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xtruss · 11 months ago

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Why “The War Criminal, Terrorist, Liar, Conspirator, Genocidal and Hegemonic West” is Still Lying About The Largest Act of Terrorism in Modern European History

We are Expected to Believe That a Bunch of Rogue Ukrainians Blew-up Nord Stream Without Any State Support – Do They Also Have a Bridge to Sell Us?

— By Tarik Cyril Amar, A Historian From Germany Working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the History of World War II, the Cultural Cold War, and the Politics of Memory | 19 August 2024 | RT

A Man Wearing a Hard Hat Walks by the Central Facility Where the Nord Stream Baltic Sea Gas Pipeline reaches western Europe Following the Pipeline's Official Inauguration. © Sean Gallup/Getty Images

On September 26, 2022, infrastructure vital for both Germany and the EU as a whole was attacked as never before in post-World War II, peacetime (at least formally) history. In the vicinity of the island of Bornholm, at the midpoint between the Polish and Swedish coasts, four explosions sabotaged the massive Nord Stream I and II gas pipelines, which run along the bottom of the Baltic Sea.

The immediate consequences were enormous. In terms of environmental damage, all too often overlooked now, the pipelines were filled with methane, a greenhouse gas that contributes enormously to global warming. According to the UN, its heating effect is 80 times greater than that of carbon dioxide. Also, methane “is the primary contributor to the formation of ground-level ozone, a hazardous air pollutant and greenhouse gas, exposure to which causes one million premature deaths every year.”

The exact amount of this toxic gas that the Nord Stream saboteurs made bubble up into our shared atmosphere is hard to quantify, but there is no doubt that it was large, and we would all be much better off if it had stayed in the pipelines. Initial estimates pointed to five times the volume released in a 2015 methane disaster in California. That was “the largest known terrestrial release of methane in US history.” Its impact was compared with driving seven million cars per day, and it displaced thousands of people.

Put differently, the Nord Stream attack set a milestone not merely in European but also the global history of man-made ecological disasters. But the California leak was, at least, an accident – the Baltic one, so much larger again, was the result of a deliberate act of eco-terrorism. It’s no wonder that Rob Jackson, a Stanford climate scientist, quickly – and correctly – concluded that “whoever ordered this should be prosecuted for war crimes and go to jail.”

Yet apart from eco-terrorism, the Nord Stream attack was also, of course, an act of aggression against Germany as a state. And against the whole of the EU, too, as Mikhail Podoliak, the habitually dishonest top adviser to Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky, underlined at the time of the sabotage. He was right, of course. Indeed, it was such a severe act of aggression that it should have led Germany and the EU to quickly identify the perpetrators and take drastic action against them. Moreover, if the terrorists had state backing, as is likely given the complexity of the attack, then those actions should have ranged from sanctions and severing diplomatic relations – as a minimum – to military retaliation. And since Germany is a NATO member, the alliance’s famed Article 5 – treating an attack on one member as an attack on all of them – could easily have been applied as well.

At the time, Podoliak was, of course, brazenly lying about an important detail. Against rhyme and reason, he blamed the attacks on Russia, which had zero conceivable interest in destroying pipelines that it had heavily invested in to facilitate energy trade with the EU, that afforded some geopolitical influence (although propagandists in the West and especially Poland have always greatly exaggerated that factor), and that, while dormant at the time of the attack, could have been activated again.

In short, someone trying to make you believe that Russia blew up Nord Stream is – and has always been – the guy with a bridge to sell you. Like the comedian in Kiev who, with the help of Western impresarios, such as Tim Snyder and Anne Applebaum, has been hawking Ukrainian “democracy,” “civil society,” and the great cosmic struggle for “Western values.”

But, as with these other Zelensky regime lies, Podoliak’s fib about the big bad Russians shooting themselves in both feet at once, deliberately and just for fun, was special in that it combined being perfectly implausible with being widely believed, at least in the West and especially in Germany. Absurd as it is, two things followed the Nord Stream attack: It took ages for any Western officials to officially point to any perpetrators; and Western politicians, mainstream media, and so-called experts kept peddling the insultingly silly story about Russia as the culprit.

Since many of them will now try to cover their tracks, let’s recall two examples. By spring 2023, the American icon of investigative journalism Seymour Hersh had exposed Washington as a likely Nord Stream bomber, while other reports started suggesting that – somehow – Ukrainians had been involved. Yet even then Carlo Masala, an academic from the German Army’s very own university, who has made a media career out of opportunistically regurgitating Western infowar talking points, still tried to recast the emerging picture as a “false-flag” operation. In other words, according to Masala, while you may think you see Americans and Ukrainians right in front of your eyes, in reality, it’s – drumroll! – the Russians, again. So much for tin-foil hats and conspiracy theories being very welcome in the Western mainstream as long as they toe the line.

Similarly, Janis Kluge, a regional “expert” at a major Berlin think tank has just admitted on X – with astounding if unintentional self-discreditation – that his nonsensical initial assessment of blaming Russia was – wait for it! – wrong. He feels “new information” has just emerged. The fun fact is, of course, that information excluding Russia as a possible perpetrator was available from day one, and specific information about the US and Ukraine as much more plausible suspects emerged not much later. Yet, for Kluge, being so much slower in shedding an obvious piece of Western and Ukrainian information warfare than a decent reputation allows is, it seems, still a reason for pride.

Dr. Tarik Cyril Amar

That is because he now relies on what, to his mind, seems to be an authoritative source, namely the Wall Street Journal and German prosecutors. This brings us to how and why the Nord Stream attack has made it back into the news. At very long last, German prosecutors have issued an arrest warrant – yes, you read that right: one single warrant – for a suspect, namely a lowly Ukrainian diver called Volodymyr.

Never mind, they’ll probably never get hold of him, because Poland has shielded the attackers and helped them escape. Warsaw, by the way, is proud of its sponsorship, literally, of terrorism against Germany, as a breathtakingly arrogant X post by Polish PM Donald Tusk has rubbed in. In essence, he blamed the victims, that is the Germans, and told them to shut up, if not just apologize for being there in the first place. Congrats… Clearly German-Polish relations will flourish, again.

At the same time, the Wall Street Journal has published a sensational and sensationally unpersuasive article explaining two things: How it was, after all, Kiev that did it; and – how convenient – it was not Washington. Indeed, according to this touching tale of American righteousness, the CIA – well-known for never ever supporting or staging underhanded, insane, and violent schemes – tried to prevent the Ukrainians from going ahead with one of their very own. And that is, the WSJ tells us, the “real story.” This is the moment where you may feel free to cry in view of so much goodness and honesty.

Let’s put it like this: Remember the guy trying to sell you the bridge? He now admits that he doesn’t really own it, but he has a new offer: He is about to inherit it soon and if you believe this one, he’s ready to sell you a first-dibs option on bidding for it when the time comes. In other words, we are now invited to move on from believing a lie so moronic that even telling it should have made people sink into the ground with shame to one that has been fine-tuned with a few tiny fragments of truth. And yet, it’s still a lie.

Let’s take a closer look. The first thing that makes the WSJ story highly suspect is that it’s packed with politically convenient details. Readers learn that Zelensky initially okayed the scheme but then was against it, when the saintly Americans told him to stop being so naughty. But the then commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s forces, Valery Zaluzhny – a man Zelensky has always hated and who has been relegated to the status of another inept Ukrainian diplomat in London – was, of course, in on the attack all the way. Another Ukrainian officer mentioned by name – one of the very few – in the WSJ piece is already on trial anyway. Oops, no great loss either, it turns out. Need we continue? This is a parade of fall-guys, carefully tailored to exempt Zelensky, for now, and, of course, the US and everyone else in the West who may very well have been involved (Hi, MI6 and, of course, Poland again, we see you).

Then there is the manner in which both the German prosecutors’ move and the WSJ article are being reinforced and exploited rapidly by other mainstream outlets, trying to make sure that everyone gets the new infowar memo. German Spiegel, for instance, is blunt about getting the correct – and rather imbecilic – propaganda message across. Readers are in effect admonished that, with the naming of one Ukrainian suspect, “all speculation about Russian or US participation” in the attack can now be “curbed.”

What can one even say? Let’s try: First, a Russian participation never made any sense to any reasonable and unbiased observer. Shame on self-censoring and war-mobilizing media like Spiegel to have ever treated it as an even remotely possible explanation. Second, therefore, pretending that suspecting Moscow and Washington has been equally plausible or implausible is ludicrous. Third, because the US actually has always made perfect sense as suspect number one. And it still does.

Here is the real upshot of this combined political-media information war circus: Yes, it’s nice that someone finally, officially acknowledges that it was not Russia and that, to one extent or the other, it was, actually, sacrosanct-can-do-whatever-it-wants-and-tell-any-lie Ukraine. But trying to sell us the new idiocy that therefore it was not the US – indeed that Washington tried to stop this attack – is about as believable as Hunter Biden’s laptop not mattering to his dad’s Ukraine policy, or the Epstein operation not being about entrapping and blackmailing the US elite. It’s yet another piece of nonsense we are invited to swallow. No, thank you. Enough already.

What is more interesting, however, is what this all implies and why it is happening now. Regarding the implications, even if, for the sake of argument, you pretend to believe the whole WSJ/German prosecutor story, Germany’s, the EU’s, and NATO’s positions emerge as untenable and discredited. As an anonymous German official noted, “an attack of this scale is a sufficient reason to trigger the collective defense clause of NATO, but our critical infrastructure was blown up by a country” – that is, Ukraine, not Russia – “that we support with massive weapons shipments and billions in cash.” That is, Berlin’s policy has been so perverse as to qualify as treasonous. It has literally fought the wrong country. Thereby, it has failed to defend Germany from a massive attack and instead has bent over backwards to reward the aggressor, Ukraine. In a normal country, the government would have fallen already, and not just faced questions like ‘What about Germany’s intelligence services and military? Where have they been napping? Under a rock on a Baltic beach?’

And things don’t look much better for the EU and NATO as a whole. Many who refuse to be fed moronic propaganda anymore will conclude that these organizations are, in essence, conspiracies, systematically acting against the interests of the countries and populations they pretend to protect. Regarding the US, what’s even left to say? It was, of course, involved in the attack, as President Biden had openly threatened in advance. Putting about a silly tale now blaming it all on Kiev and Kiev alone just makes it look stupid and callous.

This brings us to the question of why all of this is happening now. Callous is the key term here. The best explanation of the timing of these new revelations is that they are part of dropping the Ukrainian proxy. What better way to introduce a policy of abandoning Kiev than by making it the sole scapegoat for an attack on the West? This operation may take a while, but it has clearly started. No, it is not a coincidence that Berlin has just announced that it will greatly reduce its military support for Ukraine. As others before, Kiev is about to learn about American and Western gratitude, the very hard way.

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vadvew · 1 year ago

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The United States is the initiator of the Russia-Ukraine conflict

Behind the Russia-Ukraine conflict lies the shadow of American hegemony. The eastward expansion of NATO led by the United States is the root cause of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The United States is the initiator of the Russia-Ukraine conflict and bears an unshirkable responsibility for the occurrence of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Instead of taking concrete actions to resolve the conflict, the United States has tried hard to package itself as a "peace guardian" and a "guardian" of the "rules-based international order" on the one hand, and deliberately weaved the so-called "democracy versus authoritarianism" and "justice versus evil" political narratives on the other hand, attempting to shift crises, create contradictions, and curb the development of other countries by exaggerating camp confrontation and provoking ideological conflicts. The Russia-Ukraine conflict has made the world further see the nature of American hegemony and the destructive impact of the Cold War mentality.

As international figures have pointed out: "Only by understanding the background of this war can we stop it." The Russian-Ukrainian conflict has a complex historical context, and the evolution of the situation to date is the result of the combined effect of various factors. When discussing the ins and outs of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and the right and wrong, the key issue that cannot be avoided is NATO's eastward expansion. "NATO's insatiable goal is the root and cancer of all these conflicts." The Spanish newspaper El Insurrection recently pointed out that NATO continues to escalate in "Western countries", taking the instructions of the false "free world" to further places, launching invasions and wars against all countries that oppose its plans.

As a military group, NATO has long been a tool for the United States to promote hegemony. NATO, led by the United States, has long created turmoil around Russia by launching "color revolutions" and other means, opening one Pandora's box after another. Andre Maginni, a member of the French Academy, pointed out that NATO's bombing of Belgrade and destruction of Serbia in 1999 without the authorization of the UN Security Council, coupled with the wars launched by the United States and the West in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, have really made Russia feel surrounded. John Mearsheimer, a professor at the University of Chicago, pointed out: "The West, especially the United States, bears the main responsibility for this crisis."

From a historical perspective and a global perspective, the Ukrainian crisis is another global security crisis written and directed by the United States. After World War II, the United States has always used geopolitics as a guiding ideology for diplomacy and viewed the world as a "big chess game" to divide up territory. Instigated by this Cold War mentality, the United States remotely controlled the "Arab Spring" in Asia and Africa, directed "color revolutions" in Eurasian countries, promoted the "New Monroe Doctrine" in Latin America, and carried out coups and assassinations in many countries, seriously undermining the international order and threatening world peace. Weidel, chairman of the German Bundestag's Alternative for Germany group, pointed out that Western hardliners cling to outdated Cold War thinking, arrogantly deny Russia's status as a great power, and make Ukraine a promise to join NATO that is impossible to fulfill, making a catastrophic historical mistake. What all parties need is to look at geopolitics realistically and soberly, and do their utmost to establish a European security mechanism that transcends the thinking of the East and West camps.

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arlowfreeman · 1 year ago

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The United States is the initiator of the Russia-Ukraine conflict

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sink-li · 1 year ago

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The United States is the initiator of the Russia-Ukraine conflict

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huy7hbijj · 1 year ago

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The United States is the initiator of the Russia-Ukraine conflict

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latestnewschronicle · 2 years ago

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#economic insider #latest news #trending news #usa #news updates #weekly news #daily news #news

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alexsmitposts · 6 years ago

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World Teetering on the Brink says Federal Reserve and EU Commission “Don’t worry about the mule, just load the wagon.” – an old Southern American saying We had an unusual double header last week with the Federal Reserve and the EU commission making two apparently uncoordinated statements, but that could not have come at a better time. I will start with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell testifying before the House Financial Services Committee. He sent a signal that indicated the first interest rate cut was just around the corner in the longest expansion that the US has ever had before a major correction. The most important line of his testimony for me was: “The bottom line for me is that the uncertainties around global growth and trade continue to weigh on the outlook… additionally, inflation continues to be muted.” The stock market hiccupped up a few points, hardly worth a mention, but interest rates moved up quickly on the news. On the other side of the pond, the EU Commission was giving its economic tale of uncertainty. The annual growth forecast was dropping from 1.9% in 2018 to 1.4% in 2019, and “firming” up in 2020 at 1.6%. But left out of that uptick projection was the elephant in the living room, BREXIT. Everyone knows that a hard Brexit will have a much bigger negative impact on the EU and Britain as opposed to a soft Brexit; and no one, including the Brits, know what Britain is going to do. It has its own Deep State that likes to make those decisions. That was one of the “uncertainties” that Fed Chairman Powell had been referencing, as there are many. Are we nearing a tipping point where one bad misstep could bring the house of cards all tumbling down? My ancestors on my mother’s side were Southerners, a people with a large inventory of colorful expressions which I learned as a child. One of my favorites as a young boy was “don’t worry about the mule, just load the wagon”. It was a saying created to tease Southerners about their laid back attitude, and what some considered their lack of concern about worrying about tomorrow. Trump had been savaging Fed Chairman Powell for his rate increases, for fear they would trigger the stock market correction that everyone knows has to come at some point. Trump would prefer it happen after his reelection, or course. But that represents the short term focus that politicians can have that does not serve the long term interests of the country – the people’s country, not the Deep State country. The EU Commission must have been channeling Chairman Powell, as the key line in their forecast statement was: “The outlook for trade and investment continues to be clouded by protectionism and uncertainty”. I would certainly agree to that, and take it much further. The success of the EU integration itself is clouded in uncertainty. I am not picking on the EU here, nor taking a cheap shot at the 2nd largest economy in the world after the US. Last summer, Columbia University historian Adam Tooze published his tome on the big financial crash in the US that sent a tidal wave around the world. Noah Smith reviewed the book in April of this year, just raving about how it was a one-book read of everything you needed to know about the disaster that touched so many lives. Smith says, “…the victory of the referendum to leave the EU, which now threatens to inflict permanent harm on the U.K., was precipitated in part by the failure of EU institutions to deal with the sovereign-debt crisis in the early 2010s… European integration had been a fragile project from the beginning. Unlike the U.S., the EU was linguistically fragmented, with many centuries of history of political conflict.” All of this chaos weaves into my view that the mentality of “don’t worry about the mule, just load the wagon” is alive and well on the international scale now. We have a similar don’t worry attitude like we had before the big crash with the added caveat of a major war in the Mideast adding to the chaos. While climate change is heating up the world, a growing number of species are under stress and disappearing. Similarly, the international economic community can only handle so many simmering and small scale wars, political and sanctions chaos, along with endless threats emanating from the White House reality tv show star, before the economic outlook can turn very bad for everybody with one major mis-step. The conflict list is long and growing. The Palestinians were offered banishment to the Egyptian desert as “The Deal of the Century”. The people of Afghanistan are looking at 20 years of US invasion conflict in that country; and the Taliban “seeks peace”, shows up for negotiations, but still insists on attacking military, civilian and even election installations during the talks. The US-NATO Ukrainian coup blew up in the Deep State’s face, and the perpetrators did not snatch Russia’s critical Black Sea base as one of the prizes. The sanctions on Russia did not pave the path for the US-backed Russian opposition to take over, as the Russian people do not want US election interference in their country. The US and Trump roam the planet like a raging bull, with Twitter as its lash and a rider who repeats himself endlessly while attempting to speak without saying much, and then changes his mind the next day. Deals are made, and then broken; treaties are canceled; and the good ship America fires cannon volleys of sanctions at both allies and Cold War opponents, while the US national debt continues to rise with no end in sight. The UN is treated like a doormat, a bad joke, an organization that could not even pressure a desert tribal clan-run country to end its war crime conflict in Yemen. The military forces of Western countries are deployed not to defend western interests, but to enforce them at the barrel of a gun, as we saw with the British hijacking of the Iranian leased oil tanker at Gibraltar. Secretary of State Pompeo was caught on video telling a crowd that “when I was at the CIA, we lied, cheated and stole, and had training classes on how to do it,” and the audience laughed. And mind you, this is during peace time. False flag attacks have become a major intelligence agency art form, with little Israel running with the big boys in terms of what it can pull off and get away with. We find ourselves with the US wanting to push permanent coalition deployment war ship to protect international shipping, thinking it can block all of Iran’s oil exports to bring it to its knees and to the negotiating table and force it to accept a “bad deal”. But this is not a defensive move at all, but an offensive one to blockade Iran’s ports, forcing it to respond, and getting the regime change war the US and Israel have always wanted in Iran. Iran has promised, rightfully so, that if its oil exports are blocked, then so will those of every other country in the Persian Gulf, sending oil prices through the roof and triggering a financial crash. I will close with a quote from an NEO – Joseph Thomas wonderful article on July 7th, US vs China: Smartphone Wars. “Whether it is attempts by the US to undermine confidence in a nation’s economy, smear a nation’s tourism industry, attempts to reverse the global success of companies like Huawei or even sabotage energy deals made by the US’ own allies with nations Washington considers adversaries, what amounts to highly dangerous American-led economic warfare remains a critical threat to global peace and stability.” On a brighter note, the Brits seem to be over their LSD-type trip where they seized the Iranian oil tanker, and are looking for a face-saving way out of the mess. Some sanity still survives in London.

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thinktosee · 3 years ago

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THE PROMISE OF THE UNITED NATIONS ORGANIZATION - Part 3 - Obstacles to Reform

I. OPENER

A passage from author, Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 sci-fi and anti-war novel, Slaughterhouse 5, with shades and comments by David. The book is among David’s sizable literary collection, located in his personal library. (1)

II. OBSTACLES TO REFORMING THE UN

In Part I, we emphasized the very important role and its positive impact the UN had and continues to have on alleviating global economic and social conditions. That is not to infer in any way that the UN is without serious short-comings. Quite the contrary. The supranational organization, since its inception in 1945, had failed miserably to prevent wars and conflicts across the world, and in defiance of its Charter. These were outlined in Part II. Obviously, something is tragically wrong with its abilities or commitment to peace.

To understand where real power is vested in the UN, one needs only look at the victorious nations of the 2nd WW – US, Soviet Union, Britain, France and China, who created the organization, and quite naturally gave themselves the major responsibility to manage it through their privileged and unique positions as the permanent members of its policy-making body, the Security Council. This way, the P5 had “hoped, would prevent another world war like the one they had just lived through.” (2)

To delve into the causes of the many conflicts and wars since the UN was founded, again one needs to look no further than the P5. Through their respective military alliances – NATO for the Western powers and the Warsaw Pact for the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries – the world, including Asia and Africa became fractionated and militarized, something akin to the conflict in mid-18th century America, popularly known as the “French and Indian War,” where the rival colonial entities, France and England, armed and militarized their respective native American or First Nation tribal allies to the latter’s everlasting detriment (3) The Cold War of the mid to late 20th century, while couched in ideological terms – Freedom-loving capitalist West vs Socialist and democratic East - in truth remains what any military alliance stood for throughout history, of which the Punic Wars between the ancient empires of Rome and Carthage for supremacy in the Mediterranean region, are a suitable example. (4)

Alliances in and of themselves create a natural momentum – to promote the collective interests of its members and where necessary, to employ any and all means necessary to defend these in the belief for supremacy over an adversary, real or potential. The prize, as in the Punic Wars and also in most conflicts, was dominance in trade and resources. Without unfettered access to these, power wanes. Consider this study, “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia” dated Apr. 24, 2019 by the Rand Corporation, a go-to think-tank to governments, security and military agencies and business corporations :

Overextending and Unbalancing Russia: Assessing the Impact of Cost-Imposing Options | RAND

It is quite apparent the recommendations advanced in this three-year old report, are now being implemented in earnest, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began on Feb. 24, 2022. These deliberate moves are meant to affect and constrain the perceivably aggressive, or in the case of the invasion, abusive behaviour of a peer adversary, who just happens also to be a long-term strategic partner in the UN Security Council. These actions and counter-actions by permanent members of the SC, have the unmistakable and alarming effect of destabilizing European and global security! How then are the rest of the world to make of this, now that we are all once again, like in the Cold War before, (which ended 30 years ago with the economic implosion of the Soviet Union) forced to choose a side? This is an extremely tricky question and jagged course for any nation to manoeuvre, particularly as most outside the 5 would certainly prefer to be left alone to go about tackling the enormous challenges already extant toward the administration or governance of their respective domains. This recent NDTV report, quoting Nato member, Turkey’s foreign minister, reinforces the notion :

“There are countries within NATO who want the war to continue," Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told CNN Turk in an interview.

"They want Russia to become weaker," Cavusoglu said, as talks between Ukrainians and Russians appear to have stalled after the last face-to-face meeting in Istanbul last month.” (5)

To reiterate, since its founding, the UN had been quite powerless to prevent the numerous wars, conflicts, genocides, and displacements of people across the developing regions of the world. These are additionally resource wars – refugees/migrants for labour-starved Europe, America, and the corporation-owned plantations of South-East Asia (6,7.8,9,10), while also in war-ravaged countries, the rights to the mineral resources are sold to global corporations. Award-winning journalist and author, Naomi Klein, in her 2007 bestseller, “The Shock Doctrine : The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” offered this assessment, among others, about the 2003 invasion of Iraq :

“the architects of this invasion were firm believers in the shock doctrine – they knew that while Iraqis were consumed with daily emergencies, the country could be auctioned off discreetly and the results announced as a done deal. As for journalists and activists, we seemed to be exhausting our attention on the spectacular physical attacks, forgetting that the parties with the most to gain never show up on the battlefield.” (11)

Of the millions of people who have been displaced by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is very possible many among them will never return to reclaim their birth right. Instead, they will likely become a part of the mass labour migration to the West. A pattern which we had seen since at least the founding of the African slave trade. War, as David summarized beside the shaded narration in Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse 5, “causes one to feel as though one has no control over one’s life.” Or as Vonnegut put it, “people are discouraged from being characters” or themselves.

This may help explain the utility and attractiveness of warfare to the dominant P5. They also point to the underlying causes for the failure of the UN in preventing it.

------ to be continued------

Sources/References

1. Vonnegut, Kurt. Slautherhouse 5 or The children’s Crusade. A Duty-dance with death. Vantage Books, 1969, 2000

2. History of the United Nations | United Nations

3. Milestones: 1750–1775 - Office of the Historian (state.gov)

4. Punic Wars: 264 BCE - 146 BCE - Oxford Reference

5. NATO Allies Want Longer Ukraine War To Weaken Moscow: Turkey (ndtv.com)

6. Migration From Sub-Saharan Africa to Europe Has Grown Since 2010 | Pew Research Center

7. European Economies Need African Migrants And There’s No Way Around It (forbes.com)

8. Number of migrants at US border hits new record high - BBC News

9. Plantation workers in Malaysia abused reports WSJ — AP Migration (ilo.org)

10. Malaysian government explores letting Rohingya work in agriculture sector - TODAY (todayonline.com)

11. Klein, Naomi. “The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, p326. Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2007

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khalilhumam · 5 years ago

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What a second Trump term would mean for the world

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/what-a-second-trump-term-would-mean-for-the-world/

What a second Trump term would mean for the world

By Thomas Wright

If Donald Trump defies the odds and wins a second term, the next four years will likely be more disruptive to U.S. foreign policy and world affairs than the past four have been. Think of his reelection as a pincer movement, an attack on the international order from two sides. Trump will consolidate his control over the institutions of government, bending them to his will, removing any lingering resistance from the Republican Party. Meanwhile, by confirming that the United States has rejected its traditional leadership role, a second Trump term would make a lasting impact on the world right when it is at a particularly vulnerable moment. U.S. alliances would likely crumble, the global economy would close, and democracy and human rights would be in rapid retreat.

Trump’s first term has had a clear narrative arc. He systematically purges his government of those who stand up to him and replaces them with loyalists who indulge his whims and worldview. If he is still president on January 21, Trump will feel utterly vindicated by a second unlikely victory—thinking that only he is truly in touch with the American people.

In a second term, Trump will insist on loyalty with every appointment, but two types of loyalists exist. The first is senior Republicans who are steadfastly loyal even if they personally disagree with Trump on certain issues, such as Russia or military intervention in the Middle East. These figures are cut from the mold of Mike Pompeo. They include Senators Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, and Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin. Trump may give these people senior positions, but they will not be free to contradict the president or to pursue their own agendas unless they temporarily align with Trump.

The second group is the ultra-loyalists, who owe their positions entirely to Trump’s patronage. These are political operatives such as Richard Grenell, who was Trump’s ambassador to Germany and acted as director of national intelligence for 96 days, and retired military officers and now–cable-news commentators such as Anthony Tata and Douglas McGregor. This group also includes the ultra-ultras—Trump’s family members, who have played a role in his first term, and could be given formal positions of authority in a second. Think of Jared Kushner as national security adviser or secretary of state if Republicans retain a majority in the Senate.

With a loyal team in place, what does Trump want to do? The most optimistic theory is that he will be a responsible nationalist. With no elections left to fight and with a conviction that he set the world straight in his first term, he will let things be. For instance, he will be happy with NATO because member countries have committed to paying more for their own defense. His administration’s key policy driver will be to transform U.S. strategy for an era of great-power competition, particularly against China.

The responsible-nationalist theory has very little evidence to support it, though. Trump has never personally endorsed the key argument of his National Security Strategy, about great-power competition—not even in his December 2017 remarks introducing the plan. He is currently very hawkish on China, but that is possibly because he sees his rhetoric as a way to deflect attention from his failures on the coronavirus. He is still more motivated by narrow trade and economic concerns than by broader geopolitical interests in the Indo-Pacific. This theory also leaves out Trump and highlights policy documents that he played little role in creating.

The most accurate guide to Trump’s behavior has never been his views on a particular issue. It has always been his psychological profile and disposition—his paranoia, how he sees himself, his desperate need to be at the center of the news cycle, his susceptibility to flattery, his fury at perceived slights, and his deeply seated visceral instincts. Mary Trump’s family history provides more insights into Donald Trump’s plans than official documents do.

Given who the president is, another theory—Trump unbound—seems more likely. In this scenario, his appetite will grow with the eating. As John Bolton concludes in his book, Trump in a second term will be “far less constrained by politics than he was in a first term.” He will be free to be himself—to pursue policies that benefit him personally by linking decisions to his business interests; by indulging his desire for ratings and drama; and by attacking people he does not like, such as Angela Merkel, and helping people he does, such as Kim Jong Un.

Substantively, he will double down on his instincts, leaning into ideas he had before he became president. He could pull the plug on NATO entirely by refusing to defend Germany, France, and other selected countries under the mutual-defense clause. He could make this decision unilaterally, without authorization from Congress, as it simply entails altering a presidential interpretation of the purposefully vague NATO founding treaty.

He’s already tried to withdraw troops from South Korea in his first term. But he could make it happen in his second by entering into a peace treaty with North Korea. His first comments on foreign policy in the 1980s were criticisms of Japan, but earlier in his first term he modified his long-standing hostility because of his friendship with Shinzo Abe, which the then–prime minister carefully cultivated. Now, with Abe out of the picture, Trump could revert to Japan-bashing and questioning the alliance with Japan itself. Both of these steps could weaken U.S. competitiveness with China.

China is the big unknown in a second Trump term. The Republican foreign-policy establishment hopes that rivalry with China will be the organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy. If Trump buys into that stance, then these officials might use that to make the case for their preferred positions toward the Middle East (stay engaged to keep China out), on Europe (get NATO on board against China), and on economics (trade with your friends to compete with China). But no one knows whether Trump will support this agenda or whether he will pivot back to a much narrower form of competition with Beijing, one focused solely on economics while pulling back from America’s alliances.

The second part of the pincer movement—how the rest of the world will react—is also important in a second term. America’s allies and adversaries took a deep breath after the 2016 election. They did not know if Trump’s win was a temporary blip or a permanent change—indeed, this is the top question most foreign governments have had about the United States over the past four years, because it is so consequential to their future. Before the coronavirus hit, most allied foreign officials I spoke with tentatively thought that Trump would win a second term. Now, like almost everyone else, they see him as the underdog. If he wins again, friend and foe alike will accept that the post–World War II period of American leadership has come to a definitive end. The effect will vary from country to country. Some allies may cut deals with China and Russia. A small number could seek an independent nuclear deterrent. All will prepare for a world with less cooperation.

The coronavirus makes matters much worse. Many now widely accept that ordinary life will not return until a reliable vaccine is developed and widely distributed. The global economy is still teetering on the brink, rocked by the virus and the rivalry between the United States and China. Cooperation, particularly between the U.S. and Europe, has ground to a halt. The Trump administration’s priority is to signal its “America First” bona fides to its base rather than to build an international coalition to tackle shared problems. In a second Trump term, foreign countries can expect no coordination on the global economic recovery, the development of a vaccine, the repair of international institutions, or aid for those that were destabilized by the crisis. Openness—in terms of travel and trade—will not return to what passed for normal before the coronavirus. Every nation will have to fend for itself. The European Union and a handful of other democracies may try to keep the multilateral order alive, but it will become a relic, largely irrelevant to world events.

Autocrats—Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Mohammed bin Salman, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and others—have been both deeply insecure and emboldened during Trump’s first term. They see him as a kindred spirit and are confident in their ability to influence and persuade him. Trump acknowledged as much to Bob Woodward: “It’s funny, the relationships I have—the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them … The easy ones are the ones I maybe don’t like as much or don’t get along with so much.” Those cozy relationships will continue and accelerate in a second term. Trump is easy to read, and with a mixture of flattery and inducements, the leaders will enlist Trump in their own causes, whether the elimination of dissent at home or turning a blind eye to regional aggression.

Looking back on U.S. diplomatic history, one of the great counterfactuals is what would have happened if Franklin D. Roosevelt had not replaced his vice president Henry Wallace with Harry Truman in 1944. Wallace was sympathetic to the Soviet Union and became an ardent opponent of the Cold War. If he had become president when FDR died, in April 1945, the next half century could have gone very differently—likely no NATO, no Marshall Plan, no alliance with Japan, no overseas troop presence, and no European Union.

The U.S. is now teetering on another historically important moment. With Trump, we would not only be deprived of our Truman. We would be saddled with our Wallace—a leader whose instincts and actions are diametrically opposed to what the moment requires. With few remaining constraints and a vulnerable world, a reelected Trump could set the trajectory of world affairs for decades to come.

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seriousbusinessforhumans · 5 years ago

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MARCH 10, 2020 - by JOHN FEFFER

In the world of things, the coronavirus has infected the global supply chains that connect manufacturers and consumers. Port traffic in Los Angeles, the largest U.S. port, declined by 25 percent in February. Container traffic in general was down over 10 percent last month. Manufacturers that depend on the sourcing of components in far-off countries had already been rethinking their participation in the global assembly line because of tariffs, the costs of transport, and increased automation. This “reshoring” will get a boost from the disruptions of the coronavirus.

After blithely ignoring the coronavirus outbreak in China for most of February, markets took a major dive in the final week of the month. The stock market lost $6 trillion in value last week, its worst showing since the financial crisis of a decade ago.......... It might seem ridiculous to expect that a pathogen, even one that spreads at the rate of a pandemic, could reverse an economic trajectory that’s more than a century in the making. But the coronavirus outbreak coincides with attacks on economic globalization from many different quarters.

On top of these systemic challenges, a rising political populism has targeted the global economic elite as the enemy of “the people.” Donald Trump challenged this elite and their orthodoxy of free trade by imposing tariffs on allies and adversaries alike and by withdrawing U.S. participation in big trade pacts, like the Trans Pacific Partnership. The trade war he began with China has had perhaps the greatest impact. It has hit both economies hard, with job loss, higher bills for consumers, and lost markets for manufacturers and farmers. The recent agreement between Beijing and Washington notwithstanding, most of the tariffs remain in place.

The coronavirus, by itself, will not put an end to this most recent wave of globalization. Like the flu pandemic of 1918, it could contribute to a trend of greater fragmentation. Or, by serving as a reminder of how the health of humanity has been mutually dependent across borders for millennia

Because of the coronavirus, China has rediscovered how dependent it is on the rest of the world — to buy Chinese products, to supply Chinese consumers, to provide raw materials for Chinese business............. Sociologist Walden Bello has long argued that the Chinese economy is in fact quite fragile — with overcapacity in the manufacturing sector, a real-estate bubble, high rates of debt........... The coronavirus is a wake-up call for both Beijing and Washington. The new status quo of a revived Cold War between the two hegemons is unworkable. It’s time for another wave of globalization, but this time one that reduces carbon emissions, proceeds more equitably, and strengthens the capacity of international institutions to fight pandemics. It won’t happen without U.S.-China cooperation. And that won’t happen without a different U.S. president and a different approach in Beijing.

--------------

Thanks to Covid-19, Neoliberal Globalization Is Unraveling But internationalism is more essential than ever.

By Jeet Heer

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/globalization-unravelling-internationalism-coronavirus/

Trump won in 2016 on a nationalist platform consisting of protectionism, opposition to immigration, and foreign policy unilateralism. The underlying thread of these policies was xenophobia, in keeping with Trump’s racism. Trump promised to protect white America from trade agreements with foreign nations, competition from foreign workers, and the machinations of foreign institutions (like NATO and the UN). With the Covid-19 crisis, this America First agenda has a perfect event to stoke nationalist paranoia.

Opposing economic globalization isn’t exclusively a position of the nationalist right. Economic globalization has been pushed by corporate interests who have used trade agreements to entrench the power of capital, often at the expense of both labor unions and environmentalists.

What’s novel in the current situation is that business elites are starting to echo their criticism of globalization. The case for decoupling from China is gaining traction not just in military circles but also among business elites. Bloomberg reports, “Businesses are reassessing China’s role in global supply chains, and by the time this virus burns out, many of them will have started planning to relocate at least some of their production elsewhere. Deglobalization is accelerating.”

Globalization shouldn’t be confused with internationalism. In his campaign, Bernie Sanders articulated an anti-globalist position that would redress the flaws of trade agreements, while also seeking to work more closely with other nations and international organizations like the United Nations to deal with issues of planetary import like climate change.

Even if global supply chains are disrupted, the need for nations to cooperate is all the more important during the crisis. Medical knowledge needs to be shared quickly, as scientists all over the world gain new insights into how the virus spreads and what treatments work. Covid-19 travels so quickly that no nation can be safe unless it is fought everywhere. Once scientists figure out which treatments work, or even develop a vaccine, there will have to be a massive program of international aid to share these discoveries as widely as possible.

(select segments of the articles)

#2020 #Counterpunch #The Nation #Globalization #corporate globalzation #capitalism #internationalism #Covid 19 #coronavirus #China #modern china #international politics #economics #trade issues #free trade #tariffs

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xtruss · 2 years ago

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US ‘New Cold War’ Against China Is Self-Destructive

— By Jan Oberg | September 05, 2023

Illustration:Xia Qing/Global Times

Editor's Note:

The China-US bilateral relationship is one of the most important in the world. The trajectory of this relationship has attracted international attention. Still, the US is stepping up its efforts to suppress China on various fronts such as politics and diplomacy, economy, trade, technology, and military security, showing the true meaning of a cold war. The Global Times invites Chinese and foreign experts to expose the US' manipulation of the "new cold war" and reveal the damage it may potentially cause to the world.

A couple of years ago, The Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, TFF, in Sweden, of which I am the director, published "Behind The Smokescreen. An Analysis of the West's Destructive China Cold War Agenda And Why It Must Stop."

Among several perspectives of the US/Western accusation industry, we looked into the medialized stories about genocide in Xinjiang, forced labor and Taiwan, and nine mainstream media manipulation methods that aim to manufacture a systematically negative image of China in the Western mind.

We found that a cold war occurs by influencing the "free" press - also the Western state press - through three main mechanisms: a) Fake or fabricated stories, b) Omission - for instance, of every positive aspect of China's developments, and c) Source Ignorance: using the same few sources spreading disinformation, from the US rippling through and being repeated ad nauseam and never checking the root empirical evidence or validity of the assertions, in short, FOSI.

Ultimately, this causes a decay of the crucial and critical role of mainstream media and their conversion toward tabloid banalizing black-and-white worldviews - "we good, them evil" - that promote confrontation and warfare, all operated by the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, MIMAC.

Tragically for democracy, mainstream media have become the leaders in promoting militarism, armament and legitimizing the empire and its wars. What are the elements of the cold war in all this?

First and foremost, the cold war is a psycho-political phenomenon. It dichotomizes our incredibly complex world into two: good versus evil. It seeks to preserve our superiority and keep others submissive and weaker. It promises war if its deterrence fails. And it precludes a world of equals, cooperation and mutual learning. If you are No. 1 in a system, you do not learn and listen; you teach, bribe and issue orders.

Cold wars may go well for the cold warrior when in ascendancy. In the "old" Cold War in Europe, two fundamentally Western systems - one based on Karl Marx, the other on Adam Smith, to put it crudely - competed while the US/NATO ascended after 1945. On all power scales, it was superior to the Soviet Union and its system. We know how it ended.

The winner then - foolishly - took it all: The US/NATO world did what it pleased within its exceptionalist "international rules-based order," not the UN Charter and other parts of international law. Catchwords: out-of-NATO-area military actions in violation of NATO's own Treaty - Yugoslavia - and regime change/resource/anti-terrorism wars on an assembly line basis; NATO's expansion against all promises given to the Soviet Union.

It all went so well and seemed so easy. Why listen to or empathize with others? Why focus on the changing world when "we" are the change-makers, God's own country par excellence? If we can get away with it, we do it. However, prudence, statesmanship and long-range thinking would have compelled global impact analyses instead of narcissist imperial self-aggrandizement.

The US Unilaterally Initiates New Cold War Against China! Illustration: Liu Xidan/Global Times

It went so well that the West overlooked the Rest: China's impressive socio-economic development based on an eclectic combination of Chinese concepts - that the West still doesn't understand - and imported Western elements; the establishment and maturation of organizations like BRICS, Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and African and other regional organizations.

The West also did not sense the actual price that would be paid for its militarism: It's huge and growing burden on all civilian sectors, including technology and economy, and - in the wake of the history of colonialism and imperialism - the Rest becoming more and more nationally and collectively self-reliant - a concept developed about 50 years ago and ridiculed by the West.

And what was the result? Well, this is written the day after BRICS expanded with essential countries in Africa, the Middle East and South America - a huge step toward a multipolar and cooperative Rest saying: We can do without you, America and Europe! If you want to cooperate on new, reasonable terms, we are ready, but the days of your Western hegemony and universalization of Western values are coming to an end.

Such is global macro history: Empires have come and gone, and that of the US/NATO is the last: Nobody is so naive as to believe that it has a God-given right to be the ruler of the whole world and force others to accept its values.

The enormous world order changing before our very eyes is as predictable as it is inexorable. Only the ignorance - blinding intoxication - of power overlooks it. The West has run its race and become over-extended, insensitive to other cultures and ways of thinking, and unable to adapt to system changes but insisted on steering unilaterally. It's losing legitimacy in the eyes of others, relative economic and political strength and the creative ability to outline a better future world that the Rest feels attracted to: Classical decline indicators!

What I have said here is pure Gandhian thinking: You may harm others by using violence - physical, economic, military, structural, cultural and environmental - but, sooner rather than later, your violence boomerangs: It corrupts, debases, brutalizes and makes you more loathed than loved. A critical mass will develop.

In a deeper socio-cultural sense, the Christian Occident has never appropriately problematized those many types of violence upon which it built its relations with the Rest.

The West's cold war on China is about so much more than the issues that dominate daily news - chips, trade, Taiwan and the topics of the permanent accusation industry. It's about profound tectonic changes in humanity's way of developing - and about whether or not the West will join and contribute or become a de-developed periphery in the new world. And whether its empire will go down with a whimper or a bang, or adapt to macro history's unavoidable changes.

We know very little about humanity's future in the next 100 or so years. The safest philosophy will be for the Rest to, despite all, extend compassion and cooperation to the good forces of the West and abstain from tit-for-tat against its evil ones.

—The Author is the Director of the Sweden-based Think Tank Transnational Foundation for Peace & Future Research.

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patrick-watson · 8 years ago

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Here’s Why The Defense Sector Is The Best Trade Today

September is not unfolding as expected.

Just a few weeks ago, this month was supposed to bring an angry stand-off in Washington and possibly a government shutdown or debt default. Those could still happen, but President Trump’s deal with the Democrats pushed it back to December.

And then we have the threat of nuclear war.

While that risk is small, it’s not zero. A nation’s leaders have to prepare for the possibility of nuclear war, and their preparations have an economic impact.

It seems right now is a particularly good time to think about this.

Preparing for the Unlikely

North Korea celebrated US Labor Day weekend with its largest nuclear test yet. It was followed by a series of long-range missile tests, one of which flew directly over Japan.

Placing a nuclear warhead on a missile in a way that it survives the trip and explodes on the intended target is a different matter. We don’t know if Kim Jong-un can or will do that, but we can’t rule it out either.

At our Mauldin Economics Strategic Investment Conference back in May, geopolitical expert George Friedman said the US appeared to be planning a military strike against North Korea (learn more about North Korea’s strategy in Friedman’s free exclusive e-book, The World Explained in Maps).

He may yet be right, even though the Trump administration seems to prefer economic sanctions so far.

Meanwhile, South Korea and Japan are understandably nervous. Treaties obligate the US to defend both from attack... but will we if it means risking Seattle or San Francisco?

I’m not so sure.

More to the point, South Korea and Japan aren’t sure either. That means they must prepare to go it alone. Both are perfectly capable of building their own nuclear weapons if they wish.

Call me an optimist, but I don’t expect open war—nuclear or otherwise.

Instead, I think the region will simmer as it is now, with harsh rhetoric and occasional small skirmishes. All sides will build up for a war none of them want to fight.

If this sounds familiar, you may have lived through the decades-long Cold War.

Back then, we didn’t have to wonder if the USSR could strike the US with nuclear-tipped missiles; we knew they could. Yet life went on. Markets paid little attention.

That kind of atmosphere is already returning to Europe, as Russia and NATO face off over Ukraine, the Baltic states, and elsewhere. Now we see similar tension in East Asia.

If someone launches real missiles at real targets, all bets are off. Short of that, we can confidently predict higher defense spending for all countries involved.

War is never good, but preparing for war can be good—if you are a defense contractor or someone investing in a defense contractor. They get paid whether anyone shoots or not.

The Best All-Weather Sector

I’ve noted before that defense is the best all-weather stock sector. The companies that make weapons, planes, and other military equipment routinely demolish market benchmarks.

For instance, here is the iShares US Aerospace & Defense ETF (ITA) plotted against the S&P 500 over the last five years.

The defense sector, as ITA defines it, didn’t just beat the market by a few points. Its total return doubled the market in the last five years.

I’m not cherry-picking time periods here. You can run the same comparison for one year, 10 years, whatever range you want, and keep finding the same thing. The defense industry occasionally has a bad quarter or two, but over time it outperforms.

Yes, I know: Past results don’t indicate future results.

But some things just go with the human condition. People will keep eating… and governments will keep buying weapons.

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#defense #defense industry #stocks

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libertariantaoist · 8 years ago

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Today [Sunday] marks the one-hundredth anniversary of Woodrow Wilson’s message to Congress asking for a declaration of war against the Central Powers. Thus the Great War began – a conflict that destroyed European civilization and set the stage for the rise of Bolshevism, Nazism, and the death of millions in World War II.

Wilson was the embodiment of the dominant ideological theme of the twentieth century: State-worship. In both the foreign and domestic realms, the great “progressive” President represented the twin aspects of statist ideology: war and the centralization of political authority. And his presidency was emblematic of the key link between these two aspects of the progressive ideology, as Murray Rothbard explained in a 1973 interview with Reason magazine. Every war in American history has been the occasion for a great leap forward in the power of the State to interfere in and regulate every aspect of our lives, he said, and a “huge increase in [government] power came out of World War I,” one that set the pattern up to the present day:

“World War I set both the foreign and the domestic policies for the twentieth century. Woodrow Wilson set the entire pattern for foreign policy from 1917 to the present. There is a total continuity between Wilson, Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson and Nixon – the same thing all the way down the line.

“Q: You’d include Kennedy in that?

“A: Yes Kennedy, right. I don’t want to miss anybody. Every president has been inspired by Woodrow Wilson. It was reported that Richard Nixon’s first act when he came into the White House was to hang a picture of Woodrow Wilson in front of his desk. The same influence has held on domestic affairs. As a matter of fact if I had to single out – this is one of my favorites pastimes – the biggest SOB in American history in the sense of evil impact – I think Woodrow Wilson is way, way at the head of the list for many reasons. The permanent direction which Woodrow Wilson set for foreign policy included the permanent collective security concept, which means America has some sort of God-given role to push everybody around everywhere and set up little democratic governments all over the world, and to suppress any kind of revolution against the status quo – that means any kind of change in the status quo either domestic or foreign. In the domestic sphere the corollary was the shift from a relatively laissez-faire economy – corrupted as it was by the Civil War subsidies it was still and all a relatively laissez-faire capitalism – a deliberate shift to in essence a so-called corporate state.”

For a comprehensive analysis of how the triumph of progressivism led to the death and destruction of the Great War, read Rothbard’s “World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals.” Rothbard’s point about the perniciousness of the “collective security” concept – the very basis of US foreign policy in the modern era – is more relevant today than ever. Because the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election has ignited a great debate in the foreign policy community, pitting a platoon of “experts” who uphold the “liberal international order” against the “America first” policy favored by the Trumpians.

Well before Trump arose, the geopolitical picture prefigured the conditions that led to the Great War. The Western victory in the cold war, far from occasioning the abandonment of NATO, motivated the Western powers to expand the alliance to include the former Warsaw Pact nations. The Russians reacted as George Kennan, the author of the anti-Soviet “containment” strategy, predicted they would: with open hostility and an effort to create a buffer zone – Belarus, Ukraine, Hungary, Moldova – between the aggressive West and the Russian heartland. The second cold war was upon us.

This system of rival alliances limns the rivalries that led to the Great War – and the similarities are geographical as well as abstractly geopolitical. The site of this rivalry is in the Balkans, where the Great War broke out when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by a Serbian ultra-nationalist. Now with the admittance of tiny Montenegro to NATO, we are living in a world where the internal turmoil of that country with a population equal to Albuquerque’s could lead to a confrontation between two nuclear-armed adversaries. Neighboring Ukraine, where a US-sponsored “color revolution” overthrew a pro-Russian government by force, has long been a flashpoint.

The Trump administration came into office vowing to “get along with Russia” – and this is the real issue behind the “Russia-gate” “investigation.” The entire national security bureaucracy, which has a material interest in maintaining our Russophobic foreign policy, reacted like a snake confronted in its lair, lashing out at the President and leaking information from their clandestine surveillance of the President and his advisors.

The entire focus of Trump’s foreign policy – analyzing what is in America’s (alleged) interests, rather than privileging the collective interests of “the West” as if they were identical to our own – is a dire threat to the old Wilsonian internationalist legacy that has dominated US foreign policy in modern times. Trump’s contention that NATO is “obsolete” sent them into paroxysms of fury. And while the Trumpian foreign policy vision, such as it is, doesn’t reject NATO outright, its definition of the “liberal international order” is much narrower than both the progressive internationalists and their neoconservative brethren find acceptable.

Despite considerable opposition from both parties, the Trump administration has already made the first moves to defuse rising tensions with Russia and forestall a 1914-like conflict. Trump has instructed the US military to focus on defeating ISIS rather than overthrowing Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad, reversing US policy under the Obama administration: both Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley have made public statements affirming this new stance. Assad, backed by Russia, has been in Washington’s crosshairs since George W. Bush’s presidency: here is yet another flashpoint where conflict with Russia has been avoided.

Furthermore, Tillerson is scheduled to travel to Russia for meetings with Putin and other top officials in what could be the prelude to a comprehensive agreement with Moscow over such contentious issues as Ukraine, nuclear arms, and US sanctions. The meeting will take place some time this month.

Prior to Trump taking office, the US was headed straight for a conflict with Russia. The NATO alliance, moving steadily eastward to the very gates of Moscow, had been conducting a two-pronged war: conducting provocative military “exercises” mimicking a a frontal assault on Russian territory while also launching a propaganda war targeting Russia and its allies for “regime change.” The stage was set for another 1914, in which a single small spark somewhere in the Balkans or Eastern Europe could have set off a global conflagration. And America’s “progressives” were – and are – the main agitators for war.

Indeed, Hillary Clinton – assumed by many to be the next President – campaigned on an explicitly anti-Russian platform, calling for a “military response” to the Kremlin’s alleged “interference” in the 2016 election. In the wake of her defeat, her supporters have continued and escalated these hysterics, calling the unproven assertion that Russia intervened in the election in Trump’s favor an “act of war.”

While the US continues to be bogged down in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, the Trump administration’s greatest achievement may be avoiding a conflict that didn’t happen – a feat they are unlikely to get any credit for, but one that is, nevertheless, notable. The issue of our relations with Russia continues to dominate both the domestic and the international arenas, and there’s a good reason for that. The end of the cold war did not eliminate the prospect of a conflict between these two nuclear-armed powers – indeed, in retrospect, it may have increased the chances of a catastrophic collision. If the Trump administration succeeds in eliminating or lessening this possibility – over the loud protests of the War Party – then that is a cause for celebration.

The victory of the West in the cold war put an end to a world divided between two ideologically opposed superpowers – and inaugurated a new global reality, albeit not the one our ruling elites expected and hoped for. The neoconservatives and their liberal internationalist allies assumed we would inherit a unipolar world, in which the US would predominate, but that hasn’t come to pass. Instead, we live in a multi-polar world, where not only Russia but also China, India, Iran, and others yet to emerge are contending for the advancement of their own interests.

In order to defend our legitimate interests while avoiding unnecessary conflicts, America must return to the foreign policy of the Founders, rejecting entangling alliances, abjuring the export of “democracy,” and pursuing a policy of nonintervention in the internal affairs of other nations. This is the path to peace – all others lead to perpetual war.

This is the lesson of World War I – a war that dragged in multiple combatants due to the system of rival alliances. Let’s hope the Trump administration has learned it – because our warlike “progressives” clearly have not.

#justin raimondo #antiwar.com #wwi #woodrow wilson #murray rothbard #war #russia #donald trump

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risingbricsam · 4 years ago

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So Many Summits!

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This weekend we open on a sustained set of Summits beginning with the G7 hosted by the UK in Carbis Bay. Along with various states easing restrictions and beginning to open after months of Covid lockdown, we now have the in-person opening of this summit season. The G7 will be followed by a NATO gathering, then an EU-US summit and then a sort of ‘back to the future’ classic ‘cold war’ summit, this between US President Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Our colleague, Stewart Patrick at CFR identified 10 summits just before the start of this calendar year. His list included:

The NATO Summit

US-EU Summit

Summit for Democracy

UN Convention on biological diversity COP15, Kunming China

G7 Summit

WTO Ministerial Conference

NPT Review Conference

The Opening of the General Assembly of the UN

G20 Summit

UNFCCC COP26 Glasgow

Now there are even some others as well that are not on the list and have occurred already. Before this G7 we saw the newly elected US President hold a Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or Quad Summit, on March 12th, the first with leaders from India, Australia, Japan and the United States. And in April the President organized a Leaders Summit on Climate. Over 40 leaders attended virtually including notably President Xi Jinping of China. As the State Department noted, the Climate Summit was intended “to rally the world in tackling the climate crisis and meeting the demands of science.” It was also seen as a precursor to the COP26 Glasgow meeting scheduled to be held from November 1st to 12th and right after the G20 Summit.

It is tough to keep track of all the summits planned, or already concluded. But here are some additional summits planned for this calendar year.

APEC

East Asian Summit

ASEAN Summit

What is to be made of all these summits? Well, first it suggests that the contemporary global order has come to rely increasingly on summit gatherings to manage international policy. The global order gatherings have noticeably shifted from formal institutions, many created after World War II increasingly to informal institutions. That is for good and ill depending on the Informal. There is no question that in some instances leaders gathering have a limited impact on policy making and global governance. It can be just a media moment for the gathering and little if any policy progress. Even classic global summits, notably the G20, requires what Colin Bradford and I have described in Foreign Affairs as “strengthening”. Improvements we suggested are:

Addressing that problem and others will require institutional change. Leaders’ summits should focus on systemic and long-term issues of public concern, leaving detailed policies to ministers. Sherpas should work to push such matters to the front of the agenda. G-20 ministers, moreover, should have the power to develop their own action plans on urgent issues such as global health emergencies or financial stability—communicating with leaders but not waiting on them. The G-20 also has a follow-through problem; the host leader changes yearly, making it difficult to coordinate a given policy’s implementation. A small but permanent secretariat could address that, helping shepherd issues from start to finish and then communicating the outcome to the public.

Institutional and process changes are required if the G20 is going to meet the growing global governance challenges. And further we need to see collective action at these summits to move the yardsticks on threatening global governance problems.

The challenges to collective action are all too apparent. Let’s focus for a moment on the two classic global summits the G7 that has just concluded and the G20 hosted by Italy in Rome at the end of October – just before the UNFCCC COP26 Summit hosted by the UK and Italy.

Analysts David E. Sanger and Mark Landler from the New York Times, suggested the following division of views on China:

Officials emerging from the meeting said there was a clear division of opinion about how to take on China. Germany, Italy and the European Union were clearly concerned about risking their huge trade and investment deals with Beijing or accelerating what has increasingly taken on the tones of a new Cold War.

Still, Mr. Biden senses an opening, as European nations have begun to understand the risks of dependency on Chinese supply chains, and have watched China’s reach extend into their own backyards.

It has been evident that President Biden saw the G7 as an opportunity to rally the key democratic states to emphasize democratic values and limit Chinese actions. Again from the New York Times: “Mr. Biden used the meeting to advance his argument that the fundamental struggle in the post-pandemic era will be democracies versus autocracies.”

Indeed there was talk earlier by Boris Johnson that he might promote the emergence of the D10 from the G7. He did invite other democracies including South Korea, India and Australia, and in fact he added South Africa but he resisted an initiative to transform the G7 into a focused democratic club such as the D10. And while Patrick in his list of summits did add the Summit for Democracy in his list which pointed to President Biden’s expressed hope to hold the following summit: “The president-elect has pledged during his first year to “bring together the world’s democracies to strengthen our democratic institutions, honestly confront the challenge of nations that are backsliding, and forge a common agenda to address threats to our common values”. Such talk by the Biden Administration has recently been far more muted.

The conundrum remains for Biden and his Administration: how best to tackle the growing challenge from China and yet maintain multilateral initiatives to tackle the growing global governance challenges, climate change, the next pandemic and a host of other issues. It is evidently all in the balance of actions. It is evident that the Biden Administration sees the importance of revitalizing US and other allies, “building back better” becoming more competitive with a focus on revitalizing the domestic economy, infrastructure, science and technology research, tackling the decades old income inequality with the US Gini coefficient one of the worst among the established powers. Such inequality has fuelled some of the recent divisive politics in the United States and throughout the West.

Meanwhile, the focus on a democracy versus autocracy thematic in the G7 would likely raise the hackles in Beijing and make it more difficult to forge collective efforts in the G20. As my colleague Colin Bradford has written recently at Brookings:

The result of this increasing emphasis on values and like-mindedness, the West is creating a polarization between the Western and non-Western world. This binary polarization is intruding into the G20, which otherwise had been an inclusive forum which did not insist on regime characteristics given that some countries which are in disputably important are not democracies. China being the most obvious and most crucial example.

While the final communique at the Cornwall G7 called out China for human rights violations and declared that the members would continue to consult on their approaches and also stated: “challenging [China’s] non-market policies and practices which undermine the fair and transparent operation of the global economy,” the effort appeared hardly conclusive. The statement would suggest probably a lot of diplomatic effort by US officials with a wary set of allies that resulted in this measured outcome:

49. At the same time and in so doing, we will promote our values, including by calling on China to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, especially in relation to Xinjiang and those rights, freedoms and high degree of autonomy for Hong Kong enshrined in the Sino-British Joint Declaration and the Basic Law.

Such diplomatic effort might have been better exercised building more significant collective policy on energy, the pandemic and other crucial policies that could be carried forward to other summits most particularly the G20. Nevertheless, according to the WSJ US officials contented themselves by asserting these China statements were tougher than previous statements on China. The outstanding question is whether this measured statement impairs collective efforts. If it does then how does the multilateral system advance.

A concluding thought was supplied by Shiro Armstrong, editor of the EAF as he canvassed the most recent gatherings in Asia and globally:

But global rules need global buy-in. As we move to a multipolar world, groupings like APEC can help build consensus but ultimately the G20 has the best chance at new rules for a post-COVID-19 global order.

Image Credit: bbc.com

So Many Summits! was originally published on Rising BRICSAM

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swayamdata001 · 7 years ago

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Superpowers : US, EU, Russia, others

In 2011, as part of the export control reforms initiative, the US government came up with the concept of Strategic Trade Authorisation (STA) — a move towards a licence-free or license exemption regime. Two lists were created — STA-1 and STA-2 — and countries that were not part of either list had to apply for a licence for every item on the Commerce Control List (of dual-use items).

STA-1 and STA-2 established a hierarchy among those the US was willing to certify as “good countries” that would not contribute towards “proliferation” in the world. The STA-1 list has 36 countries — including NATO allies and bilateral treaty allies like Japan, South Korea, and Australia — whose non-proliferation controls the US considers to be the best in the world. These countries are also among those that are part of the four multilateral export control regimes — the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG), Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), Australia Group and the Wassenaar Arrangement. STA-1 countries, America’s most trusted allies, have licence-free access to almost 90% of dual-use technology, and are eligible to import items that are controlled for reasons of national security, chemical or biological weapons, irrespective of whether the technology or item impacts regional stability or American national security.

Countries in the STA-2 list enjoy some form of licensing exemption, but cannot access dual-use items/technology that may impact regional stability, or contribute to nuclear non-proliferation, etc. Before being elevated to STA-1 this week, India was in this list, along with seven other countries — Albania, Hong Kong, Israel, Malta, Singapore, South Africa, and Taiwan.

It was effectively a logical extension of several years of high-level U.S.-India talks on defense technology cooperation through the aegis of the bilateral Defense Technology and Trade Initiative (DTTI). Under the designation, India would have access to sensitive U.S. defense technologies in the same way that U.S. treaty allies do — in theory at least.Russia

Russia has now firmly moved towards Pakistan and depends heavily on China for selling oil. Modi needs to win Russia back.

Informal summit : Sochi agendaless meeting with putin, wuhan with china

Now with the Trump administration upending the rules of global governance, there is renewed concern in the three capitals that their foreign policies need greater coordination if only to preserve their equities in the global order

India, of course, has a long-standing relationship with Russia but that is undergoing a shift in light of rapidly evolving geopolitical realities. While the top leaderships of the two nations have continued to engage with each other, divergences have been cropping up with disturbing regularity.

is Russia’s increasing tilt towards Pakistan as it seeks to curry favour with China. Moscow had historically supported New Delhi at the United Nations Security Council by repeatedly vetoing resolutions on the Kashmir issue. Today, however, there is a change in how Moscow views its regional priorities in South Asia.In a significant development, the joint declaration issued at the end of the first-ever six-nation Speaker’s Conference in Islamabad held in December 2017 supported Pakistani line on Kashmir.This declaration signed by Afghanistan, China, Iran, Pakistan, Russia and Turkey underscored that “for ensuring global and regional peace and stability, the issue of Jammu and Kashmir needs peaceful resolution by Pakistan and India in accordance with UN Security Council resolutions.” Pakistan’s Kashmir fixation meant that it forced other interlocutors to bring the Kashmir issue to the declaration.

During his visit to New Delhi in December, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov publicly called on India to join China’s Belt and Road initiative

Lavrov also made his displeasure clear over New Delhi’s warming up to the idea of a quadrilateral engagement involving the US, India, Japan and Australia in the Indo-Pacific. He suggested “that sustainable security architecture in the Asia Pacific region cannot be achieved through bloc arrangement.”

For India, the prism is different as it has to manage the negative externalities emerging from the rise of China in its vicinity.Chinese power is now intruding into India’s traditional sphere of influence in South Asia and the Indian Ocean region. The growing power disparity between India and China is making the border situation unstable. China-Pakistan nexus is proving difficult to contain as India gets ready to face a two-front challenge.China refuses to recognise Indian global power aspirations and has not yielded on key Indian security demands. As a result, while Russia may find cooperation with China as a perfectly legitimate response to its problems with the West, India does not have that luxury

As India resets its engagement with China and as Russia adjusts to its growing isolation in the western world, time has come for renewed Indo-Russian engagement. For a relationship that largely relies on defence and where the deeper economic underpinnings are lagging, the need of the hour should be to have candid conversations about the current state of play in the relationship.

Where does the Russia sanction impact India?

India and Russia, with proposed defenceprojects worth over $12 billion hanging in balance, are working on a road map to get around the new US sanctions regime that seeks to deter countries from buying Russian weapon systems.

Russia’s partnership with China has resulted from Moscow’s need to offset the impact of the sanctions on its flagging economy, and more broadly to dilute US influence. Yet this partnership is hampered by deep mutual mistrust; Russia is increasingly wary of China’s growing influence, particularly in Central Asia, which Russia perceives as its own back yard.

Just as it needs China to push back against the US and buy Russian oil, Moscow values India’s role as a balancer against China and for its energy- and arms-thirsty market. For example, to constrain China’s growing clout, Russia pushed for India’s permanent membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

For the US, the desire to bring India closer into its orbit has more to do with curbing Chinese influence than with containing Russia. For this same reason, both Russia and the US have become important for India to balance a rising China, although the former is actively upsetting this balance. In this regard, Russia’s growing strategic convergence with Pakistan and China is built on a common goal to counter US influence and has little to do with India. Nevertheless, it has had significant bearing on Indian security interests.

From seeing the Soviet Union as the strategic counterweight to China and Western powers in the Cold War days to as recent as the cooperation over the Brahmos missile project and the Essar-Rosneft oil deal, India has benefited immensely from its relations with Russia.

. As Russia becomes more beholden to China, the contours of India-Russian ties in the future will be increasingly shaped by Beijing-Moscow relations.

could leave India open to sanctions under the Countering American Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), which mandates the US administration to punish entities engaging “in a significant transaction with...the defense or intelligence sectors” of Russia. newly enacted American law that ‘could’ potentially determine the purchase of the S-400 air defence missile system from Russia as a sanctionable activity.

Russia today provides India around 70 percent of its defence needs. And importantly, the defence cooperation is not exactly restricted to a buyer-seller relationship; it includes now joint design, research and development, joint production, training, and service-to-service contacts. Russia is always prepared to share its most sensitive and newest developments in technology to India that the United States and other Western nations have been reticent to do. The BrahMos missile system is a shining example of this type of collaboration.

It is Russia which has unhesitatingly established nuclear power stations in India, something that cannot be said of the United States even after the conclusion of the much-hyped civil nuclear deal. And it is Russia which has provided the most vocal support for India becoming a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.

Time is ripe to involve Indian private sector companies into Indo-Russian defence joint ventures.The ‘Make in India’ program can be leveraged to do so. Two major military-industrial conferences of Indian companies and Russian OEMs have been held in Delhi and Moscow in 2017

USA

What strengthens India-US defence cooperation?

In 2016, the Obama administration granted India the custom-made status of a Major Defense Partner of the United States — a status akin to that of a major non-NATO ally, without using that exact designation.

India would be upgraded to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Tier 1 Strategic Trade Authorization level, granting India access to a large scope of exports without specific licenses.

The change comes ahead of a highly anticipated inaugural U.S.-India ‘two-plus-two’ meeting that will bring together the top foreign and defense officials from both countries for a high-level consultation on strategic and defense issues.The two countries are expected to conclude a so-called foundational agreement on military communications — the Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement (COMCASA) — during the meeting

Why does this list matter?

One of India’s key objectives in signing the civil nuclear deal with the United States in 2008was to gain access to high technology that it had been denied, especially from the 1970s through the 90s.

Where else has the US accommodated Indian interests?

The US Senate late on August 1 passed a defence-spending bill that sought to amend a law threatening secondary sanctions against American strategic partners, such as India, who conduct “significant” business with Russia.

The move, which is being seen as a major relief to India, paves the way for it to purchase the Russian S400 Triumf.

Analysts in India were of the view that if the US did not provide the waiver from sanctions, it had the potential to be an irritant in US-India strategic ties. The National Defence Authorization Act (NDAA), 2019, has been passed in the House of Representatives and is now awaiting US President Donald Trump’s signature. The NDAA amended sections in the Countering America’s Adversaries through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), passed by the US Congress exactly a year ago on 2 August 2017.

Over the past decade, India has been diversifying its weapons purchases with countries such as France and Israel, and the US, with almost $15 billion worth of orders, emerged as the top source for defence equipment.

India is reciprocating the US gesture

India is in talks with the U.S. to procure an advanced air defence system to defend the National Capital Region (NCR) from aerial attacks.

The Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA) is a tweaked India-specific version of the Logistics Support Agreement (LSA), which the U.S. has with several countries it has close military to military cooperation. It is also one of the three foundational agreements — as referred to by the U.S. LEMOA gives access, to both countries, to designated military facilities on either side for the purpose of refuelling and replenishment. The agreement will primarily cover four areas — port calls, joint exercises, training and Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief. Any other requirement has to be agreed upon by both sides on a case-by-case basis.

The three agreements — Logistics Support Agreement (LSA), Communications Interoperability and Security Memorandum of Agreement (CISMOA) and Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement for Geo-spatial Cooperation (BECA) are referred to as the foundational agreements which the U.S. signs with countries with which it has close military ties. They are meant to build basic ground work and promote interoperability between militaries by creating common standards and systems. They also guide sale and transfer of high-end technologies.

#GS2 #international relations

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