Bilderberg Group changes itself for the modern world – and return of Trump
Several of Bilderberg's 31-member steering committee have senior roles in the defence industry.
The billionaire former Google boss, #Eric #Schmidt, chaired the recent National Security Commission on AI,
and is now busy launching a kamikaze drone company aimed at the lucrative Ukraine market.
Meanwhile, the hugely wealthy Swedish industrialist #Marcus #Wallenberg is chair of defense manufacturer #Saab, which enjoyed a 71% boost in orders in the first nine months of 2024, largely due to the war with Russia.
The tech luminary and Donald Trump insider #Peter #Thiel founded the fast-growing robotics company #Anduril and the booming surveillance and AI giant #Palantir.
His loyal lieutenant #Alex #Karp, the CEO of Palantir, was voted on to the board of Bilderberg a few years ago.
Karp, who claims his company is “responsible for most of the targeting in Ukraine”, recently told the New York Times that the US will “very likely” soon be fighting a three-front war with China, Russia and Iran.
In some respects, the geopolitical mood today is not so different from how it was in the 1950s, when Bilderberg was born.
Top of the agenda at the first meeting in 1954 was “the attitude towards communism and the Soviet Union”,
with the “strictly confidential” conference report referring repeatedly to “the communist threat”.
Seventy years later, at the most recent summit in Madrid, the primary threat is “Russia”,
which sat grimly at the foot of the conference agenda underneath “Ukraine and the world”, and “the future of warfare”.
In 1954, the alliance was facing “the emergence ofcommunist imperialism”.
In 2024, it’s up against what Stoltenberg calls “the emerging axis of autocrats”, headed by Russia, China and North Korea.
#Stoltenberg and his successor as secretary general, #Rutte, were both at this summer’s Madrid meeting.
Joining them in the conference hall were a clutch of high-up Pentagon officials and Nato’s second most senior military leader,
US general #Chris #Cavoli, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe.
It was Cavoli’s second conference, and he’s not the first Saceur to attend the talks: they’ve been coming along to strategise since the mid-60s.
Bilderberg has always had close links with the military:
its founders included senior members of British and American intelligence,
and a previous Nato leader, #Lord #Carrington, chaired the group from 1990 to 1998.
Even the shamefaced resignation of its founding chair, #Prince #Bernhard of the Netherlands, had a military twist:
he was caught up in the Lockheed bribery scandal of 1976, the only year (pre-Covid) that the conference was cancelled.
And it’s telling that arguably the most dominant figure at Bilderberg in the last several decades was the grand strategist and warmonger, #Henry #Kissinger, who was lauded as a foreign policy genius by some and despised as a mass-murdering war criminal by others.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/25/jens-stoltenberg-bilderberg-group-trump-presidency?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
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