that he doesn't recognize red lines on Taiwan and Ukraine, and that is not a good thing. There is a difference between not giving up as pursuing your goals and dreams, on one hand, and not being able to hear no, especially when peace and people's lives are at stake.

Under Trump, we saw four years of withdrawal and restraint, and only strategic, surgical strikes against a very limited number of bad guys - the US national security hard-core establishment's nightmare, basically. Then there was Covid and the world stopped. The US war machine is itching and you can sense it. They have been itching for a long time. For that, they also need Congress and the Republicans who right now have other problems and are not exactly interested in war. But before that the US war machine needs something else done, in fact. Biden is kind of in the way.