Kiribati Has Benefitted from Abolishing Its Military

by Richard Westra / November 20th, 2024

David Swanson asked me to write about Kiribati after I wrote to him to point out Costa Rica is not the only “full-fledged and totally independent country to be entirely demilitarised.” Kiribati, and other small countries I suspect, have no military. In Kiribati’s case this was a deliberate decision taken by the first President and Government of Kiribati as it was becoming Independent in 1979. Like Costa Rica it has almost certainly benefitted from that foundational decision. Many other newly independent ex British colonies suffered from coups and military rule as a result of the British policy of promoting nationhood on the British model: Westminster type parliament, independent judiciary, and a military force. It was interesting interviewing Sir Ieremia Tabai, the first President and a leading campaigner at the time when it was an issue, stating that the motivation was heavily economic – we are a small country with very little money so we can’t go wasting it on buying guns. If only more leaders would adhere to such basic commonsense!

But first of all a bit of an introduction to Kiribati, as most people have never heard of us and even fewer know much about us. Kiribati sits right in the middle of the Pacific Ocean but tending to the Western side. It is the only country in the world with a claim to be in all four hemispheres, north, south, east and west, spanning as it does the Equator and the 180 meridian, the International Date Line. There are 33 islands spread over 3000kms from west to east along the Equator. The population is currently 130,000 and rising fast, with more than half living in the capital Tarawa. The population is over 90% ethnically homogenous Micronesian, I-Kiribati, with its own language and unique culture. Kiribati dance is a unique cultural form and is central in the culture, an integral part of every occasion from the opening of Parliament to weddings, birthdays, and public holidays. It is one of the main ways in which the culture preserves itself, the Kiribati diaspora using it as an excuse to come together wherever they are and teach it to the children.

Current revenue is predominantly from fishing licences for the right to fish in Kiribati’s vast Exclusive Economic Zone, mainly tuna. The country is very democratic with 45 MPs elected from all the islands who then choose Presidential candidates from amongst their number and these then go up for election by the whole country. The President, who sits for 4 years, barring a vote of no confidence, then chooses a Cabinet from amongst their supporters. The country is now on its fifth President in 45 years. Presidents can have a maximum of three terms. Despite being classified by the UN as a Least Developed State Kiribati has free universal education and health provision, a form of Universal Basic Income, state provision for disabled people, and a non-contributary pension scheme for all those over 60. While some of these benefits are well below the standards provided in more wealthy countries they all represeent advances on previous times. Kiribati has a sovereign wealth fund of $1.5 billion and receives foreign aid from countries such as Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, Korea, the USA, Cuba, the UN, and the EU. The logistics of Kiribati ensure that it is never likely to become a developed state: the isolation and distances involved, and the consequent difficulties of providing services to tiny communities of only a few hundred people separated by thousands of kilometres ensuring that it continues to be underdeveloped, by world standards.

Isolation has not prevented Kiribati from suffering the depradations of colonialism, militarism, and capitalism. The islands were initially settled by various waves of settlement over the past few thousand years resulting in a homogenous culture and language developed over that timescale. Western Europeans started to arrive in the 19th century, particularly whalers operating out of America and elsewhere which started the first great exploitation, decimating the whale population which has not recovered to this day. This was followed at the turn of the 20th century by the beginning of phosphate mining on Banaba, or Ocean Island as it was called by the British. Banaba was mined to such an extent that its inhabitants were forced to resettle on another island which had been bought for them with their own money. It has been suggested that Banaba’s phosphate was used to subsidise the exponential growth of agriculture in Australia and New Zealand, Britain’s partners in exploiting Kiribati, to the tune of $800 million until the phosphate ran out in 1979, the year of Kiribati independence from Britain. Banaban phosphate royalties also covered the cost of Britain’s colonial administration of the Kiribati.

During WWII, the Japanese invaded Kiribati and fortified one island heavily which then became the site of one of the first major battles of the Pacific war when it was retaken by the Americans at the Battle of Tarawa. In the post WWII decades the British used Kiribati as a nuclear testing ground, doing atmospheric tests on Kiritimati Island in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The U.S. tested its bombs on Bikini and Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands immediately north of Kiribati, while the French tested theirs in Muroroa to the south, inflicting on Kiribati and its Pacific island neighbours what Western nations’ own populations refused to accept.

Whilst fishing revenues are now the basis of the Kiribati economy, it is also true that this is the main way in which the country is exploited as its fishing licence revenues are only a small percentage of the profits gained by foreign fishing companies fishing in its EEZ. Kiribati has had to work hard, along with other Pacific countries, Parties to the Nauru Agreement (PNU), to get even the comparatively small amount it gets in licences, gradually building on its success in forcing American fishing fleets to pay in the mid-1980s. Faced by the complete refusal of U.S. fishing companies to pay for fishing in Kiribati waters Kiribati sold the fishing rights to the Russians, exploiting their superpower rivalry so effectively that the following year the U.S. started to pay as prescribed by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea(UNCLOS) – a great example of a microstate manipulating two superpowers to achieve its own ends!

Although to date Kiribati has suffered little from climate change it is quite possible that this could provide an existential threat in the future if ocean acidification and temperature increases, sea level rise and weather pattern change combine to make life impossible and cause dispersal of Kiribati’s people, despite Kiribati having made minuscule contributions to the causes.

Kiribati has hosted visits from foreign warships from the U.S., China, Taiwan, Australia, France and others but these are courtesy visits often bringing medical and other teams to share their expertise. Kiribati benefits from the assistance of an Australian patrol boat to police its EEZ and has occasionally held fishing boats illegally fishing in Kiribati waters. It also benefits from New Zealand Air Force search and rescue teams assisting searches for missing fishermen.

Pacific countries generally, and Kiribati particularly, are seen by the United States and its allies as being stategically important in their geo-political rivalry with China – or their need to have an enemy in order to justify their military spending and safeguard the profits of the military industrial complex. Whenever Kiribati is mentioned in articles and programmes in the Western media it is usually accompanied by references to its strategic significance and the threat of it being taken over by China, particularly over recent years since 2019 when Kiribati returned its diplomatic recognition to China following recognition of Taiwan in 2003. The fear seems to be that Kiribati will allow China to build ports and airbases from which China would be able to attack the United States and disrupt trade, although neither Kiribati nor China has shown any inclination to do this, a case it seems of the pot calling the kettle black. The United States has multiple military bases in the Pacific, and indeed throughout the world, and seems to think that everyone else wants to waste money and resources in the same way. Following the switch from Taiwan to China in 2019 the U.S. has been keen to make connections in Kiribati but has been thwarted by the lack of a military it can entice with hardware and a shortage of land in the capital Tarawa where it could build an Embassy. Kiribati sees itself as a Christian country and is naturally culturally connected to the U.S. – its first missionaries were American. U.S. churches have a strong presence in the country. It was liberated by U.S. forces defeating the Japanese in World War II. It has benefitted in the past from Peace Corps volunteers. And its official language is English which makes it part of the Anglophone world. There is a Kiribati diaspora including communities in the U.S. At the same time, the people of Kiribati have no wish to be controlled by any foreign power, and resent any country that interferes with Kiribati’s independence. Experience has also taught Kiribati that it can exploit rivalry for its own benefit. The dangers for Kiribati in this are that should the rivalry escalate to war it is likely that rival powers would prefer to fight in somewhere like Kiribati rather than in their own countries.

Whilst thinking about writing this article it occurred to me that a major benefit of Kiribati’s lack of a military is the lack of guns in the country. I can’t remember anyone ever having been shot, and on asking around I found that no one else could either – hardly surprising as there are no guns to shoot with! This was not always the case. Early contact with Europeans, mainly whalers and traders, was characterised by a trade in tobacco, alcohol, guns, and metal — knives, pots and pans, nails etc. Various chiefs and factions acquired guns to gain an advantage over local rivals, which led to a number of conflicts on and between different islands in the latter half of the 19^th century. This came to an end however with the declaration of a Protectorate by the British in 1892 when HMS Royalist raised the Union Jack on all the different islands and rounded up all the guns at the same time.

It feels to me that Kiribati has much to teach the world. Its culture is very communal with an expectation that we should help each other, most strongly within the extended family but also on a wider level. Strangers and visitors are welcomed and treated very well. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of maneabas, communal meeting houses where everybody is welcome, often offering accomodation to anyone who needs it. The expectation is that decisions should be reached by consensus. Most houses are not locked and many are indeed open sided without walls. Kiribati clearly demonstrates the benefits of any people having their own space over which they have control and which they can call their own, without being dominated or subjugated by other ethnicities — a principle which if applied worldwide would lead to the break up of bullying superpowers and other countries that have usually been created through conquest. We could see hundreds, or indeed thousands, of states offering all peoples their own autonomy within a cooperative world framework. Many conflicts in the world are caused by the domination of one group by another within the confines of a larger state, whether that be the Palestinians in Israel, the indigenous peoples of the Americas within their colonised lands, the Rohingya in Myanmar/Bangladesh, the Uyghers in China, the Basques and Catalans in Spain, the Kurds within Iran, Iraq, and Turkey, the West Papuans in Indonesia, or innumerable ethnicities within the colonial imposed boundaries of Africa.

In conclusion, it is worth reiterating the main benefits of Kiribati’s lack of a military. Ieremia insisted that the rationale was wholly economic – we cannot afford to spend money financing a military as that will deprive far more essential services such as education and health of much needed resources. And who is going to attack us anyway out here in the middle of the ocean? The other benefits, which are difficult to be so sure about, include the political stability that has allowed peaceful development and the unchallenged primacy of the democratic electoral system without interference from unelected military officers enforced by soldiers. Then there is the lack of a gun culture leading to completely unnecessary deaths. It is difficult to imagine any advantages that would be gained by having a military!

Richard Westra is Designated Associate Professor, Graduate School of Law, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan. His work has been published in numerous international refereed journals. He is author and editor of 10 books including Confronting Global Neoliberalism: Third World Resistance and Development Strategies, Clarity Press 2010. Read other articles by Richard.

A Common Thread Runs Through Trump Appointments: Look Out Iran!

by Ted Snider Posted onNovember 18, 2024

Former President and President-elect Donald Trump has been tarred, inconsistently with his actual record, with the charge of being soft on Russia. He has never been charged with being soft on Iran.

Trump unilaterally and illegally pulled out of the JCPOA nuclear agreement with Iran. He imposed devastating sanctions on Iran. He ordered the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s top general and the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force. General Mark Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the last Trump administration, says he feared that Trump would launch missile strikes on Iran that could trigger an all out war. “If you do this,” Milley told him, “you’re gonna have a fucking war.”

Trump’s transition team is already working on plans to “drastically increase sanctions on Iran and throttle its oil sales.” According to a former Trump official, “Tightening the economic noose around Iran is going to be a day one foreign policy priority to start cleaning up Biden’s Middle East mess.”

Trump has tapped Brian Hook to lead his State Department transition team. Hook was Special Representative for Iranian Affairs at the State Department in Trump’s first term. He was an architect of the sanction and maximum pressure policy on Iran. Hook recently told CNN that the Trump administration “would isolate Iran diplomatically and weaken them economically.” He stressed that to deter Iran, they have to believe that the U.S. has “a credible threat of military force.”

As Secretary of State, Trump has appointed Senator Mark Rubio. Rubio has been hawkish on almost everything. His appointment could be dangerous for Cuba and Venezuela. But it could also be very dangerous for Iran. Rubio favored illegally pulling out of the JCPOA. He advocated the authorization of force without limits against Iran, including sending U.S. forces. In 2015, Rubio said that the U.S. “should never, ever take off the table the notion that it may be necessary to conduct some sort of nucle – uh, military strike against their nuclear ambition.”

As his National Security Advisor, Trump has appointed Representative Mike Waltz. Waltz is a China hawk. He may simply be a war hawk, having supported wars in Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq and Syria.

Waltz once demanded that President Biden “punch Iran in the nose.” He supports threatening to attack Iran. Waltz has suggested that Israel should have bombed Iran’s oil export sites and its Natanz nuclear facilities. He advocates for the U.S. showing Iran “that our military capabilities are such that we could indeed severely damage their [nuclear] program.” Days before the election, on November 2, Waltz promised that a Trump administration would “return to maximum pressure to bring Iran back to the table for a better deal!” On the same day, Waltz co-authored a piece for The Economist in which he argued that the Biden-Harris administration “should put a credible military option on the table to make clear to the Iranians that America would stop them building nuclear weapons.”

Both arguments made that day are strikingly uninformed and unnecessarily provocative. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has already stated that Iran is “ready to engage with JCPOA participants” and that “[i]f JCPOA commitments are implemented fully and in good faith, dialogue on other issues can follow.” He has even made the bold move of calling for bypassing intermediaries in favor of direct negotiations with the United States. As for stopping Iran from building nuclear weapons, as CIA Director William Burns said in October, “[W]e do not see evidence today that the supreme leader has reversed the decision that he took at the end of 2003 to suspend the weaponization program. We don’t see evidence today that such a decision [to build a bomb] has been made. We watch it very carefully.” In 2022, the  U.S. Department of Defense’s Nuclear Posture Review concluded that “Iran does not today possess a nuclear weapon and we currently believe it is not pursuing one.”

Trumps intelligence appointments include Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence and John Ratcliffe as Director of the CIA. Gabbard was a Democratic congresswoman and a candidate, against Joe Biden, in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary before becoming a Republican. Like her political allegiance, her policy on Iran has been mixed. In 2013, she supported sanctioning Iran. A year later, she called Iran the “world’s leading state-sponsor of terrorism.” Later, though, she supported the JCPOA nuclear agreement with Iran and criticized Trump for pulling out of it and for escalating tension. She would also come to call for ending sanctions.

Ratcliffe is a China hawk, but he has also called for a harder line against Iran. In June, Ratcliffe argued that the Biden administration had not been tough enough on Iran.

Trump’s policy decisions, though, are as unpredictable as his appointments. After speaking three times since Trump’s election, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that he and Trump “see eye-to-eye on the Iranian threat in all its components, and the danger posed by it.” At the same time, there has reportedly been some talk in the Russian media of hope that the Trump administration could reach out to Iran to reduce tension.

Though the roll call of appointments leaves no doubt that Trump has selected a foreign policy team that is hawkish on Iran, The New York Times reports that on November 11, Elon Musk met with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations. Musk is an important Trump advisor who joined Trump in some of his phone calls with world leaders since being elected, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and, perhaps, Turkish President Recep Erdogan. He is reportedly scheduled to meet Argentina’s President Javier Milei in the coming days when Milei comes to the U.S. to meet with Trump.

Iranian officials say the meeting between Musk and Ambassador Amir Saeid Iravani focussed on ways to reduce tension between the U.S. and Iran. They said that the meeting was “good news” and that it was “positive.” Trita Parsi, and expert on Iran’s foreign policy and on American-Iranian relations, says that Trump ultimately may have wanted a deal with Iran in his first term but was misdirected by Iran hawks in his administration, including Mike Pompeo and John Bolton. He reports that Iranian officials recognize Trump’s desire for a deal, but calculate that his ability to pull it off will be determined by whom he appoints to influential positions.

And that’s the question. The appointments are certainly not laden with promise. But, perhaps, the early meeting with Iran is. If Trump’s chosen circle leans once again to hawkishness on Iran, the tragedy of his selections will be that Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, was elected on a platform that included improving relations with the United States. There is a possible path to peace if Trump is not, once again, pushed by those he appointed down the path of animosity.

Ted Snider is a regular columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative as well as other outlets. To support his work or for media or virtual presentation requests, contact him at tedsnider@bell.net.

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Eight Reasons Why Marco Rubio Would Be a Disastrous Secretary of State

by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / November 18th, 2024

Rubio and Trump during a break in the 2016 presidential debate. AP photo.

Of all Trump’s choices for his foreign policy team, Marco Rubio is the least controversial to the neoconservative foreign policy establishment in Washington, and the most certain to provide continuity with all that is wrong with U.S. foreign policy, from Cuba to the Middle East to China.

The only area where there might be some hope for ending a war is Ukraine, where Rubio has come close to Donald Trump’s position, praising Ukraine for standing up to Russia, but recognizing that the U.S. is funding a deadly “stalemate war” that needs to be “brought to a conclusion.”

But in all the other hot spots around the world, Rubio is likely to make conflicts even hotter, or start new ones.

1. His obsession with regime change in Cuba will sink any chance of better relations with the island.

Like other Cuban-American politicians, Marco Rubio has built his career on vilifying the Cuban Revolution and trying to economically strangle and starve into submission the people of his parents’ homeland.

It is ironic, therefore, that his parents left Cuba before the Revolution, during the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, whose executioners, secret police and death squads killed an estimated 20,000 people, according to the CIA, leading to a wildly popular revolution in 1959.

When President Obama began to restore relations with Cuba in 2014, Rubio swore to do “everything possible” to obstruct and reverse that policy. In May 2024, Rubio reiterated his zero tolerance for any kind of social or economic contacts between the U.S. and Cuba, claiming that any easing of the U.S. blockade will only “strengthen the oppressive regime and undermine the opposition… Until there is freedom in Cuba, the United States must maintain a firm stance.”

In 2024 Rubio also introduced legislation to ensure that Cuba would remain on the U.S. “State Sponsor of Terrorism List,” imposing sanctions that cut Cuba off from the U.S.-dominated Western banking system.

These measures to destroy the Cuban economy have led to a massive wave of migration in the past two years. But when the U.S. Coast Guard tried to coordinate with their Cuban counterparts, Rubio introduced legislation to prohibit such interaction. While Trump has vowed to stem immigration, his Secretary of State wants to crush Cuba’s economy, forcing people to abandon the island and set sail for the United States.

2. Applying his anti-Cuba template to the rest of Latin America will make enemies of more of our neighbors.

Rubio’s disdain for his ancestral home in Cuba has served him so well as an American politician that he has extended it to the rest of Latin America. He has sided with extreme right-wing politicians like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Javier Milei in Argentina, and rails against progressive ones, from Brazil’s Ignacio Lula da Silva to Mexico’s popular former President Lopez Obrador, whom he called “an apologist for tyranny” for supporting other leftist governments.

In Venezuela, he has promoted brutal sanctions and regime change plots to topple the government of Nicolas Maduro. In 2019 he was one of the architects of Trump’s failed policy of recognizing opposition figure Juan Guaido as president. He has also advocated for sanctions and regime change in Nicaragua.

In March 2023, Rubio urged President Biden to impose sanctions on Bolivia for prosecuting  leaders of a 2019 U.S.-backed coup that led to massacres that killed at least 21 people.

Rubio also condemned the government of Honduras for withdrawing from an extradition treaty with the United States this past August, in response to decades of U.S. interference that had turned Honduras into a narco-state riven by poverty, gang violence and mass emigration, until the election of democratic socialist President Xiomara Castro in 2022.

Rubio’s major concern about Latin America now seems to be the influence of China, which has become the leading trade partner of most Latin American countries. Unlike the U.S., China focuses on economic benefits and not internal politics, while American politicians like Marco Rubio still see Latin America as the U.S. “backyard.”

While Rubio’s virulent anti-leftist stands have served him well in climbing to senior positions in the U.S. government, and now into Trump’s inner circle, his disdain for Latin American sovereignty bodes ill for U.S. relations with the region.

3. He believes the US and Israel can do no wrong, and that God has given Palestine to Israel.

Despite the massive death toll in Gaza and global condemnation of Israel’s genocide, Rubio still perpetuates the myth that “Israel takes extraordinary steps to avoid civilian losses” and that innocent people die in Gaza because Hamas has deliberated placed them in the way and used them as human shields. The problem, he says, is “an enemy that doesn’t value human life.”

When asked by CODEPINK in November 2024 if he would support a ceasefire, Rubio replied, “On the contrary. I want them to destroy every element of Hamas they can get their hands on. These people are vicious animals.”

There are few times in this past year that the Biden administration has tried to restrain Israel, but when Biden begged Israel not to send troops into the southern city of Rafah, Rubio said that was like telling the Allied forces in World War II not to attack Berlin to get Hitler.

In a letter to Secretary of State Blinken in August 2024, Rubio criticized the Biden administration’s decision to sanction Israeli settlers linked to anti-Palestinian violence in the occupied West Bank.

“Israel has consistently sought peace with the Palestinians. It is unfortunate that the Palestinians, whether it be the Palestinian Authority or FTOs [Foreign Terrorist Organisations] such as Hamas, have rejected such overtures,” Rubio wrote. “Israelis rightfully living in their historic homeland are not the impediment to peace; the Palestinians are,” he added.

No country besides Israel subscribes to the idea that its borders should be based on 2,000-year-old religious scriptures, and that it has a God-given right to displace or exterminate people who have lived there since then to reconquer its ancient homeland. The United States will find itself  extraordinarily isolated from the rest of the world if Rubio tries to assert that as a matter of U.S. policy.

4. His deep-seated enmity toward Iran will fuel Israel’s war on its neighbors, and may lead to a U.S. war with Iran.

Rubio is obsessed with Iran. He claims that the central cause of violence and suffering in the Middle East is not Israeli policy but “Iran’s ambition to be a regional hegemonic power.” He says that Iran’s goal in the Middle East is to “seek to drive America out of the region and then destroy Israel.”

He has been a proponent of maximum pressure on Iran, including a call for more and more sanctions. He believes the U.S. should not re-enter the Iran nuclear deal, saying: “We must not trade away U.S. and Israeli security for vague commitments from a terrorist-sponsoring regime that has killed Americans and threatens to annihilate Israel.”

Rubio calls Lebanon’s Hezbollah a “full blown agent of Iran right on Israel’s border” and that wiping out Hezbollah’s leadership, along with entire neighborhoods full of civilians, is a “service to humanity.” He alleges that Iran has control over Iraq, Syria, the Houthis in Yemen and is a threat to Jordan. He claims that “Iran has put a noose around Israel,” and says that the goal of U.S. policy should be regime change in Iran, which would set the stage for war.

While there will hopefully be leaders in the Pentagon who will caution Donald Trump about the perils of a war with Iran, Rubio will not be a voice of reason.

5.  He is beholden to big money, from the weapons industry to the Israel lobby.

Open Secrets reports that Rubio has received over a million dollars in campaign contributions from pro-Israel groups during his career. The Pro-Israel America PAC was his single largest campaign contributor over the last 5 years. When he last ran for reelection in 2022, he was the third largest recipient of funding by pro-Israel groups in the Senate, taking in $367,000 from them for that campaign.

Rubio was also the fourth largest recipient of funding from the “defense” industry in the Senate for the 2022 cycle, receiving $196,000. Altogether, the weapons industry has invested $663,000 in his Congressional career.

Rubio is clearly beholden to the US arms industry, and even more so to the Israel lobby, which has been one of his largest sources of campaign funding. This has placed him in the vanguard of Congress’s blind, unconditional support for Israel and subservience to Israeli narratives and propaganda, making it unlikely that he will ever challenge the ongoing extermination of the Palestinian people or their expulsion from their homeland.

6. He’s so antagonistic towards China that China has sanctioned him–twice!

Speaking at the Heritage Foundation in 2022, Rubio said: “The gravest threat facing America today, the challenge that will define this century and every generation represented here, is not climate change, the pandemic, or the left’s version of social justice. The threat that will define this century is China.”

It will be hard for our nation’s “top diplomat” to ease tensions with a country he has so maligned. He antagonized China by co-sponsoring the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which allows the U.S. to bar  Chinese imports over alleged Uyghur rights abuses, abuses that China denies and independent researchers question. In fact, Rubio has gone so far as to accuse China of a “grotesque campaign of genocide” against the Uyghurs.

On Taiwan, he has not only introduced legislation to increase military aid to the island, but actually supports Taiwanese independence — a dangerous deviation from the US government’s long-standing One China approach.

The Chinese responded to Rubio by sanctioning him, not once but twice–once regarding the Uyghurs and once for his support of Hong Kong protests. Unless China lifts the sanctions, he would be the first U.S. secretary of state to be banned from even visiting China.

Analysts expect China to try to sidestep Rubio and engage directly with Trump and other senior officials. Steve Tsang, the director of the China Institute at the U.K.’s School of Oriental and African Studies, told Reuters, “If that doesn’t work, then I think we’re going to get into a much more regular escalation of a bad relationship.”

7. Rubio knows sanctions are a trap, but he doesn’t know how to escape.

Rubio is a leading advocate of unilateral economic sanctions, which are illegal under international law, and which the UN and other countries refer to as “unilateral economic coercive measures.”

The United States has used these measures so widely and wildly that they now impact a third of the world’s population. U.S. officials, from Treasury Secretary Yellen to Rubio himself, have warned that using the U.S. financial system and the dollar’s reserve currency status as weapons against other countries is driving the rest of the world to conduct trade in other currencies and develop alternative financial systems.

In March 2023, Rubio complained on Fox News, “We won’t have to talk sanctions in five years, because there will be so many countries transacting in currencies other than the dollar, that we won’t have the ability to sanction them.”

And yet Rubio has continued to be a leading sponsor of sanctions bills in the Senate, including new sanctions on Iran in January 2024 and a bill in July to sanction foreign banks that participate in alternative financial systems.

So, while other countries develop new financial and trading systems to escape abusive, illegal U.S. sanctions, the nominee for Secretary of State remains caught in the same sanctions trap that he complained about on Fox.

8. He wants to crack down on U.S. free speech.

Rubio wants to curtail the right to free speech enshrined in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In May, he described campus protests against Israel as a “complete breakdown of law and order.”

Rubio claimed to be speaking up for other students at American universities. “[They] paid a lot of money to go to these schools, [but are being disrupted by] a few thousand antisemitic zombies who have been brainwashed by two decades of indoctrination in the belief that the world is divided between victimizers and victims, and that the victimizers in this particular case, the ones that are oppressing people, are Jews in Israel,” said Rubio.

The Florida senator has said he supports Trump’s plan to deport foreign students who engage in pro-Palestinian campus protests. In April, he called for punishing supporters of the Israel boycott movement as part of efforts to counter antisemitism, falsely equating any attempt to respond to Israel’s international crimes with antisemitism.

And what about those crimes, which the students are protesting? After visiting Israel in May, Rubio wrote an article for National Review, in which he never mentioned the thousands of civilians Israel has killed, and instead blamed Iran, Biden and “morally corrupt international institutions” for the crisis.

Marco Rubio expects Americans to believe that it is not genocide itself, but protests against genocide, that are a complete breakdown of law and order. He couldn’t be more wrong if he tried.

Students are not Rubio’s only target. In August 2023, he alleged that certain “far-left and antisemitic entities” may have violated the Foreign Assistance Registration Act by their ties to China. He called for a Justice Department investigation into 18 groups, starting with CODEPINK. These unfounded claims of China connections are only meant to intimidate legitimate groups that are exercising their free speech rights.

Conclusion

On each of these issues, Rubio has shown no sign of understanding the difference between domestic politics and diplomacy. Whether he’s talking about Cuba, Palestine, Iran or China, or even about CODEPINK, all his supposedly tough positions are based on cynically mischaracterizing the actions and motivations of his enemies and then attacking the “straw man” he has falsely set up.

Unscrupulous politicians often get away with that, and Rubio has made it his signature tactic because it works so well for him in American politics. But that will not work if and when he sits down to negotiate with other world leaders as U.S. secretary of state.

His underlying attitude to foreign relations is, like Trump’s, that the United States must get its way or else, and that other countries who won’t submit must be coerced, threatened, couped, bombed or invaded. This makes Rubio just as ill-equipped as Antony Blinken to conduct diplomacy, improve U.S. relations with other countries or resolve disputes and conflicts peacefully, as the UN Charter requires.Email

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books, November 2022.  Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for PEACE, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran:  The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on our Hands:  The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. Read other articles by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.

 

As Biden Leaves Office, the US Empire is Desperate to Maintain Its Hegemony

by Owen Schalk / November 18th, 2024

This November, US president Joe Biden will leave office with the world in turmoil and US fingerprints on the bodies of untold thousands across the globe: in Gaza and Lebanon, Yemen and Syria, Cuba and Venezuela, Pakistan and Haiti, and elsewhere.

While Biden attempted to cast his foreign policy actions as defending “democracy” against “authoritarianism,” this framing is a lie. The real motive force behind the Biden administration’s bloody foreign policy is a fear of waning hegemony – of losing the benefits the US economy derives from political and economic domination of the global majority.

In that vein, the US is still trying to suffocate the model of socialist Latin American integration forwarded by Cuba and Venezuela. Washington is still arming the Israeli genocide in Palestine, the invasion of Lebanon, and other Israeli aggressions against “Axis of Resistance” forces in the region, namely Iran. On top of this, the US is still supporting or carrying out airstrikes against Yemen and Syria, still hoping to bleed Russia dry in Ukraine, still backing a Pakistani military dictatorship imposed with US backing, still engineering the re-invasion of Haiti, and still plotting an economic war (and perhaps a hot one) against China.

The Biden administration genuinely believed it could remake the world in its vision, and particularly the Middle East à la the neoconservatives of the George W. Bush administration. A Nation article by Aída Chávez laid out Biden’s disturbing plan for the Middle East and wider world, a plan that relies on Israel successfully carrying out the ethnic cleansing of Palestine:

One goal of the “Biden doctrine,” as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman called it, is to achieve the “global legitimacy” necessary to “take on Iran in a more aggressive manner.” With Hamas out of the picture and a demilitarized Palestinian state under the influence of the Gulf regimes, the thinking goes, the US will have Arab cover in the region to be able to counter Iran – and the cheap drones they’re worried about – and then put all of its energy toward a confrontation with China.

Following Israel’s killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, US officials jumped at the chance to push “a much wider agenda – including an opening for the next stage of America’s geopolitical ambitions.” This “next stage” includes the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the signing of a US-Saudi defence treaty, and the Gulf monarchies leading Gaza’s so-called “reconstruction” as a pro-US “emirate,” in the words of Republican Senator Lindsey Graham.

Following the killing of Sinwar, Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal stated, “After recent conversations w/leaders of Israel, Saudi Arabia & UAE, I have real hope that Sinwar’s death creates truly historic opportunities for Israel’s security, cessation of fighting & regional peace & stability through normalization of relations. The moment must be seized.” Lindsey Graham elaborated on the “historic opportunities” of which Washington hopes to take advantage. “MBS and MBZ at the UAE will come in and rebuild Gaza,” he said in a recent interview. “[They will] create an enclave in the Palestine.”

According to Bob Woodward’s new book War, Graham reportedly told Biden, “It’s going to take a Democratic president to convince Democrats to vote to go to war for Saudi Arabia.” To which Biden responded, “Let’s do it.”

While Washington aims to violently remake the Middle East to serve its geopolitical aims – a stark contrast to China’s recent peacemaking between Saudi Arabia and Iran – other targets of imperialism continue to suffer as well.

In April 2022, the Biden administration helped engineer the removal of popular Pakistani president Imran Khan from office. The US wanted Khan ousted because he entertained positive relations with China and Russia, two powers that Washington views as a threat to its hegemony. As Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu stated in a now infamous cypher to the Pakistani military, “if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington.”

Since the US-backed coup against Khan, the Pakistani military has taken extreme measures to prevent the ousted president’s return to power, including legal onslaughts, the arrest of thousands of supporters, crackdowns on social media activists, the imprisonment and torture of independent journalists such as Imran Riaz Khan, the decimation of Khan’s party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), and the rigging of an election earlier this year.

In other words, a de facto military junta has seized total power in Pakistan, and Washington backs them because they have reversed Khan’s non-aligned position and returned the country to the US orbit.

Meanwhile, Haiti has become a target of Washington once more. Earlier this year, the Biden administration courted Kenya’s President William Ruto to lead a US-funded invasion force into Haiti, which is wracked by violence after over a century of exploitation and underdevelopment by the US and allies, including Canada. The mission’s ostensible goal is to free Haiti from warring paramilitary gangs – however, the invasion force and its backers ignore the reality that the paramilitaries are a consequence of the brutally unequal political, economic, and social hierarchies imposed on Haiti by Global North powers. In reality, Haiti requires sovereignty and respect, not a new spiral of bloodshed and misery.

Haiti’s Caribbean neighbours, Cuba and Venezuela, have also endured immense suffering due to Biden’s imperialist policies. Cuba and Venezuela have long been targets of US imperialism – Cuba for over sixty years, Venezuela for twenty-five – and the Biden era continued this brutal interventionism. In the case of Cuba, Biden kept in place the hundreds of additional sanctions and the egregious “state sponsor of terrorism” designation imposed by Donald Trump. The Trump-Biden sanctions are harsher than any previous president’s, depriving the small Caribbean nation of billions of dollars per year. “The sanctions today,” says political scientist William LeoGrande, “have a greater impact on the Cuban people than ever before.” People are going hungry, hundreds of thousands hope to migrate, and most recently, the country’s power grid collapsed under the weight of Biden’s coercive measures.

As Drop Site news contributor Ed Augustin wrote in early October:

Government food rations [in Cuba] – a lifeline for the country’s poor – are fraying. Domestic agriculture, which has always been weak, has cratered in recent years for lack of seeds, fertilizer, and petrol, forcing the state to import 100 percent of the basic subsidized goods. But there’s not enough money to do that. Last year the government eliminated chicken from the basic food basket most adults receive. Last month, the daily ration of bread available to all Cubans was cut by a quarter. Even vital staples like rice and beans now arrive late. Food insecurity on the island is rising, according to a recent report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Vulnerable groups – older people, pregnant women, children and people with chronic illnesses – are most affected by the knock-on effects of US policy.

In all the cases described above, the Biden administration has taken extreme measures to snuff out challenges to its imperialist hegemony – measures that manifest first and foremost in the physical destruction of Palestinians and Lebanese by US-made weapons, the imposition of hunger, desperation, and migration crises on Cuba and Venezuela, the US-backed occupation of Haiti, the violent repression of Pakistanis’ desire for sovereignty and non-alignment, and more. Meanwhile, one-third of the world’s nations – and 60 percent of poor countries – face some type of US sanctions for having displeased the imperial hegemon.

The prevailing world system, a system defined by US imperialism and the imposition of the neoliberal Washington Consensus around the globe, is facing an array of challenges, from Latin America and the Caribbean to Palestine to East Asia.

How is Washington responding? Through the economic strangulation of countries like Cuba and Venezuela that present an alternative model; through a “day after” plan in the Middle East that would reduce Gaza to a neocolony of Washington and the Gulf monarchies; through coups against popular non-aligned leaders like Imran Khan; through the re-invasion of Haiti, a nation whose sovereignty has long been subverted by imperialism; through pressuring the Ukrainian government to lower the draft age so Kyiv can continue sending its young people into the meat grinder on behalf of Washington’s geopolitical aims; and through continuing to trudge the path toward war with China.

Ironically, the US empire’s violent response to its waning hegemony is expediting the emergence of an alternative world order, one marked by the de-dollarization and South-South cooperation of the BRICS group. As Biden leaves office and Trump returns to the White House, we can safely assume that the violence of imperialism will continue, perhaps intensify, and at the same time, the global majority will continue its efforts to forge new relationships outside the umbrella of US unilateralism.

Owen Schalk is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, among them two books on Canadian foreign policy. Among many other writing credits, he is a columnist at Canadian Dimension magazine. Read other articles by Owen.

The Dying — and Constantly Lying — U.S. Empire

by Eric Zuesse / November 18th, 2024

On 25 July 1945, U.S. President Harry Truman accepted the advices from both his personal hero General Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill, to 100% reverse his predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s carefully designed plan to prevent a WW3 by creating a fully armed democratic federal government of the world to create adjudicate and enforce international laws and NO national laws, and to outlaw and end the cause that had produced both World Wars, which was imperialism and the contests between them, and so he created the basis for what he named “the United Nations” to do that, but his immediate successor Truman’s version of the U.N. was/is instead a mere talking forum, with no such powers. This would allow him and Eisenhower to create the military-industrial complex to take over the entire world starting with Russia and all of its neighbors. His plan failed, but nonetheless then the Soviet Union itself failed, because of its Marxian economics and dictatorship; and, on 24 February 1990, Truman’s successor President GHW Bush started secretly to inform America’s European colonies that though the Soviet Union and its communism and its military alliance against America’s NATO, the Warsaw Pact, would likely all soon end, the U.S. side of the Cold War would secretly continue on until Russia itself will be defeated, because, as Bush said to Helmut Kohl, “We prevailed, they didn’t!” In other words, he was telling them to continue on until Russia itself becomes just another U.S. colony like they were, because “we” can do it. He was telling them that “we” will do it, because we can. And none of them objected, because they all would be cut in on the take. But all of this was in blatant violation of repeatedly made verbal promises that the U.S. regime and its agents had made to the Soviet leader Gorbachev that NATO wouldn’t be expanded and take in Warsaw Pact nations if the Soviet Union would break up.

Fast-forward a few more decades, and the U.S. regime invaded a nation that was friendly toward Russia, Iraq, on 20 March 2003, and destroyed it.

On 5 January 2020, Iraq’s Government ordered the U.S. out of Iraq. The Trump regime refused. A reporter for CNN, Manu Raju, tweeted from the Air Force 1 press pool, “Trump … tells pool he will slap Iraq with ‘very big sanctions’ if they force US troops to leave. ‘We have a very extraordinarily expensive air base that’s there. It cost billions of dollars to build. Long before my time. We’re not leaving unless they pay us back for it.’ Trump added: ‘If they do ask us to leave, if we don’t do it in a very friendly basis, we will charge them sanctions like they’ve never seen before ever. It’ll make Iranian sanctions look somewhat tame.’”

The next day, on January 6, Sajad Jiyad of The Century Foundation blogged from Baghdad, “On the issue of US bases, Iraqi sovereignty and sanctions” and reported and presented the legal documents proving that (quoting now from the contract that both Iraq and U.S. had signed) “Iraq owns all the buildings and installations, the nontransferable structures on the ground that are located in the areas and installations agreed upon, including those the U.S. utilizes, constructs, changes or improves.” Furthermore, he noted that, “The US troops that are currently in Iraq are part of a request for assistance to combat ISIS that was sent in 2014. These troops are meant to advise, train and assist Iraqi troops. This request was sent by the Iraqi government and can be revoked at any time.”

On 7 January 2020, Time magazine headlined “Iraq’s Outgoing Prime Minister Says U.S. Troops Must Leave.” Trump responded that only the U.S. Government will decide when to leave Iraq.

On January 24, “The Chief of Police in Baghdad just estimated the number of Iraqis protesting against the US’ presence in Iraq today to be in excess of one million people.” The march in Baghdad was 5 miles long.

On 17 February 2020, I headlined “Trump plans to keep US troops permanently in Iraq under NATO command.” On 24 November 2020, NATO headlined “Denmark assumes command of NATO Mission Iraq.” But Iraqis don’t want any alien military force occupying their country. On 24 February 2021, NATO headlined “NATO Mission in Iraq” and reported, based only upon Iraq’s having requested and received in October 2018 additional training so as to defeat ISIS — that temporary request for training became NATO’s excuse to extend permanently America’s occupation. That NATO report ignored the demand by Iraq’s parliament in January 2020 for all U.S. troops to leave Iraq immediately and ignored the millions of Iraqis who subsequently demonstrated against the U.S. and who demanded the U.S. to leave immediately. (Trump responded to that Iraqi demand by threatening to destroy Iraq if Iraq’s Government would continue its demand.)

And, of course, America’s invasion of Iraq on 20 March 2023 was based totally on lies which the U.S.-and-allied press refused to expose at the time — or even now — to be lies, but instead trumpeted those lies to the public stenographically from the regime’s mouthpieces as being ‘news’. And, likewise, the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media hide from their public that the overthrow of Ukraine’s Government during 20-27 February 2014 was a U.S. coup intead of the ‘democratic’ ‘revolution’ they all trumpeted it as being. On 3 July 2023, I headlined “Comparing Two U.S.-Government Catastrophes: Bush’s 2003 Invasion of Iraq, and Obama’s 2014 Coup in Ukraine.”

So: all of this is old news, which is never reported in the U.S.-and-allied press, which instead starts from assumptions that are false about both the Iraq and the Ukraine matters. And the U.S.-and-allied media never apologize to the public about their having lied, because they say that they make only mistakes, no lies. That’s a lie about their lying.

 Eric Zuesse is an investigative historian. His new book, America's Empire of Evil: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public. Read other articles by Eric.