“WE ARE PRESENT AT THE FUNERAL OF OLD SCHOOL OF DIPLOMACY” – VALDAI CLUB INTERVIEWS RICHARD SAKWA
JUNE 16, 2024 1 COMMENT
Valdai Club/Literaturnaya Gazeta, 5/15/24
Translated by Geoffrey Roberts
Will Russia return to dialogue with the West? Or is humanity sliding from a cold war to a “hot” one? What is the essence of the Ukrainian crisis? Will we arrive at a multipolar world? Can Russia be split by inter-ethnic differences? We talk about these pressing political topics with politologist, Richard Sakwa, the leading British expert on Russia, Emeritus Professor at the University of Kent, and a member of the Valdai international discussion club.
Q: Richard, you are the author of many books and articles about Russia, you often visit our country, give lectures, and interviews. Is this causing problems for you in Britain?
In Britain they’ve made it a “moral issue” – they say you can’t have anything to do with Russia because it is at war with Ukraine. But for some reason, no one called for a boycott of the United States and Great Britain during the Vietnam War, the invasion of Iraq, the bombing of Serbia, or the destruction of Libya. I am a supporter of diplomacy; dialogue is needed now more than ever. As a scientist, I must explain what is happening, and this requires constant dialogue with colleagues and politicians. It’s good there is the Valdai Club, a classic liberal discussion platform where everyone can express their opinion.
Q: Why did the second Cold War happen if, with the disappearance of the USSR, there were no ideological contradictions left between East and West?
When George Orwell coined the term “Cold War” in a Tribune article in September 1945, few thought the concept would last long. But the first Cold War began almost immediately after World War II, and lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Then there was a 25-year “cold peace” that gave way to a new Cold War. In 2014, the European security system created as a result of the old Cold War collapsed spectacularly. Europe has lived in uncertainty for nearly thirty years, stuck with Cold War institutions and practices that have failed to develop structures and ideas anchored in the new reality.
Q: Is this what you call a crisis of purpose in Europe?
There is no goal here, because there is no dialectic of development, but there is an endless movement in a circle, causing dizziness among politicians. This is also visible at the everyday level. When I was young, even Labourites talked about specific goals: a bridge will be built here, a factory there, and a nuclear power plant there. There was always a vision of the future, there was some kind of plan. Now no one is saying where we are going. This has affected all European politics.
During the years of the “cold peace”, not a single fundamental problem of European security was resolved. It is Europe’s failure to create an inclusive and comprehensive peace regime covering the entire continent that has given rise to the current confrontation and discord. Europe has simply resumed its “civil wars”. An eloquent example is Ukraine. This conflict shows the deep “tensions” in the European order and the “failure” of the security system…The collapse of a “united and free” Europe is now obvious.
Q: Have we jumped from one Cold War to another Cold War?
Yes, and this one is much more dangerous and deeper than the first one when everything was clear: communism versus capitalism, the struggle of ideas, etc. Then the “political West” appeared. A common economic and humanitarian space emerged in Europe, and that is good. But at the same time, the American military-industrial complex also strengthened, which inevitably led to the creeping militarisation of the state and society.
The West perceived the end of the Cold War in 1989 as a victory, while in the USSR under Gorbachev they talked about a return to universal human values and counted on equal relations with the West, recognising the market economy and human rights. In 1989 Gorbachev was confident the “spirit of April 1945” – when Soviet and American soldiers embraced on the Elbe – had returned. But in the West, they long ago forgot this spirit and behaved with the USSR, and then with Russia, not as partners, but as winners. In Washington they started talking seriously about the “end of history.”
Q: After all, it was then that the United States received a decade of complete freedom of action and began to feel like “masters of the world” in the literal sense?
Yes, the disappearance of the USSR led to an imbalance, the emergence of a unipolar world in which the United States reigned supreme. But the unipolar world did not become safer and did not bring peace. America, which felt itself a hegemon, did what it wanted throughout the 90s, not paying attention to the UN and especially not remembering the “spirit of 1945.” Washington preferred to solve problems by military force.
Washington assumes systems (civilisations) cannot coexist peacefully, and that force decides everything. But Russia, China and many other countries believe the world needs a fundamentally new system of relations based on equality, and not on the forceful dictatorship of one superpower. West and East understand each other less and less.
Q: It turns out that Kipling was right when he noted in 1889 the West and the East cannot come together – East is East and West is West?
Perhaps he was right, but today it is more and more obvious that this “civilisational discrepancy” is secondary. The main reason for instability is America’s attempts to maintain global hegemony, which gives rise to a series of wars and colour revolutions. I am not an idealist, but I am convinced that such contradictions can be resolved peacefully. The idea of a pan-European home from Lisbon to Vladivostok is wonderful, but this pan-Europeanism contradicts Atlanticism, based on US hegemony. This is a strategic mistake because there can be no peace without a balance of power. The political West has, to put it mildly, been radicalized….
-Russians in such cases say oborzel: loosely translated – became insolent. Or, more politely, stopped seeing the shores.
– A very precise word! This political West “does not notice” the UN and absolutised human rights no longer protect human rights but are used as a tool to achieve geopolitical goals. Militarisation remains the “engine of the economy” and “liberalisation” – taken to the point of absurdity – has become its opposite, denying the state and thereby bringing anarchy closer. This is indicative of a “new conservatism” in the United States in which “America is above all.”
Q: I remember someone once said that “Germany above all” … It turns out that the idea of Pax Americana is alive? However, Secretary of State Blinken recently admitted that America’s hegemony is ending.
Objectively, it is ending. But in Washington they are still confident of their right to messianism and world hegemony, and they do not abandon the logic of confrontation. This became completely clear after the 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia, the unprovoked war in Iraq and the destruction of Libya. It was after this that what I call Post-Western Russia began to emerge. But a “post-Westernising” Russia denies not Western civilization or culture, but those policies of the West that have become an obstacle to the creation of a pan-European home as the main condition for common security in both Europe and the world.
If you like, you can call me Britain’s last Gaullist, but I agree with General de Gaulle’s grandson, Philippe de Gaulle, who sees the solution not in strengthening and expanding NATO, but in creating a common economic and humanitarian space from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Q: There cannot be normal relations with America?
Normal relationships are equal relationships. But for this, Americans must move away from Atlanticism and stop looking at the world as their backyard, where they are free to do whatever comes into their head. For now, I doubt their desire to live in a world of equals. They are accustomed to the role of hegemon and will not give it up.
Q: Is it possible today to perceive the EU and NATO as a single whole?
For me the EU was always a peace project, but, alas, it is now a war project. With the end of the Cold War, we expected the emergence of a common economic Eurasian space without borders, we expected good relations between Europe and Russia. In reality, the EU has become a political-economic appendage of NATO.
Q: Or maybe the United States simply doesn’t need a united and strong Europe? Sorry, but, for example, an alliance between Berlin and Moscow has always been a “bad dream” for the Anglo-Saxons – which means that they still don’t want to lead matters to such an alliance?
The idea of Ostpolitik dominated the minds of the Germans for a long time; it was a policy beneficial to Germany, which involved close cooperation with Russia in all spheres – from economic to humanitarian. But, as you correctly noted, such an alliance did not suit Washington and London, which means that such an alliance could not be permitted, especially when the EU became part of the political West. The “European project” is no longer working, and, unfortunately, I do not yet see any path to compromise in Europe’s relations with Russia.
Q: Have all diplomatic means been exhausted?
Today we are present at the funeral of old school of diplomacy – an institution that was based on immutable laws and rules that were observed even at the height of the Cold War. Now diplomatic dialogue has been reduced to almost zero. This is the result of the actions of the political West – of the unified system of Western political, financial and cultural institutions created and controlled by Washington and London. During the Cold War, these institutions were called upon to help the West fight the USSR. In 1989–1991, it seemed that they would die out as relics of the past. But the rudiments did not disappear, they became stronger. Now NATO is transforming from a regional association into a global one, and there is already talk of an Asia-Pacific “branch” of the alliance. NATO has become a tool for promoting American ideology, just like the IMF, WTO or the World Bank.
Q: The Americanization of Europe is, in fact, the colonisation of the Old World? Who is behind this? The notorious deep state?
I don’t think there is a “conspiracy theory” at work here. I would talk about the global interests of the United States, which deliberately upset the balance of power after the destruction of the USSR, and the vassalisation of Europe is one of the consequences of such a policy. Yes, there are still islands of disobedience – Hungary with Orban, Slovakia with Fico, Serbia with Vucic, there is the Alternative for Germany or Marine Le Pen in France. But the rest are no longer resisting; the political West has swallowed up the political elite of Europe.
Q: Can the political East balance the situation?
Right now, the process of crystallising a political East is underway. This is not a primitive anti-West, but a conscious counterbalance, an alternative to the political West to ensure a balance of power in Europe and the world. This is just emerging, and is the core is the Russian-Chinese alliance, which wants to return to the “spirit of 1945.” Moscow and Beijing want peace and cooperation rather than confrontation – a return to peace based not on the protectionist “rules” of Washington, but on International Law. BRICS and the SCO are examples of such cooperation. India, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and other rapidly developing states claim that they have a vested interest in avoiding the logic of the Cold War and Atlanticism. They see NATO creeping into the Asian region, but they know that where there is NATO, there will be war. The danger lies in the transformation of NATO from an aggressive regional system into an aggressive global system. The political East – Russia and China – does not want collective defense, but collective security.
Q: Does the West have a scenario for ending anti-Russian sanctions?
I will answer in the words of Lenin. When asked how long the New Economic Policy, introduced in 1922, would last, he replied: “NEP is serious, and for a long time, but not forever.”
Q: Why is the influence of the United States weakening?
I think the problem is that the system created by the political West has become hermetic, closed in on itself. It does not take into account the interests of most of the world because it was created to meet the needs of specific Western countries. It cannot find a common language with systems external to the West – with Russia, China, and the countries of the Global South. This causes protests from countries that do not belong to the political West. Hence the confrontation with Russia, which refused to play by the “rules” imposed by Washington.
Q: You also spoke about the role of the Western military-industrial complex. How much does it influence US policy?
The military-industrial complex today dominates both in the States and throughout the Western world. This is also reflected in the formation of public opinion. The military-industrial complex has united both decision-making centre and the media; this complex needs the image of an enemy – otherwise why arm? Note that the veiled demonisation of Russia continued even after the disappearance of the USSR. And when friction between Moscow and Washington began, it turned out to be very easy to return to the coordinates of the Cold War, where Russia is an existential enemy. Nothing was left of diplomacy, the image of a “fierce Russia” was fixed in the minds of the masses, and then it was easier to declare that they won’t talk to the enemy, they will fight with the enemy. And Ukraine was chosen as the battlefield for this war.
Q: Why did Washington choose Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia, and not, for example, Kazakhstan?
It’s good that you remembered Kazakhstan. This country is self-confident, interested in multipolarity, and the Kazakhs have chosen a smart, multi-vector policy, focusing on cooperation with Russia, China, as well as the West. In Ukraine, they preferred “one master.” It had seemed that Ukraine – which emerged from the USSR as a powerful industrial state – could become a “bridge” between East and West and derive enormous benefits from both the Soviet legacy and its geographical location. Instead, Kiev pointedly turned its back on Russia and scurried to the EU. In 2014, the Ukrainian nationalists who came to power started a war in Donbass. Recently I had the opportunity to communicate with representatives of the DPR, and they said: in 2014 we did not talk about secession from Ukraine, we only asked that they leave the Russian language alone, but they sent an army against us, they started killing us, and this forever turned Donbass away from Ukraine. But the Ukrainians themselves voted twice for peace, choosing Poroshenko and then Zelensky, who promised the peaceful development of the country. But instead of giving Ukrainians the constitutional basis for such a peace, they began to build a “political nation”, ban the Russian language and portray Ukraine as anti-Russia. What happened is what I call the Galicisation of Ukraine.
We need a path to peace, and it lies through the system of European collective security, which includes Russia. But today that system is in ruins.
Q: Don’t you have any comforting forecasts for the foreseeable future?
I’m rather pessimistic! The political West is militarising, not only economically, but also culturally and in terms of mass consciousness. These are steps towards a “hot war.” We are at a turning point when someone’s victory will mean the crushing defeat of others, and then peaceful resolution of conflict becomes less and less realistic.
Q: Can anything change after the November elections in the USA?
Don’t think so. Escalation of the conflict and Europe’s involvement in it is beneficial to the United States, especially since almost all European NATO members have agreed to increase military budgets. Alas, NATO has become an ideological project; and because of this super-ideologisation, the alliance has lost its flexibility and pragmatism, which means it has lost the ability to use a wide range of peaceful opportunities to ensure European security.
Q: Is the idea of dividing Russia into 41 regions still popular in the West today?
Such reasoning can be heard more often from those Russian liberals who have fled to the West. These people consider the fragmentation of Russia inevitable, if there is a new government in Russia or it suffers military defeat in Ukraine. But only a madman can seriously think about such “fragmentation”. Serious politicians do not even consider this scenario, if only because Russia is a nuclear power.
Q: But there are hopes of inciting interethnic conflicts within Russia?
These are groundless hopes. Once I had the opportunity to visit Nizhny Novgorod at the festival of Tatar culture. In a huge hall, where there were Tatars, Russians, and people of other nationalities, the concert went on for four hours, Tatar songs were played, Tatar dances were performed, and then everyone stood up and sang the Russian anthem together. For me, it was a symbol of Russia – a huge multinational, multi-religious country, a common home, where all peoples feel safe, where the state helps develop the national culture of large and small nations. This does not mean that there are no problems, but there are also achievements. The West doesn’t see this and thinks that Russia can be divided along ethnic lines. This is a strategic mistake!
Q: There are such expressions- as “Russian dream”, “American dream”. Does Britisher Richard Sakwa have an “English dream”? How do you see the world in twenty years?
The main thing is that there is peace. I want humanity to arrive at what I would call conservative socialism, or natural socialism, with equality of opportunity and a market economy. In such a society, the law, time-tested traditions, local cultures and languages, must all be respected. Diversity within a single framework. It should be a high-tech, environmentally friendly world of reason and of moderation in all things, with strong states and strong self-government. But to achieve this, it is necessary to break with the psychology of Cold War and confrontation, to get rid of the habit of measuring military strength when it is possible to come to agreements that respect each other’s interests.
I would like to see a world where there is a global order of peace, not war. That is my English dream.
Q: Now, my favourite question: what book would you take with you to a desert island?
I definitely couldn’t get by with just one book. I would definitely take the Bible, a volume of Shakespeare and the complete collection of Dickens. I hope that by the time I finish reading all this, a ship will appear on the horizon that will rescue me!
https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2024/06/we- ... ard-sakwa/
The Nature of Foxes
Re: The Nature of Foxes
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Nature of Foxes
The Game is Up
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - June 18, 2024 0
[Source: tunnelwall.blogspot.com]
However much Western commentators want to sustain the age of empire, a new multipolar world order has already begun to take root
In September, I attended a talk sponsored by the Tulsa Committee on Foreign Relations by an inside-the-beltway pundit named Ali Wyne,[1] a former senior fellow at the pro-NATO Atlantic Council and David Rockefeller fellow at the elitist Trilateral Commission.
Wyne told the audience in so many words that the sun had not yet set on the American empire; that the Biden administration was outmaneuvering the evil Putin in Ukraine; and that the U.S. was still a beacon of hope for the rest of humanity.
Fadi Lama [Source: claritypress.com]
Lama is an international adviser for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and geopolitical consultant with a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech).
He points out at the beginning of his book that in 1500, prior to the era of Western colonialism, there was a relatively fair political-economic world order with a close equilibrium between population and wealth generation. But by the end of World War II, the West accounted for only 30% of global population but 60% of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP).[2]
When many colonized nations gained their independence, the West imposed a neo-colonial framework that enabled their resources to be exploited by Western multinational corporations.
Some countries on the front lines of the Cold War, such as West Germany, Japan and South Korea, were allowed unhindered development as part of a geopolitical strategy designed to keep them within the Western orbit and curb the advance of Communism. However, being pseudo-independent states, when the political necessity was removed, they were cut back to size.
The liberation of China in the 1949 Communist-led revolution (an event known in the U.S. as the “loss of China”) was a historical turning point that began to reverse the Western monopolization of wealth and power and set the stage for the re-empowerment of the Global South.
By 2017, China—known as the “sick man of Asia” in the 19th century following its de facto colonization of Great Britain following the Opium War—was the world’s number one economy with its real goods production amounting to 24% of global real goods production.
Under Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership, China regained its sovereignty and lifted 770 million people out of poverty, with homelessness now being practically non-existent.[3]
According to Lama, China’s staggering economic success resulted from a centralized political system in which commercial banking was dominated by the public sector. Central bank financial and monetary policies were further put under the control of the Chinese government, which implemented policies serving the national interest rather than those of the Western financial oligarchy.[4]
China’s economic success contrasts markedly with the growing economic stagnation in Western countries and the U.S. resulting from the neo-liberal economic model in which the private sector is elevated above the public sector.
By 2014, the top 0.1% in the U.S. owned as many assets as the bottom 90%, an obscene inequality ratio accompanied by a dramatic rise in poverty, which had been reduced massively in China under more socialist-oriented policies.[5]
[Source: depts.washington.edu
]
China’s superior state-centric economic model is currently being followed by Russia which has withstood record U.S. sanctions under Vladimir Putin’s leadership through a renewed commitment to economic autarky (self-sufficiency) and investment in local industries and technologies.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. strategic planners saw a golden opportunity to reduce Russia’s status to that of a fourth-rate power and to enable the plunder of its bountiful natural resources.
The overzealous policies backfired, however, pushing Russia into alliance with China that signifies the birth of a new multi-polar world order that holds the potential to restore the global economic parity from 1500—before Western colonization took root.
Lama emphasizes the fact that Russia now provides food aid in Afghanistan and Africa and fertilizer to poor countries, and has forged growing relations with both China and Iran, the latter having gained independence from Western colonial tutelage in 1979 when the Shah was overthrown.[6]
Lama finds significant economic synergy and growing win-win cooperation in the economic, cultural, scientific and military fields between China, Russia and Iran, which he says are “de facto allies in the struggle for a ‘Fair World.’”[7]
Russia and China today are leading the way in space exploration, clean energy technologies as well as cutting-edge missile technologies at a time that U.S. weapons systems are proving to be extraordinarily costly and inefficient owing to a Byzantine Pentagon contracting system and under-skilled workforce due to the skyrocketing costs of higher education.
Today’s shifting power balance can be compared with 1997 when “‘the empire’ had control over three of the top four energy reserves: Venezuela was a U.S. vassal, Russian energy resources were under control of the Money Powers (Western financial oligarchs) via their proxy Russian oligarchs, and Saudi Arabia was a compliant U.S. tributary. Of the top four, only Iranian reserves were out of the Money Powers’ control.”
By 2022, Lama writes, “the Empire had lost control of the top three reserves, Venezuela, Iran and Russia, while Saudi Arabia is no longer as compliant as it was in 1997.”[8]
What happened in the interim was a period of heightened military intervention and imperial overreach resulting in a counter-mobilization that signifies the end of the era of Western empires dating back to the 16th century.
Bretton Woods: From Military to Financial Colonialism
The imperial framework after World War II was established through the Bretton Woods economic system, which Lama says was designed to “lock countries into a financial structure controlled by the West.”
[Source: azcoinnews.com].
Lama writes that this structure “requires central bank governors be independent of their governments, but dependent on rules established by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), at the top of the pyramid in the Bretton Woods system.[9]
Established in 1930 to handle reparations payments imposed on Germany at the Versailles Conference after World War I, BIS had helped finance Hitler’s rise to power and was owned by central banks, setting policies for them that directly influenced the global economy.
Franklin D. Roosevelt had proposed liquidating the BIS due to its cooperation with Nazi Germany, though the resolution that he sponsored to that effect at the July 1944 Bretton Woods Conference at which the post-World War II monetary and political global structure was being set, was revoked after Roosevelt’s death.
John Maynard Keynes addressing the July 1944 Bretton Woods Conference in New Hampshire. [Source: centerforfinancialstability.org]
According to Lama, when some newly decolonized countries tried to adopt an alternative economic arrangement to Bretton Woods, their leaders (Togo’s Sylvanus Olympio, Egypt’s Nasser; Indonesia’s Sukarno; Democratic Republic of Congo’s Lumumba; Iran’s Mossadegh; Ecuador’s Jaime Roldos; Panama’s Omar Torrijos) were eliminated by wars, coups or assassinations [over a 25-year span].[10]
Economic hit men would descend on developing countries offering loans for infrastructure projects whose real purpose was to plunge these countries into debt so they would become dependent on foreign creditors and their economies could be restructured along neo-liberal lines and in the service of multi-national corporations.
A pillar of the Bretton Woods system was that the U.S. dollar was established as the international trade currency, which was convertible into gold at the fixed rate of $35 per ounce of gold.
With the decline of U.S. competitiveness in the 1960s, the Nixon administration froze the convertibility of the U.S. dollar in gold and, instead, made it convertible to oil, provided that oil was sold only in U.S. dollars.
This led to a dramatic increase in the price of oil and petrodollar arrangement with Saudi Arabia by which the U.S. provided military protection and weapons to the Saudis in exchange for the promise of them trading their oil in U.S. dollars and using income from oil to buy U.S. Treasury bills. Interest on these sales was then spent by the U.S. Department of the Treasury on infrastructure projects in Saudi Arabia to be executed by U.S. companies.
[Source: ethers.news]
The fact that other countries had to hold reserves in U.S. dollars to cover their oil imports allowed the U.S. to incur high trade deficits bred by deindustrialization in the neo-liberal era without causing a depreciation of the U.S. dollar.[11]
However, this is no longer sustainable in the long term and Russia and China are spearheading a shift in the global economy by which oil and other commodities are no longer being traded in U.S. dollars, ushering in the end of the American Century.
The Money Power
Lama’s book includes discussion of the growth of the Western financial oligarchy, or what he calls the Money Power, who are the major shareholders of the leading hedge funds (BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street) and have become the absolute rulers over society.
According to Lama, the Money Power is well placed to control elections in Western democracies and control mass media in all its forms, print, TV and social media platforms.
They support free trade agreements designed to usurp what little is left of national sovereignty and a neo-liberal vulture economy in which all aspects of the economy are privatized in order to maximize corporate profits.
The U.S. decline has been fueled by the Money Power’s recognition that maintaining a strong manufacturing base was no longer necessary when trade deficits could be offset by currency manipulation owing to Nixon’s convertibility of the U.S. dollar to oil and the trade in oil around the world in U.S. dollars.
The U.S. economy is increasingly dominated by the financial sector which flourishes at the expense of other vital economic sectors, leading to the high wealth concentration and impoverishment of society made worse by austerity measures entailing cutbacks in social and other government services.
[Source: politicalcartoons.com]
Russophobia, Sinophobia and the End of an Era
The intense Russophobia cultivated in the U.S. media over the last decade is the result of the Money Power’s lust for Russia’s immense wealth, which it was starting to gain access to in the 1990s before Vladimir Putin reasserted national control over Russia’s economy.
The anti-Russia propaganda has had the greatest impact on the educated classes, as 77% of Americans with post-graduate degrees considered Russia an enemy in a March 2022 poll, compared to 66% with high school education or less.[12]
Russophobia has been combined with an ascendant Islamophobia and Sinophobia, whose purpose is to mobilize public support for confronting the troika of powers (Russia, Iran and China), which threaten Western hegemony.
According to Lama, if a date were to be identified for the end of the U.S. empire, it would be January 8, 2020, when Iran avenged the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani by attacking a U.S. air base in Iraq and displaying Iran’s weapons capability.
Afterwards, the U.S. Central Command (Centcom) significantly relocated its headquarters from Doha, Qatar, just 125 miles from Iranian shores, to safety in Tampa, Florida.
Satellite image, showing the damage to at least five structures at Ain al-Asad Air Base in Iraq in a series of precision missile strikes launched by Iran. [Source: wikipedia.org]
While the current U.S.-Israeli war in Gaza has created a renewed pretext for expanded U.S. military intervention in the Middle East, Lama’s book makes clear that the U.S. could not win a war against Iran for regime change.
Contrary to Wyne’s analysis, the U.S. has also been outmaneuvered in Ukraine, whose army is in a state of disrepair after a failed counteroffensive. It is further being outmaneuvered by China, which is winning hearts and minds through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that provides low-interest loans to countries for infrastructural development with no strings attached.
In sum, the Great Game for world domination appears to be up and the Money Power has lost. That is why they are behaving so erratically in manufacturing crisis after crisis as they desperately attempt to sustain a fading world order defined by profound inequality and injustice.
1.Wyne is author of the 2022 book, America’s Great-Power Opportunity: Revitalizing U.S. Foreign Policy to Meet the Challenges of Strategic Competition (Cambridge: Polity, 2022). ↑
2.Fadi Lama, Why the West Can’t Win: From Bretton Woods to a Multipolar World (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2023), 2. ↑
3.Lama, Why the West Can’t Win, 189. ↑
4.Lama, Why the West Can’t Win, 6, 7. ↑
5.Lama, Why the West Can’t Win, 14, 16, 17. ↑
6.Lama, Why the West Can’t Win, 245. ↑
7.Lama, Why the West Can’t Win, 240. ↑
8.Lama, Why the West Can’t Win, 238. ↑
9.Lama, Why the West Can’t Win, 3. ↑
10.Lama, Why the West Can’t Win, 4. ↑
11.Lama, Why the West Can’t Win, 32, 33. ↑
12.Lama, Why the West Can’t Win, 210. ↑
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/0 ... ame-is-up/
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - June 18, 2024 0
[Source: tunnelwall.blogspot.com]
However much Western commentators want to sustain the age of empire, a new multipolar world order has already begun to take root
In September, I attended a talk sponsored by the Tulsa Committee on Foreign Relations by an inside-the-beltway pundit named Ali Wyne,[1] a former senior fellow at the pro-NATO Atlantic Council and David Rockefeller fellow at the elitist Trilateral Commission.
Wyne told the audience in so many words that the sun had not yet set on the American empire; that the Biden administration was outmaneuvering the evil Putin in Ukraine; and that the U.S. was still a beacon of hope for the rest of humanity.
Fadi Lama [Source: claritypress.com]
Lama is an international adviser for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and geopolitical consultant with a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech).
He points out at the beginning of his book that in 1500, prior to the era of Western colonialism, there was a relatively fair political-economic world order with a close equilibrium between population and wealth generation. But by the end of World War II, the West accounted for only 30% of global population but 60% of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP).[2]
When many colonized nations gained their independence, the West imposed a neo-colonial framework that enabled their resources to be exploited by Western multinational corporations.
Some countries on the front lines of the Cold War, such as West Germany, Japan and South Korea, were allowed unhindered development as part of a geopolitical strategy designed to keep them within the Western orbit and curb the advance of Communism. However, being pseudo-independent states, when the political necessity was removed, they were cut back to size.
The liberation of China in the 1949 Communist-led revolution (an event known in the U.S. as the “loss of China”) was a historical turning point that began to reverse the Western monopolization of wealth and power and set the stage for the re-empowerment of the Global South.
By 2017, China—known as the “sick man of Asia” in the 19th century following its de facto colonization of Great Britain following the Opium War—was the world’s number one economy with its real goods production amounting to 24% of global real goods production.
Under Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership, China regained its sovereignty and lifted 770 million people out of poverty, with homelessness now being practically non-existent.[3]
According to Lama, China’s staggering economic success resulted from a centralized political system in which commercial banking was dominated by the public sector. Central bank financial and monetary policies were further put under the control of the Chinese government, which implemented policies serving the national interest rather than those of the Western financial oligarchy.[4]
China’s economic success contrasts markedly with the growing economic stagnation in Western countries and the U.S. resulting from the neo-liberal economic model in which the private sector is elevated above the public sector.
By 2014, the top 0.1% in the U.S. owned as many assets as the bottom 90%, an obscene inequality ratio accompanied by a dramatic rise in poverty, which had been reduced massively in China under more socialist-oriented policies.[5]
[Source: depts.washington.edu
]
China’s superior state-centric economic model is currently being followed by Russia which has withstood record U.S. sanctions under Vladimir Putin’s leadership through a renewed commitment to economic autarky (self-sufficiency) and investment in local industries and technologies.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. strategic planners saw a golden opportunity to reduce Russia’s status to that of a fourth-rate power and to enable the plunder of its bountiful natural resources.
The overzealous policies backfired, however, pushing Russia into alliance with China that signifies the birth of a new multi-polar world order that holds the potential to restore the global economic parity from 1500—before Western colonization took root.
Lama emphasizes the fact that Russia now provides food aid in Afghanistan and Africa and fertilizer to poor countries, and has forged growing relations with both China and Iran, the latter having gained independence from Western colonial tutelage in 1979 when the Shah was overthrown.[6]
Lama finds significant economic synergy and growing win-win cooperation in the economic, cultural, scientific and military fields between China, Russia and Iran, which he says are “de facto allies in the struggle for a ‘Fair World.’”[7]
Russia and China today are leading the way in space exploration, clean energy technologies as well as cutting-edge missile technologies at a time that U.S. weapons systems are proving to be extraordinarily costly and inefficient owing to a Byzantine Pentagon contracting system and under-skilled workforce due to the skyrocketing costs of higher education.
Today’s shifting power balance can be compared with 1997 when “‘the empire’ had control over three of the top four energy reserves: Venezuela was a U.S. vassal, Russian energy resources were under control of the Money Powers (Western financial oligarchs) via their proxy Russian oligarchs, and Saudi Arabia was a compliant U.S. tributary. Of the top four, only Iranian reserves were out of the Money Powers’ control.”
By 2022, Lama writes, “the Empire had lost control of the top three reserves, Venezuela, Iran and Russia, while Saudi Arabia is no longer as compliant as it was in 1997.”[8]
What happened in the interim was a period of heightened military intervention and imperial overreach resulting in a counter-mobilization that signifies the end of the era of Western empires dating back to the 16th century.
Bretton Woods: From Military to Financial Colonialism
The imperial framework after World War II was established through the Bretton Woods economic system, which Lama says was designed to “lock countries into a financial structure controlled by the West.”
[Source: azcoinnews.com].
Lama writes that this structure “requires central bank governors be independent of their governments, but dependent on rules established by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), at the top of the pyramid in the Bretton Woods system.[9]
Established in 1930 to handle reparations payments imposed on Germany at the Versailles Conference after World War I, BIS had helped finance Hitler’s rise to power and was owned by central banks, setting policies for them that directly influenced the global economy.
Franklin D. Roosevelt had proposed liquidating the BIS due to its cooperation with Nazi Germany, though the resolution that he sponsored to that effect at the July 1944 Bretton Woods Conference at which the post-World War II monetary and political global structure was being set, was revoked after Roosevelt’s death.
John Maynard Keynes addressing the July 1944 Bretton Woods Conference in New Hampshire. [Source: centerforfinancialstability.org]
According to Lama, when some newly decolonized countries tried to adopt an alternative economic arrangement to Bretton Woods, their leaders (Togo’s Sylvanus Olympio, Egypt’s Nasser; Indonesia’s Sukarno; Democratic Republic of Congo’s Lumumba; Iran’s Mossadegh; Ecuador’s Jaime Roldos; Panama’s Omar Torrijos) were eliminated by wars, coups or assassinations [over a 25-year span].[10]
Economic hit men would descend on developing countries offering loans for infrastructure projects whose real purpose was to plunge these countries into debt so they would become dependent on foreign creditors and their economies could be restructured along neo-liberal lines and in the service of multi-national corporations.
A pillar of the Bretton Woods system was that the U.S. dollar was established as the international trade currency, which was convertible into gold at the fixed rate of $35 per ounce of gold.
With the decline of U.S. competitiveness in the 1960s, the Nixon administration froze the convertibility of the U.S. dollar in gold and, instead, made it convertible to oil, provided that oil was sold only in U.S. dollars.
This led to a dramatic increase in the price of oil and petrodollar arrangement with Saudi Arabia by which the U.S. provided military protection and weapons to the Saudis in exchange for the promise of them trading their oil in U.S. dollars and using income from oil to buy U.S. Treasury bills. Interest on these sales was then spent by the U.S. Department of the Treasury on infrastructure projects in Saudi Arabia to be executed by U.S. companies.
[Source: ethers.news]
The fact that other countries had to hold reserves in U.S. dollars to cover their oil imports allowed the U.S. to incur high trade deficits bred by deindustrialization in the neo-liberal era without causing a depreciation of the U.S. dollar.[11]
However, this is no longer sustainable in the long term and Russia and China are spearheading a shift in the global economy by which oil and other commodities are no longer being traded in U.S. dollars, ushering in the end of the American Century.
The Money Power
Lama’s book includes discussion of the growth of the Western financial oligarchy, or what he calls the Money Power, who are the major shareholders of the leading hedge funds (BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street) and have become the absolute rulers over society.
According to Lama, the Money Power is well placed to control elections in Western democracies and control mass media in all its forms, print, TV and social media platforms.
They support free trade agreements designed to usurp what little is left of national sovereignty and a neo-liberal vulture economy in which all aspects of the economy are privatized in order to maximize corporate profits.
The U.S. decline has been fueled by the Money Power’s recognition that maintaining a strong manufacturing base was no longer necessary when trade deficits could be offset by currency manipulation owing to Nixon’s convertibility of the U.S. dollar to oil and the trade in oil around the world in U.S. dollars.
The U.S. economy is increasingly dominated by the financial sector which flourishes at the expense of other vital economic sectors, leading to the high wealth concentration and impoverishment of society made worse by austerity measures entailing cutbacks in social and other government services.
[Source: politicalcartoons.com]
Russophobia, Sinophobia and the End of an Era
The intense Russophobia cultivated in the U.S. media over the last decade is the result of the Money Power’s lust for Russia’s immense wealth, which it was starting to gain access to in the 1990s before Vladimir Putin reasserted national control over Russia’s economy.
The anti-Russia propaganda has had the greatest impact on the educated classes, as 77% of Americans with post-graduate degrees considered Russia an enemy in a March 2022 poll, compared to 66% with high school education or less.[12]
Russophobia has been combined with an ascendant Islamophobia and Sinophobia, whose purpose is to mobilize public support for confronting the troika of powers (Russia, Iran and China), which threaten Western hegemony.
According to Lama, if a date were to be identified for the end of the U.S. empire, it would be January 8, 2020, when Iran avenged the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani by attacking a U.S. air base in Iraq and displaying Iran’s weapons capability.
Afterwards, the U.S. Central Command (Centcom) significantly relocated its headquarters from Doha, Qatar, just 125 miles from Iranian shores, to safety in Tampa, Florida.
Satellite image, showing the damage to at least five structures at Ain al-Asad Air Base in Iraq in a series of precision missile strikes launched by Iran. [Source: wikipedia.org]
While the current U.S.-Israeli war in Gaza has created a renewed pretext for expanded U.S. military intervention in the Middle East, Lama’s book makes clear that the U.S. could not win a war against Iran for regime change.
Contrary to Wyne’s analysis, the U.S. has also been outmaneuvered in Ukraine, whose army is in a state of disrepair after a failed counteroffensive. It is further being outmaneuvered by China, which is winning hearts and minds through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that provides low-interest loans to countries for infrastructural development with no strings attached.
In sum, the Great Game for world domination appears to be up and the Money Power has lost. That is why they are behaving so erratically in manufacturing crisis after crisis as they desperately attempt to sustain a fading world order defined by profound inequality and injustice.
1.Wyne is author of the 2022 book, America’s Great-Power Opportunity: Revitalizing U.S. Foreign Policy to Meet the Challenges of Strategic Competition (Cambridge: Polity, 2022). ↑
2.Fadi Lama, Why the West Can’t Win: From Bretton Woods to a Multipolar World (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2023), 2. ↑
3.Lama, Why the West Can’t Win, 189. ↑
4.Lama, Why the West Can’t Win, 6, 7. ↑
5.Lama, Why the West Can’t Win, 14, 16, 17. ↑
6.Lama, Why the West Can’t Win, 245. ↑
7.Lama, Why the West Can’t Win, 240. ↑
8.Lama, Why the West Can’t Win, 238. ↑
9.Lama, Why the West Can’t Win, 3. ↑
10.Lama, Why the West Can’t Win, 4. ↑
11.Lama, Why the West Can’t Win, 32, 33. ↑
12.Lama, Why the West Can’t Win, 210. ↑
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/0 ... ame-is-up/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Nature of Foxes
US Imperialism is Driving Millions of People to Flee Their Homes Across the World
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JUNE 20, 2024
Stephanie Weatherbee Brito
Sudanese refugees in Chad. Over 10 million people have been forcibly displaced in over a year of war in Sudan. Photo: Wikimedia commons
The intensification of existing violent conflicts and emergence of new ones have caused a significant increase in the number of forcibly displaced people.
On this year’s World Refugee Day – June 20 – we must collectively reckon with the fact that more than 117 million people are victims of forced displacement. From Palestine to Sudan, Yemen to Ukraine, and the Democratic Republic of Congo to Myanmar, the specter of violence casts its long shadow across the world and results in the tragedy of death and displacement that we have become all too familiar with. According to the Armed Conflict Location and Events Data (ACLED) Conflict Index, the world is becoming more violent, as is synthesized by the fact that one in six people are estimated to have been exposed to conflict in 2024. This marks, according to ACLED, a 22% increase in political violence incidents in the past five years and begs the question, “Why is war becoming the norm around the world?”
To understand the expansion of war and violent conflict in recent years, it is necessary to look at global factors rather than focus exclusively on the causes of each conflict. When we look at the bigger picture, we find an increasingly unequal world with a burgeoning arms market and failing global governance structures. These factors are all connected to the structural crisis of capitalism and the US imperialist project which has reacted to its decline with increased aggression.
Over several decades, US actions have contributed to a state of global disorder, linked to a broader agenda aimed at establishing and maintaining unipolarity. Since the 1970s, the United States has increasingly pursued a foreign policy marked by unilateral actions and strategies designed to further its interests, often without regard for their impact on other actors, including some of its allies.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the US ruling class became convinced it had established a new unipolar order destined to endure indefinitely. Since then, the number of violent conflicts with US participation has increased and include: Panama (1989), Iraq (1990), Yugoslavia (1995), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), Syria (2014), Ukraine (2022), Palestine (2023). In some of these instances, the conflicts instigated by the United States have overflowed beyond borders, grown through the involvement of unpredictable militias, and resulted in chaos, violence, and a breakdown of state authority. This has often only led to further escalation of violence. In this way, the US effort to maintain unipolarity has heightened global conflict.
The United States has also dismantled any semblance of global governance aimed at preventing and resolving conflicts. The League of Nations (1919) and later the United Nations (1945) were established to foster peace and security by implementing a framework of international law to govern nations’ behavior. However, the US has consistently flouted these multilateral structures and international laws while shielding its close allies from repercussions for their transgressions. A significant example of this, marking a pivotal moment in undermining the rules-based order, is the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. This invasion, purportedly launched as a “preemptive” strike, lacked evidence of provocation and was based on false claims regarding Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction.
By initiating a war that failed to meet internationally accepted justifications for conflict, the US set a precedent wherein the ability to wage war—coupled with control over media narratives to justify military actions—supersedes the obligation to justify military intervention under international law. This action by the United States undermined any notion of peace and security within a rules-based system. Following the largely unchallenged war in Iraq, the US proceeded to wage wars explicitly aimed at asserting its dominance and control. The 2011 NATO-led invasion of Libya epitomizes these overt attempts to dismantle and intimidate those who defy or oppose US hegemony.
Producers of weapons and war
US imperialism relies heavily on the unparalleled military dominance it has built and maintained over decades. To this end, military spending by the United States has steadily increased. Currently, the gigantic military machine commanded by the US is funded by USD 1.537 trillion (counting only US spending) and USD 2.13 trillion (including the expenditure by US allies). In percentages, the US-led military bloc is responsible for 74.3% of military spending globally. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the world’s five top arms-producing and military service companies, Lockheed Martin Corp., Raytheon Technologies, Northrop Grumman Corp., Boeing and General Dynamics Corp, are of US origin.
The US is both indirectly – by building its incredible stockpile of weapons – and directly – by producing a significant amount of the arms circling the world today – responsible for the vast amount of weapons in the world today – weapons which are instrumental to perpetuating and escalating conflicts.
The existence of readily available arms has the effect of fueling disputes that may not have escalated were weapons unavailable. This was seen in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq, where age-old differences between groups that had co-existed in relative peace for decades became bloody conflicts between tribal leaders and religious groups, due to the availability of guns and the use of these distinct groups as proxies by the US and its rivals.
As one conflict ends, its weapons quickly travel to neighboring countries, opening up new war fronts. According to the United Nations Office of Disarmament Affairs (UNODA), the “excessive accumulation and wide availability [of small arms] may aggravate political tension, often leading to more lethal and longer-lasting violence”.
Since the US project for global hegemony was inaugurated in 1945, the US has staged military interventions in over a dozen countries. Afghanistan alone was targeted by 81,638 bombs or missiles by the US and its allies between 2001 and 2021. Other countries such as Vietnam, Somalia, Laos, Kuwait, Grenada, Yemen, and dozens of others have also suffered mass destruction and devastation under US-led military interventions.
According to the global trends report of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) there has been a steady increase in the number of forcibly displaced persons yearly. In 2023 at least 27.2 million people were forced to flee, amounting to a total of 117.3 million which remain displaced, and constituting an 8% increase from the previous year. The UNHCR reports that the numbers of conflict-related fatalities are closely correlated with the number of people displaced each year. The three countries with the largest numbers of forced displacement are all currently embroiled in armed conflict: Sudan, Palestine, and Myanmar.
Economic siege as war
But bombs are not the only means the US has to advance its agenda; it has also taken advantage of its power over the global economic system to coerce unruly nations into towing the Washington line.
Coercive and unilateral measures, or sanctions, are widely used by the US to impoverish, starve, and weaken its enemies. Currently, the US has unilaterally imposed these measures on approximately 39 nations and territories. Sanctions are war by another name, as the outcomes of these result in civilian loss of life at a scale comparable to war.
Through both military interventions and economic sanctions, the United States has shown its willingness to coerce any nation deviating from its interests. This has fostered a global environment where nations vie for power and influence. The US’s propensity to invade and punish perceived adversaries has spurred countries to bolster their military and geopolitical capabilities to safeguard their sovereignty in a world marked by violence and conflict, saturated with weaponry and lacking effective mechanisms to ensure peace.
The outcome of the US hegemonic project has been a world of constant and endless wars, whether these involve the US directly or not. Struggles for control of land and resources by diverging factions quickly escalate to armed conflict due to the readily available weapons and the willing funding of regional powers looking to build their geopolitical force. This is essentially what is happening in Sudan today, where the conflict has resulted in more than ten million displaced persons. The conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces serves to thwart the democratic process the people have been struggling for since 2018, as rival military groups struggle to control the country and its resources.
Furthermore, the proliferation of conflicts contributes to the normalization of violent conflict itself. As we are exposed to ever-increasing numbers of civilian casualties, refugee camps, and the widespread devastation of cities, our response to warfare becomes passive and minimal.
Instead, our response must be expressed in political action that addresses the root causes of the permanent state of war in which we live. Only by countering US imperialism, its disregard for international institutions, and its enormous military machine can we end the state of widespread violence and conflict that haunts humanity – and address the root of the refugee crisis that is felt around the world.
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/06/ ... the-world/
******
Make-Believe Politics
June 21, 2024
The super-rich may be just out of view, but the strings they pull are all too visible, writes Jonathan Cook.
Parachute display during G7 Summit in Apulia, Italy, on June 12. (Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street)
By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net
We live in a world of make-believe politics, a world where strings pulled in the interests of the super-rich are ever more visible.
And yet we are expected to pretend we cannot see those strings. More astonishing still, many people really do seem blind to the puppet show.
1. The “leader of the free world,” President Joe Biden, can barely maintain his attention for more than a few minutes without straying off topic, or wandering offstage. When he has to walk before the cameras, he does so like he is auditioning for the role of a geriatric robot. His whole body is gripped with the concentration he needs to walk in a straight line.
And yet we are supposed to believe he is carefully working the levers of the western empire, making critically difficult calculations to keep the West free and prosperous, while keeping in check its enemies — Russia, China, Iran — without provoking a nuclear war. Is he really capable of doing all that when he struggles to put one foot in front of the other?
2. Part of that tricky diplomatic balancing act Biden is supposedly conducting, along with other Western leaders, relates to Israel’s military operation in Gaza. The West’s “diplomacy” — backed by weapons transfers — has resulted in the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children; the gradual starvation of 2.3 million Palestinians over many months; and the destruction of 70 percent of the enclave’s housing stock and almost all of its major infrastructure and institutions, including schools, universities and hospitals.
And yet we are supposed to believe that Biden has no leverage over Israel, even though Israel is entirely dependent on the United States for the weapons it is using to destroy Gaza.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on June 10. (State Department/Chuck Kennedy)
We are supposed to believe Israel is acting solely in “self-defence,” even when most of the people being killed are unarmed civilians; and that it is “eliminating” Hamas, even though Hamas doesn’t appear to have been weakened, and even though Israel’s starvation policies will take their toll on the young, elderly and vulnerable long before they kill a single Hamas fighter.
We are supposed to believe that Israel has a plan for the “day after” in Gaza that won’t look anything like the outcome these policies appear designed to achieve: making Gaza uninhabitable so that the Palestinian population is forced to leave.
And on top of all this, we are supposed to believe that, in ruling that a “plausible” case has been made that Israel is committing genocide, the judges of the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, have shown they do not understand the legal definition of the crime of genocide. Or possibly that they are driven by anti-Semitism.
The International Court of Justice, principal judicial organ of the U.N., holding public hearings in February on Israel practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. (ICJ)
3. Meanwhile, the same Western leaders arming Israel’s slaughter of many tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, including more than 15,000 children, have been shipping hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of armaments to Ukraine to assist its armed forces.
Ukraine must be helped, we are told, because it is the victim of an aggressive neighbouring power, Russia, determined on expansion and land theft.
And yet we are supposed to ignore the two decades of Western military expansion eastwards, via NATO, that has finally coming knocking, in Ukraine, on Russia’s door — and the fact that the West’s best experts on Russia warned throughout that time that we were playing with fire in doing so and that Ukraine would prove a red line for Moscow.
We are supposed to make no comparison between Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and Israel’s aggression against the Palestinians. In the latter case, Israel is supposedly the victim, even though it has been violently occupying its Palestinian neighbours’ territory for three-quarters of a century while, in flagrant violation of international law, building Jewish settlements on the territory meant to form the basis of a Palestinian state.
Sept. 23, 2012: Pro-Israeli settlements demonstrators, dressed in white, in march through East Jerusalem. (Tal King, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)
We are supposed to believe that the Palestinians of Gaza have no right to defend themselves comparable to Ukraine’s right — no right to defend against decades of Israeli belligerence, whether the ethnic cleansing operations of 1948 and 1967, the apartheid system imposed on the remnant Palestinian population afterwards, the 17-year blockade of Gaza that denied its inhabitants the essentials of life, or the “plausible genocide” the West is now arming and providing diplomatic cover for.
In fact, if the Palestinians do try to defend themselves, the West not only refuses to help them, as it has Ukraine, but considers them terrorists – even the children, it seems.
4. Julian Assange, the journalist and publisher who did most to expose the inner workings of Western establishments, and their criminal schemes in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, has been behind bars for five years in Belmarsh high-security prison.
Before that, he spent seven years arbitrarily detained — according to United Nations legal experts — in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, forced to seek asylum there from political persecution. In an interminable legal process, the U.S. seeks his extradition so he can be locked away in near-isolation for up to 175 years.
And yet we are supposed to believe that his 12 years of effective detention — having been found guilty of no crime – is entirely unrelated to the fact that, in publishing secret cables, Assange revealed that, behind closed doors, the West and its leaders sound and act like gangsters and psychopaths, especially about foreign affairs, not like the stewards of a benign global order they claim to be overseeing.
Assange supporters in London celebrate news of the court granting Assange permission to appeal on May 20. (Alisdare Hickson, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
The leaked documents Assange published show Western leaders ready to destroy whole societies to further Western resource domination and their own enrichment — and eager to wield the most outrageous lies to achieve their goals. They have no interest in upholding the supposedly cherished value of freedom of the press, except when that freedom is being weaponised against their enemies.
We are supposed to believe that Western leaders genuinely want journalists to act as a watchdog, a restraint, on their power even when they are hounding to death the very journalist who created a whistleblowers’ platform, WikiLeaks, to do precisely that. (Assange has already suffered a stroke from the more than a decade-long strain of fighting for his freedom.)
We are supposed to believe that the West will give Assange a fair trial, when the very states colluding in his incarceration — and in the C.I.A.’s case, planned assassination — are the ones he exposed for engaging in war crimes and state terrorism.
We are supposed to believe that they are pursuing a legal process, not persecution, in redefining as the crime of “espionage” his efforts to bring transparency and accountability to international affairs.
5. The media claim to represent the interests of Western publics in all their diversity, and to act as a true window on the world.
We are supposed believe that this same media is free and pluralistic, even when it is owned by the super-rich as well as western states that were long ago hollowed out to serve the super-rich.
We are supposed to believe that a media completely dependent for its survival on revenues from big corporate advertisers [and leaks from government officials] can bring us news and analysis without fear or favour.
We are supposed to believe that a media whose primary role is selling audiences to corporate advertisers can question whether, in doing so, it is playing a beneficial or harmful role.
The News Building in London, home to The Sun, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones, Harper Collins, 2015. (Sarah Marshall, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
We are supposed to believe that a media plugged firmly into the capitalist financial system that brought the global economy to its knees in 2008, and has been hurtling us towards ecological catastrophe, is in a position to evaluate and critique that capitalist model dispassionately, that media outlets could somehow turn on the billionaires who own them, or could forego the income from the billionaire-owned corporations that prop up the media’s finances through advertising.
We are supposed to believe that the media can objectively assess the merits of going to war. That is, wars waged serially by the West — from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Libya to Syria, from Ukraine to Gaza — when media corporations are embedded in corporate conglomerates whose other big interests include arms manufacturing and fossil-fuel extraction.
We are supposed to believe that the media uncritically promotes endless growth for reasons of economic necessity and common sense, even though the contradictions are glaring: that the forever growth model is impossible to sustain on a finite planet where resources are running out.
6. In Western political systems, unlike those of its enemies, there is supposedly a meaningful democratic choice between candidates representing opposing worldviews and values.
U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Labour Leader Keir Starmer, side by side at front of group at right, join the procession to hear King Charles III open the new session of the Houses of Parliament, Nov. 7, 2023. (UK Parliament, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
We are supposed to believe in a Western political model of openness, pluralism and accountability even when in the U.S. and U.K. the public are offered an electoral scrap between two candidates and parties that, to stand a chance of winning, need to win favour with the corporate media representing the interests of its billionaire owners, need to keep happy billionaire donors who fund their campaigns and need to win over Big Business by demonstrating their unwavering commitment to a model of endless growth that is completely unsustainable.
We are supposed to believe that these leaders serve the voting public — offering a choice between right and left, between capital and labour — when, in truth, the public is only ever presented with a choice between two parties prostrated before Big Money, when the parties’ policy programmes are nothing more than competitions in who can best appease the wealth-elite.
We are supposed to believe that the “democratic” West represents the epitome of political health, even though it repeatedly dredges up the very worst people imaginable to lead it.
In the U.S., the “choice” imposed on the electorate is between one candidate (Biden) who should be pottering around his garden, or maybe preparing for his final, difficult years in a care home, and a competitor (Donald Trump) whose relentless search for adoration and self-enrichment should never have been indulged beyond hosting a TV reality show.
In the U.K., the “choice” is no better: between a candidate (Rishi Sunak) richer than the British king and equally cosseted and a competitor (Sir Keir Starmer) who is so ideologically hollow that his public record is an exercise in decades of shape-shifting.
All, let us note, are fully signed up to the continuing genocide in Gaza, all are unmoved by many months of the slaughter and starvation of Palestinian children, all are only too ready to defame as antisemites anyone who shows an ounce of the principle and humanity they all too obviously lack.
The super-rich may be just out of view, but the strings they pull are all too visible. Time to cut ourselves loose.
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/06/21/m ... -politics/
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JUNE 20, 2024
Stephanie Weatherbee Brito
Sudanese refugees in Chad. Over 10 million people have been forcibly displaced in over a year of war in Sudan. Photo: Wikimedia commons
The intensification of existing violent conflicts and emergence of new ones have caused a significant increase in the number of forcibly displaced people.
On this year’s World Refugee Day – June 20 – we must collectively reckon with the fact that more than 117 million people are victims of forced displacement. From Palestine to Sudan, Yemen to Ukraine, and the Democratic Republic of Congo to Myanmar, the specter of violence casts its long shadow across the world and results in the tragedy of death and displacement that we have become all too familiar with. According to the Armed Conflict Location and Events Data (ACLED) Conflict Index, the world is becoming more violent, as is synthesized by the fact that one in six people are estimated to have been exposed to conflict in 2024. This marks, according to ACLED, a 22% increase in political violence incidents in the past five years and begs the question, “Why is war becoming the norm around the world?”
To understand the expansion of war and violent conflict in recent years, it is necessary to look at global factors rather than focus exclusively on the causes of each conflict. When we look at the bigger picture, we find an increasingly unequal world with a burgeoning arms market and failing global governance structures. These factors are all connected to the structural crisis of capitalism and the US imperialist project which has reacted to its decline with increased aggression.
Over several decades, US actions have contributed to a state of global disorder, linked to a broader agenda aimed at establishing and maintaining unipolarity. Since the 1970s, the United States has increasingly pursued a foreign policy marked by unilateral actions and strategies designed to further its interests, often without regard for their impact on other actors, including some of its allies.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the US ruling class became convinced it had established a new unipolar order destined to endure indefinitely. Since then, the number of violent conflicts with US participation has increased and include: Panama (1989), Iraq (1990), Yugoslavia (1995), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), Syria (2014), Ukraine (2022), Palestine (2023). In some of these instances, the conflicts instigated by the United States have overflowed beyond borders, grown through the involvement of unpredictable militias, and resulted in chaos, violence, and a breakdown of state authority. This has often only led to further escalation of violence. In this way, the US effort to maintain unipolarity has heightened global conflict.
The United States has also dismantled any semblance of global governance aimed at preventing and resolving conflicts. The League of Nations (1919) and later the United Nations (1945) were established to foster peace and security by implementing a framework of international law to govern nations’ behavior. However, the US has consistently flouted these multilateral structures and international laws while shielding its close allies from repercussions for their transgressions. A significant example of this, marking a pivotal moment in undermining the rules-based order, is the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. This invasion, purportedly launched as a “preemptive” strike, lacked evidence of provocation and was based on false claims regarding Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction.
By initiating a war that failed to meet internationally accepted justifications for conflict, the US set a precedent wherein the ability to wage war—coupled with control over media narratives to justify military actions—supersedes the obligation to justify military intervention under international law. This action by the United States undermined any notion of peace and security within a rules-based system. Following the largely unchallenged war in Iraq, the US proceeded to wage wars explicitly aimed at asserting its dominance and control. The 2011 NATO-led invasion of Libya epitomizes these overt attempts to dismantle and intimidate those who defy or oppose US hegemony.
Producers of weapons and war
US imperialism relies heavily on the unparalleled military dominance it has built and maintained over decades. To this end, military spending by the United States has steadily increased. Currently, the gigantic military machine commanded by the US is funded by USD 1.537 trillion (counting only US spending) and USD 2.13 trillion (including the expenditure by US allies). In percentages, the US-led military bloc is responsible for 74.3% of military spending globally. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the world’s five top arms-producing and military service companies, Lockheed Martin Corp., Raytheon Technologies, Northrop Grumman Corp., Boeing and General Dynamics Corp, are of US origin.
The US is both indirectly – by building its incredible stockpile of weapons – and directly – by producing a significant amount of the arms circling the world today – responsible for the vast amount of weapons in the world today – weapons which are instrumental to perpetuating and escalating conflicts.
The existence of readily available arms has the effect of fueling disputes that may not have escalated were weapons unavailable. This was seen in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq, where age-old differences between groups that had co-existed in relative peace for decades became bloody conflicts between tribal leaders and religious groups, due to the availability of guns and the use of these distinct groups as proxies by the US and its rivals.
As one conflict ends, its weapons quickly travel to neighboring countries, opening up new war fronts. According to the United Nations Office of Disarmament Affairs (UNODA), the “excessive accumulation and wide availability [of small arms] may aggravate political tension, often leading to more lethal and longer-lasting violence”.
Since the US project for global hegemony was inaugurated in 1945, the US has staged military interventions in over a dozen countries. Afghanistan alone was targeted by 81,638 bombs or missiles by the US and its allies between 2001 and 2021. Other countries such as Vietnam, Somalia, Laos, Kuwait, Grenada, Yemen, and dozens of others have also suffered mass destruction and devastation under US-led military interventions.
According to the global trends report of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) there has been a steady increase in the number of forcibly displaced persons yearly. In 2023 at least 27.2 million people were forced to flee, amounting to a total of 117.3 million which remain displaced, and constituting an 8% increase from the previous year. The UNHCR reports that the numbers of conflict-related fatalities are closely correlated with the number of people displaced each year. The three countries with the largest numbers of forced displacement are all currently embroiled in armed conflict: Sudan, Palestine, and Myanmar.
Economic siege as war
But bombs are not the only means the US has to advance its agenda; it has also taken advantage of its power over the global economic system to coerce unruly nations into towing the Washington line.
Coercive and unilateral measures, or sanctions, are widely used by the US to impoverish, starve, and weaken its enemies. Currently, the US has unilaterally imposed these measures on approximately 39 nations and territories. Sanctions are war by another name, as the outcomes of these result in civilian loss of life at a scale comparable to war.
Through both military interventions and economic sanctions, the United States has shown its willingness to coerce any nation deviating from its interests. This has fostered a global environment where nations vie for power and influence. The US’s propensity to invade and punish perceived adversaries has spurred countries to bolster their military and geopolitical capabilities to safeguard their sovereignty in a world marked by violence and conflict, saturated with weaponry and lacking effective mechanisms to ensure peace.
The outcome of the US hegemonic project has been a world of constant and endless wars, whether these involve the US directly or not. Struggles for control of land and resources by diverging factions quickly escalate to armed conflict due to the readily available weapons and the willing funding of regional powers looking to build their geopolitical force. This is essentially what is happening in Sudan today, where the conflict has resulted in more than ten million displaced persons. The conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces serves to thwart the democratic process the people have been struggling for since 2018, as rival military groups struggle to control the country and its resources.
Furthermore, the proliferation of conflicts contributes to the normalization of violent conflict itself. As we are exposed to ever-increasing numbers of civilian casualties, refugee camps, and the widespread devastation of cities, our response to warfare becomes passive and minimal.
Instead, our response must be expressed in political action that addresses the root causes of the permanent state of war in which we live. Only by countering US imperialism, its disregard for international institutions, and its enormous military machine can we end the state of widespread violence and conflict that haunts humanity – and address the root of the refugee crisis that is felt around the world.
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/06/ ... the-world/
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Make-Believe Politics
June 21, 2024
The super-rich may be just out of view, but the strings they pull are all too visible, writes Jonathan Cook.
Parachute display during G7 Summit in Apulia, Italy, on June 12. (Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street)
By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net
We live in a world of make-believe politics, a world where strings pulled in the interests of the super-rich are ever more visible.
And yet we are expected to pretend we cannot see those strings. More astonishing still, many people really do seem blind to the puppet show.
1. The “leader of the free world,” President Joe Biden, can barely maintain his attention for more than a few minutes without straying off topic, or wandering offstage. When he has to walk before the cameras, he does so like he is auditioning for the role of a geriatric robot. His whole body is gripped with the concentration he needs to walk in a straight line.
And yet we are supposed to believe he is carefully working the levers of the western empire, making critically difficult calculations to keep the West free and prosperous, while keeping in check its enemies — Russia, China, Iran — without provoking a nuclear war. Is he really capable of doing all that when he struggles to put one foot in front of the other?
2. Part of that tricky diplomatic balancing act Biden is supposedly conducting, along with other Western leaders, relates to Israel’s military operation in Gaza. The West’s “diplomacy” — backed by weapons transfers — has resulted in the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children; the gradual starvation of 2.3 million Palestinians over many months; and the destruction of 70 percent of the enclave’s housing stock and almost all of its major infrastructure and institutions, including schools, universities and hospitals.
And yet we are supposed to believe that Biden has no leverage over Israel, even though Israel is entirely dependent on the United States for the weapons it is using to destroy Gaza.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on June 10. (State Department/Chuck Kennedy)
We are supposed to believe Israel is acting solely in “self-defence,” even when most of the people being killed are unarmed civilians; and that it is “eliminating” Hamas, even though Hamas doesn’t appear to have been weakened, and even though Israel’s starvation policies will take their toll on the young, elderly and vulnerable long before they kill a single Hamas fighter.
We are supposed to believe that Israel has a plan for the “day after” in Gaza that won’t look anything like the outcome these policies appear designed to achieve: making Gaza uninhabitable so that the Palestinian population is forced to leave.
And on top of all this, we are supposed to believe that, in ruling that a “plausible” case has been made that Israel is committing genocide, the judges of the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, have shown they do not understand the legal definition of the crime of genocide. Or possibly that they are driven by anti-Semitism.
The International Court of Justice, principal judicial organ of the U.N., holding public hearings in February on Israel practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. (ICJ)
3. Meanwhile, the same Western leaders arming Israel’s slaughter of many tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, including more than 15,000 children, have been shipping hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of armaments to Ukraine to assist its armed forces.
Ukraine must be helped, we are told, because it is the victim of an aggressive neighbouring power, Russia, determined on expansion and land theft.
And yet we are supposed to ignore the two decades of Western military expansion eastwards, via NATO, that has finally coming knocking, in Ukraine, on Russia’s door — and the fact that the West’s best experts on Russia warned throughout that time that we were playing with fire in doing so and that Ukraine would prove a red line for Moscow.
We are supposed to make no comparison between Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and Israel’s aggression against the Palestinians. In the latter case, Israel is supposedly the victim, even though it has been violently occupying its Palestinian neighbours’ territory for three-quarters of a century while, in flagrant violation of international law, building Jewish settlements on the territory meant to form the basis of a Palestinian state.
Sept. 23, 2012: Pro-Israeli settlements demonstrators, dressed in white, in march through East Jerusalem. (Tal King, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)
We are supposed to believe that the Palestinians of Gaza have no right to defend themselves comparable to Ukraine’s right — no right to defend against decades of Israeli belligerence, whether the ethnic cleansing operations of 1948 and 1967, the apartheid system imposed on the remnant Palestinian population afterwards, the 17-year blockade of Gaza that denied its inhabitants the essentials of life, or the “plausible genocide” the West is now arming and providing diplomatic cover for.
In fact, if the Palestinians do try to defend themselves, the West not only refuses to help them, as it has Ukraine, but considers them terrorists – even the children, it seems.
4. Julian Assange, the journalist and publisher who did most to expose the inner workings of Western establishments, and their criminal schemes in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, has been behind bars for five years in Belmarsh high-security prison.
Before that, he spent seven years arbitrarily detained — according to United Nations legal experts — in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, forced to seek asylum there from political persecution. In an interminable legal process, the U.S. seeks his extradition so he can be locked away in near-isolation for up to 175 years.
And yet we are supposed to believe that his 12 years of effective detention — having been found guilty of no crime – is entirely unrelated to the fact that, in publishing secret cables, Assange revealed that, behind closed doors, the West and its leaders sound and act like gangsters and psychopaths, especially about foreign affairs, not like the stewards of a benign global order they claim to be overseeing.
Assange supporters in London celebrate news of the court granting Assange permission to appeal on May 20. (Alisdare Hickson, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
The leaked documents Assange published show Western leaders ready to destroy whole societies to further Western resource domination and their own enrichment — and eager to wield the most outrageous lies to achieve their goals. They have no interest in upholding the supposedly cherished value of freedom of the press, except when that freedom is being weaponised against their enemies.
We are supposed to believe that Western leaders genuinely want journalists to act as a watchdog, a restraint, on their power even when they are hounding to death the very journalist who created a whistleblowers’ platform, WikiLeaks, to do precisely that. (Assange has already suffered a stroke from the more than a decade-long strain of fighting for his freedom.)
We are supposed to believe that the West will give Assange a fair trial, when the very states colluding in his incarceration — and in the C.I.A.’s case, planned assassination — are the ones he exposed for engaging in war crimes and state terrorism.
We are supposed to believe that they are pursuing a legal process, not persecution, in redefining as the crime of “espionage” his efforts to bring transparency and accountability to international affairs.
5. The media claim to represent the interests of Western publics in all their diversity, and to act as a true window on the world.
We are supposed believe that this same media is free and pluralistic, even when it is owned by the super-rich as well as western states that were long ago hollowed out to serve the super-rich.
We are supposed to believe that a media completely dependent for its survival on revenues from big corporate advertisers [and leaks from government officials] can bring us news and analysis without fear or favour.
We are supposed to believe that a media whose primary role is selling audiences to corporate advertisers can question whether, in doing so, it is playing a beneficial or harmful role.
The News Building in London, home to The Sun, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones, Harper Collins, 2015. (Sarah Marshall, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
We are supposed to believe that a media plugged firmly into the capitalist financial system that brought the global economy to its knees in 2008, and has been hurtling us towards ecological catastrophe, is in a position to evaluate and critique that capitalist model dispassionately, that media outlets could somehow turn on the billionaires who own them, or could forego the income from the billionaire-owned corporations that prop up the media’s finances through advertising.
We are supposed to believe that the media can objectively assess the merits of going to war. That is, wars waged serially by the West — from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Libya to Syria, from Ukraine to Gaza — when media corporations are embedded in corporate conglomerates whose other big interests include arms manufacturing and fossil-fuel extraction.
We are supposed to believe that the media uncritically promotes endless growth for reasons of economic necessity and common sense, even though the contradictions are glaring: that the forever growth model is impossible to sustain on a finite planet where resources are running out.
6. In Western political systems, unlike those of its enemies, there is supposedly a meaningful democratic choice between candidates representing opposing worldviews and values.
U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Labour Leader Keir Starmer, side by side at front of group at right, join the procession to hear King Charles III open the new session of the Houses of Parliament, Nov. 7, 2023. (UK Parliament, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
We are supposed to believe in a Western political model of openness, pluralism and accountability even when in the U.S. and U.K. the public are offered an electoral scrap between two candidates and parties that, to stand a chance of winning, need to win favour with the corporate media representing the interests of its billionaire owners, need to keep happy billionaire donors who fund their campaigns and need to win over Big Business by demonstrating their unwavering commitment to a model of endless growth that is completely unsustainable.
We are supposed to believe that these leaders serve the voting public — offering a choice between right and left, between capital and labour — when, in truth, the public is only ever presented with a choice between two parties prostrated before Big Money, when the parties’ policy programmes are nothing more than competitions in who can best appease the wealth-elite.
We are supposed to believe that the “democratic” West represents the epitome of political health, even though it repeatedly dredges up the very worst people imaginable to lead it.
In the U.S., the “choice” imposed on the electorate is between one candidate (Biden) who should be pottering around his garden, or maybe preparing for his final, difficult years in a care home, and a competitor (Donald Trump) whose relentless search for adoration and self-enrichment should never have been indulged beyond hosting a TV reality show.
In the U.K., the “choice” is no better: between a candidate (Rishi Sunak) richer than the British king and equally cosseted and a competitor (Sir Keir Starmer) who is so ideologically hollow that his public record is an exercise in decades of shape-shifting.
All, let us note, are fully signed up to the continuing genocide in Gaza, all are unmoved by many months of the slaughter and starvation of Palestinian children, all are only too ready to defame as antisemites anyone who shows an ounce of the principle and humanity they all too obviously lack.
The super-rich may be just out of view, but the strings they pull are all too visible. Time to cut ourselves loose.
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/06/21/m ... -politics/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Nature of Foxes
Chris Hedges: The Impending Collapse of US Empire
June 21, 2024
The military machine commits fiascos abroad. At home, by diverting funds and resources to endless war, it disembowels and impoverishes the nation.
Saddam Hussein’s statue toppled in Baghdad shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. (DoD, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons)
By Chris Hedges
Declassified UK
The public perception of the American empire, at least to those within the United States who have never seen the empire dominate and exploit the “wretched of the earth,” is radically different from reality.
These manufactured illusions, ones Joseph Conrad wrote so presciently about, posit that the empire is a force for good. The empire, we are told, fosters democracy and liberty. It spreads the benefits of “Western civilization.”
These are deceptions repeated ad nauseam by a compliant media and mouthed by politicians, academics and the powerful. But they are lies, as all of us who have spent years reporting overseas understand.
Matt Kennard in his book The Racket — where he reports from Haiti, Bolivia, Turkey, Palestine, Egypt, Tunisia, Mexico, Colombia and many other countries — rips back the veil. He exposes the hidden machinery of empire. He details its brutality, mendacity, cruelty and its dangerous self-delusions.
In the late stage of empire, the image sold to a gullible public begins to entrance the mandarins of empire. They make decisions based not on reality, but on their distorted visions of reality, one coloured by their own propaganda.
Matt refers to this as “the racket.” Blinded by hubris and power they come to believe their deceptions, propelling the empire towards collective suicide. They retreat into a fantasy where hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude.
They replace diplomacy, multilateralism and politics with unilateral threats and the blunt instrument of war. They become the purblind architects of their own destruction.
Matt writes:
“A couple of years after my initiation at The Financial Times a few things started to become clearer. I came to realise a difference between myself and the rest of the people staffing the racket — the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) workers, the economists in the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and so on.”
He continues,
“While I was coming to understand how the racket really worked, I started to see them as willing dupes. There was no doubt they seemed to believe in the virtue of the mission; they imbibed all the theories that were meant to dress up global exploitation in the language of ‘development’ and ‘progress’. I saw this with American ambassadors in Bolivia and Haiti, and with countless other functionaries I interviewed.”
“They genuinely believe the myths,” he concludes,
“and of course are paid handsomely to do so. To help these agents of the racket get up in the morning there also exists, throughout the West, a well-stocked army of intellectuals whose sole purpose is to make theft and brutality acceptable to the general population of the U.S. and its racketeering allies.”
The United States carried out one of the greatest strategic blunders in its history, one that sounded the death knell of the empire, when it invaded and occupied for two decades Afghanistan and Iraq.
The architects of the war in the George W. Bush White House, and the array of useful idiots in the press and academia who were cheerleaders for it, knew very little about the countries being invaded. They believed their technological superiority made them invincible.
Matt Kennard. (Twitter/X)
They were blindsided by the ferocious blowback and armed resistance that led to their defeat. This was something those of us who knew the Middle East — I was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, speak Arabic and reported from the region for seven years — predicted.
But those intent on war preferred a comforting fantasy. They stated, and probably believed, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, although they had no valid evidence to support this claim.
They insisted that democracy would be implanted in Baghdad and spread across the Middle East. They assured the public that U.S. troops would be greeted by grateful Iraqis and Afghans as liberators. They promised that oil revenues would cover the cost of reconstruction.
They insisted that the bold and quick military strike — “shock and awe” — would restore American hegemony in the region and dominance in the world. It did the opposite. As Zbigniew Brzezi?ski noted, this “unilateral war of choice against Iraq precipitated a widespread delegitimation of U.S. foreign policy.”
The War State
America since the end of World War II has become a stratocracy — government dominated by the military. There is a constant preparation for war. The war machine’s massive budgets are sacrosanct. Its billions of dollars in waste and fraud are ignored.
Its military fiascos in Southeast Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East disappear into the vast black hole of historical amnesia. This amnesia, which means there is never accountability, licences the war machine to leap from military debacle to debacle while it economically disembowels the country.
The militarists win every election. They cannot lose. It is impossible to vote against them. The war state is a Götterdämmerung, as Dwight Macdonald writes, “without the gods.”
Nov. 24, 2004: U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld applauding President George W. Bush during his remarks at the Pentagon on a military spending bill. (DoD)
Since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its tax dollars on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government.
Military systems are sold before they are produced with guarantees that huge cost overruns will be covered.
Foreign aid is contingent on buying U.S. weapons. Egypt, which receives some $1.3 billion in foreign military financing, is required to devote it to buying and maintaining U.S. weapons systems.
Israel, meanwhile, has received $158 billion in bilateral assistance from the U.S. since 1949, almost all of it since 1971 in the form of military aid, with most of it going towards arms purchases from American weapons manufacturers.
The U.S. public funds the research, development and building of weapons systems and then buys these same weapons systems on behalf of foreign governments. It is a circular system of corporate welfare.
In the year to September 2022, the U.S. spent $877 billion on the military. This was more than the next 10 countries — including China, Russia, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom — combined.
These huge military expenditures, along with the rising costs of a for-profit healthcare system, have driven the U.S. national debt to over $31 trillion, nearly $5 trillion more than the U.S.’ entire Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
This imbalance is not sustainable, especially once the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency. As of January 2023, the U.S. spent a record $213 billion servicing the interest on its national debt.
The Empire at Home
The military machine, by diverting funds and resources to endless war, disembowels and impoverishes the nation at home, as Matt’s reporting from Washington, Baltimore and New York illustrates.
The cost to the public — socially, economically, politically and culturally — is catastrophic. Workers are reduced to subsistence level and preyed upon by corporations that have privatised every facet of society from health care and education to the prison-industrial complex.
Militarists divert funds from social and infrastructure programs. They pour money into research and development of weapons systems and neglect renewable energy technologies. Bridges, roads, electrical grids and levees collapse. Schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. Our public transportation system is a shambles.
Militarised police gun down mostly unarmed, poor people of colour and fill a system of penitentiaries and jails that hold a staggering 25 percent of the world’s prisoners although Americans represent only 5 percent of the global population.
Cities, deindustrialized, are in ruins. Opioid addiction, suicide, mass shootings, depression and morbid obesity plague a population that has fallen into profound despair.
Militarised societies are fertile ground for demagogues. Militarists, like demagogues, see other nations and cultures in their own image — threatening and aggressive. They seek only domination. They peddle illusions of a return to a mythical golden age of total power and unlimited prosperity.
The deep disillusionment and anger that led to Donald Trump’s election — a reaction to the corporate coup d’état and the poverty afflicting at least half of the country — have destroyed the myth of a functioning democracy.
As Matt notes:
“The American elite that has grown fat from looting abroad is also fighting a war at home. From the 1970s onwards, the same white-collar mobsters have been winning a war against the people of the US, in the form of a massive, underhand con. They have slowly but surely managed to sell off much of what the American people used to own under the guise of various fraudulent ideologies such as the ‘free market’. This is the ‘American way’, a giant swindle, a grand hustle.”
He continues,
“In this sense, the victims of the racket are not just in Port-au-Prince and Baghdad; they are also in Chicago and New York City. The same people that devise the myths about what we do abroad have also built up a similar ideological system that legitimises theft at home; theft from the poorest, by the richest. The poor and working people of Harlem have more in common with the poor and working people of Haiti than they do with their elites, but this has to be obscured for the racket to work.”
“Many actions taken by the US government, in fact, habitually harm the poorest and most destitute of its citizens,” he concludes. “The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is a good example. It came into force in January 1994 and was a fantastic opportunity for US business interests, because markets were opened up for an investment and export bonanza. Simultaneously, thousands of US workers lost their jobs to workers in Mexico where their wages could be beaten down by even poorer people.”
Self-Immolation
“Collateral Crucifixion” mural created by the artist duo Captain Borderline on the side of a house in Berlin, April 2021. (Singlespeedfahrer, Wikimedia Commons, CC0)
The public, bombarded with war propaganda, cheers on their self-immolation. It revels in the despicable beauty of U.S. military prowess. It speaks in the thought-terminating clichés spewed out by mass culture and mass media. It imbibes the illusion of omnipotence and wallows in self-adulation.
The mantra of the militarised state is national security. If every discussion begins with a question of national security, every answer includes force or the threat of force. The preoccupation with internal and external threats divides the world into friend and foe, good and evil.
Those such as Julian Assange who expose the crimes and suicidal folly of empire are ruthlessly persecuted. The truth, a truth Matt uncovers, is bitter and hard.
“While rising empires are often judicious, even rational in their application of armed force for conquest and control of overseas dominions, fading empires are inclined to ill-considered displays of power, dreaming of bold military masterstrokes that would somehow recoup lost prestige and power,” the historian Alfred McCoy writes.
“Often irrational even from an imperial point of view, these micro military operations can yield haemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the process already under way.”
It is vital we see what lies before us. If we continue to be entranced by the images on the walls of Plato’s cave, images that bombard us on screens day and night, if we fail to understand how empire works and its self-destructiveness we will all, especially with the looming climate crisis, descend into a Hobbesian nightmare where the tools of repression, so familiar on the outer reaches of empire, cement into place terrifying corporate totalitarian states.
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/06/21/c ... us-empire/
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Ruling Class Finally Awakens to the Reality of America's Decline
SIMPLICIUS
JUN 22, 2024
Change is in the air.
I’ve written previously on the panic currently effervescing through the global elites, made viscerally apparent at conclaves like the Davos forum earlier this year. But in America particularly, a deep worry is now consciously gnawing the ruling class—they can see it, feel it: that the American Empire is on its last legs, close to collapse.
This month has seen a bevy of new thinkpieces from top American deepstate figures or old-guard publications urging the changing of course, lest the country be swept away by the remorseless tide of history.
The first and most prominent of these making the rounds is that of former speech writer and White House staffer to Obama, Ben Rhodes, entitled:
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-s ... rld-rhodes
Rhodes remains among the political haute monde, having founded a thinktank alongside Jake Sullivan, which had many interlinkings with Soros’ Open Society organizations. That’s to say, Rhodes has his finger on the pulse of the ‘inner circles’ of the patriciate, which is underscored by the CFR’s journal offering tribune to his latest. And so it’s even more telling that he’s moved to sound the alarm against a country he feels is—as the cover art above obliges—stumbling headfirst into historic headwinds.
The article is actually quite long and detailed, so we have Arnaud Bertrand to summarize its finest points. The first bolded portion below gets to the heart of Rhodes’ startling argument—but read the rest of the bolded:
This is an interesting piece by brhodes, Obama's Former Deputy National Security Advisor
In an immense departure from US policy to date, he advocates that the US "abandons the mindset of American primacy" and "pivots away from the political considerations, maximalism, and Western-centric view that have caused [the Biden] administration to make some of the same mistakes as its predecessors".
He writes, and I find this a very powerful sentence, that "meeting the moment requires building a bridge to the future—not the past." As in not seek to regain a lost hegemony, but adapt to the "world as it is" which he calls "the world of post-American primacy".
To be sure, the piece still has strong relents of the liberal instincts to remake the world in America's image - a leopard cannot change its spots - but at least he acknowledges the reality that the world has changed and that the US should view itself as a power coexisting with others, not THE power that needs to dominate the rest of the world. Which is a first step...
Also, significantly, he points out the insanity of "framing the battle between democracy and autocracy as a confrontation with a handful of geopolitical adversaries" when the West's own democracies are in such sorry states today that they can hardly be called "democracies" anymore... He writes that instead of trying to constantly interfere in changing other countries' systems, "ultimately, the most important thing that America can do in the world is detoxify its own democracy".
The below encapsulates the core thesis, which is that America’s global primacy is over, and the only way for the country to stay afloat is to adapt to the new realities:
Yet even though a return to competent normalcy was in order, the Biden administration’s mindset of restoration has occasionally struggled against the currents of our disordered times. An updated conception of U.S. leadership—one tailored to a world that has moved on from American primacy and the eccentricities of American politics—is necessary to minimize enormous risks and pursue new opportunities.
This is the theme which recurs again and again throughout the new zeitgeist taking over political discourse in the stricken Beltway—panicking neocons are exhorting each other: we’re in a fight for our lives, if we don’t accept the new realities, we’ll drown!
Publications like Foreign Affairs are where the elite address not us, but each other, in the long-standing tradition of euphemism as secret-coded language of their ‘interior world’ of the deepstate and outlying political class. Here Mr. Rhodes adeptly navigates the nuances of this privileged cant when he declares that the Rules Based Order has fallen:
But lodged in the creases of his appeal are the keys to the game: why is the Order dead? He answers: because countries previously vassalized by strict obedience to the Hegemon are now, for once, acting independently and making—quelle surprise!—sovereign decisions. And thus is translated the secret message of the inter-elite argot: the ‘Rules Based Order’ was nothing more than a veil for line-toeing slavery, and it’s now finished forever.
He spells it out even more clearly in a fittingly titled section toward the end:
Again the laundered speech; allow us to translate: “Our primacy has come to an end because the world has woken up to our sham. All the current conflicts we’re engaged in—are ones in which we have no actual legal justifications to be involved. Now our gig is up and the world has seen our blatant hypocrisy and double standards, including our own citizens, who now refuse to die for our globalist greed!”
Finally, in the end comes his reasonable surmise:
None of this will be easy, and success is not preordained, since unreliable adversaries also have agency. But given the stakes, it is worth exploring how a world of competing superpower blocs could be knitted into coexistence and negotiation on issues that cannot be dealt with in isolation.
Did you hear that? That’s the ghostly death knell of the U.S. establishment tolling in the night. For once, without uttering its repelling name, they have in essence invoked multipolarity as the sole workable solution going forward. They acknowledge America’s power has reached its natural end, its final logical conclusion, and only working together with other superpowers remains a viable policy moving forward.
(Paywall)
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/rul ... ens-to-the
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Former UN Weapons Inspector Warns About Looming Threat of Nuclear War
By Morrigan Johnson - June 21, 2024 2
Scott Ritter and Colonel Richard Black, a former Virginia state senator, warn about dangers of nuclear war in press conference on June 12. [Source: youtube.com]
Says: “You will die”
“You will die,” Scott Ritter warned Americans on Wednesday morning in a press conference hosted by the Schiller Institute. “The danger is real,” he said, “and Amercians should be scared.”
Ritter noted that, as the war in Ukraine escalates and the U.S. is providing weapons to directly attack Russia, “Anatoly Antonov, the top Russian nuclear weapon expert and lead negotiator on past nuclear treaties with the U.S., is sitting in the Kremlin and his phone is not ringing. We are not even attempting at diplomacy.”
Anatonov—his phone is not ringing. [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
Ritter was joined by Helga Zepp-LaRouche and former intelligence professionals Lawrence Wilkerson and former Republican state senator and Vietnam veteran Richard Black. They urged the people of the United States and the world to awaken to the danger of mutually assured destruction.
Their dire warning comes as tensions escalate to a point reminiscent of, or even exceeding, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis during the first Cold War period, when the world came within a heartbeat of nuclear war breaking out.
The Western media are simply not covering developments. Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector who exposed the deceit surrounding the WMD and Iraq, urged Americans to take the urgency and sense of danger to the polls in the next election to prevent World War III, and to pressure decision makers every step of the way.
While the Russian nuclear doctrine is defensive, the American doctrine has been under pressure to miniaturize the nuclear capabilities into conventional use and to develop first strike capabilities in recent years.
In January, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakhorova raised the alarm that the White House has no one in charge of nukes with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in the hospital with prostate cancer. After October 7th, Israel’s Dimona nuclear site came under American integration and control, amid widespread inter-governmental, inter-institutional and inter-state mistrust and dysfunction. The American and Israeli nuclear capabilities are otherwise, under a “there is no doctrine” doctrine.
Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor. [Source: haaretz.com]
Following the 2023 Belarus-Russia nuclear arms deal, in response to increased NATO activity, spokeswoman Zakharova pointed out the inadequate reaction of a number of Western capitals to decisions regarding the development of the deal, saying “In the context of the total hybrid war unleashed by the West against Russia and the declared intention of the United States and NATO to inflict a “strategic defeat” on us, it would be naive to continue to count on the complete absence of any military-technical countermeasures on our part in this area. We reserved and continue to reserve the right to take the necessary additional steps to ensure the security of Russia and its allies.”
The spokeswoman continued, “Moreover, unlike NATO, which is a conglomerate of countries subordinate to the United States, in our case we are talking about a Union State that officially has a common military doctrine. Therefore, we are talking about security measures taken by the Union State on its own national territory. All necessary decisions in this regard have been made, and they will be strictly implemented.” Putin declared Belarus a nuclear power in January 2024.
On the evening of May 14th, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) completed a sub-critical experiment at the PULSE facility in Nevada. Seismic activity data and advanced computer models are analyzed in Sandia and Los Alamos National Lab, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and the Mission Support and Test Services LLC. Satellites are also routinely used.
[Source: pozirk.online]
Ukraine is striking targets deep inside Russia with Western weapons. Ukraine has violated weapons restrictions and red lines in the past. However ,NATO member states, the U.S. and Germany, are now fully authorizing the scope of how Western weapons can be used, including striking deep into Russian territory.
[Source: foreignpolicy.com]
On May 22nd, Ukrainian drones struck the Armavir Radar Station in Russia’s southwestern Krasnodar Krai region, a part of Russia’s early warning radar system used for the detection of incoming ICBM attacks. Such a defensive radar warning system plays a vital role in the security of the country and is integrated into the nuclear command and control system. In strategic terms, it signals imminent nuclear Armageddon.
[Source: eir.news]
A Russian flotilla is now miles from the Florida coast with a strong message, reminiscent of the first Cuban Missile Crisis. Included among the flotilla, equipped with hypersonic missiles, is a Yasen-class Kazen submarine armed with nuclear SLBMs.
[Source: washingtonpost.com]
Mutually assured destruction is inevitable unless the U.S. shifts its foreign policy direction. If the Earth were destroyed in nuclear war, it would result in a nuclear winter.
[Source: twitter.com]
Stability-instability paradox
There is a stability-instability paradox arising out of the blurring of conventional war, proxy war compared to direct involvement in war, and nuclear war—these are all very separate states of war. The lack of clarity and lack of diplomacy by the Western powers, however, have led to an international stability crisis.
Consider the purpose of nuclear deterrent logic to be along the lines of nuclear mutually assured destruction that ought to become all-fearing where states avoid war at all costs. The argument of deterrence posits that states are made more safe through mutually assured destruction. The stability-instability paradox is a well-established concept in nuclear security literature.
But the paradox can spiral out of control, making the world less safe on the small scale where conventional war is blurred from the big scale nuclear war. The doctrine that would trigger a nuclear war might not always be as clear on the conventional level and non-state level from the nuclear level, leaving a zone of instability.
The paradox can be exaggerated theoretically at both extremes. Does deterrence prevent war, or is it destabilizing? It means that nuclear weapons can create extreme stability and instability scenarios, depending on certain factors. Wherever the state’s doctrines are unclear, or insufficient, the necessity of extremely clear state-to-state communication at high levels must take place to clarify the state of war, and the red lines between conventional, non-state threats, or nuclear war. The problem is that diplomacy is not occurring.
The U.S. is involved in a conventional proxy, waging hybrid war by non-state means, and crossing every red line. The U.S. and NATO are belligerents in the war, but act as if not at war.
Americans are even more unaware than at the state level due to the media’s blackout of the state’s foreign policy failures, or the world situation.
On June 13th, NATO General Secretary Jens Soltenberg gave a speech stating the intent to develop “response options”, by meeting with counterparts in North America the following week.
The diplomatic breakdown is at a crisis point and Putin is being pressured to change the Russian doctrine, from a defensive one to something that addresses the existential Russian security demands. When will the U.S. and NATO respect Russia’s red liines?
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/0 ... clear-war/
June 21, 2024
The military machine commits fiascos abroad. At home, by diverting funds and resources to endless war, it disembowels and impoverishes the nation.
Saddam Hussein’s statue toppled in Baghdad shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. (DoD, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons)
By Chris Hedges
Declassified UK
The public perception of the American empire, at least to those within the United States who have never seen the empire dominate and exploit the “wretched of the earth,” is radically different from reality.
These manufactured illusions, ones Joseph Conrad wrote so presciently about, posit that the empire is a force for good. The empire, we are told, fosters democracy and liberty. It spreads the benefits of “Western civilization.”
These are deceptions repeated ad nauseam by a compliant media and mouthed by politicians, academics and the powerful. But they are lies, as all of us who have spent years reporting overseas understand.
Matt Kennard in his book The Racket — where he reports from Haiti, Bolivia, Turkey, Palestine, Egypt, Tunisia, Mexico, Colombia and many other countries — rips back the veil. He exposes the hidden machinery of empire. He details its brutality, mendacity, cruelty and its dangerous self-delusions.
In the late stage of empire, the image sold to a gullible public begins to entrance the mandarins of empire. They make decisions based not on reality, but on their distorted visions of reality, one coloured by their own propaganda.
Matt refers to this as “the racket.” Blinded by hubris and power they come to believe their deceptions, propelling the empire towards collective suicide. They retreat into a fantasy where hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude.
They replace diplomacy, multilateralism and politics with unilateral threats and the blunt instrument of war. They become the purblind architects of their own destruction.
Matt writes:
“A couple of years after my initiation at The Financial Times a few things started to become clearer. I came to realise a difference between myself and the rest of the people staffing the racket — the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) workers, the economists in the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and so on.”
He continues,
“While I was coming to understand how the racket really worked, I started to see them as willing dupes. There was no doubt they seemed to believe in the virtue of the mission; they imbibed all the theories that were meant to dress up global exploitation in the language of ‘development’ and ‘progress’. I saw this with American ambassadors in Bolivia and Haiti, and with countless other functionaries I interviewed.”
“They genuinely believe the myths,” he concludes,
“and of course are paid handsomely to do so. To help these agents of the racket get up in the morning there also exists, throughout the West, a well-stocked army of intellectuals whose sole purpose is to make theft and brutality acceptable to the general population of the U.S. and its racketeering allies.”
The United States carried out one of the greatest strategic blunders in its history, one that sounded the death knell of the empire, when it invaded and occupied for two decades Afghanistan and Iraq.
The architects of the war in the George W. Bush White House, and the array of useful idiots in the press and academia who were cheerleaders for it, knew very little about the countries being invaded. They believed their technological superiority made them invincible.
Matt Kennard. (Twitter/X)
They were blindsided by the ferocious blowback and armed resistance that led to their defeat. This was something those of us who knew the Middle East — I was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, speak Arabic and reported from the region for seven years — predicted.
But those intent on war preferred a comforting fantasy. They stated, and probably believed, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, although they had no valid evidence to support this claim.
They insisted that democracy would be implanted in Baghdad and spread across the Middle East. They assured the public that U.S. troops would be greeted by grateful Iraqis and Afghans as liberators. They promised that oil revenues would cover the cost of reconstruction.
They insisted that the bold and quick military strike — “shock and awe” — would restore American hegemony in the region and dominance in the world. It did the opposite. As Zbigniew Brzezi?ski noted, this “unilateral war of choice against Iraq precipitated a widespread delegitimation of U.S. foreign policy.”
The War State
America since the end of World War II has become a stratocracy — government dominated by the military. There is a constant preparation for war. The war machine’s massive budgets are sacrosanct. Its billions of dollars in waste and fraud are ignored.
Its military fiascos in Southeast Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East disappear into the vast black hole of historical amnesia. This amnesia, which means there is never accountability, licences the war machine to leap from military debacle to debacle while it economically disembowels the country.
The militarists win every election. They cannot lose. It is impossible to vote against them. The war state is a Götterdämmerung, as Dwight Macdonald writes, “without the gods.”
Nov. 24, 2004: U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld applauding President George W. Bush during his remarks at the Pentagon on a military spending bill. (DoD)
Since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its tax dollars on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government.
Military systems are sold before they are produced with guarantees that huge cost overruns will be covered.
Foreign aid is contingent on buying U.S. weapons. Egypt, which receives some $1.3 billion in foreign military financing, is required to devote it to buying and maintaining U.S. weapons systems.
Israel, meanwhile, has received $158 billion in bilateral assistance from the U.S. since 1949, almost all of it since 1971 in the form of military aid, with most of it going towards arms purchases from American weapons manufacturers.
The U.S. public funds the research, development and building of weapons systems and then buys these same weapons systems on behalf of foreign governments. It is a circular system of corporate welfare.
In the year to September 2022, the U.S. spent $877 billion on the military. This was more than the next 10 countries — including China, Russia, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom — combined.
These huge military expenditures, along with the rising costs of a for-profit healthcare system, have driven the U.S. national debt to over $31 trillion, nearly $5 trillion more than the U.S.’ entire Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
This imbalance is not sustainable, especially once the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency. As of January 2023, the U.S. spent a record $213 billion servicing the interest on its national debt.
The Empire at Home
The military machine, by diverting funds and resources to endless war, disembowels and impoverishes the nation at home, as Matt’s reporting from Washington, Baltimore and New York illustrates.
The cost to the public — socially, economically, politically and culturally — is catastrophic. Workers are reduced to subsistence level and preyed upon by corporations that have privatised every facet of society from health care and education to the prison-industrial complex.
Militarists divert funds from social and infrastructure programs. They pour money into research and development of weapons systems and neglect renewable energy technologies. Bridges, roads, electrical grids and levees collapse. Schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. Our public transportation system is a shambles.
Militarised police gun down mostly unarmed, poor people of colour and fill a system of penitentiaries and jails that hold a staggering 25 percent of the world’s prisoners although Americans represent only 5 percent of the global population.
Cities, deindustrialized, are in ruins. Opioid addiction, suicide, mass shootings, depression and morbid obesity plague a population that has fallen into profound despair.
Militarised societies are fertile ground for demagogues. Militarists, like demagogues, see other nations and cultures in their own image — threatening and aggressive. They seek only domination. They peddle illusions of a return to a mythical golden age of total power and unlimited prosperity.
The deep disillusionment and anger that led to Donald Trump’s election — a reaction to the corporate coup d’état and the poverty afflicting at least half of the country — have destroyed the myth of a functioning democracy.
As Matt notes:
“The American elite that has grown fat from looting abroad is also fighting a war at home. From the 1970s onwards, the same white-collar mobsters have been winning a war against the people of the US, in the form of a massive, underhand con. They have slowly but surely managed to sell off much of what the American people used to own under the guise of various fraudulent ideologies such as the ‘free market’. This is the ‘American way’, a giant swindle, a grand hustle.”
He continues,
“In this sense, the victims of the racket are not just in Port-au-Prince and Baghdad; they are also in Chicago and New York City. The same people that devise the myths about what we do abroad have also built up a similar ideological system that legitimises theft at home; theft from the poorest, by the richest. The poor and working people of Harlem have more in common with the poor and working people of Haiti than they do with their elites, but this has to be obscured for the racket to work.”
“Many actions taken by the US government, in fact, habitually harm the poorest and most destitute of its citizens,” he concludes. “The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is a good example. It came into force in January 1994 and was a fantastic opportunity for US business interests, because markets were opened up for an investment and export bonanza. Simultaneously, thousands of US workers lost their jobs to workers in Mexico where their wages could be beaten down by even poorer people.”
Self-Immolation
“Collateral Crucifixion” mural created by the artist duo Captain Borderline on the side of a house in Berlin, April 2021. (Singlespeedfahrer, Wikimedia Commons, CC0)
The public, bombarded with war propaganda, cheers on their self-immolation. It revels in the despicable beauty of U.S. military prowess. It speaks in the thought-terminating clichés spewed out by mass culture and mass media. It imbibes the illusion of omnipotence and wallows in self-adulation.
The mantra of the militarised state is national security. If every discussion begins with a question of national security, every answer includes force or the threat of force. The preoccupation with internal and external threats divides the world into friend and foe, good and evil.
Those such as Julian Assange who expose the crimes and suicidal folly of empire are ruthlessly persecuted. The truth, a truth Matt uncovers, is bitter and hard.
“While rising empires are often judicious, even rational in their application of armed force for conquest and control of overseas dominions, fading empires are inclined to ill-considered displays of power, dreaming of bold military masterstrokes that would somehow recoup lost prestige and power,” the historian Alfred McCoy writes.
“Often irrational even from an imperial point of view, these micro military operations can yield haemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the process already under way.”
It is vital we see what lies before us. If we continue to be entranced by the images on the walls of Plato’s cave, images that bombard us on screens day and night, if we fail to understand how empire works and its self-destructiveness we will all, especially with the looming climate crisis, descend into a Hobbesian nightmare where the tools of repression, so familiar on the outer reaches of empire, cement into place terrifying corporate totalitarian states.
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/06/21/c ... us-empire/
******
Ruling Class Finally Awakens to the Reality of America's Decline
SIMPLICIUS
JUN 22, 2024
Change is in the air.
I’ve written previously on the panic currently effervescing through the global elites, made viscerally apparent at conclaves like the Davos forum earlier this year. But in America particularly, a deep worry is now consciously gnawing the ruling class—they can see it, feel it: that the American Empire is on its last legs, close to collapse.
This month has seen a bevy of new thinkpieces from top American deepstate figures or old-guard publications urging the changing of course, lest the country be swept away by the remorseless tide of history.
The first and most prominent of these making the rounds is that of former speech writer and White House staffer to Obama, Ben Rhodes, entitled:
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-s ... rld-rhodes
Rhodes remains among the political haute monde, having founded a thinktank alongside Jake Sullivan, which had many interlinkings with Soros’ Open Society organizations. That’s to say, Rhodes has his finger on the pulse of the ‘inner circles’ of the patriciate, which is underscored by the CFR’s journal offering tribune to his latest. And so it’s even more telling that he’s moved to sound the alarm against a country he feels is—as the cover art above obliges—stumbling headfirst into historic headwinds.
The article is actually quite long and detailed, so we have Arnaud Bertrand to summarize its finest points. The first bolded portion below gets to the heart of Rhodes’ startling argument—but read the rest of the bolded:
This is an interesting piece by brhodes, Obama's Former Deputy National Security Advisor
In an immense departure from US policy to date, he advocates that the US "abandons the mindset of American primacy" and "pivots away from the political considerations, maximalism, and Western-centric view that have caused [the Biden] administration to make some of the same mistakes as its predecessors".
He writes, and I find this a very powerful sentence, that "meeting the moment requires building a bridge to the future—not the past." As in not seek to regain a lost hegemony, but adapt to the "world as it is" which he calls "the world of post-American primacy".
To be sure, the piece still has strong relents of the liberal instincts to remake the world in America's image - a leopard cannot change its spots - but at least he acknowledges the reality that the world has changed and that the US should view itself as a power coexisting with others, not THE power that needs to dominate the rest of the world. Which is a first step...
Also, significantly, he points out the insanity of "framing the battle between democracy and autocracy as a confrontation with a handful of geopolitical adversaries" when the West's own democracies are in such sorry states today that they can hardly be called "democracies" anymore... He writes that instead of trying to constantly interfere in changing other countries' systems, "ultimately, the most important thing that America can do in the world is detoxify its own democracy".
The below encapsulates the core thesis, which is that America’s global primacy is over, and the only way for the country to stay afloat is to adapt to the new realities:
Yet even though a return to competent normalcy was in order, the Biden administration’s mindset of restoration has occasionally struggled against the currents of our disordered times. An updated conception of U.S. leadership—one tailored to a world that has moved on from American primacy and the eccentricities of American politics—is necessary to minimize enormous risks and pursue new opportunities.
This is the theme which recurs again and again throughout the new zeitgeist taking over political discourse in the stricken Beltway—panicking neocons are exhorting each other: we’re in a fight for our lives, if we don’t accept the new realities, we’ll drown!
Publications like Foreign Affairs are where the elite address not us, but each other, in the long-standing tradition of euphemism as secret-coded language of their ‘interior world’ of the deepstate and outlying political class. Here Mr. Rhodes adeptly navigates the nuances of this privileged cant when he declares that the Rules Based Order has fallen:
But lodged in the creases of his appeal are the keys to the game: why is the Order dead? He answers: because countries previously vassalized by strict obedience to the Hegemon are now, for once, acting independently and making—quelle surprise!—sovereign decisions. And thus is translated the secret message of the inter-elite argot: the ‘Rules Based Order’ was nothing more than a veil for line-toeing slavery, and it’s now finished forever.
He spells it out even more clearly in a fittingly titled section toward the end:
Again the laundered speech; allow us to translate: “Our primacy has come to an end because the world has woken up to our sham. All the current conflicts we’re engaged in—are ones in which we have no actual legal justifications to be involved. Now our gig is up and the world has seen our blatant hypocrisy and double standards, including our own citizens, who now refuse to die for our globalist greed!”
Finally, in the end comes his reasonable surmise:
None of this will be easy, and success is not preordained, since unreliable adversaries also have agency. But given the stakes, it is worth exploring how a world of competing superpower blocs could be knitted into coexistence and negotiation on issues that cannot be dealt with in isolation.
Did you hear that? That’s the ghostly death knell of the U.S. establishment tolling in the night. For once, without uttering its repelling name, they have in essence invoked multipolarity as the sole workable solution going forward. They acknowledge America’s power has reached its natural end, its final logical conclusion, and only working together with other superpowers remains a viable policy moving forward.
(Paywall)
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/rul ... ens-to-the
*******
Former UN Weapons Inspector Warns About Looming Threat of Nuclear War
By Morrigan Johnson - June 21, 2024 2
Scott Ritter and Colonel Richard Black, a former Virginia state senator, warn about dangers of nuclear war in press conference on June 12. [Source: youtube.com]
Says: “You will die”
“You will die,” Scott Ritter warned Americans on Wednesday morning in a press conference hosted by the Schiller Institute. “The danger is real,” he said, “and Amercians should be scared.”
Ritter noted that, as the war in Ukraine escalates and the U.S. is providing weapons to directly attack Russia, “Anatoly Antonov, the top Russian nuclear weapon expert and lead negotiator on past nuclear treaties with the U.S., is sitting in the Kremlin and his phone is not ringing. We are not even attempting at diplomacy.”
Anatonov—his phone is not ringing. [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
Ritter was joined by Helga Zepp-LaRouche and former intelligence professionals Lawrence Wilkerson and former Republican state senator and Vietnam veteran Richard Black. They urged the people of the United States and the world to awaken to the danger of mutually assured destruction.
Their dire warning comes as tensions escalate to a point reminiscent of, or even exceeding, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis during the first Cold War period, when the world came within a heartbeat of nuclear war breaking out.
The Western media are simply not covering developments. Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector who exposed the deceit surrounding the WMD and Iraq, urged Americans to take the urgency and sense of danger to the polls in the next election to prevent World War III, and to pressure decision makers every step of the way.
While the Russian nuclear doctrine is defensive, the American doctrine has been under pressure to miniaturize the nuclear capabilities into conventional use and to develop first strike capabilities in recent years.
In January, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakhorova raised the alarm that the White House has no one in charge of nukes with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in the hospital with prostate cancer. After October 7th, Israel’s Dimona nuclear site came under American integration and control, amid widespread inter-governmental, inter-institutional and inter-state mistrust and dysfunction. The American and Israeli nuclear capabilities are otherwise, under a “there is no doctrine” doctrine.
Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor. [Source: haaretz.com]
Following the 2023 Belarus-Russia nuclear arms deal, in response to increased NATO activity, spokeswoman Zakharova pointed out the inadequate reaction of a number of Western capitals to decisions regarding the development of the deal, saying “In the context of the total hybrid war unleashed by the West against Russia and the declared intention of the United States and NATO to inflict a “strategic defeat” on us, it would be naive to continue to count on the complete absence of any military-technical countermeasures on our part in this area. We reserved and continue to reserve the right to take the necessary additional steps to ensure the security of Russia and its allies.”
The spokeswoman continued, “Moreover, unlike NATO, which is a conglomerate of countries subordinate to the United States, in our case we are talking about a Union State that officially has a common military doctrine. Therefore, we are talking about security measures taken by the Union State on its own national territory. All necessary decisions in this regard have been made, and they will be strictly implemented.” Putin declared Belarus a nuclear power in January 2024.
On the evening of May 14th, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) completed a sub-critical experiment at the PULSE facility in Nevada. Seismic activity data and advanced computer models are analyzed in Sandia and Los Alamos National Lab, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and the Mission Support and Test Services LLC. Satellites are also routinely used.
[Source: pozirk.online]
Ukraine is striking targets deep inside Russia with Western weapons. Ukraine has violated weapons restrictions and red lines in the past. However ,NATO member states, the U.S. and Germany, are now fully authorizing the scope of how Western weapons can be used, including striking deep into Russian territory.
[Source: foreignpolicy.com]
On May 22nd, Ukrainian drones struck the Armavir Radar Station in Russia’s southwestern Krasnodar Krai region, a part of Russia’s early warning radar system used for the detection of incoming ICBM attacks. Such a defensive radar warning system plays a vital role in the security of the country and is integrated into the nuclear command and control system. In strategic terms, it signals imminent nuclear Armageddon.
[Source: eir.news]
A Russian flotilla is now miles from the Florida coast with a strong message, reminiscent of the first Cuban Missile Crisis. Included among the flotilla, equipped with hypersonic missiles, is a Yasen-class Kazen submarine armed with nuclear SLBMs.
[Source: washingtonpost.com]
Mutually assured destruction is inevitable unless the U.S. shifts its foreign policy direction. If the Earth were destroyed in nuclear war, it would result in a nuclear winter.
[Source: twitter.com]
Stability-instability paradox
There is a stability-instability paradox arising out of the blurring of conventional war, proxy war compared to direct involvement in war, and nuclear war—these are all very separate states of war. The lack of clarity and lack of diplomacy by the Western powers, however, have led to an international stability crisis.
Consider the purpose of nuclear deterrent logic to be along the lines of nuclear mutually assured destruction that ought to become all-fearing where states avoid war at all costs. The argument of deterrence posits that states are made more safe through mutually assured destruction. The stability-instability paradox is a well-established concept in nuclear security literature.
But the paradox can spiral out of control, making the world less safe on the small scale where conventional war is blurred from the big scale nuclear war. The doctrine that would trigger a nuclear war might not always be as clear on the conventional level and non-state level from the nuclear level, leaving a zone of instability.
The paradox can be exaggerated theoretically at both extremes. Does deterrence prevent war, or is it destabilizing? It means that nuclear weapons can create extreme stability and instability scenarios, depending on certain factors. Wherever the state’s doctrines are unclear, or insufficient, the necessity of extremely clear state-to-state communication at high levels must take place to clarify the state of war, and the red lines between conventional, non-state threats, or nuclear war. The problem is that diplomacy is not occurring.
The U.S. is involved in a conventional proxy, waging hybrid war by non-state means, and crossing every red line. The U.S. and NATO are belligerents in the war, but act as if not at war.
Americans are even more unaware than at the state level due to the media’s blackout of the state’s foreign policy failures, or the world situation.
On June 13th, NATO General Secretary Jens Soltenberg gave a speech stating the intent to develop “response options”, by meeting with counterparts in North America the following week.
The diplomatic breakdown is at a crisis point and Putin is being pressured to change the Russian doctrine, from a defensive one to something that addresses the existential Russian security demands. When will the U.S. and NATO respect Russia’s red liines?
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/0 ... clear-war/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Nature of Foxes
Graham ‘accidentally’ exposes the true nature of U.S. diplomacy
June 22, 2024 Global Times
An open pit mine for iron ore in Ukraine. The country has the largest uranium deposit in Europe. Ukraine’s natural resources include coal, oil, natural gas, manganese ore, and graphite.
Global Times editorial
Recently, senior U.S. politician and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham unabashedly stated in a media interview that Ukraine holds business value for the U.S. He claimed that there are “10 to 12 trillion dollars of critical minerals” in Ukraine, and the primary reason for supporting Ukraine is to seize these critical minerals by defeating Russia on the battlefield. Furthermore, he advocated for seizing and using frozen Russian assets in Europe and the U.S..
These remarks reveal the true intentions behind the U.S. political elites’ current policy toward the Ukraine crisis. As foreign netizens bluntly stated on social media, “Now you know why the West won’t allow peace talks.”
As a Senate “hawk,” Graham often garners attention with his extreme rhetoric. For example, he once claimed that parts of Iran must be “blew off the map,” and he touted U.S. military aid to Ukraine as “the best money we’ve ever spent,” hence he was added to a list of “terrorists and extremists” compiled by Russia’s state financial monitoring agency, Rosfinmonitoring. He has also repeatedly stirred up tensions over the Taiwan question, threatening “sanctions from hell” against China.
Many of Graham’s radical ideas can only remain at the level of bluster, but his latest remarks on camera have sparked significant outrage for two reasons: First, because he “accidentally” exposed the true nature of U.S. diplomacy, making it clearer to the world what lies behind the facade of the U.S.’ claim that it wants to “maintain peace”; and second, because of the speeches and actions of the U.S. political elites he represents, which constantly fuel the Ukraine crisis, starkly contrast with the international community’s consensus on de-escalating tensions, and creating conditions for a cease-fire and an end to the war.
Graham views the Ukraine crisis as a business deal, a perspective that is somewhat representative among the U.S. political elites. Many of them talk about peace, but their real concern is not Ukraine, nor European stability. On the contrary, they are keen on Ukraine’s abundant resources and how to exploit Europe’s prolonged and profound crisis to continuously consolidate U.S.’ absolute power and dominance in European security affairs.
Turning the Ukraine crisis into a global conflict is the main policy trend of the U.S. in handling the crisis. Washington intends to turn this crisis into a key propeller for its own geopolitical competition around the world. Such policy goals are quite dangerous. Dialogue and negotiation are the only feasible way to resolve the crisis. This is the common voice of any responsible person in the international community.
However, in the past two years or so, the U.S. and certain NATO countries have continued to undermine the opportunities and efforts of Russia and Ukraine to resume direct dialogue, and even attempted to maximize the use of the crisis for their own gains, creating pressure in Europe and even the world under which people must choose sides and highlight camp confrontation.
The extreme measures advocated by Graham once again show that the U.S. policy elites are taking a big gamble. The lack of historical reflection is the main reason why the U.S. frequently makes mistakes in major decisions. At present, the U.S. should best learn from the idea of building a “peace without victory” put forward during WWI by Woodrow Wilson, the architect of U.S. diplomacy, and use the idea of ensuring cooperation among major powers and not engaging in camp confrontation to deal with thorny diplomatic issues such as the Ukraine crisis. Regrettably, the current U.S. decision-making elites have both ignored the painful lessons learned from the wars of the 20th century and trampled on the warnings of their predecessors. This is a tragedy of U.S. diplomacy.
The crisis in Ukraine has entered its third year of overall escalation. The war is still ongoing, the impact continues to spill over, and the conflict is in danger of further escalation. If we want to achieve an early ceasefire and end the war, we cannot allow the Graham-style bellicose thinking to spread. U.S. elites often flaunt themselves with terms such as “democracy” and “rules” and deliberately exaggerate that they are “top students” in international relations. Graham has already told the truth about U.S. diplomacy. The U.S. is the one that ignores rules, stubbornly interferes in other countries’ internal affairs, and creates chaos within other countries and in the international community.
Graham’s remarks that Ukrainian resources cannot be given to Russia and China have fully demonstrated the narrow-mindedness of the U.S. in the Ukraine crisis.
https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2024/ ... diplomacy/
Old Strom was a racist pig and hypocrite who fathered a child upon a black servant. Old Fritz was unintelligible. But this guy, holy shit, takes the cake for blatant opportunism. A best buddy of the warmonger McCain who joined him in publicly trashing Trump until McCain went to hell and then Lindsey stuck his head so far up Trump's ass that he could see his tonsils. But the over-the-top belligerence sells well in these parts and perhaps dissuades his fellow Republicans from giving credence to persistent rumors of his sexual preference, of which their christo-fascist preachers would not approve. Wading through a sea of dough from the MIC doesn't hurt either....
I am ceaselessly amused when various liberals and progressives implore me to contact my senator for this or that burning issue. Who do they think I am, Raytheon?
June 22, 2024 Global Times
An open pit mine for iron ore in Ukraine. The country has the largest uranium deposit in Europe. Ukraine’s natural resources include coal, oil, natural gas, manganese ore, and graphite.
Global Times editorial
Recently, senior U.S. politician and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham unabashedly stated in a media interview that Ukraine holds business value for the U.S. He claimed that there are “10 to 12 trillion dollars of critical minerals” in Ukraine, and the primary reason for supporting Ukraine is to seize these critical minerals by defeating Russia on the battlefield. Furthermore, he advocated for seizing and using frozen Russian assets in Europe and the U.S..
These remarks reveal the true intentions behind the U.S. political elites’ current policy toward the Ukraine crisis. As foreign netizens bluntly stated on social media, “Now you know why the West won’t allow peace talks.”
As a Senate “hawk,” Graham often garners attention with his extreme rhetoric. For example, he once claimed that parts of Iran must be “blew off the map,” and he touted U.S. military aid to Ukraine as “the best money we’ve ever spent,” hence he was added to a list of “terrorists and extremists” compiled by Russia’s state financial monitoring agency, Rosfinmonitoring. He has also repeatedly stirred up tensions over the Taiwan question, threatening “sanctions from hell” against China.
Many of Graham’s radical ideas can only remain at the level of bluster, but his latest remarks on camera have sparked significant outrage for two reasons: First, because he “accidentally” exposed the true nature of U.S. diplomacy, making it clearer to the world what lies behind the facade of the U.S.’ claim that it wants to “maintain peace”; and second, because of the speeches and actions of the U.S. political elites he represents, which constantly fuel the Ukraine crisis, starkly contrast with the international community’s consensus on de-escalating tensions, and creating conditions for a cease-fire and an end to the war.
Graham views the Ukraine crisis as a business deal, a perspective that is somewhat representative among the U.S. political elites. Many of them talk about peace, but their real concern is not Ukraine, nor European stability. On the contrary, they are keen on Ukraine’s abundant resources and how to exploit Europe’s prolonged and profound crisis to continuously consolidate U.S.’ absolute power and dominance in European security affairs.
Turning the Ukraine crisis into a global conflict is the main policy trend of the U.S. in handling the crisis. Washington intends to turn this crisis into a key propeller for its own geopolitical competition around the world. Such policy goals are quite dangerous. Dialogue and negotiation are the only feasible way to resolve the crisis. This is the common voice of any responsible person in the international community.
However, in the past two years or so, the U.S. and certain NATO countries have continued to undermine the opportunities and efforts of Russia and Ukraine to resume direct dialogue, and even attempted to maximize the use of the crisis for their own gains, creating pressure in Europe and even the world under which people must choose sides and highlight camp confrontation.
The extreme measures advocated by Graham once again show that the U.S. policy elites are taking a big gamble. The lack of historical reflection is the main reason why the U.S. frequently makes mistakes in major decisions. At present, the U.S. should best learn from the idea of building a “peace without victory” put forward during WWI by Woodrow Wilson, the architect of U.S. diplomacy, and use the idea of ensuring cooperation among major powers and not engaging in camp confrontation to deal with thorny diplomatic issues such as the Ukraine crisis. Regrettably, the current U.S. decision-making elites have both ignored the painful lessons learned from the wars of the 20th century and trampled on the warnings of their predecessors. This is a tragedy of U.S. diplomacy.
The crisis in Ukraine has entered its third year of overall escalation. The war is still ongoing, the impact continues to spill over, and the conflict is in danger of further escalation. If we want to achieve an early ceasefire and end the war, we cannot allow the Graham-style bellicose thinking to spread. U.S. elites often flaunt themselves with terms such as “democracy” and “rules” and deliberately exaggerate that they are “top students” in international relations. Graham has already told the truth about U.S. diplomacy. The U.S. is the one that ignores rules, stubbornly interferes in other countries’ internal affairs, and creates chaos within other countries and in the international community.
Graham’s remarks that Ukrainian resources cannot be given to Russia and China have fully demonstrated the narrow-mindedness of the U.S. in the Ukraine crisis.
https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2024/ ... diplomacy/
Old Strom was a racist pig and hypocrite who fathered a child upon a black servant. Old Fritz was unintelligible. But this guy, holy shit, takes the cake for blatant opportunism. A best buddy of the warmonger McCain who joined him in publicly trashing Trump until McCain went to hell and then Lindsey stuck his head so far up Trump's ass that he could see his tonsils. But the over-the-top belligerence sells well in these parts and perhaps dissuades his fellow Republicans from giving credence to persistent rumors of his sexual preference, of which their christo-fascist preachers would not approve. Wading through a sea of dough from the MIC doesn't hurt either....
I am ceaselessly amused when various liberals and progressives implore me to contact my senator for this or that burning issue. Who do they think I am, Raytheon?
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Nature of Foxes
How Corporations Are Fueling Geopolitical Tensions and Global Conflicts in the 21st Century
Posted on June 24, 2024 by Conor Gallagher
By John P. Ruehl, an Australian-American journalist living in Washington, D.C., and a world affairs correspondent for the Independent Media Institute. He is a contributing editor to Strategic Policy and a contributor to several other foreign affairs publications. His book, Budget Superpower: How Russia Challenges the West With an Economy Smaller Than Texas’, was published in December 2022. Originally produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Shortly after the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas War and the beginning of the widescale destruction of Gaza in October 2023, McDonald’s executives in Chicago found themselves inadvertently entangled in the conflict. Local owners of McDonald’s restaurants are given significant autonomy over profits and operations, and franchisees had begun taking sides. Social media posts by McDonald’s in Israel highlighted the provision of free meals to Israeli soldiers, causing McDonald’s franchises across the Middle East to collectively pledge millions of dollars to support Palestinians in Gaza.
McDonald’s has since attempted to minimize commenting on the franchisees and navigate its way through the controversy. In April 2024, McDonald’s Corporation announced it would buy back 225 of its restaurants from Alonyal Limited, the Israeli company that manages McDonald’s in the country, for an undisclosed amount. Expected to be finalized over the next few months, the deal will keep McDonald’s busy as the company tries to reverse the decline in regional sales and stock price caused by the affair.
The incident demonstrates how multinational corporations with global footprints and decentralized operations can rapidly find themselves fueling opposing sides of conflicts. While McDonald’s top executives did not plan to show support for either Israel or Palestine, profit incentives have occasionally driven companies to support multiple sides in conflicts, often in more meaningful ways. The Iran-Iraq War from 1980 to 1988 saw Western weapons manufacturers directly and indirectly supply both sides with arms, capitalizing on the shifting Western government support for Iraq and Iran throughout the conflict.
However, as multinational companies have expanded their international operations amid increasing globalization and strains on the U.S.-led global order, they are now challenged with maintaining business dealings with both the U.S. and countries hostile to American interests. Additionally, these companies are becoming more entangled in fueling opposing sides of civil conflicts within other countries, directly and indirectly, in ways that can prolong or escalate violence.
The war in Ukraine has exposed how multinational corporations have become less willing to fully comply with the directives of any single government, including the U.S., when it conflicts with their financial interests. Despite Russia’s annexation of Crimea and instigation of a proxy war in Ukraine’s Donbas region in 2014, numerous Western companies continued operating in both countries, providing the Russian government with tax revenue, technological expertise, products, and employee knowledge, easing the Russian government’s efforts to support its war efforts. However, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, many Western companies faced the dilemma of complying with sanctions by exiting Russia or retaining access to lucrative government contracts and a 145-million-person consumer market.
Yet while most departed Russia due to public pressure and sanctions, other companies remained in the country, citing expensive exit costs. Others which officially left Russia or declared their intention to do so continue to operate in Russia and have proven essential to the Kremlin’s ability to reduce the impact of sanctions. Meanwhile, even China, Russia’s most important partner, had its largest commercial drone company, DJI, emerge as the largest drone provider for both Russia and Ukraine, showing the powerful allure of profits and how international markets allow the flow of products to war zones regardless of geopolitical alliances.
As tensions between the West and China have also intensified over recent years, Western companies have faced mounting pressure to sever ties. U.S. tech giants like Google, IBM, and Cisco have come under fire for aiding the development of China’s security capabilities, albeit ostensibly for domestic use. In 2019, comments by NBA officials over China’s response to pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong drew severe financial repercussions for the NBA’s operations in China, and drew a response from the White House criticizing companies that had “kowtowed to the lure of China’s money and markets.”
Yet Beijing continues to try to compel foreign companies to take a separate stance from their home governments on divisive issues, or at least ensure neutrality. Many U.S. companies already generate larger revenues in China than domestically and are not willing to ostracize the world’s second-largest economy and largest consumer market.
While multinational companies have historically operated under deference to the U.S. during the last few decades of neoliberal globalization, the challenges to the U.S.-led international order have made many reconsider their positions. This dynamic, coupled with globalized supply chains and markets, appears to have emboldened some multinational corporations to believe that they can support multiple sides in geopolitical confrontations with relative impunity, while their products and services will likely find their way to desired destinations and partners regardless of government directives.
Instead of marching in lockstep with Washington, companies appear more willing to try to maintain ties to the U.S. while simultaneously maintaining and building ties with countries hostile to it. This approach risks aggravating geopolitical tensions and undermining the coherence of the U.S.-led global order, as the profit motives of multinational corporations diverge from the foreign policy objectives of the governments where they are based.
Importantly, as globalization has advanced, multinational corporations have become increasingly involved in civil conflicts and regions with fragile governance. In some cases, they have actively exacerbated tensions by supporting rebel groups and governments. Chiquita Brands International S.à.r.l., one of the largest agricultural companies in the world, admitted to paying money to both the FARC rebel group and right-wing paramilitary groups in Colombia in the 1990s and 2000s to ensure the safety of operations.
This practice of companies supporting multiple sides in conflicts is particularly evident in Africa, often to secure access to resources. In Nigeria, U.S. companies Shell and Chevron have paid insurgent groups to safeguard their oil and gas interests, while also providing tax and developmental funds to the Nigerian government. Similarly, mining companies like Afrimex (UK) Ltd. and Belgium-based Trademet SA have made payments to rebel groups operating in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), as well as working with the DRC government.
Chinese mining companies are also alleged to have paid Nigerian militant groups to access mineral reserves in the country, while simultaneously conducting business with the Nigerian government. In Myanmar, various Chinese and Thai firms have pursued a dual-track approach of officially signing deals with the military junta while covertly engaging with ethnic armed groups controlling territories rich in natural resources.
Mining, logging, and agricultural companies also paid “revolutionary taxes” to the New People’s Army (NPA) and other insurgent groups in the Philippines, including companies like Lepanto Consolidated Mining Company and Philex Mining Corporation, prompting public disapproval by Filipino officials. Louis Berger Group, an engineering consultancy, meanwhile paid the Taliban and other groups in Afghanistan to protect supply convoys and construction projects, while serving contracts for the U.S. military.
Banks and payment processing networks are also indirectly facilitating or turning a blind eye to financing designated terrorist and criminal groups. The FinCEN Files, released in 2020, also revealed how banks like the UK’s Standard Chartered PLC processed millions of dollars for Arab Bank customers, despite Arab Bank being found liable in 2014 for knowingly transmitting money to Hamas.
The growing direct and indirect role of corporations in conflict zones, particularly in regions with weak state enforcement, is also being led by private military and security companies (PMSCs). These firms are often employed by other private actors to safeguard investments and personnel but have a natural tendency to manage and prolong conflicts rather than resolve them. Across Africa in particular, PMSCs are present to serve private interests as well as governments. The increasing use of PMSCs globally has raised concerns about the ability of multinational corporations to swiftly shift their support between conflicting sides as their strategic interests evolve, potentially taking a far more active role in fueling and prolonging conflicts.
Governments, of course, regularly support rival actors in conflicts. Competing political factions, shifting interests, political expediency, economic motives, desperation, and a desire to promote instability. The Syrian Civil War saw Pentagon-funded Syrian rebels fighting those supported by the Central Intelligence Agency. Meanwhile, the Syrian government itself was paying the Islamic State (IS) to buy back its own stolen oil and natural gas while backing other rebel groups to fight IS.
But the risk of corporations more actively supporting multiple sides in conflict zones and carving up their own territories and spheres of influence is a concerning prospect, akin to the Dutch East India Company which governed its own territories through military force and trade monopolies. While there are still waning expectations that multinational corporations pick clearer sides in interstate conflicts, there appears to be little stopping them from fueling and prolonging intrastate conflicts featuring non-state actors, as long as it serves their financial interests. Urgent action is needed to strengthen the regulation and accountability of PMSCs and multinational corporations operating in conflict zones, as their ability to shape conflicts appears set to continue growing.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/06 ... ntury.html
******
Covert Action: The CIA and the USA’s imperialist handbook
A breakdown of the CIA’s long history of subverting workers’ movements at home and abroad.
Proletarian TV
Sunday 23 June 2024
Alternative Views hosts this interview with John Stockwell, a former CIA agent turned state critic and author of In Search of Enemies: Red Sunset, a meticulously detailed insider account of CIA covert actions. Joining him is Louis Wolf, a respected alternative journalist and writer who co-founded CovertAction magazine, which serves as a vital source of information for the general public regarding the actions of the CIA.
The CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) as we know it today emerged in the aftermath of World War 2 when President Harry Truman’s administration brought in the National Security Act of 1947. This pivotal legislation reshaped American intelligence efforts. Before this, the nation’s intelligence apparatus was primarily focused on gathering foreign intelligence, beginning with the establishment of the Office of the Coordination of Information (COI) by President Franklin D Roosevelt.
The COI’s successor was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which moved on from mere information gathering to what the CIA now describes on its website as ‘unconventional and paramilitary operations’ – essentially, to activities that would be termed terrorism when carried out by other nations. Following the OSS, there was a transitional period during which the Strategic Services Unit (SSU) served as a precursor to the establishment of the modern CIA.
For imperialist nations like the USA, maintaining control over other countries is imperative to enriching the ruling class. Recognising the difficulty in gaining widespread public support for continuous kinetic warfare, the imperialist states have instead established loyal and ruthless agencies that operate behind the scenes, tasked with carrying out covert wars and military operations that uphold western global hegemony.
In this interview, Stockwell and Wolf delve into how the administration of President Ronald Reagan significantly expanded the CIA’s authority during the 1980s. This enlargement emboldened the agency still further, granting it the power to act with impunity, free from the oversight of the media or the constraints of criminal courts.
What’s more, the CIA was given permission to operate within the borders of the United States, against its own population. This extension of powers was a response to mounting public scrutiny, as people became increasingly aware of the consequences of US actions around the world.
This revealing discussion elucidates the CIA’s transformation and its pivotal role in advancing imperialist agendas, particularly during periods of intensified political crisis.
https://thecommunists.org/2024/06/23/tv ... -handbook/
Posted on June 24, 2024 by Conor Gallagher
By John P. Ruehl, an Australian-American journalist living in Washington, D.C., and a world affairs correspondent for the Independent Media Institute. He is a contributing editor to Strategic Policy and a contributor to several other foreign affairs publications. His book, Budget Superpower: How Russia Challenges the West With an Economy Smaller Than Texas’, was published in December 2022. Originally produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Shortly after the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas War and the beginning of the widescale destruction of Gaza in October 2023, McDonald’s executives in Chicago found themselves inadvertently entangled in the conflict. Local owners of McDonald’s restaurants are given significant autonomy over profits and operations, and franchisees had begun taking sides. Social media posts by McDonald’s in Israel highlighted the provision of free meals to Israeli soldiers, causing McDonald’s franchises across the Middle East to collectively pledge millions of dollars to support Palestinians in Gaza.
McDonald’s has since attempted to minimize commenting on the franchisees and navigate its way through the controversy. In April 2024, McDonald’s Corporation announced it would buy back 225 of its restaurants from Alonyal Limited, the Israeli company that manages McDonald’s in the country, for an undisclosed amount. Expected to be finalized over the next few months, the deal will keep McDonald’s busy as the company tries to reverse the decline in regional sales and stock price caused by the affair.
The incident demonstrates how multinational corporations with global footprints and decentralized operations can rapidly find themselves fueling opposing sides of conflicts. While McDonald’s top executives did not plan to show support for either Israel or Palestine, profit incentives have occasionally driven companies to support multiple sides in conflicts, often in more meaningful ways. The Iran-Iraq War from 1980 to 1988 saw Western weapons manufacturers directly and indirectly supply both sides with arms, capitalizing on the shifting Western government support for Iraq and Iran throughout the conflict.
However, as multinational companies have expanded their international operations amid increasing globalization and strains on the U.S.-led global order, they are now challenged with maintaining business dealings with both the U.S. and countries hostile to American interests. Additionally, these companies are becoming more entangled in fueling opposing sides of civil conflicts within other countries, directly and indirectly, in ways that can prolong or escalate violence.
The war in Ukraine has exposed how multinational corporations have become less willing to fully comply with the directives of any single government, including the U.S., when it conflicts with their financial interests. Despite Russia’s annexation of Crimea and instigation of a proxy war in Ukraine’s Donbas region in 2014, numerous Western companies continued operating in both countries, providing the Russian government with tax revenue, technological expertise, products, and employee knowledge, easing the Russian government’s efforts to support its war efforts. However, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, many Western companies faced the dilemma of complying with sanctions by exiting Russia or retaining access to lucrative government contracts and a 145-million-person consumer market.
Yet while most departed Russia due to public pressure and sanctions, other companies remained in the country, citing expensive exit costs. Others which officially left Russia or declared their intention to do so continue to operate in Russia and have proven essential to the Kremlin’s ability to reduce the impact of sanctions. Meanwhile, even China, Russia’s most important partner, had its largest commercial drone company, DJI, emerge as the largest drone provider for both Russia and Ukraine, showing the powerful allure of profits and how international markets allow the flow of products to war zones regardless of geopolitical alliances.
As tensions between the West and China have also intensified over recent years, Western companies have faced mounting pressure to sever ties. U.S. tech giants like Google, IBM, and Cisco have come under fire for aiding the development of China’s security capabilities, albeit ostensibly for domestic use. In 2019, comments by NBA officials over China’s response to pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong drew severe financial repercussions for the NBA’s operations in China, and drew a response from the White House criticizing companies that had “kowtowed to the lure of China’s money and markets.”
Yet Beijing continues to try to compel foreign companies to take a separate stance from their home governments on divisive issues, or at least ensure neutrality. Many U.S. companies already generate larger revenues in China than domestically and are not willing to ostracize the world’s second-largest economy and largest consumer market.
While multinational companies have historically operated under deference to the U.S. during the last few decades of neoliberal globalization, the challenges to the U.S.-led international order have made many reconsider their positions. This dynamic, coupled with globalized supply chains and markets, appears to have emboldened some multinational corporations to believe that they can support multiple sides in geopolitical confrontations with relative impunity, while their products and services will likely find their way to desired destinations and partners regardless of government directives.
Instead of marching in lockstep with Washington, companies appear more willing to try to maintain ties to the U.S. while simultaneously maintaining and building ties with countries hostile to it. This approach risks aggravating geopolitical tensions and undermining the coherence of the U.S.-led global order, as the profit motives of multinational corporations diverge from the foreign policy objectives of the governments where they are based.
Importantly, as globalization has advanced, multinational corporations have become increasingly involved in civil conflicts and regions with fragile governance. In some cases, they have actively exacerbated tensions by supporting rebel groups and governments. Chiquita Brands International S.à.r.l., one of the largest agricultural companies in the world, admitted to paying money to both the FARC rebel group and right-wing paramilitary groups in Colombia in the 1990s and 2000s to ensure the safety of operations.
This practice of companies supporting multiple sides in conflicts is particularly evident in Africa, often to secure access to resources. In Nigeria, U.S. companies Shell and Chevron have paid insurgent groups to safeguard their oil and gas interests, while also providing tax and developmental funds to the Nigerian government. Similarly, mining companies like Afrimex (UK) Ltd. and Belgium-based Trademet SA have made payments to rebel groups operating in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), as well as working with the DRC government.
Chinese mining companies are also alleged to have paid Nigerian militant groups to access mineral reserves in the country, while simultaneously conducting business with the Nigerian government. In Myanmar, various Chinese and Thai firms have pursued a dual-track approach of officially signing deals with the military junta while covertly engaging with ethnic armed groups controlling territories rich in natural resources.
Mining, logging, and agricultural companies also paid “revolutionary taxes” to the New People’s Army (NPA) and other insurgent groups in the Philippines, including companies like Lepanto Consolidated Mining Company and Philex Mining Corporation, prompting public disapproval by Filipino officials. Louis Berger Group, an engineering consultancy, meanwhile paid the Taliban and other groups in Afghanistan to protect supply convoys and construction projects, while serving contracts for the U.S. military.
Banks and payment processing networks are also indirectly facilitating or turning a blind eye to financing designated terrorist and criminal groups. The FinCEN Files, released in 2020, also revealed how banks like the UK’s Standard Chartered PLC processed millions of dollars for Arab Bank customers, despite Arab Bank being found liable in 2014 for knowingly transmitting money to Hamas.
The growing direct and indirect role of corporations in conflict zones, particularly in regions with weak state enforcement, is also being led by private military and security companies (PMSCs). These firms are often employed by other private actors to safeguard investments and personnel but have a natural tendency to manage and prolong conflicts rather than resolve them. Across Africa in particular, PMSCs are present to serve private interests as well as governments. The increasing use of PMSCs globally has raised concerns about the ability of multinational corporations to swiftly shift their support between conflicting sides as their strategic interests evolve, potentially taking a far more active role in fueling and prolonging conflicts.
Governments, of course, regularly support rival actors in conflicts. Competing political factions, shifting interests, political expediency, economic motives, desperation, and a desire to promote instability. The Syrian Civil War saw Pentagon-funded Syrian rebels fighting those supported by the Central Intelligence Agency. Meanwhile, the Syrian government itself was paying the Islamic State (IS) to buy back its own stolen oil and natural gas while backing other rebel groups to fight IS.
But the risk of corporations more actively supporting multiple sides in conflict zones and carving up their own territories and spheres of influence is a concerning prospect, akin to the Dutch East India Company which governed its own territories through military force and trade monopolies. While there are still waning expectations that multinational corporations pick clearer sides in interstate conflicts, there appears to be little stopping them from fueling and prolonging intrastate conflicts featuring non-state actors, as long as it serves their financial interests. Urgent action is needed to strengthen the regulation and accountability of PMSCs and multinational corporations operating in conflict zones, as their ability to shape conflicts appears set to continue growing.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/06 ... ntury.html
******
Covert Action: The CIA and the USA’s imperialist handbook
A breakdown of the CIA’s long history of subverting workers’ movements at home and abroad.
Proletarian TV
Sunday 23 June 2024
Alternative Views hosts this interview with John Stockwell, a former CIA agent turned state critic and author of In Search of Enemies: Red Sunset, a meticulously detailed insider account of CIA covert actions. Joining him is Louis Wolf, a respected alternative journalist and writer who co-founded CovertAction magazine, which serves as a vital source of information for the general public regarding the actions of the CIA.
The CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) as we know it today emerged in the aftermath of World War 2 when President Harry Truman’s administration brought in the National Security Act of 1947. This pivotal legislation reshaped American intelligence efforts. Before this, the nation’s intelligence apparatus was primarily focused on gathering foreign intelligence, beginning with the establishment of the Office of the Coordination of Information (COI) by President Franklin D Roosevelt.
The COI’s successor was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which moved on from mere information gathering to what the CIA now describes on its website as ‘unconventional and paramilitary operations’ – essentially, to activities that would be termed terrorism when carried out by other nations. Following the OSS, there was a transitional period during which the Strategic Services Unit (SSU) served as a precursor to the establishment of the modern CIA.
For imperialist nations like the USA, maintaining control over other countries is imperative to enriching the ruling class. Recognising the difficulty in gaining widespread public support for continuous kinetic warfare, the imperialist states have instead established loyal and ruthless agencies that operate behind the scenes, tasked with carrying out covert wars and military operations that uphold western global hegemony.
In this interview, Stockwell and Wolf delve into how the administration of President Ronald Reagan significantly expanded the CIA’s authority during the 1980s. This enlargement emboldened the agency still further, granting it the power to act with impunity, free from the oversight of the media or the constraints of criminal courts.
What’s more, the CIA was given permission to operate within the borders of the United States, against its own population. This extension of powers was a response to mounting public scrutiny, as people became increasingly aware of the consequences of US actions around the world.
This revealing discussion elucidates the CIA’s transformation and its pivotal role in advancing imperialist agendas, particularly during periods of intensified political crisis.
https://thecommunists.org/2024/06/23/tv ... -handbook/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Nature of Foxes
The martyrdom in Atlanta
June 30, 2024 José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez
June 28, 2024, from Havana
Last night, the much-publicized debate between U.S. presidential candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump finally took place. There will not be another one.
If there is one thing that most of the opinions that have begun to appear in the media and digital networks around the world agree on, it is that the outcome was predictable: an erratic, inconsistent, and confused incumbent president facing a former president who lies and attacks mercilessly to impose himself.
Virtually nothing of substance was said about the country’s pressing problems. The Americans who today have no access to health insurance, those who live in hundreds of towns with no infrastructure and contaminated water, those who fear every morning that their children will walk to school and be shot dead on the way, those who pray that they will not be deported, the women who aspire to be able to decide about their pregnancy, none of them now have any better certainty of what their fate will be.
The vision of the future is slipping through the fingers of big businessmen who tremble in the face of formidable competition from China, of arms producers bent on confrontation with Russia, of those who wish to get there faster to exploit the natural resources of Africa or Latin America, of those who fear a change in the international order in which the United States will not determine the fate of all.
Certainly, the outcome was foreseeable, very foreseeable, and yet Democratic and Republican strategists made a great exercise of betting on the impossible. Or did they? A debate between the two oldest candidates ever to face each other in history, where on one side is a sitting president who is physically and mentally unfit to govern, and on the other is a former president who consistently and unabashedly misrepresents the truth and uses politics to avoid justice, could not end any other way.
Then, the underlying question is: if everything was pointing in the same direction and the outcome was almost inevitable, why are both political tribes (not parties) marching straight to the precipice? It is possible that at this moment, the most repeated phrase in English in North America is “I warned,” “I said this was going to happen,” or “Biden very weak, Trump very bullying. ”
The spectacle that has just taken place, with which many companies and consultants have lined their pockets with total disrespect for the real hope of the people in the streets, could have been avoided. Some leadership on the Democratic side should have prevented the public confirmation of Biden’s weakness and proposed alternative paths that will now be urgently sought. On the Republican side, it was a matter of not reaching the historical demoralization of trying to reach power through an individual (and his close entourage) totally corrupt and condemned by the law.
So, when politics in a country of such proportions marches totally with its back to reality and the ability to foresee events is lost, it can be affirmed that the coming crisis is of greater proportions than expected. Americans have flocked to the coast to passively watch a hurricane and now feel that a tsunami is coming their way as well.
One of the great ironies in the days leading up to the debate was that political figures of both tendencies were presented in different spaces with a coherent discourse for the local public, with proposed solutions (feasible or not) to the most pressing problems, with a veiled rejection of the state of affairs, which placed them in a position to aspire to be real candidates of their respective electoral formations. It is possible that now, at least from the Democratic side, this reflection is being made, and they are working tirelessly to fabricate the figure of a substitute.
This is the second strategic failure of the Democrats against the same Republican contender since they tried to remove Trump through impeachment, an objective that was clearly difficult to achieve. Those winds brought the storms of generational change, at least in the Democratic leadership of the House of Representatives.
The same will not happen on the Republican side, where Trump and his entourage will continue in their crusade to change the rules of the game, dismantle what remains of the state’s regulatory apparatus, remove all limits that prevent the rise of figures who get rich by theft or fraud and not by the traditional exploitation of labor or intellect, and create every day a virtual reality different from the one out the window.
The transmission of the debate abroad would not have had so many followers, if it were not a country that does not affect third parties in its behavior. And an interesting phenomenon is taking place in this area: in the first hours, more concern is expressed among the traditional allies (or subordinates) of the United States than among those that Washington considers its strategic enemies.
Europe, having become more submissive and dependent, fears that the worst is yet to come, whether in the form of energy crises, unnecessary military expenditures, or the imminence of a local conflict unwanted by its populations.
In Beijing and Moscow, they could be appreciating that a team whose ways are already known to them, which functions almost like a cult and which has for them many vulnerabilities, is once again coming to power. There will be no creativity, only repetition of failed formulas.
There is only one certainty: the scenario of 2025 will be completely different from that of 2016 and even 2020. If both candidates were alive and healthy for the occasion, they would have to face new dynamics without diverting attention to re-election attempts, which would no longer be possible. So far, neither of them has seen generational change within their political structures as a priority, an objective on which other leaders should be working.
In the space of the next four years, new political phenomena will emerge within the United States, such as the increase of candidates at all levels who declare themselves independent, the potential emergence of other alternatives, the growing incorporation of technologists who will build supposedly apolitical platforms and the in crescendo consumption of information generated by algorithms and that does not reflect reality.
The states of American disunity will feel increasingly distant from Washington, D.C., and will try to solve the problems of their environment with limited means and, possibly, with an external relationship that they have not attempted so far. The accumulation of domestic difficulties will be inversely proportional and will limit resources and time to try to influence the outside world. All ears will be alert to the sound of the steps with which the new cyclical economic crisis is approaching.
So far, the U.S. political system has shown signs of being able to pull itself together and recover from critical moments at a very high social cost by further fragmenting the domestic economic strata and printing dollars without productive backing. What resources will it appeal to this time?
José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez is Director of the International Policy Research Center (CIPI) in Havana, Cuba.
translation: Resumen Latino Americano – English
https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2024/ ... n-atlanta/
June 30, 2024 José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez
June 28, 2024, from Havana
Last night, the much-publicized debate between U.S. presidential candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump finally took place. There will not be another one.
If there is one thing that most of the opinions that have begun to appear in the media and digital networks around the world agree on, it is that the outcome was predictable: an erratic, inconsistent, and confused incumbent president facing a former president who lies and attacks mercilessly to impose himself.
Virtually nothing of substance was said about the country’s pressing problems. The Americans who today have no access to health insurance, those who live in hundreds of towns with no infrastructure and contaminated water, those who fear every morning that their children will walk to school and be shot dead on the way, those who pray that they will not be deported, the women who aspire to be able to decide about their pregnancy, none of them now have any better certainty of what their fate will be.
The vision of the future is slipping through the fingers of big businessmen who tremble in the face of formidable competition from China, of arms producers bent on confrontation with Russia, of those who wish to get there faster to exploit the natural resources of Africa or Latin America, of those who fear a change in the international order in which the United States will not determine the fate of all.
Certainly, the outcome was foreseeable, very foreseeable, and yet Democratic and Republican strategists made a great exercise of betting on the impossible. Or did they? A debate between the two oldest candidates ever to face each other in history, where on one side is a sitting president who is physically and mentally unfit to govern, and on the other is a former president who consistently and unabashedly misrepresents the truth and uses politics to avoid justice, could not end any other way.
Then, the underlying question is: if everything was pointing in the same direction and the outcome was almost inevitable, why are both political tribes (not parties) marching straight to the precipice? It is possible that at this moment, the most repeated phrase in English in North America is “I warned,” “I said this was going to happen,” or “Biden very weak, Trump very bullying. ”
The spectacle that has just taken place, with which many companies and consultants have lined their pockets with total disrespect for the real hope of the people in the streets, could have been avoided. Some leadership on the Democratic side should have prevented the public confirmation of Biden’s weakness and proposed alternative paths that will now be urgently sought. On the Republican side, it was a matter of not reaching the historical demoralization of trying to reach power through an individual (and his close entourage) totally corrupt and condemned by the law.
So, when politics in a country of such proportions marches totally with its back to reality and the ability to foresee events is lost, it can be affirmed that the coming crisis is of greater proportions than expected. Americans have flocked to the coast to passively watch a hurricane and now feel that a tsunami is coming their way as well.
One of the great ironies in the days leading up to the debate was that political figures of both tendencies were presented in different spaces with a coherent discourse for the local public, with proposed solutions (feasible or not) to the most pressing problems, with a veiled rejection of the state of affairs, which placed them in a position to aspire to be real candidates of their respective electoral formations. It is possible that now, at least from the Democratic side, this reflection is being made, and they are working tirelessly to fabricate the figure of a substitute.
This is the second strategic failure of the Democrats against the same Republican contender since they tried to remove Trump through impeachment, an objective that was clearly difficult to achieve. Those winds brought the storms of generational change, at least in the Democratic leadership of the House of Representatives.
The same will not happen on the Republican side, where Trump and his entourage will continue in their crusade to change the rules of the game, dismantle what remains of the state’s regulatory apparatus, remove all limits that prevent the rise of figures who get rich by theft or fraud and not by the traditional exploitation of labor or intellect, and create every day a virtual reality different from the one out the window.
The transmission of the debate abroad would not have had so many followers, if it were not a country that does not affect third parties in its behavior. And an interesting phenomenon is taking place in this area: in the first hours, more concern is expressed among the traditional allies (or subordinates) of the United States than among those that Washington considers its strategic enemies.
Europe, having become more submissive and dependent, fears that the worst is yet to come, whether in the form of energy crises, unnecessary military expenditures, or the imminence of a local conflict unwanted by its populations.
In Beijing and Moscow, they could be appreciating that a team whose ways are already known to them, which functions almost like a cult and which has for them many vulnerabilities, is once again coming to power. There will be no creativity, only repetition of failed formulas.
There is only one certainty: the scenario of 2025 will be completely different from that of 2016 and even 2020. If both candidates were alive and healthy for the occasion, they would have to face new dynamics without diverting attention to re-election attempts, which would no longer be possible. So far, neither of them has seen generational change within their political structures as a priority, an objective on which other leaders should be working.
In the space of the next four years, new political phenomena will emerge within the United States, such as the increase of candidates at all levels who declare themselves independent, the potential emergence of other alternatives, the growing incorporation of technologists who will build supposedly apolitical platforms and the in crescendo consumption of information generated by algorithms and that does not reflect reality.
The states of American disunity will feel increasingly distant from Washington, D.C., and will try to solve the problems of their environment with limited means and, possibly, with an external relationship that they have not attempted so far. The accumulation of domestic difficulties will be inversely proportional and will limit resources and time to try to influence the outside world. All ears will be alert to the sound of the steps with which the new cyclical economic crisis is approaching.
So far, the U.S. political system has shown signs of being able to pull itself together and recover from critical moments at a very high social cost by further fragmenting the domestic economic strata and printing dollars without productive backing. What resources will it appeal to this time?
José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez is Director of the International Policy Research Center (CIPI) in Havana, Cuba.
translation: Resumen Latino Americano – English
https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2024/ ... n-atlanta/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Nature of Foxes
Patrick Lawrence: 90 Min That Shook the Liberal World
July 3, 2024
CNN’s spectacle made it clear that Biden and Trump present no sensible choice and stand as insults to those who persist in the act of voting.
Donald Trump – Joe Biden CNN debate on June 27. (C-Span still)
By Patrick Lawrence
ScheerPost
Give me a sec to think. I need to make a list. Two.
The genocide in Gaza, the Middle East tinderbox, Bezalel Smotrich, the lost proxy war in Ukraine, relations with Russia, the danger of nuclear war, the fate of NATO, China, the threat of war with Iran, the emergence of a new world order, Europe’s turn toward populism, third world debt, global inequality, the sharply worsening climate crisis: It is a start on the foreign side, in no particular order.
Inter the endless alia in these United States, I’ve got social and economic inequality, money in politics, our drift toward late-imperial bankruptcy, the corruption of the judiciary, the housing crisis from hell, Julian Assange and press freedom, the creeping censorship regime, widespread drug addiction, immigration, the price of eggs, the Pentagon budget: I will leave out Taylor Swift and stop here.
So, a brief précis of the imposing problems defining the tasks of all world leaders in 2024, and then another atop the first for the man or woman who sits behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, as every president since Kennedy has. I settled last night at 8 Central time thinking I might hear a little something about, maybe, one or two items on each of these lists as Donald Trump and Joe Biden faced off — I decline the term “debate” — in a studio at CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta.
Nothing. Not a usefully coherent thought to any of this. Nero should have been up there as an honorary third candidate — with his fiddle for the background music, of course.
When these two frightening people descended into a bickering exchange concerning Biden’s golf handicap and Trump’s girth, I knew this first and probably last direct exchange between two incompetents contending for the world’s most powerful office was a lost cause. I lost 90 minutes of my time as it schussed down the chute. But never mind that.
And never mind the media “analysts,” who rated the event like theater critics according to who turned in the best performance. The American people lost and they lost big. And beyond Americans, the rest of the world lost, too.
I have regretted for years the extent to which elections in this country have come to be determined not by ideas, courage and imagination, guiding principles, or the articulation of wise ways forward, but by affect.
There is a history to this that goes back to the 18th century — sentimental politics, let’s call it — but we can leave that for another time. We are on notice as of this CNN face-off that affect is all there is left in the matter of presidential politics.
Spectacle
“The Society of the Spectacle Guy Debord” video still, September 2009. (Marc Blieux, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Guy Debord, the tortured sage of the 1968 événements in Paris, warned us all those years ago that public life in what used to be the Western democracies had lapsed into sheer spectacle. This is what we saw last week, but let us not stop there.
Our politics, our political process, our voting rituals: These were up on that studio stage last week right along with the two buffoons demanding our attention, and we must now see that these are all mere spectacle, too. Let us not speak of any such thing as oratory: Far too elevated, that, as it presupposes thought.
The best that might plausibly be said of the Biden–Trump encounter is that can be read as a confrontation between the populism on the rise across the Atlantic world and the liberal-authoritarian elites waging political, social, economic, and ideological war against it from the watchtowers of sequestered power. But this may be grasping at straws, I confess.
If Biden is a good-enough expression of what has become of American liberalism — or what it has been for at least a century, as I see it — Trump is an appalling representative of populism as it now revives, even its rightist stripe. I can take Jordan Bardella, who now carries the standard for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, seriously. After Wednesday night, even those few worthy ideas Trump has had over the years — a new détente with Moscow, etc. — do not redeem him.
A blowhard who makes things up met a confused, addled man who is past it: This is the instant orthodoxy among mainstream media — how swiftly do they settle on what they will write and broadcast in boring unison—seems right but nothing like the right story. The right story is that we are in immediate, very serious, very consequential trouble.
In the immediate, we had better consider carefully the beyond-dispute, recorded-on-television reality that a demented man now stands (for however many hours a day he can stand) as the world’s most powerful leader. And if human beings are at bottom sight animals, Americans most of all, they can now see, if they care to admit what they have seen, that these two men present no sensible choice and stand as insults to those who persist in the act of voting.
I have marveled for years as the Democratic machine, Wall Street and all those flaccid liberals in Hollywood put their faith and many millions of dollars into a man whose mental and physical capacities were failing. This made no sense, other than to suggest the Democrats operate according to whose turn it is or could find no credible candidate.
Miranda Devine, the right-wing columnist at The New York Post, reported in The Laptop from Hell, her 2021 exposé, that those in Biden’s inner circle were remarking on his incipient dementia as far back as 2012.
Trump and Biden during the CNN face-off. (C-Span still)
Beyond this, the Man from Scranton simply did not present himself as presidential timber, as it is put. It is one thing to roll logs in Congress, where small-time horse trading and corruption are more or less part of the routine, and altogether a mistake to think a long-serving senator who has his teeth whitened can import these habits into the White House and make them work there. Could no one see the mismatch?
Last Wednesday night, not to be missed, finally shook Biden’s clerks in the media awake. James Carville, the barb-tongued Southerner who has advised Democrats for decades, remarked before the debate that all the mainstream liberals would watch the debate hearts in mouths hoping there would be no fatal slip or silence. There were a few, but all in Biden’s 90 minutes before however many millions tuned in were one-start-to-finish slip.
The New York Times published an astonishing opinion page in its Friday editions. No fewer than six regular contributors, all of them Biden devotees for years, now say he must step aside. Tom Friedman’s headline: “Joe Biden Is a Good Man and a Good President. He must Now Bow Out of the Race.” Paul Krugman: “The Best President of My Adult Life Needs to Withdraw.” Ross Douthat, in one of those back-and-forth “conversations” the Times stages in its pages: “Is Biden Too Old? American Got Its Answer.”
Something curious in the Krugman case. His piece, in which he argued that Kamala Harris would make a fine replacement should Biden drop out — amazing, Krugman — was pulled from the page a few hours after it was published. I’m not even going to speculate why the economist-turned-Democratic-ideologue took this decision.
Harris speaking at a primary rally in Orangeburg, South Carolina on Feb. 20. (Eric Elofson/Biden For President, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
I decline to mark this down to wisdom (always a safe course when corporate journalists are at issue). To me this sudden volte-face reflects nothing so much as years of irresponsibility, ideological conformity, and a lemming-like march to what turns out now to be a tumultuous political sea.
“No one respects us,” Trump insisted severally during the fateful 90 minutes. “The world laughs at us.” I seriously doubt another Trump presidency would improve matters in this line, but his reminder of how American politics looks beyond American shores was right.
“I am worried about the image projected to the outside world,” Sergey Radchenko, an international relations man at Johns Hopkins, wrote on “X.” “It is not an image of leadership. It is an image of terminal decline.”
I’ll say. What’re they thinking, I wondered while watching Wednesday evening. What thinking in Paris, Moscow, Brasilia, Beijing, Mexico City, Pretoria? The question kept ringing in my mind like some awful case of tinnitus of the brain.
I have heard and read various answers, all to be expected, none good. I do not get many foreign observers laughing, but many or most worrying or worse. Here is one from the eye of the storm.
Mazin Qumsiyeh is a professor at Bethlehem University and an energetic publisher of a privately circulated newsletter. He wrote Thursday morning, and I will leave the harsh language as it is:
“The U.S./Israel empire marches on with some successes and some setbacks. Zionist-picked Conman Trump faced off against Zionist-picked Genocide Joe in a presidential debate with no public moderator by two committed Zionist Jews, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash…. It gives the U.S. public a distraction to keep the delusion that they still have democracy instead of dealing with real challenges like climate change, rich getting richer and poor getting poorer, the madness of war, etc.…
Israel as an apartheid regime must end or the US/Israel killing machine goes on and will lead us to global catastrophic war thanks to the lobby/special interests. We need to focus efforts on stopping the addiction to war (and genocide) for profit and to work to build a sustainable future.”
Just a few words to remind ourselves of what people sound like in the imperium’s distant reaches. Professor Qumsiyeh founded and directs the Palestine Institute of Biodiversity and Sustainability. He signs his newsletters, “Stay human and keep Palestine alive.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/07/03/p ... ral-world/
******
Election! Season 60: Implausible plots and dramatic distractions
Kayla Carman
July 3, 2024
Ensure only candidates acceptable to the elites run, even if they appear to be rogue and less acceptable than the preferred option.
2024 heralds the new season of the waning show, Election. Not just in the U.S. but also in the UK, with its sister show and original series recently announcing a surprise return to our screens. Naturally, the unfettered masses have been primed to lap this up, especially given the salacious cliffhangers from the end of last season: accusations of voter fraud, attempts to neutralise unpalatable candidates, the orchestrated “storming” of the Capitol, and perhaps, most juicy of all, the impending return of the (seemingly sempiternal) gratuitous anti-hero, “the Donald.” With its audacious plots and the tension mounting like a powder keg, it certainly feels like this season will be explosive, yet while everyone loves an immersive drama, it’s important to remember, at the risk of being the killjoy adult in the room, that this is, for the most part, all a work of fiction.
“If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.” A quote erroneously attributed to Mark Twain, but heck, why let the truth get in the way of a good story during these increasingly Orwellian times where political integrity is about as common as a child dying from COVID 19. Despite the disingenuous attribution, the accurate content of the quote should be obvious to anyone critically assessing the current state of the political systems of the West. The things that the people care about—wage stagnation, inflation, food prices, affordable housing, job opportunities, job security, the cost of living, investment in local communities, and health—are always ignored by the incumbent within the one-party duopoly. If you’re as old and jaded as I am, it’s easy to see that the party in charge is always “the bad guy,” with the opposition calling out their false promises with moral disdain and pledging to make changes for the better if they’re given the reigns of faux power. The government always blames external factors for failing to deliver, twisting data to deceptively suggest they’re doing a decent job despite the palpable and obvious social decay enveloping the nation, or if all else fails, inducing a climate of fear that the other party is even more incompetent or, worse yet, a threat to this pseudo-democracy itself. Perhaps the wisest move is to make the public perceive deliberate sociopathic corruption as incompetence and, with the cleverest sleight of hand, introduce legislation to subvert democracy in order to supposedly save it.
The idea that any of these offices hold real power in current times is what the Greeks would refer to as a comi-tragedy. It’d be funny if it wasn’t so desperately sad for the citizens having to survive within this quagmire. There’s no “giggity” for these families, guys. In the U.S., the current choice for leader of the “free” world is between two creepy old dudes that can’t construct a reasoned, rational, and coherent sentence amongst them. At least Obama sounded like a statesman during the period he was bombing the hell out of oil rich regions and ending Habeas Corpus, removing basic human rights for his own citizens while grinning like a good guy in the illusory world of caring, patriarchal governance. Now the collapse of Western hegemony is so pertinent that the real powers that be don’t even bother finding believable puppets to do their bidding. The fact that a narcissistic gameshow host is the best of a bad bunch because he occasionally won’t go along with the deep state and military industrial complex’s insidious agenda screams volumes.
With Operation Mockingbird infiltrating the media decades ago and the power of MNCs, banking elites, and private-public partnerships headed by billionaires to push their agendas, it’s little wonder that the public is perpetually bombarded with fear-based nonsense to keep them in line and prevent them from revolting as their entire way of life crumbles. Allegedly, Putin, COVID, and now the potential reelection of Trump could bring down the West and all of its values. This is yet more deflection. The collapse of the petrodollar, forecast by those who understand the deterministic, cyclical nature of empire and its impending fall, has ensured that this is the path we’re on, regardless of which demented puppet sits on the throne of the crumbling fort.
The talk of misinformation, a word that wasn’t used in discourse until a few years ago, is just more subversion. Democracy has always been a sham, and those that expose the government grift really feel the force of Western freedom; just ask Assange having to make plea deals with the devil after years of captivity and torture and Snowden exiled in Russia to avoid a life sentence in his native country. Thank the Lord for the exemplary, non-tyrannical free press that citizens of Russia and China could never understand, or perhaps they’re just more honest about their authoritarian nature than we are.
As the aforementioned above demonstrated, the biggest purveyor of misinformation is the government. Consider all the dastardly, deceitful plots from previous seasons: the Gulf of Tonkin, WMDs, Assad’s chemical weapons, Putin’s unprovoked attack to take over Ukraine and then Europe, Nord Stream, and the ethical decency of Israel. Surely this latest story of, ‘the necessity to combat misinformation via censorship in order to save us,’ is a plot line so brazen and demented that it might just run for president. What’s really happening behind the scenes is the need to censor dissident voices that expose the unscrupulous agendas in an age where information can be shared far and wide between people no longer indoctrinated by the show’s legacy that from birth tried to convince us to believe that the government works in our interest.
Every grassroots organisation gets infiltrated by the establishment to quash its threat to power from within, BLM being the latest example. It’s been happening for decades and just gets more blatant as the ship sinks. The DNC rigged the primaries against Bernie in 2016 to ensure the Super PAC’s preferred candidate, the most heinous Clinton, ran. Worse than that, for all of their anti-Trump posturing, they actually ran propaganda campaigns to delegitimize other conservative candidates, believing they were more likely to beat ’the Donald’ than more serious candidates during Season 58 of this farcical show. Both parties and their media narrative spinners also make it very difficult for third parties to be in the running in terms of costs, exposure, and even strong-arm tactics to remove them from state ballots. Heaven forbid, it would be easy for a candidate representing the people to be considered a fair and viable alternative. That sounds far too democratic to be allowed to happen. Luckily for RFK Jr., he has the money and contacts to run, but still, CNN is coming up with obscure rules to prevent him from debating, knowing that his counterarguments, buttressed by facts about COVID and Ukraine, would destroy the opposition’s credibility. The state should have really dealt with him by now, but perhaps his allegiance to Israel is what’s preventing him from being subjected to the same fate as Gary Webb.
In the UK, the choice is now between two talentless, equally unpopular WEF puppets with about as much charisma as beige paint. The only thing keeping them in the running is how malleable they are for those truly running the show—the lobbyists and, above them, the banking dynasties. The takedown of Corbyn by the Israel lobby, media parasites, and deep state is documented categorically by Al Jazeera investigative documentaries easily available on Youtube, and yet the majority of the British public are totally unaware and just stick with the sound bites that he was a terrorist sympathiser for helping to broker peace in Ireland and that he’s “commie scum” for wanting to invest in hospitals and education instead of the military industrial complex to maim innocents abroad. Perhaps his biggest crime was standing in solidarity with Palestine, which is simply unacceptable in the bastion of humanity that is the West—that same humanity that surely makes him an antisemite? Just like his stance against South African apartheid, which made him a pariah at the time, current events are seemingly proving him correct. Luckily, the propaganda was enough to defeat him, as Wikileaks exposed the next step to “neutralise the Corbyn threat.” “Confessions of an Economic Hitman” outlines the ethical and decent processes the U.S. uses in order to “export democracy” throughout the world. Just don’t vote for anyone who wants to put the needs of the people before the agenda of the establishment, because then the fallacy is exposed in all its hypocritical, inglorious bastardry.
This is why the UK and U.S. follow a two-party system. The illusion of choice. It’s always the same game. Ensure only candidates acceptable to the elites run, even if they appear to be rogue and less acceptable than the preferred option. Look at Trump’s background and how friendly he is with crooked Hilary behind the scenes. They have class solidarity; they’re just petrified that the masses will, hence the relentless culture wars to divide and conquer. They see that more people are awakening to the theatre, hence the need to introduce legislation to criminalise dissent, guised as protection from disinformation. Adults don’t need babying by the same incompetent, corrupt numbskulls that have destroyed the American dream and presided over the social decay and crumbling infrastructure of the UK.
Despite the ever-more desperate plots, ratings continue to decline, with more and more people demanding these one-dimensional political characters break through the fourth wall. In these times, the mainstream media, for its part, should be made to feature the standard disclaimer, “Some scenes have been created for entertainment purposes,” like all profit-chasing reality shows. Evidently, transparently disclosing that it is indeed “sponsored by Pfizer” fails to alert its remaining audience to its fictional narratives funded by corporate donors. The only solution left now is to switch off this dramatic nonsense and start getting involved in the community at a local level, finding common ground with those with differing opinions, and changing actual reality for the better. It’s high time that we all demand the permanent cancellation of this shit-show.
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... tractions/
Donald Trump was never the choice of the ruling class, not the majority for sure. Pretty much the 'extractive industries' who loved his hatred of the environment. And the hard-core Christians who chose to overlook the hypocritical swine that he was as long as they got what they wanted. I still think he will be derailed, by means fair or foul, and never thought he'd go to jail. It may be that the Supremes signed his death warrant by limiting the possibilities. Could that be the plan?
July 3, 2024
CNN’s spectacle made it clear that Biden and Trump present no sensible choice and stand as insults to those who persist in the act of voting.
Donald Trump – Joe Biden CNN debate on June 27. (C-Span still)
By Patrick Lawrence
ScheerPost
Give me a sec to think. I need to make a list. Two.
The genocide in Gaza, the Middle East tinderbox, Bezalel Smotrich, the lost proxy war in Ukraine, relations with Russia, the danger of nuclear war, the fate of NATO, China, the threat of war with Iran, the emergence of a new world order, Europe’s turn toward populism, third world debt, global inequality, the sharply worsening climate crisis: It is a start on the foreign side, in no particular order.
Inter the endless alia in these United States, I’ve got social and economic inequality, money in politics, our drift toward late-imperial bankruptcy, the corruption of the judiciary, the housing crisis from hell, Julian Assange and press freedom, the creeping censorship regime, widespread drug addiction, immigration, the price of eggs, the Pentagon budget: I will leave out Taylor Swift and stop here.
So, a brief précis of the imposing problems defining the tasks of all world leaders in 2024, and then another atop the first for the man or woman who sits behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, as every president since Kennedy has. I settled last night at 8 Central time thinking I might hear a little something about, maybe, one or two items on each of these lists as Donald Trump and Joe Biden faced off — I decline the term “debate” — in a studio at CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta.
Nothing. Not a usefully coherent thought to any of this. Nero should have been up there as an honorary third candidate — with his fiddle for the background music, of course.
When these two frightening people descended into a bickering exchange concerning Biden’s golf handicap and Trump’s girth, I knew this first and probably last direct exchange between two incompetents contending for the world’s most powerful office was a lost cause. I lost 90 minutes of my time as it schussed down the chute. But never mind that.
And never mind the media “analysts,” who rated the event like theater critics according to who turned in the best performance. The American people lost and they lost big. And beyond Americans, the rest of the world lost, too.
I have regretted for years the extent to which elections in this country have come to be determined not by ideas, courage and imagination, guiding principles, or the articulation of wise ways forward, but by affect.
There is a history to this that goes back to the 18th century — sentimental politics, let’s call it — but we can leave that for another time. We are on notice as of this CNN face-off that affect is all there is left in the matter of presidential politics.
Spectacle
“The Society of the Spectacle Guy Debord” video still, September 2009. (Marc Blieux, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Guy Debord, the tortured sage of the 1968 événements in Paris, warned us all those years ago that public life in what used to be the Western democracies had lapsed into sheer spectacle. This is what we saw last week, but let us not stop there.
Our politics, our political process, our voting rituals: These were up on that studio stage last week right along with the two buffoons demanding our attention, and we must now see that these are all mere spectacle, too. Let us not speak of any such thing as oratory: Far too elevated, that, as it presupposes thought.
The best that might plausibly be said of the Biden–Trump encounter is that can be read as a confrontation between the populism on the rise across the Atlantic world and the liberal-authoritarian elites waging political, social, economic, and ideological war against it from the watchtowers of sequestered power. But this may be grasping at straws, I confess.
If Biden is a good-enough expression of what has become of American liberalism — or what it has been for at least a century, as I see it — Trump is an appalling representative of populism as it now revives, even its rightist stripe. I can take Jordan Bardella, who now carries the standard for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, seriously. After Wednesday night, even those few worthy ideas Trump has had over the years — a new détente with Moscow, etc. — do not redeem him.
A blowhard who makes things up met a confused, addled man who is past it: This is the instant orthodoxy among mainstream media — how swiftly do they settle on what they will write and broadcast in boring unison—seems right but nothing like the right story. The right story is that we are in immediate, very serious, very consequential trouble.
In the immediate, we had better consider carefully the beyond-dispute, recorded-on-television reality that a demented man now stands (for however many hours a day he can stand) as the world’s most powerful leader. And if human beings are at bottom sight animals, Americans most of all, they can now see, if they care to admit what they have seen, that these two men present no sensible choice and stand as insults to those who persist in the act of voting.
I have marveled for years as the Democratic machine, Wall Street and all those flaccid liberals in Hollywood put their faith and many millions of dollars into a man whose mental and physical capacities were failing. This made no sense, other than to suggest the Democrats operate according to whose turn it is or could find no credible candidate.
Miranda Devine, the right-wing columnist at The New York Post, reported in The Laptop from Hell, her 2021 exposé, that those in Biden’s inner circle were remarking on his incipient dementia as far back as 2012.
Trump and Biden during the CNN face-off. (C-Span still)
Beyond this, the Man from Scranton simply did not present himself as presidential timber, as it is put. It is one thing to roll logs in Congress, where small-time horse trading and corruption are more or less part of the routine, and altogether a mistake to think a long-serving senator who has his teeth whitened can import these habits into the White House and make them work there. Could no one see the mismatch?
Last Wednesday night, not to be missed, finally shook Biden’s clerks in the media awake. James Carville, the barb-tongued Southerner who has advised Democrats for decades, remarked before the debate that all the mainstream liberals would watch the debate hearts in mouths hoping there would be no fatal slip or silence. There were a few, but all in Biden’s 90 minutes before however many millions tuned in were one-start-to-finish slip.
The New York Times published an astonishing opinion page in its Friday editions. No fewer than six regular contributors, all of them Biden devotees for years, now say he must step aside. Tom Friedman’s headline: “Joe Biden Is a Good Man and a Good President. He must Now Bow Out of the Race.” Paul Krugman: “The Best President of My Adult Life Needs to Withdraw.” Ross Douthat, in one of those back-and-forth “conversations” the Times stages in its pages: “Is Biden Too Old? American Got Its Answer.”
Something curious in the Krugman case. His piece, in which he argued that Kamala Harris would make a fine replacement should Biden drop out — amazing, Krugman — was pulled from the page a few hours after it was published. I’m not even going to speculate why the economist-turned-Democratic-ideologue took this decision.
Harris speaking at a primary rally in Orangeburg, South Carolina on Feb. 20. (Eric Elofson/Biden For President, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
I decline to mark this down to wisdom (always a safe course when corporate journalists are at issue). To me this sudden volte-face reflects nothing so much as years of irresponsibility, ideological conformity, and a lemming-like march to what turns out now to be a tumultuous political sea.
“No one respects us,” Trump insisted severally during the fateful 90 minutes. “The world laughs at us.” I seriously doubt another Trump presidency would improve matters in this line, but his reminder of how American politics looks beyond American shores was right.
“I am worried about the image projected to the outside world,” Sergey Radchenko, an international relations man at Johns Hopkins, wrote on “X.” “It is not an image of leadership. It is an image of terminal decline.”
I’ll say. What’re they thinking, I wondered while watching Wednesday evening. What thinking in Paris, Moscow, Brasilia, Beijing, Mexico City, Pretoria? The question kept ringing in my mind like some awful case of tinnitus of the brain.
I have heard and read various answers, all to be expected, none good. I do not get many foreign observers laughing, but many or most worrying or worse. Here is one from the eye of the storm.
Mazin Qumsiyeh is a professor at Bethlehem University and an energetic publisher of a privately circulated newsletter. He wrote Thursday morning, and I will leave the harsh language as it is:
“The U.S./Israel empire marches on with some successes and some setbacks. Zionist-picked Conman Trump faced off against Zionist-picked Genocide Joe in a presidential debate with no public moderator by two committed Zionist Jews, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash…. It gives the U.S. public a distraction to keep the delusion that they still have democracy instead of dealing with real challenges like climate change, rich getting richer and poor getting poorer, the madness of war, etc.…
Israel as an apartheid regime must end or the US/Israel killing machine goes on and will lead us to global catastrophic war thanks to the lobby/special interests. We need to focus efforts on stopping the addiction to war (and genocide) for profit and to work to build a sustainable future.”
Just a few words to remind ourselves of what people sound like in the imperium’s distant reaches. Professor Qumsiyeh founded and directs the Palestine Institute of Biodiversity and Sustainability. He signs his newsletters, “Stay human and keep Palestine alive.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/07/03/p ... ral-world/
******
Election! Season 60: Implausible plots and dramatic distractions
Kayla Carman
July 3, 2024
Ensure only candidates acceptable to the elites run, even if they appear to be rogue and less acceptable than the preferred option.
2024 heralds the new season of the waning show, Election. Not just in the U.S. but also in the UK, with its sister show and original series recently announcing a surprise return to our screens. Naturally, the unfettered masses have been primed to lap this up, especially given the salacious cliffhangers from the end of last season: accusations of voter fraud, attempts to neutralise unpalatable candidates, the orchestrated “storming” of the Capitol, and perhaps, most juicy of all, the impending return of the (seemingly sempiternal) gratuitous anti-hero, “the Donald.” With its audacious plots and the tension mounting like a powder keg, it certainly feels like this season will be explosive, yet while everyone loves an immersive drama, it’s important to remember, at the risk of being the killjoy adult in the room, that this is, for the most part, all a work of fiction.
“If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.” A quote erroneously attributed to Mark Twain, but heck, why let the truth get in the way of a good story during these increasingly Orwellian times where political integrity is about as common as a child dying from COVID 19. Despite the disingenuous attribution, the accurate content of the quote should be obvious to anyone critically assessing the current state of the political systems of the West. The things that the people care about—wage stagnation, inflation, food prices, affordable housing, job opportunities, job security, the cost of living, investment in local communities, and health—are always ignored by the incumbent within the one-party duopoly. If you’re as old and jaded as I am, it’s easy to see that the party in charge is always “the bad guy,” with the opposition calling out their false promises with moral disdain and pledging to make changes for the better if they’re given the reigns of faux power. The government always blames external factors for failing to deliver, twisting data to deceptively suggest they’re doing a decent job despite the palpable and obvious social decay enveloping the nation, or if all else fails, inducing a climate of fear that the other party is even more incompetent or, worse yet, a threat to this pseudo-democracy itself. Perhaps the wisest move is to make the public perceive deliberate sociopathic corruption as incompetence and, with the cleverest sleight of hand, introduce legislation to subvert democracy in order to supposedly save it.
The idea that any of these offices hold real power in current times is what the Greeks would refer to as a comi-tragedy. It’d be funny if it wasn’t so desperately sad for the citizens having to survive within this quagmire. There’s no “giggity” for these families, guys. In the U.S., the current choice for leader of the “free” world is between two creepy old dudes that can’t construct a reasoned, rational, and coherent sentence amongst them. At least Obama sounded like a statesman during the period he was bombing the hell out of oil rich regions and ending Habeas Corpus, removing basic human rights for his own citizens while grinning like a good guy in the illusory world of caring, patriarchal governance. Now the collapse of Western hegemony is so pertinent that the real powers that be don’t even bother finding believable puppets to do their bidding. The fact that a narcissistic gameshow host is the best of a bad bunch because he occasionally won’t go along with the deep state and military industrial complex’s insidious agenda screams volumes.
With Operation Mockingbird infiltrating the media decades ago and the power of MNCs, banking elites, and private-public partnerships headed by billionaires to push their agendas, it’s little wonder that the public is perpetually bombarded with fear-based nonsense to keep them in line and prevent them from revolting as their entire way of life crumbles. Allegedly, Putin, COVID, and now the potential reelection of Trump could bring down the West and all of its values. This is yet more deflection. The collapse of the petrodollar, forecast by those who understand the deterministic, cyclical nature of empire and its impending fall, has ensured that this is the path we’re on, regardless of which demented puppet sits on the throne of the crumbling fort.
The talk of misinformation, a word that wasn’t used in discourse until a few years ago, is just more subversion. Democracy has always been a sham, and those that expose the government grift really feel the force of Western freedom; just ask Assange having to make plea deals with the devil after years of captivity and torture and Snowden exiled in Russia to avoid a life sentence in his native country. Thank the Lord for the exemplary, non-tyrannical free press that citizens of Russia and China could never understand, or perhaps they’re just more honest about their authoritarian nature than we are.
As the aforementioned above demonstrated, the biggest purveyor of misinformation is the government. Consider all the dastardly, deceitful plots from previous seasons: the Gulf of Tonkin, WMDs, Assad’s chemical weapons, Putin’s unprovoked attack to take over Ukraine and then Europe, Nord Stream, and the ethical decency of Israel. Surely this latest story of, ‘the necessity to combat misinformation via censorship in order to save us,’ is a plot line so brazen and demented that it might just run for president. What’s really happening behind the scenes is the need to censor dissident voices that expose the unscrupulous agendas in an age where information can be shared far and wide between people no longer indoctrinated by the show’s legacy that from birth tried to convince us to believe that the government works in our interest.
Every grassroots organisation gets infiltrated by the establishment to quash its threat to power from within, BLM being the latest example. It’s been happening for decades and just gets more blatant as the ship sinks. The DNC rigged the primaries against Bernie in 2016 to ensure the Super PAC’s preferred candidate, the most heinous Clinton, ran. Worse than that, for all of their anti-Trump posturing, they actually ran propaganda campaigns to delegitimize other conservative candidates, believing they were more likely to beat ’the Donald’ than more serious candidates during Season 58 of this farcical show. Both parties and their media narrative spinners also make it very difficult for third parties to be in the running in terms of costs, exposure, and even strong-arm tactics to remove them from state ballots. Heaven forbid, it would be easy for a candidate representing the people to be considered a fair and viable alternative. That sounds far too democratic to be allowed to happen. Luckily for RFK Jr., he has the money and contacts to run, but still, CNN is coming up with obscure rules to prevent him from debating, knowing that his counterarguments, buttressed by facts about COVID and Ukraine, would destroy the opposition’s credibility. The state should have really dealt with him by now, but perhaps his allegiance to Israel is what’s preventing him from being subjected to the same fate as Gary Webb.
In the UK, the choice is now between two talentless, equally unpopular WEF puppets with about as much charisma as beige paint. The only thing keeping them in the running is how malleable they are for those truly running the show—the lobbyists and, above them, the banking dynasties. The takedown of Corbyn by the Israel lobby, media parasites, and deep state is documented categorically by Al Jazeera investigative documentaries easily available on Youtube, and yet the majority of the British public are totally unaware and just stick with the sound bites that he was a terrorist sympathiser for helping to broker peace in Ireland and that he’s “commie scum” for wanting to invest in hospitals and education instead of the military industrial complex to maim innocents abroad. Perhaps his biggest crime was standing in solidarity with Palestine, which is simply unacceptable in the bastion of humanity that is the West—that same humanity that surely makes him an antisemite? Just like his stance against South African apartheid, which made him a pariah at the time, current events are seemingly proving him correct. Luckily, the propaganda was enough to defeat him, as Wikileaks exposed the next step to “neutralise the Corbyn threat.” “Confessions of an Economic Hitman” outlines the ethical and decent processes the U.S. uses in order to “export democracy” throughout the world. Just don’t vote for anyone who wants to put the needs of the people before the agenda of the establishment, because then the fallacy is exposed in all its hypocritical, inglorious bastardry.
This is why the UK and U.S. follow a two-party system. The illusion of choice. It’s always the same game. Ensure only candidates acceptable to the elites run, even if they appear to be rogue and less acceptable than the preferred option. Look at Trump’s background and how friendly he is with crooked Hilary behind the scenes. They have class solidarity; they’re just petrified that the masses will, hence the relentless culture wars to divide and conquer. They see that more people are awakening to the theatre, hence the need to introduce legislation to criminalise dissent, guised as protection from disinformation. Adults don’t need babying by the same incompetent, corrupt numbskulls that have destroyed the American dream and presided over the social decay and crumbling infrastructure of the UK.
Despite the ever-more desperate plots, ratings continue to decline, with more and more people demanding these one-dimensional political characters break through the fourth wall. In these times, the mainstream media, for its part, should be made to feature the standard disclaimer, “Some scenes have been created for entertainment purposes,” like all profit-chasing reality shows. Evidently, transparently disclosing that it is indeed “sponsored by Pfizer” fails to alert its remaining audience to its fictional narratives funded by corporate donors. The only solution left now is to switch off this dramatic nonsense and start getting involved in the community at a local level, finding common ground with those with differing opinions, and changing actual reality for the better. It’s high time that we all demand the permanent cancellation of this shit-show.
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... tractions/
Donald Trump was never the choice of the ruling class, not the majority for sure. Pretty much the 'extractive industries' who loved his hatred of the environment. And the hard-core Christians who chose to overlook the hypocritical swine that he was as long as they got what they wanted. I still think he will be derailed, by means fair or foul, and never thought he'd go to jail. It may be that the Supremes signed his death warrant by limiting the possibilities. Could that be the plan?
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Nature of Foxes
SCOTT RITTER: ‘My Life’s Work Melting Before My Eyes’
July 7, 2024
As was the case in June 1982, people of the United States need to send a collective signal that they will not tolerate policies that lead toward nuclear war.
Oct. 18, 1988: Roland LaJoie, director of the U.S. On-Site Inspection Agency, leads a delegation of Soviet inspectors who had come to the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona to monitor the destruction of ground-launched cruise missile weapon systems in the first round of reductions mandated by the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. (U.S. National Archives, Public domain)
By Scott Ritter
Special to Consortium News
On July 1 the Russian delegation to the Vienna Negotiations on Military Security and Arms Control organized a round table on “The Transformation of the World Order in the context of the Ukrainian Crisis.” This article is derived from the author’s presentation there.
Reflecting on my participation on July 1 in the Russian-hosted forum in Vienna on the ongoing transformation of the world order, I was struck by the words of Ambassador Alexander Lukashevich, the permanent representative of the Russian Federation to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).
The ambassador told a very personal story when he took part in the Istanbul summit back in November 1999 as a junior diplomat in the delegation he now heads. There, despite tensions that existed between the United States/NATO and the Russian Federation over NATO’s then bombing of Serbia, OSCE leaders, through a process of dialogue, adopted three foundational documents that served as the framework for European security for the next two decades.
These were the Charter for European Security; the Agreement on Adaptation of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe; and the Istanbul Summit Declaration.
The Charter for European Security reaffirmed the commitment to a free, democratic and integrated Europe as defined by the geographic and political boundaries set forth by the territories encompassed by the OSCE, which coexisted in peace, with their respective individuals and communities enjoying freedom, prosperity and security.
The Agreement on Adaptation of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) served to modify the existing CFE Treaty to consider the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact; the unification of Germany; and the expansion of NATO, all with the goal of facilitating equitable security and stability for all parties to the treaty.
Finally, the Istanbul Summit Declaration outlined the shared vision for European security and cooperation, emphasizing strengthening cooperation between the OSCE and other international organizations, enhancement of OSCE peacekeeping efforts, and expansion of OSCE-backed police activities designed to maintain the rule of law.
Ambassador Lukashevich lamented that the conflict in Ukraine, beginning with the 2014 Maidan coup that saw Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich ousted by U.S. and E.U.-backed Ukrainian nationalists, has undermined and destroyed all three of the Istanbul Summits crowning achievements.
INF
Helmeted protesters face off against police on Dynamivska Street during the Maidan uprising in Kiev, Jan 20, 2014. (Mstyslav Chernov, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
The OSCE, working at the behest of NATO, used the Minsk Accords to further the expansion of NATO, instead of brokering peace in Ukraine. Today, NATO is engaged in a war with Russia using Ukraine as its proxy. In short, the very processes of peace and security Lukashevich said he’d worked so hard to create and implement back in 1999 were “melting before my eyes.”
I had been involved in a process of foundational importance to European security — the implementation of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. The INF Treaty was signed by President Ronald Reagan and the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev on Dec. 8, 1987.
In February 1988 I was one of the first military officers assigned to the newly created On-Site Inspection Agency (OSIA), created by the U.S. Department of Defense to implement the INF Treaty.
In June 1988 I was dispatched to the Soviet Union as part of an advanced party of inspectors to install a multi-million-dollar monitoring installation outside the gates of a Soviet missile factory in the city of Votkinsk, some 750 miles east of Moscow in the foothills of the Ural Mountains.
For the next two years I worked in the company of my fellow American inspectors, side-by-side with our newfound Soviet colleagues, to implement a treaty which, without our mutual commitment to making the world a safer place through disarmament, would most likely have failed in the face of deep-seated opposition in both the U.S. and Soviet Union (you can read about my experiences in my book, Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika.)
Square One
Gorbachev and Reagan signing the INF Treaty in the White House in 1987. (White House Photographic Office – National Archives and Records Administration, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
On June 28 last month, a mere three days before the Russian round table in Vienna, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia was going to resume production of short- and intermediate-range missiles — the very weapons myself and my fellow American and Soviet inspectors had worked so hard to eliminate. Putin said he would weigh their potential deployment in Europe and elsewhere to offset similar deployments by the United States of intermediate-range missiles in Europe and the Pacific.
Putin was referring to the deployment by the U.S. of Mk 70 containerized missile launchers capable of firing the SM-6 “Typhon” dual-capability missile as well as the Tomahawk ground-launched cruise missile. The SM-6 has a range of under 310 miles, making it compliant under the terms of the INF Treaty, the Tomahawk’s range of 1,800 miles makes it an INF-capable system.
The United States withdrew from the INF Treaty in 2019, during the presidency of Donald Trump. Russia, however, indicated that it would not either produce or deploy INF-capable missiles (despite being accused by the U.S. of doing just that in justifying its decision to withdraw from the landmark arms control agreement) so long as the U.S. did not introduce them into Europe.
U.S. Army Typhon medium-range capability missile system. (US Army, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
In September 2023, the U.S. deployed two Mk 70 launchers onto the soil of Denmark as part of NATO military exercises. And in May of 2024 the U.S. likewise deployed the Mk 70 launcher on the soil of the Philippines. These actions prompted Putin’s response.
In short, we have literally gone back to square one when it comes to arms control and nuclear disarmament — to a time when Cold War politics nearly brought the U.S. and Russia to the edge of the nuclear abyss.
That is where we stand today.
Like Ambassador Lukashevich, I am literally watching my life’s work melt before my eyes.
The difference between now and then is stark. Four decades ago, we had an engaged public, and diplomats who talked to one another.
June 24 marked the 42nd anniversary of the million-person march in Central Park against nuclear war and for nuclear disarmament.
The political pressure created by this event resonated into the halls of power.
‘Walk in the Woods’
Nitze, left, visiting The Hague in January 1985 while serving as U.S. arms control adviser. (Rob Croes/Anefo, CC0, Wikimedia Commons)
July 16 will mark the 42nd anniversary of the famous “Walk in the Woods” conducted by Paul Nitze and Yuli Kvitsinsky, respectively the U.S. and Soviet lead negotiators for INF talks that, at the time, were stymied.
Faced with a calcified recalcitrance on the part of U.S. hardliners, the two men took a walk in the woods outside Geneva, Switzerland, where they outlined possible ways to break the negotiation impasse.
The ideas that Nitze and Kvitsinsky came up with never came to pass — neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union were ready to undertake such drastic actions.
But their courageous stab at diplomacy at a time when neither side was talking to the other shook free the rust that had frozen their respective sides, lubricating the machinery of diplomacy, and set in motion the processes that led to Reagan and Gorbachev signing the INF Treaty some five and a half years later.
The key take-away from the Nitze-Kvitsinsky “Walk in the Woods” was that, when it comes to meaningful arms control, success is not immediate. The process of arms control must be seen in the long term.
It was also clear that fear fueled consideration of positive outcomes that eventually led to an equitable solution in the form of the INF Treaty.
There is no doubt in my mind that within the ranks of the Russian and U.S. diplomatic corps today are two men possessed of the vision and courage of Paul Nitze and Yuli Kvitsinsky who can, if given the opportunity, recreate the magic of the “Walk in the Woods.” That magic helped create the conditions for negotiations that helped pull the U.S. and Soviet Union from the nuclear abyss more than four decades ago.
But two hurdles must be crossed first. It is difficult to imagine a U.S. and Russian diplomat walking and talking today when, as Professor Sergey Markedonev, a fellow participant at the Vienna round table pointed out, official U.S. policy precludes even shaking hands with Russian diplomats.
It’s Up to the American People
To cross that bridge the U.S. government needs a signal from the American people that such behavior is not acceptable.
We need a modern-day version of the June 1982 Central Park million-person rally in support of nuclear disarmament and arms control and against nuclear war.
America has an election coming up in November where issues of our collective existential survival as a people and nation are on the line.
There is no more existential issue than that of nuclear war.
As was the case in June 1982, we, the people of the United States, need to send a collective signal to all who seek to represent us in the highest office of the land, that we will not tolerate policies that lead toward nuclear war.
That we insist on policies that promote nuclear disarmament and arms control.
That we demand that our diplomats begin talking with their Russian counterparts.
I’m tired of watching my life’s work melt before my very eyes.
It’s time to rebuild the foundations of our collective survival.
To make mainstream the cause of disarmament that once saved us from nuclear Armageddon.
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/07/07/s ... e-my-eyes/
July 7, 2024
As was the case in June 1982, people of the United States need to send a collective signal that they will not tolerate policies that lead toward nuclear war.
Oct. 18, 1988: Roland LaJoie, director of the U.S. On-Site Inspection Agency, leads a delegation of Soviet inspectors who had come to the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona to monitor the destruction of ground-launched cruise missile weapon systems in the first round of reductions mandated by the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. (U.S. National Archives, Public domain)
By Scott Ritter
Special to Consortium News
On July 1 the Russian delegation to the Vienna Negotiations on Military Security and Arms Control organized a round table on “The Transformation of the World Order in the context of the Ukrainian Crisis.” This article is derived from the author’s presentation there.
Reflecting on my participation on July 1 in the Russian-hosted forum in Vienna on the ongoing transformation of the world order, I was struck by the words of Ambassador Alexander Lukashevich, the permanent representative of the Russian Federation to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).
The ambassador told a very personal story when he took part in the Istanbul summit back in November 1999 as a junior diplomat in the delegation he now heads. There, despite tensions that existed between the United States/NATO and the Russian Federation over NATO’s then bombing of Serbia, OSCE leaders, through a process of dialogue, adopted three foundational documents that served as the framework for European security for the next two decades.
These were the Charter for European Security; the Agreement on Adaptation of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe; and the Istanbul Summit Declaration.
The Charter for European Security reaffirmed the commitment to a free, democratic and integrated Europe as defined by the geographic and political boundaries set forth by the territories encompassed by the OSCE, which coexisted in peace, with their respective individuals and communities enjoying freedom, prosperity and security.
The Agreement on Adaptation of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) served to modify the existing CFE Treaty to consider the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact; the unification of Germany; and the expansion of NATO, all with the goal of facilitating equitable security and stability for all parties to the treaty.
Finally, the Istanbul Summit Declaration outlined the shared vision for European security and cooperation, emphasizing strengthening cooperation between the OSCE and other international organizations, enhancement of OSCE peacekeeping efforts, and expansion of OSCE-backed police activities designed to maintain the rule of law.
Ambassador Lukashevich lamented that the conflict in Ukraine, beginning with the 2014 Maidan coup that saw Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich ousted by U.S. and E.U.-backed Ukrainian nationalists, has undermined and destroyed all three of the Istanbul Summits crowning achievements.
INF
Helmeted protesters face off against police on Dynamivska Street during the Maidan uprising in Kiev, Jan 20, 2014. (Mstyslav Chernov, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
The OSCE, working at the behest of NATO, used the Minsk Accords to further the expansion of NATO, instead of brokering peace in Ukraine. Today, NATO is engaged in a war with Russia using Ukraine as its proxy. In short, the very processes of peace and security Lukashevich said he’d worked so hard to create and implement back in 1999 were “melting before my eyes.”
I had been involved in a process of foundational importance to European security — the implementation of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. The INF Treaty was signed by President Ronald Reagan and the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev on Dec. 8, 1987.
In February 1988 I was one of the first military officers assigned to the newly created On-Site Inspection Agency (OSIA), created by the U.S. Department of Defense to implement the INF Treaty.
In June 1988 I was dispatched to the Soviet Union as part of an advanced party of inspectors to install a multi-million-dollar monitoring installation outside the gates of a Soviet missile factory in the city of Votkinsk, some 750 miles east of Moscow in the foothills of the Ural Mountains.
For the next two years I worked in the company of my fellow American inspectors, side-by-side with our newfound Soviet colleagues, to implement a treaty which, without our mutual commitment to making the world a safer place through disarmament, would most likely have failed in the face of deep-seated opposition in both the U.S. and Soviet Union (you can read about my experiences in my book, Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika.)
Square One
Gorbachev and Reagan signing the INF Treaty in the White House in 1987. (White House Photographic Office – National Archives and Records Administration, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
On June 28 last month, a mere three days before the Russian round table in Vienna, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia was going to resume production of short- and intermediate-range missiles — the very weapons myself and my fellow American and Soviet inspectors had worked so hard to eliminate. Putin said he would weigh their potential deployment in Europe and elsewhere to offset similar deployments by the United States of intermediate-range missiles in Europe and the Pacific.
Putin was referring to the deployment by the U.S. of Mk 70 containerized missile launchers capable of firing the SM-6 “Typhon” dual-capability missile as well as the Tomahawk ground-launched cruise missile. The SM-6 has a range of under 310 miles, making it compliant under the terms of the INF Treaty, the Tomahawk’s range of 1,800 miles makes it an INF-capable system.
The United States withdrew from the INF Treaty in 2019, during the presidency of Donald Trump. Russia, however, indicated that it would not either produce or deploy INF-capable missiles (despite being accused by the U.S. of doing just that in justifying its decision to withdraw from the landmark arms control agreement) so long as the U.S. did not introduce them into Europe.
U.S. Army Typhon medium-range capability missile system. (US Army, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
In September 2023, the U.S. deployed two Mk 70 launchers onto the soil of Denmark as part of NATO military exercises. And in May of 2024 the U.S. likewise deployed the Mk 70 launcher on the soil of the Philippines. These actions prompted Putin’s response.
In short, we have literally gone back to square one when it comes to arms control and nuclear disarmament — to a time when Cold War politics nearly brought the U.S. and Russia to the edge of the nuclear abyss.
That is where we stand today.
Like Ambassador Lukashevich, I am literally watching my life’s work melt before my eyes.
The difference between now and then is stark. Four decades ago, we had an engaged public, and diplomats who talked to one another.
June 24 marked the 42nd anniversary of the million-person march in Central Park against nuclear war and for nuclear disarmament.
The political pressure created by this event resonated into the halls of power.
‘Walk in the Woods’
Nitze, left, visiting The Hague in January 1985 while serving as U.S. arms control adviser. (Rob Croes/Anefo, CC0, Wikimedia Commons)
July 16 will mark the 42nd anniversary of the famous “Walk in the Woods” conducted by Paul Nitze and Yuli Kvitsinsky, respectively the U.S. and Soviet lead negotiators for INF talks that, at the time, were stymied.
Faced with a calcified recalcitrance on the part of U.S. hardliners, the two men took a walk in the woods outside Geneva, Switzerland, where they outlined possible ways to break the negotiation impasse.
The ideas that Nitze and Kvitsinsky came up with never came to pass — neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union were ready to undertake such drastic actions.
But their courageous stab at diplomacy at a time when neither side was talking to the other shook free the rust that had frozen their respective sides, lubricating the machinery of diplomacy, and set in motion the processes that led to Reagan and Gorbachev signing the INF Treaty some five and a half years later.
The key take-away from the Nitze-Kvitsinsky “Walk in the Woods” was that, when it comes to meaningful arms control, success is not immediate. The process of arms control must be seen in the long term.
It was also clear that fear fueled consideration of positive outcomes that eventually led to an equitable solution in the form of the INF Treaty.
There is no doubt in my mind that within the ranks of the Russian and U.S. diplomatic corps today are two men possessed of the vision and courage of Paul Nitze and Yuli Kvitsinsky who can, if given the opportunity, recreate the magic of the “Walk in the Woods.” That magic helped create the conditions for negotiations that helped pull the U.S. and Soviet Union from the nuclear abyss more than four decades ago.
But two hurdles must be crossed first. It is difficult to imagine a U.S. and Russian diplomat walking and talking today when, as Professor Sergey Markedonev, a fellow participant at the Vienna round table pointed out, official U.S. policy precludes even shaking hands with Russian diplomats.
It’s Up to the American People
To cross that bridge the U.S. government needs a signal from the American people that such behavior is not acceptable.
We need a modern-day version of the June 1982 Central Park million-person rally in support of nuclear disarmament and arms control and against nuclear war.
America has an election coming up in November where issues of our collective existential survival as a people and nation are on the line.
There is no more existential issue than that of nuclear war.
As was the case in June 1982, we, the people of the United States, need to send a collective signal to all who seek to represent us in the highest office of the land, that we will not tolerate policies that lead toward nuclear war.
That we insist on policies that promote nuclear disarmament and arms control.
That we demand that our diplomats begin talking with their Russian counterparts.
I’m tired of watching my life’s work melt before my very eyes.
It’s time to rebuild the foundations of our collective survival.
To make mainstream the cause of disarmament that once saved us from nuclear Armageddon.
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/07/07/s ... e-my-eyes/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Nature of Foxes
NATO SUMMIT: Alliance’s Endgame Appears to Be Nuclear War
July 9, 2024
A hostile military alliance, now including even Sweden and Finland, is at the very borders of Russia. Chris Wright asks how Russian leaders are supposed to react to this as the NATO summit kicked off in Washington.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg meeting with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Monday ahead of the NATO summit in Washington this week. (NATO/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
By Chris Wright
Common Dreams
The world is at its most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Back then, however, the fear of total destruction consumed the public; today, few people seem even to be aware of this possibility.
It is easily imaginable that nuclear war could break out between Russia (and perhaps China) and the West, yet politicians continue to escalate tensions, place hundreds of thousands of troops at “high readiness,” and attack military targets inside Russia, even while ordinary citizens blithely go on with their lives.
The situation is without parallel in history.
Consider the following facts. A hostile military alliance, now including even Sweden and Finland, is at the very borders of Russia. How are Russian leaders — whose country was almost destroyed by Western invasion twice in the 20th century — supposed to react to this? How would Washington react if Mexico or Canada belonged to an enormous, expansionist, and highly belligerent anti-U.S. military alliance?
As if expanding NATO to include Eastern Europe wasn’t provocative enough, Washington began to send billions of dollars’ worth of military aid to Ukraine in 2014, to “improve interoperability with NATO,” in the words of the Defense Department.
Why this Western involvement in Ukraine, which, as Barack Obama said while president, is “a core Russian interest but not an American one?”
One reason was given by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) in a recent moment of startling televised candor: Ukraine is “sitting on $10 to $12 trillion of critical minerals… I don’t want to give that money and those assets to Putin to share with China.”
As The Washington Post has reported:
“Ukraine harbors some of the world’s largest reserves of titanium and iron ore, fields of untapped lithium, and massive deposits of coal. Collectively, they are worth tens of trillions of dollars.”
Ukraine also has colossal reserves of natural gas and oil, in addition to neon, nickel, beryllium and other critical rare earth metals. For NATO’s leadership, Russia and, in particular, China can’t be permitted access to these resources. The war in Ukraine must, therefore, continue indefinitely, and negotiations with Russia mustn’t be pursued.
Meanwhile, as Ukraine was being de facto integrated into NATO in the years before 2022, the United States put into operation an anti-ballistic-missile site in Romania in 2016.
NATO’s Aegis Ashore Ballistic Missile Defense System (AABMDS) site in Deveselu, Romania in 2019. (U.S. Navy/Amy Forsythe, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
As Benjamin Abelow notes in How the West Brought War to Ukraine, the missile launchers that the ABM system uses can accommodate nuclear-tipped offensive weapons like the Tomahawk cruise missile.
“Tomahawks,” he points out, “have a range of 1,500 miles, can strike Moscow and other targets deep inside Russia, and can carry hydrogen bomb warheads with selectable yields up to 150 kilotons, roughly 10 times that of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.” Poland now boasts a similar ABM site.
American assurances that these anti-missile bases are defensive in nature, to protect against an (incredibly unlikely) attack from Iran, can hardly reassure Russia, given the missile launchers’ capability to launch offensive weapons.
In another bellicose move, the Trump administration in 2019 unilaterally withdrew from the 1987 Treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces.
Russia responded by proposing that the U.S. declare a moratorium on the deployment of short- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe, saying it wouldn’t deploy such missiles as long as NATO members didn’t. Washington dismissed these proposals, which upset some European leaders. “Has the absence of dialogue with Russia,” French President Emmanuel Macron said, “made the European continent any safer? I don’t think so.”
The situation is especially dangerous given what experts call “warhead ambiguity.” As senior Russian military officers have said, “There will be no way to determine if an incoming ballistic missile is fitted with a nuclear or a conventional warhead, and so the military will see it as a nuclear attack” that warrants a nuclear retaliation.
A possible misunderstanding could thus plunge the world into nuclear war.
The “Deckhouse” — command and control center of NATO’s Aegis Ashore Ballistic Missile Defense System (AABMDS) site in Redzikowo, Poland. (U.S. Navy/Amy Forsythe, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
So now we’re more than two years into a proxy war with Russia that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and has seen Ukraine even more closely integrated into the structures of NATO than it was before.
And the West continues to inch ever closer to the nuclear precipice. Ukraine has begun using U.S. missiles to strike Russian territory, including defensive (not only offensive) missile systems.
This summer, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and Belgium will begin sending F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, and Denmark and the Netherlands have said there will be no restrictions on the use of these planes to strike targets in Russia. F-16s are able to deliver nuclear weapons, and Russia has said the planes will be considered a nuclear threat.
Bringing the world even closer to terminal crisis, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg states that 500,000 troops are at “high readiness,” and in the next five years, NATO allies will “acquire thousands of air defense and artillery systems, 850 modern aircraft — mostly fifth-generation F-35s —and also a lot of other high-end capabilities.”
Macron has morphed into one of Europe’s most hawkish leaders, with plans to send military instructors to Ukraine very soon. At the same time, NATO is holding talks about taking more nuclear weapons out of storage and placing them on standby.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Stoltenberg, and U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO Julianne Smith at “NATO Day” on Monday at Washington Nationals’ Park ahead of the summit this week in D.C. (NATO/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Where all this is heading is unclear, but what’s obvious is that Western leaders are acting with reckless disregard for the future of humanity.
Their bet is that Putin will never deploy nuclear weapons, despite his many threats to do so and recent Russian military drills to deploy tactical nuclear weapons. Given that Russian use of nuclear warheads might well precipitate a nuclear response by the West, the fate of humanity hangs on the restraint and rationality of one man, Putin—a figure who is constantly portrayed by Western media and politicians as an irrational, bloodthirsty monster.
So the human species is supposed to place its hope for survival in someone we’re told is a madman, who leads a state that feels besieged by the most powerful military coalition in history, apparently committed to its demise.
Maybe the madmen aren’t in the Russian government but rather in NATO governments?
It is downright puzzling that millions of people aren’t protesting in the streets every day to deescalate the crisis and pull civilization back from the brink. Evidently the mass media have successfully fulfilled their function of manufacturing consent. But unless the Western public wakes up, the current crisis might not end as benignly as did the one in 1962.
Scientists to Biden: Cancel New Nuclear IBM System
July 10, 2024
More than 700 scientists, in an open letter to the U.S. president and Congress, call the new intercontinental-range ballistic missile system, known as Sentinel, expensive and dangerous.
Northrop Grumman and an industry partner successfully conducted Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile Shroud Fly-off Test at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake verifying the shroud did not strike enclosed payload, critical to mission success. (Northrop Grumman)
By Edward Carver
Common Dreams
More than 700 scientists have called for an end to the United States’ land-based nuclear weapons program that’s set to be replaced after a Pentagon decision to approve the program despite soaring costs.
In an open letter to President Joe Biden and Congress, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) argued againstthe new intercontinental-range ballistic missile system, known as Sentinel.
“As scientists and engineers, we are acutely aware of the grave risk of nuclear war,” the letter began. “We are particularly concerned about the needless dangers created by the deployment of expensive, dangerous, and unnecessary land-based, intercontinental-range ballistic missiles (ICBMs).” The scientists said the land-based nuclear weapons are unnecessary because:
“The United States deploys an assured ability to retaliate against a nuclear attack without land-based missiles. Roughly 1,000 nuclear warheads are deployed on U.S. submarines hidden at sea, essentially invulnerable to attack. Submarine-launched ballistic missiles are as accurate as silo-based missiles, quick to respond, and provide more destructive capability than could ever be employed effectively.
Specifically, one nuclear detonation can destroy an entire city; hundreds or thousands of detonations would cause millions of immediate deaths, the destruction of critical infrastructure, and potentially catastrophic climate impacts. The U.S. Navy deploys twelve submarines and is working to replace the entire fleet. Silo-based missiles do not provide any important additional capability.”
The Department of Defense on Monday certified the continuation of the Sentinel project, releasing the results of a review that was legally required when the cost estimate ballooned to “at least” $131 billion earlier this year, which drew the scrutiny of some Democrats in Congress, according to The Hill.
The Defense review found that Sentinel was “essential to national security,” but 716 scientists, including ten Nobel laureates and 23 members of the National Academies, disagreed with the assessment.
“There is no sound technical or strategic rationale for spending tens of billions of dollars building new nuclear weapons,” Tara Drozdenko, director of UCS’ global security program, said in a statement.
Barish at Nobel Prize press conference in Stockholm in December 2017. (Bengt Nyman, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Barry Barish, a signatory to the letter, was also harshly critical of the Pentagon’s approach.
“It is unconscionable to continue to develop nuclear weapons, like the Sentinel program,” he said.
The soaring costs of Sentinel, which is overseen by the defense contractor Northrup Grumman, have been the subject of media attention. The program will cost an estimated $214 million per missile, far more than originally expected, Bloomberg reported on Friday.
However, the cost is hardly the only reason to cancel the program, UCS scientists argue. The silos that house the nuclear missiles, which are found in North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Nebraska, are vulnerable to attack — in fact, they are designed to draw enemy weapons away from other U.S. targets, according to Scientific American.
Such an attack would expose huge swaths of the American population to radioactive fallout.
Because they are a likely target, the siloed missiles are kept on “hair-trigger” alert so the U.S. president can launch them within minutes. This “increases the risk of nuclear war” that could start from false alarms, miscalculations, or misunderstandings, the UCS letter states.
The scientists further argue that there’s no need for a land-based nuclear weapons system given the effectiveness of nuclear-armed submarines — one of the other parts of the nuclear triad, along with bomber jets. Such submarines are “hidden at sea” and “essentially invulnerable to attack,” according to the letter. Moreover, the submarine missiles are just as accurate as land-based missiles, and already have “destructive capability than could ever be employed effectively,” it states.
The submarine system is also being overhauled, as is the “air” component of the nuclear triad. In total, the U.S. military plans to spend more than $1 trillion over 30 years on renewing the nuclear arsenal, according to the Arms Control Association.
The U.S. leads the way in a surge of global spending on nuclear arms, according to two studies published last month, one of which found that nearly $3,000 per second was spent in 2023.
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/07/10/s ... bm-system/
July 9, 2024
A hostile military alliance, now including even Sweden and Finland, is at the very borders of Russia. Chris Wright asks how Russian leaders are supposed to react to this as the NATO summit kicked off in Washington.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg meeting with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Monday ahead of the NATO summit in Washington this week. (NATO/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
By Chris Wright
Common Dreams
The world is at its most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Back then, however, the fear of total destruction consumed the public; today, few people seem even to be aware of this possibility.
It is easily imaginable that nuclear war could break out between Russia (and perhaps China) and the West, yet politicians continue to escalate tensions, place hundreds of thousands of troops at “high readiness,” and attack military targets inside Russia, even while ordinary citizens blithely go on with their lives.
The situation is without parallel in history.
Consider the following facts. A hostile military alliance, now including even Sweden and Finland, is at the very borders of Russia. How are Russian leaders — whose country was almost destroyed by Western invasion twice in the 20th century — supposed to react to this? How would Washington react if Mexico or Canada belonged to an enormous, expansionist, and highly belligerent anti-U.S. military alliance?
As if expanding NATO to include Eastern Europe wasn’t provocative enough, Washington began to send billions of dollars’ worth of military aid to Ukraine in 2014, to “improve interoperability with NATO,” in the words of the Defense Department.
Why this Western involvement in Ukraine, which, as Barack Obama said while president, is “a core Russian interest but not an American one?”
One reason was given by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) in a recent moment of startling televised candor: Ukraine is “sitting on $10 to $12 trillion of critical minerals… I don’t want to give that money and those assets to Putin to share with China.”
As The Washington Post has reported:
“Ukraine harbors some of the world’s largest reserves of titanium and iron ore, fields of untapped lithium, and massive deposits of coal. Collectively, they are worth tens of trillions of dollars.”
Ukraine also has colossal reserves of natural gas and oil, in addition to neon, nickel, beryllium and other critical rare earth metals. For NATO’s leadership, Russia and, in particular, China can’t be permitted access to these resources. The war in Ukraine must, therefore, continue indefinitely, and negotiations with Russia mustn’t be pursued.
Meanwhile, as Ukraine was being de facto integrated into NATO in the years before 2022, the United States put into operation an anti-ballistic-missile site in Romania in 2016.
NATO’s Aegis Ashore Ballistic Missile Defense System (AABMDS) site in Deveselu, Romania in 2019. (U.S. Navy/Amy Forsythe, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
As Benjamin Abelow notes in How the West Brought War to Ukraine, the missile launchers that the ABM system uses can accommodate nuclear-tipped offensive weapons like the Tomahawk cruise missile.
“Tomahawks,” he points out, “have a range of 1,500 miles, can strike Moscow and other targets deep inside Russia, and can carry hydrogen bomb warheads with selectable yields up to 150 kilotons, roughly 10 times that of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.” Poland now boasts a similar ABM site.
American assurances that these anti-missile bases are defensive in nature, to protect against an (incredibly unlikely) attack from Iran, can hardly reassure Russia, given the missile launchers’ capability to launch offensive weapons.
In another bellicose move, the Trump administration in 2019 unilaterally withdrew from the 1987 Treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces.
Russia responded by proposing that the U.S. declare a moratorium on the deployment of short- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe, saying it wouldn’t deploy such missiles as long as NATO members didn’t. Washington dismissed these proposals, which upset some European leaders. “Has the absence of dialogue with Russia,” French President Emmanuel Macron said, “made the European continent any safer? I don’t think so.”
The situation is especially dangerous given what experts call “warhead ambiguity.” As senior Russian military officers have said, “There will be no way to determine if an incoming ballistic missile is fitted with a nuclear or a conventional warhead, and so the military will see it as a nuclear attack” that warrants a nuclear retaliation.
A possible misunderstanding could thus plunge the world into nuclear war.
The “Deckhouse” — command and control center of NATO’s Aegis Ashore Ballistic Missile Defense System (AABMDS) site in Redzikowo, Poland. (U.S. Navy/Amy Forsythe, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
So now we’re more than two years into a proxy war with Russia that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and has seen Ukraine even more closely integrated into the structures of NATO than it was before.
And the West continues to inch ever closer to the nuclear precipice. Ukraine has begun using U.S. missiles to strike Russian territory, including defensive (not only offensive) missile systems.
This summer, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and Belgium will begin sending F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, and Denmark and the Netherlands have said there will be no restrictions on the use of these planes to strike targets in Russia. F-16s are able to deliver nuclear weapons, and Russia has said the planes will be considered a nuclear threat.
Bringing the world even closer to terminal crisis, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg states that 500,000 troops are at “high readiness,” and in the next five years, NATO allies will “acquire thousands of air defense and artillery systems, 850 modern aircraft — mostly fifth-generation F-35s —and also a lot of other high-end capabilities.”
Macron has morphed into one of Europe’s most hawkish leaders, with plans to send military instructors to Ukraine very soon. At the same time, NATO is holding talks about taking more nuclear weapons out of storage and placing them on standby.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Stoltenberg, and U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO Julianne Smith at “NATO Day” on Monday at Washington Nationals’ Park ahead of the summit this week in D.C. (NATO/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Where all this is heading is unclear, but what’s obvious is that Western leaders are acting with reckless disregard for the future of humanity.
Their bet is that Putin will never deploy nuclear weapons, despite his many threats to do so and recent Russian military drills to deploy tactical nuclear weapons. Given that Russian use of nuclear warheads might well precipitate a nuclear response by the West, the fate of humanity hangs on the restraint and rationality of one man, Putin—a figure who is constantly portrayed by Western media and politicians as an irrational, bloodthirsty monster.
So the human species is supposed to place its hope for survival in someone we’re told is a madman, who leads a state that feels besieged by the most powerful military coalition in history, apparently committed to its demise.
Maybe the madmen aren’t in the Russian government but rather in NATO governments?
It is downright puzzling that millions of people aren’t protesting in the streets every day to deescalate the crisis and pull civilization back from the brink. Evidently the mass media have successfully fulfilled their function of manufacturing consent. But unless the Western public wakes up, the current crisis might not end as benignly as did the one in 1962.
Scientists to Biden: Cancel New Nuclear IBM System
July 10, 2024
More than 700 scientists, in an open letter to the U.S. president and Congress, call the new intercontinental-range ballistic missile system, known as Sentinel, expensive and dangerous.
Northrop Grumman and an industry partner successfully conducted Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile Shroud Fly-off Test at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake verifying the shroud did not strike enclosed payload, critical to mission success. (Northrop Grumman)
By Edward Carver
Common Dreams
More than 700 scientists have called for an end to the United States’ land-based nuclear weapons program that’s set to be replaced after a Pentagon decision to approve the program despite soaring costs.
In an open letter to President Joe Biden and Congress, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) argued againstthe new intercontinental-range ballistic missile system, known as Sentinel.
“As scientists and engineers, we are acutely aware of the grave risk of nuclear war,” the letter began. “We are particularly concerned about the needless dangers created by the deployment of expensive, dangerous, and unnecessary land-based, intercontinental-range ballistic missiles (ICBMs).” The scientists said the land-based nuclear weapons are unnecessary because:
“The United States deploys an assured ability to retaliate against a nuclear attack without land-based missiles. Roughly 1,000 nuclear warheads are deployed on U.S. submarines hidden at sea, essentially invulnerable to attack. Submarine-launched ballistic missiles are as accurate as silo-based missiles, quick to respond, and provide more destructive capability than could ever be employed effectively.
Specifically, one nuclear detonation can destroy an entire city; hundreds or thousands of detonations would cause millions of immediate deaths, the destruction of critical infrastructure, and potentially catastrophic climate impacts. The U.S. Navy deploys twelve submarines and is working to replace the entire fleet. Silo-based missiles do not provide any important additional capability.”
The Department of Defense on Monday certified the continuation of the Sentinel project, releasing the results of a review that was legally required when the cost estimate ballooned to “at least” $131 billion earlier this year, which drew the scrutiny of some Democrats in Congress, according to The Hill.
The Defense review found that Sentinel was “essential to national security,” but 716 scientists, including ten Nobel laureates and 23 members of the National Academies, disagreed with the assessment.
“There is no sound technical or strategic rationale for spending tens of billions of dollars building new nuclear weapons,” Tara Drozdenko, director of UCS’ global security program, said in a statement.
Barish at Nobel Prize press conference in Stockholm in December 2017. (Bengt Nyman, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Barry Barish, a signatory to the letter, was also harshly critical of the Pentagon’s approach.
“It is unconscionable to continue to develop nuclear weapons, like the Sentinel program,” he said.
The soaring costs of Sentinel, which is overseen by the defense contractor Northrup Grumman, have been the subject of media attention. The program will cost an estimated $214 million per missile, far more than originally expected, Bloomberg reported on Friday.
However, the cost is hardly the only reason to cancel the program, UCS scientists argue. The silos that house the nuclear missiles, which are found in North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Nebraska, are vulnerable to attack — in fact, they are designed to draw enemy weapons away from other U.S. targets, according to Scientific American.
Such an attack would expose huge swaths of the American population to radioactive fallout.
Because they are a likely target, the siloed missiles are kept on “hair-trigger” alert so the U.S. president can launch them within minutes. This “increases the risk of nuclear war” that could start from false alarms, miscalculations, or misunderstandings, the UCS letter states.
The scientists further argue that there’s no need for a land-based nuclear weapons system given the effectiveness of nuclear-armed submarines — one of the other parts of the nuclear triad, along with bomber jets. Such submarines are “hidden at sea” and “essentially invulnerable to attack,” according to the letter. Moreover, the submarine missiles are just as accurate as land-based missiles, and already have “destructive capability than could ever be employed effectively,” it states.
The submarine system is also being overhauled, as is the “air” component of the nuclear triad. In total, the U.S. military plans to spend more than $1 trillion over 30 years on renewing the nuclear arsenal, according to the Arms Control Association.
The U.S. leads the way in a surge of global spending on nuclear arms, according to two studies published last month, one of which found that nearly $3,000 per second was spent in 2023.
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/07/10/s ... bm-system/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."