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Will Quiet Middle East Last? Or Is It Lull Before Next Storm?
Will Quiet Middle East Last? Or Is It Lull Before Next Storm?
Across the Middle East, the coronavirus is stirring up both upheavals and more subtle changes from Tel Aviv to Riyadh, little reported and when covered little understood in the Western media.
In Israel, the virus has enabled that master political magician Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to pull off yet another spectacular escape as improbable as any in a James Bond or Star Wars movie to remain in power indefinitely.
After matching him in three successive national elections, Blue and White opposition leader, former Army Chief of Staff retired Lieutenant General Benny Gantz finally blinked: Because of the coronavirus pandemic crisis, he agreed to enter into a coalition with Netanyahu leading it for the first 18 months.
This is more than enough time for Netanyahu, a master political infighter and intriguer to splinter Blue and White into fragments. Indeed, Gantz has already done the biggest part of the job for him.
His own top allies in the new party, former Finance Minister Yair Lapid and former Defense Minister and Army Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon both firmly opposed any agreement to compromise with Netanyahu refused to go along with it. Currently, even Gantz and Netanyahu have not yet finalized their agreement, but Netanyahu has seized the initiative from him. His record in power over the past decade suggests he will not release it easily.
Netanyahu can at least boast that his lockdown has kept Israel relatively isolated from the pandemic. That is not the case in Iran, which boasts close trade and energy ties with China and where the virus has been raging ferociously.
That of course, is also the case in the United States. Extremist US hawks have been gloating – hopefully – that the crisis in Iran might discredit and topple the government there. That seems very unlikely at the moment.
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US, NATO Consumed by ‘Black Sea Madness’
US, NATO Consumed by ‘Black Sea Madness’
Whom the gods would destroy, Friedrich Nietzsche famously said, they first make mad. What would Nietzsche make of the current, truly mad US and NATO obsession with charging into the Black Sea? It is a useful thought to ponder.
The Black Sea was far outside NATO’s traditional theater of operations for most of the Alliance’s history. However, Brussels and Washington have been piling up their military assets and visibility in the region like bees at a honey pot – or like a rogue herd of elephants charging off the edge of a cliff.
Yet NATO’s “In Your Face” presence in the Black Sea protects no one. On the contrary, it puts America’s allies in the region at grave risk by escalating tensions and increasing the danger that full scale war could break out by deliberately manufactured incident (Just think the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964) and or through a random error or clash that escalates out of control.
The US/NATO forward presence in the Black Sea is strategic madness. And it replicates parallel incendiary US exercises in fake macho stupidity against Beijing in the South China Sea: A region from which the Chinese people suffered invasion and societal collapse on a genocidal scale following defeats by Britain and France in the First Opium War (1839-42) and by Imperial Japan in its terrible invasion of summer 1937.
Washington seems equally intent on opening up a third front against Iran with its parallel forward policy in the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean.
Three simultaneous wars against three major nations, two of which are the largest, most populous in the world and formidably nuclear armed? US grand strategy –insofar as there is one – seems to have national suicide as its only goal.
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Bertrand Russell Diagnoses Washington War Madness and the Coming Rape of Venezuela
Bertrand Russell Diagnoses Washington War Madness and the Coming Rape of Venezuela
It is a scene depressingly familiar to inhabitants of Political Washington over the past 30 years since US armed invasion of small or vulnerable countries came back into fashion after being briefly discredited following the Vietnam War. This time it is Venezuela and its twice democratically-elected President Nicolas Maduro that is being demonized as a Diabolical Menace to the very survival of All That is Good and True.
One does not have to uncritically admire everything President Maduro has done as leader of his country to confidently predict what will happen if the US government succeeds in toppling him and imposing its own ridiculous figurehead – boyish, fearful, eager-to-please little Juan Guiado: Venezuela’s version of Mario Rubio and the nonentity being touted as his country’s liberator (how the spirit of Simon Bolivar must be raging – or laughing uncontrollably!).
Then, the miseries of the unfortunate Venezuelan people will not end: They will only just have begun.
Washington’s Armchair Heroes are determined to transform the Bolivarian Republic into the Gulliverian Republic – a joke of a state presided over by worthless tiny midgets.
We have seen this same infernal script play out in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Ukraine with efforts to impose it on Syria and Yemen.
The outcome is always the same: Worse wars, worse suffering, huge increases in civilian death tolls, collapses of economies, violent anarchy, flourishing extreme Islamist and other terrorist groups where previously there were none, enormous rackets sexually enslaving children and young women, soaring per capita drug abuse rates.
The philosopher-statesmen and wise pundit-prophets of Washington shake their heads sadly and move on every looking for new worlds to liberate – and destroy.
Why is this happening yet again as it has remorselessly before under the previous five successive US presidents?
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Woodrow Wilson Goes to Europe: One Hundred Years of Delusional American Madness
Woodrow Wilson Goes to Europe: One Hundred Years of Delusional American Madness
We are now in the dubious position of “celebrating” – if that is the word – the 100th anniversary of US President Woodrow Wilson’s departure on December 4, 1918 on the liner SS George Washington for the Versailles Peace Conference where he was confident he would dictate his brilliant solutions that would end war in the world for all time.
Historians and psychiatrists – including Dr. Sigmund Freud himself who co-authored a book on Wilson – have endlessly debated whether Wilson was sane and just deluded or raving mad. Freud clearly inclined to the latter view. And he had ample evidence to support him. What is most alarming is that, as Henry Kissinger – significantly not born an American at all – points out, all US presidents either share Wilson’s ridiculous messianic fantasies or feel they must pretend to.
During the supposed dark age of the Cold War from 1945 to 1989, the recognition that the Soviet Union was at least as militarily powerful as the United States imposed the disciplines of realism and restraint on US policymakers. But since the Berlin Wall came down, the Warsaw Pact was dissolved and the Soviet Union peacefully disassembled, that restraint has vanished.
Every US president since then really believes that the United States is unique in history and fated to remake the entire world in its own image. History is over, American triumph over the whole world is ensured. And since that globalist vision is inevitable, flawless, perfect and virtuous, it follows that every bombing campaign, every war, every imposition of economic sanctions, the toppling of every government and the destruction of every society that dares to disagree is divinely approved.
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The Stampede of the Gadarene Swine: US Leaders Allowing Ukraine to Pull Them into Global War
The Stampede of the Gadarene Swine: US Leaders Allowing Ukraine to Pull Them into Global War
George Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel was right – Again: The only thing the human race learns from history is that it learns nothing from history.
In 1914,the British Empire, largest in human history and one of the longest-lasting, charged into World War I to defend “gallant little Belgium” whose King Leopold over the previous 30 years had carried out one of the longest, largest genocides of all time, killing 10 million people in the Congo.
Germany, wealthiest, most prosperous nation in Europe, blundered into the same needless war when feckless Kaiser Wilhelm II causally gave sweeping approval to Austria-Hungary to annihilate the tiny nation of Serbia. Millions of brave and idealistic Russians eagerly volunteered to fight in the war to protect “gallant little Serbia.” Most of them died too. There is no record that any of the Serbian leaders after the war visited any of their mass graves.
Now it is the United States’ turn.
Since the end of the Cold War US policymakers, presidents and their congresses have carried out virtually every stupidity and folly imaginable for any major power. The only one they have so far avoided has been the danger of stumbling into a full scale world war.
However, now, with the escalating and increasingly hysterical US support for the shady and risk-taking junta in Kiev, President Donald Trump risks committing that most dire and unforgivable of all horrors.
Trump today is no more than putty in the hands of his national security adviser John Bolton, one of the masterminds of the catastrophe that was the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
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Written in History: The Death of America’s Hyper-Power Fantasy
Written in History: The Death of America’s Hyper-Power Fantasy
In 1987, Paul Kennedy, a British professor of history at Yale University, unleashed a political and intellectual firestorm with the publication of his great (677-page) book, “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.” Kennedy produced a magisterial overview of the competition for global power over the past 500 years from 1500 AD to the present.
Kennedy proposed the thesis that any power that achieved, imagined it had achieved or sought to achieve and maintain a dominant hyper-power role of global dominance was doomed to lose it and then rapidly decline in overall power, wealth, prosperity and influence.
Kennedy argued – with a wealth of detail drawn from different nations over his vast period of half a millennium – that the very attempt to achieve and maintain such power forced every nation that attempted it into a ruinous pattern of strategic overstretch.
This demanded every major global empire in their turn to devote ruinously far too many economic resources to unproductive military power and ever more costly global commitments and conflicts.
The more ambitious the commitments, the quicker came military defeat, economic ruin and national collapse, Kennedy documented.
Kennedy published his book however at exactly the wrong moment for its abundantly documented conclusions and arguments to be taken seriously in the United States. The Cold War was just ending. The heroic actions of the Russian people in rejecting communism and leading in the dismantling of the Soviet Union were being misinterpreted as an eternal and lasting victory for the United States and for the forces of free market capitalism and minimum government regulation.
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Seeing the Big Picture: Russia-China Economic Cooperation, the SCO and Global Climate Change
Seeing the Big Picture: Russia-China Economic Cooperation, the SCO and Global Climate Change
This year’s Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok was as usual the subject of dismissive coverage – if any in the mainstream US and UK media. Viewed through the feverish and unregulated speculative bubbles that have defined what passes for 21st century global finance in New York and London, the slow but steady and enormous moves towards industrial and resource consolidation and cooperation between Beijing and Moscow are occurring at too slow a rate to grab Western imaginations shaped by Attention Deficit Disorders.
This failure to grasp the scale of what is going on is like Aesop’s Fable of the Tortoise and the Hare. Western leaders, strategists and financiers think in 24 hour news cycles and soundbites. Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China are thinking in terms of decades and generations.
Western leaders and commentators believe Russian-Chinese economic cooperation has already failed and can never succeed be because it is moving slowly. They fail to grasp that it is moving consistently and steadily in the same direction.
What Russia and China are doing, as perceptive contributors to the Strategic Culture Foundation such as Federico Pieraccini have pointed out is to integrate the strategic security dimension of the highly successful and now well-established Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) with the economic investment dimension of China’s Road and Belt Initiative.
A comparison could be with the much touted success of the combined Marshall Plan and NATO Alliance initiatives produced by the United States in the late 1940s to integrate all of Western Europe under US leadership and control.
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Unipolar Moments Never Last More Than a Moment
Unipolar Moments Never Last More Than a Moment
American leaders, politicians, policymakers and pundits are fond of talking about the “Unipolar Moment” and “Hyper Power” position that they imagine the United States enjoys in the world.
Totally lacking from this fantasy are any inconvenient historical facts.
The US Unipolar Moment (insofar as it existed at all) lasted less than a decade from the break-up of the Soviet Union at the end of December 1991 to June 15, 2001. The US “moment” barely made it into the 21st Century.
On that epochal day of June 15, 2001, two major events happened. First, US President George W. Bush gave a speech in Warsaw pledging to integrate the three tiny Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into NATO as a prime strategic goal of the United States.
That very same day, Russia and China created with four Central Asian nations the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO): The most populous and powerful international security organization in history.
This year, the SCO doubled in population by adding India and Pakistan at the same time – two major nuclear powers with a combined population of 1.5 billion people. That means the SCO now includes more than 3 billion people, around 40 percent of the human race.
From the moment the SCO was created – dedicated from its inception to preserve and protect a multipolar world from the domination of any one power, the US unipolar moment was dead and gone.
This reality was confirmed less than three months later when al-Qaeda’s terror attacks of September 11, 2001 killed almost 3,000 people. More Americans died that day than in the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
George W. Bush should have been impeached for his gross incompetence. Instead his popularity soared. Imagining the Unipolar Moment (or Era) to be still in full flood he invaded Afghanistan later that year and Iraq less than two years later. The United States is still endlessly stuck in those unending wars.
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One Minute to Midnight: Latest US Sanctions Propel Nations Towards Risk of War
One Minute to Midnight: Latest US Sanctions Propel Nations Towards Risk of War
The State Department’s announcement on August 8 that the US government was going to impose sweeping new economic sanctions on Russia over the still mysterious and unresolved Skripal Affair was a truly fateful one. The famous Doomsday Clock of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists should have immediately been moved forward to one minute to midnight on receipt of the news. (It already is set at only two minutes to the midnight that signifies catastrophic global thermonuclear war.)
For the lesson of history is a clear one: Such sanctions do far worse than prevent constructive dialogue and efforts to settle major differences of policy and interest between great nations. When they are seen as an existential threat to the very existence of that nation, they drive the targeted country’s government to consider all-out war.
That is exactly how the trans-oceanic total war between the United States and Japan – the very first and so far thankfully only war that has seen the use of nuclear weapons against cities and human populations – began. And it was the United States that triggered it.
Japan had been remorselessly expanding into China and across the Pacific Theater for a decade and its ferocious war of conquest against China was already four years old and had claimed millions of lives by the summer of 1941.
It was then that US code breakers learned of Japan’s plans also to occupy the French colonial territories of Indochina – today the nations of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
In response therefore, and at the insistent urging of his assistant secretary of state for economic affairs Dean Acheson, President Franklin D. Roosevelt imposed a devastating embargo on the US export of raw materials that Japan could use for war.
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The World Transformed and No One in America Noticed
The World Transformed and No One in America Noticed
The world transformed and nobody in the West noticed. India and Pakistan have joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The 17 year-old body since its founding on June 15, 2001 has quietly established itself as the main alliance and grouping of nations across Eurasia. Now it has expanded from six nations to eight, and the two new members are the giant nuclear-armed regional powers of South Asia, India, with a population of 1.324 billion and Pakistan, with 193.2 million people (both in 2016).
In other words, the combined population of the SCO powers or already well over 1.5 billion has virtually doubled at a single stroke.
The long-term global consequences of this development are enormous. It is likely to prove the single most important factor insuring peace and removing the threat of nuclear war over South Asia and from 20 percent of the human race. It now raises the total population of the world in the eight SCO nations to 40 percent, including one of the two most powerful thermonuclear armed nations (Russia) and three other nuclear powers (China, India and Pakistan).
This development is a diplomatic triumph especially for Moscow. Russia has been seeking for decades to ease its longtime close strategic ally India into the SCO umbrella. This vision was clearly articulated by one of Russia’s greatest strategic minds of the 20th century, former Premier and Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov, who died in 2015. In the past China quietly but steadfastly blocked the India’s accession, but with Pakistan, China’s ally joining at the same time, the influence of Beijing and Moscow is harmonized.
The move can only boost Russia’s already leading role in the diplomacy and national security of the Asian continent. For both Beijing and Delhi, the road for good relations with each other and the resolution of issues such as sharing the water resources of the Himalayas and investing in the economic development of Africa now runs through Moscow.
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