NUCLEAR FUSION AT 100: THE HIDDEN RACE FOR ENERGY SUPREMACY

by: Maya Posch

HACKADAY
January 23, 2020



It’s hardly a secret that nuclear fusion has had a rough time when it comes to its image in the media: the miracle power source that is always ‘just ten years away’. Even if no self-respecting physicist would ever make such a statement, the arrival of commercial nuclear fusion power cannot come quickly enough for many. With the promise of virtually endless, clean energy with no waste, it does truly sound like something from a science-fiction story.

Meanwhile, in the world of non-fiction, generations of scientists have dedicated their careers to understanding better how plasma in a reactor behaves, how to contain it and what types of fuels would work best for a fusion reactor, especially one that has to run continuously, with a net positive energy output. In this regard, 2020 is an exciting year, with the German Wendelstein 7-X stellarator reaching its final configuration, and the Chinese HL-2M tokamak about to fire up.

Join me after the break as I look into what a century of progress in fusion research has brought us and where it will take us next.


PREVIOUSLY IN PURSUIT OF NUCLEAR FUSION

The discovery that the total mass equivalent of four hydrogen atoms is more than that of a single helium (4He) atom was made in 1920 by British physicist Francis William Aston. This observation led to the conclusion that net energy can be released when one fuses hydrogen cores together, for example in the common deuterium (2D) tritium (3T) reaction:



Deuterium (2H, or D) is a common, stable isotope of hydrogen that occurs naturally in abundance, to the rate of 0.02% of the hydrogen in Earth’s oceans. Tritium (3H, or T) is an unstable, radioactive (beta emitter) isotope of hydrogen, with a half-life of 12.32 years. Tritium is formed naturally by the interaction with cosmic rays, but can be easily bred from lithium metal, either in a breeder blanket in a fusion reactor, or from a fission reactor that uses heavy water (deuterium), like Canada’s CANDU reactors.

The UK ZETA Z-pinch fusion reactor in 1958.

The first neutrons from nuclear fusion were detected in 1933 by staff members of Ernest Rutherfords’ at the University of Cambridge. This involved the acceleration of protons towards a target with energies of up to 600 keV. Research on the topic during the 1930s would lay the foundation for the development of the first concepts for fusion reactors, initially involving the Z-pinch concept which uses the Lorentz force to contain the plasma.

Teams around the world worked in absolute secrecy, with all fusion-related research being classified. The British created the ZETA stabilized pinch fusion reactor, with the hope that this would prove to be a viable blueprint for commercial fusion reactors. Unfortunately, ZETA proved that the Z-pinch design would always suffer from instabilities, and by 1961 the Z-pinch concept was abandoned.

Meanwhile, the Russians had developed the tokamak reactor concept during the 1950s, partially based on the Z-pinch design. The tokamak design proved to be able to suppress the instabilities that had plagued Z-pinch reactors, as well as early stellerator designs. These days, most fusion reactors in operation are of the tokamak design, though the stellarator has seen a resurgence recently, especially in the form of the Wendelstein 7-X project.

WHAT WE CAN EXPECT TO SEE IN 2020

A schematic view of Wendelstein 7-X’s magnets.

As mentioned in the article introduction, Wendelstein 7-X has reached an important milestone. Since we first wrote about this project back in 2015, the project has worked through all of its targets except the final one: cooled divertor operation. The reactor is currently being upgraded with these divertors which should theoretically allow for steady-state operation, allowing for impurities to be removed from the plasma during operation.

Installing the new divertors and cryopumps will continue into much of 2020, involving the running of a 55 meter long transfer line to the cryoplant, along with the installation of new storage tanks for helium gas and liquid nitrogen. With some luck we’ll see the first tests of the new system this year, but most likely the first continuous operations of WX-7 will take place in 2021.

China’s HL-2M tokamak at Southwestern Institute of Physics (SWIP).

Over in China, the final touches have been put on its HL-2M tokamak, which is the latest in a range of tokamak designs since the 1960s. The HL-2M is the new configuration of the HL-2A tokamak, one of three tokamaks currently in use in China (EAST and J-TEXT being the other two). HL-2M has seen big changes to its coil configuration that allow for the creation of many types of plasma, along with the testing of various types of divertor configurations. This year HL-2M will see its first plasma.

Depending on the performance of HL-2M, it will allow for the CFETR (China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor) project to start its construction phase in the 2020s. In its first phase, the CFETR tokamak would demonstrate steady-state operation and tritium breeding. In its second phase CFETR would be updated to allow for a power output of 1 GW (compared to ITER’s 500 MW) and a fusion gain (Q) higher than 12.
FUSION IS HARD

The main reason why nuclear fusion is taking so long compared to nuclear fission is that the former requires the ideal conditions to even occur, let alone persist. This means high temperatures, high pressures, high currents, or a combination thereof. Even then plasma containment is notoriously complicated, as the plasma isn’t a nice, calm gaseous state that’s just kinda floating there. Rather it’s a seething collection of plasma at high pressures and many millions of degrees Celsius that’ll breach through the magnetic confinement any chance it gets. Although significant progress has been made here, the coming years will tell whether we’ll avoid a Z-pinch-like dead-end with the tokamak and stellarator designs.

Many aspects of running a nuclear fusion reactor remain somewhat of a mystery, much as it was with the first fission reactors, where early generation II designs saw countless changes to materials used, along with fundamental changes to the overall design to improve performance and safety. Although fusion reactors are less challenging in this regard, they do have to deal with the neutron bombardment of materials in the core, which can weaken them. This also leads to the only waste that is produced by fusion reactors: the reactor core itself.

A combination of activation through this exposure to neutrons, along with contamination with tritium will render core materials radioactive, requiring handling of the resulting low- to intermediate- level radioactive waste like steel and other building materials at the end of the reactor’s lifespan. Fortunately, studies have shown that intermediate storage of up to 100 years is sufficient to render these materials safe.

Regardless, the neutron exposure is one aspect which can likely be dealt with in a more direct way through material selection or through neutron capture mechanisms in future reactor designs. As China’s program evolves through HL-2M into CFETR and ITER into DEMO, the hope is that we can catch any issues and make improvements before fusion hits prime time.

LOW ENERGY NUCLEAR REACTIONS

Tangentially related to fusion, LENR is what used to be called ‘Cold Fusion’. Marred by decades of ridicule, a number of scientists have nonetheless persisted in examining the phenomenon that lit up the world with promises of fusion power at room temperature. Dismissing the original theory of hydrogen atoms fusing, the current theory is that protons and electrons can be merged to form neutrons. For a detailed overview, see for example this video presentation by Prof. Peter Hagelstein, an MIT associate professor.

According to the Widom-Larsen theory, the reason why the original 1989 experiment was so hard to recreate is because it relies on hydrogen atoms settling on active sites on the palladium (or equivalent) layer. This means that one needs to create a suitable surface on a nano level, something which was not realistic in the 1980s.

Even if LENR never turns into anything more than a curiosity, it does give us a glimpse in another way that atoms seem to behave. Best case it might provide us with ways to improve fusion reactors in ways that we cannot fathom today, by lowering pressure and temperature requirements.

ENERGY DOMINANCE IS THE GAME

A commercial fusion reactor would be essentially the pinnacle of energy generation, barring the development of anti-matter reactors or such. As an energy source, its fuel is practically unlimited, with the deuterium-tritium type having enough fuel on Earth for millions of years, and the deuterium process version offering billions of years of energy production using just the deuterium available on Earth. The first nation to master this capability stands to gain a lot.

Colony in space, with a clear view of nearby planets.

Fusion reactors are inherently safe, due to the complexity of maintaining the proper conditions for the fusion process to take place. During operation, no waste is produced, but instead very useful helium (4He) is created which has countless applications in everything from industry to running MRI scanners, to filling up party balloons. While nuclear fusion will very likely co-exist with nuclear fission (possibly using FNRs) in a complementary fashion, the former being ideally suited to handle electricity and heat generation for all population centers on Earth.

Exactly when we’ll see the first commercially viable fusion reactor appear is hard to tell at this point. With ITER not projected to see first plasma until 2035, we might see China with its CFETR and successor reactors reach the point of commercial viability by the 2030s or 2040s. Yet as the UK learned with ZETA, in plasma physics nothing is certain.

[Main image: Experimental visualization of the field line on a magnetic surface in Wendelstein 7-X. CC-BY 4.0, Wendelstein 7-X team]Posted in Featured, green hacks, Interest, Science, SliderTagged cfetr, deuterium, hl-2m, ITER, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, Tritium, wendelstein 7-x, wx-7

TECHNO MYTHOS

Is nuclear fusion the 'hottest' new renewable on the block?

Tokamak Energy's reactor could be where nuclear fusion first occurs. - Copyright Tokamak Energy

By Lottie Limb • Updated: 13/12/2021 - 16:59

A small railway town in southern England could go down in history as the place where nuclear fusion kicked off.

The reaction process - which would generate vast amounts of low-carbon energy - has evaded scientists for decades, but a private company in Didcot, Oxfordshire says it’s now a question of if, not when.

Tokamak Energy is firing its nuclear reactor up to 50 million degrees celsius - almost twice the core temperature of the sun. By shooting 140,000 amps of electricity into a cloud of hydrogen gas, the team are trying to force hydrogen atoms to fuse, thereby creating helium.

These fusion forces are the same ones that power the sun. While there’s no danger that Didcot could become the new centre of the solar system, the industrial estate could spark the start of a cheap, clean energy supply.

Nuclear fusion poses huge technical challenges.

Tokamak Energy

“We will crack it,” CEO Chris Kelsall told the BBC on a recent trip, “the answer is out there right now with Mother Nature as we speak. What we have to do is find that key and unlock the safe to that solution. It will be found.”

Having ramped the temperature up to mind-boggling degrees, the experiment’s next step is to see if nuclear fusion can produce more energy than it uses.

Is nuclear fusion safe?

In case it rings alarm bells to anyone in the vicinity, nuclear fusion is very different from nuclear fission and its associated disasters

The process occurs inside a ‘tokamak’ - a device which uses a powerful magnetic field to contain the swirling cloud of hydrogen gas. This stops the superheated plasma from touching the edge of the vessel, as it would otherwise melt anything it comes into contact with.

If anything goes wrong inside a fusion reactor, the device just stops - so there’s no risk of this astronomical heat being unleashed.

Magnetic fields trap the electrically-charged plasma particles in an 'apple-core' shape, keeping the fusion fuels contained and hot.

Tokamak Energy

The plasma has to be heated to 10 times the temperature of the sun to get it going, and is capable of fusing two hydrogen nuclei into a helium nucleus.

Nuclear fission, on the other hand, is the dangerous kind. This creates energy by splitting one ‘heavy’ atom (typically uranium) into two. This breakdown generates a large amount of radioactive waste in the process, which remains hazardous for years.

Fusion cannot produce a runaway chain reaction, like the one that happened at Chernobyl in 1986, so no exclusion zone is needed around Milton Park, Didcot, where the reactor is based.

Laura Hussey, an editor who works minutes away at a publishing office on the business park, says she is “really encouraged to hear how safe it is and really happy to see this big investment in clean energy.”

The nuclear fusion reactor shares the park with a number of other businesses.

Tokamak Energy

When will nuclear fusion become a viable source of energy?

It’s a question that scientists have been asking themselves (and have been asked by journalists) for decades. “It’s difficult,” Tokamak Energy physicist Dr Hannah Willett says, while explaining that “[we] get a lot more energy out of this reaction than out of just burning fossil fuels.”

If successful, the experiment could see a constellation of tiny suns created on Earth. Fusion energy would be a major pathway in the green transition - alongside natural sources like solar, wind and tidal. The hydrogen can be derived from seawater, meaning we have a virtually limitless supply of fuel.

Scientists have been trying to make fusion work for more than 50 years and it could still be a while before we can effectively power our homes using it.

Once fusion power is achieved, the scalable technology could be rolled out across the world

Tokamak Energy

But as governments get more serious about renewable power - with the UK investing £10 million (€11.7 million) into Tokamak Energy last year, Kelsall’s “key” feels increasingly within reach.

Meanwhile five locations in Scotland and England have been shortlisted as the potential future home of the UK’s prototype fusion energy plant - the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) - with a decision due around the end of 2022.

Scientists hope the power station can be wired into the national electricity grid - eventually providing energy for people’s homes, and a template to be replicated around the world.

Is nuclear fusion finally for real? 

Some very rich people seem to think so.

James Pethokoukis, Columnist
December 3, 2021·

Fusion. Illustrated | iStock

America's first Atomic Age ended on March 28, 1979, with the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island Unit 2 reactor, near Middletown, Pennsylvania. Despite the negligible radiation release, the accident led to canceled projects, industry bankruptcies, and a further public souring on nuclear energy. Nuclear's share of U.S. electricity production has been flat, around 20 percent, for decades.

But the dreams of the most optimistic nuclear proponents were always far bigger than an America dotted with fission reactors, where power is produced by the controlled splitting of uranium atoms. Eventually, fission would be replaced by fusion, the melding of hydrogen isotopes which produces more — much more — energy than it consumes. Then we would have energy's Holy Grail: pollution-free power produced using common (and therefore cheap) elements like hydrogen. No carbon emissions, no long-lived radioactive waste. All we have to do is solve one of the trickiest engineering problems in human history: recreating the sun here on Earth.

That project has been stalled by long years of technical frustration. But now, some of the world's richest people are betting the fusion problem might be solvable sooner rather than later. Earlier this week, Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), a startup spun off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said it had raised nearly $2 billion in private investment, including from mega-billionaires Bill Gates and George Soros. This is the biggest bet on fusion so far, even amid record funding for some two other dozen startups.

The CFS haul doubles the investor dough devoted to those firms, and that includes the previous record of $500 million invested early last month into Helion, a startup backed by well-known tech investors Sam Altman and Peter Thiel. As for CFS, CEO Bob Mumgaard said the new investment would allow it to demonstrate a net-energy fusion reactor by 2025 as well as begin work on the first commercial fusion power plant by the early 2030s.

Replacing dirty fossil fuels with clean power doesn't fully capture the potential of nuclear fusion. Clean, cheap, abundant energy could, for instance, help produce hydrogen for fuel, power giant machines to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and desalinate water on a large scale. No longer would concerns about energy and climate change limit our aspirations, even if they just involve energy-intensive Bitcoin mining.

And that's just here on Earth. While one could make an argument in favor of other emerging power sources — including advanced fission, enhanced geothermal, even space-based solar power — fusion would be especially helpful if humanity is going to become a space-faring civilization. As physicist Arthur Turrell, author of The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet, told me in a recent interview: "If you look at what realistic trips outside of our kind of solar system's backyard would have to be powered by — or even the Earth's backyard, I should say — fusion is one of the best candidates for that, because it packs a lot of energy into a very small amount of space."

Critics point to past hype cycles and failure, which is totally fair. But the level of private interest, in addition to recent technical advances, should give special reason for hope this time around. Hard-headed, results-oriented investors are sinking big money into the sector because they really think breakthroughs are imminent in a way they haven't been before. Maybe, a decade from now, the world's first $3 trillion company will be a fusion company rather than an online retailer or social media platform.

Moreover, this wouldn't be the first time a long-gestating energy technology suddenly burst on the scene and changed everything. The recent surge in gasoline prices has some politicians recalling the 1970s energy shocks. But there's a more recent example of an energy price spike, although many of us seem to have forgotten it.

A combination of strong demand and stagnant production caused an oil shock in 2007 and 2008, with oil prices hitting a record high of $145 a barrel on July 3, 2008. It was a great time for books and blogs about "peak oil" and how the world was running out of cheap fossil fuels. But then the global financial crisis crushed economies and demand while the "shale revolution" — the combo of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling — simultaneously came into its own. The U.S. significantly increased domestic oil and natural gas production. We innovated our way out of peak oil.

But there are no guarantees fusion will follow that pattern. Sometimes the smart money gets it wrong. The artificial intelligence sector is famous for its boom and busts (also known as "AI winter") where interest soars and investor cash floods in — and then floods out again when the tech fails to deliver. Where are all the self-driving cars that were supposed to be on American roads by now?

The same could happen with fusion. Yet compared to the odds of humans dealing with climate change by consuming less and accepting a slower increase (or even a decline) in living standards, the chances for an Age of Fusion look pretty good.

Alberta’s public service union votes to accept new collective agreement with province

By Emily Mertz Global News
Posted December 13, 2021


The two sides reached a settlement in mid-October after months of mediation.

AUPE represents about 95,000 workers in the province, including 22,000 who work in government services such as corrections, sheriffs, trades workers, conservation workers, social services, as well as administrative and support service workers.

The settlement was reached on Oct. 13 after about 20 months of negotiations.

“This round of bargaining has been the most challenging we have faced for many years,” AUPE president Guy Smith said.

“While these negotiations proceeded, our members have worked through a deadly global pandemic while continuing to provide vital services to Albertans. We appreciate the determination our members displayed to support each other and their negotiating team,” Smith added.

“They stood strongly opposed to the proposed employer concessions and to secure a collective agreement that respects them and the services they provide.”

READ MORE: Alberta government asks unionized public sector workers to take 4% pay cut

The agreement will expire on March 31, 2024.

According to the AUPE, it includes:
employment security for permanent staff staying in effect until Dec. 31, 2022
a 1.25 per cent salary increase effective Jan. 1, 2023

a minimum 1.5 per cent salary increase with potential for an additional 0.5 per cent increase based on economic factors effective Sept. 1, 2023

an eight per cent salary increase for employees performing duties as part of the Rural Alberta Provincial Integrated Defence response force as a result of significant expansion of policing duties, responsibilities and risks. The 8 per cent increase will be retroactive to April 1, 2021, and remain in place as long as RAPID exists

The union said the government withdrew concessions it had been seeking, including:
a four per cent salary rollback
the elimination of employment security
a significant reduction in shift differential pay
a significant reduction in weekend premium pay
the elimination of the paid Christmas closure days
added benefit plan costs for employees
reductions in overtime pay
reductions in health spending account provisions

2:03 Alberta nurses and other public sector unions warn of job action after wage rollback request – Jul 7, 2021

Alberta’s minister of finance said he was pleased AUPE members voted to accept the mediator’s recommendation.

“This four-year agreement comes after months of dedicated negotiations between the government of Alberta and the union. Full details of the ratified deal will be made available in the coming days,” Travis Toews said.

“I want to thank AUPE leadership for helping us achieve labour stability for the public service.

“This agreement recognizes the province’s long-term economic outlook and offers members compensation increases in the third and fourth year of the contract.”

Toews said this deal accomplishes the government’s goal of bringing spending in line with other provinces.

“I am hopeful that other public sector unions will look to this successful process, and that bargaining will proceed constructively across the broader public sector,” Toews said.

“The government respects the hard work and dedication of Alberta’s public service employees and their contribution to our province.”

What nonprofits offer to the evolving world of work

The patient effort of understanding problems — this is something people enjoy being a part of, if it is truly valued.

By Kristi Rendahl
DECEMBER 14, 2021

JEFF WHEELER, STAR TRIBUNE
The pandemic has exacerbated the problem of people leaving nonprofit work, while also deepening the severity of the issues the sector aims to address. Above, food was served at Loaves & Fishes’ Hopkins location in 2019.


The Star Tribune recently reported on the "Great Resignation" in the nonprofit sector ("Nonprofits grapple with sudden staffing shortages," Dec. 6), an unsurprising turn of events given that 75% of employees in the sector are women and that millions of women left employment due to COVID-related child care and school routine disruptions. Nonprofits also are struggling to address the staffing shortage as they compete with for-profit businesses that offer more attractive pay and benefits.

Some organizations are offering generous vacation time and flexible schedules and even are proposing tuition reimbursement in order to improve their odds at finding candidates. Many nonprofits, though, possess something more enticing than even these: the opportunity to create solutions for the problems of our time.

For years the nonprofit sector has discussed the impending exodus of baby boomer generation executives through retirement, along with the leadership and experience gap that would result if we weren't careful. The global coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated this possibility, while also deepening the severity of the issues the sector aims to address: chasms in academic achievements; health inequities; access to technology; hunger; poverty rates; and gender, racial and ethnic inequalities, all of which exist within the United States and are more pronounced on a global scale.

We are no longer simply inviting new staff, board members and philanthropists to join the playing field, because the field has undergone seismic changes. We cannot assume that the same approaches will remain as effective in this new paradigm of awareness and experience.

In addition to traditional pay and benefits, nonprofits are wise to highlight what should be the core, messy work of any organization seeking to have a social benefit, which is, before anything, defining the problems that keep us awake at night. It sounds straightforward, especially if you are pressed to prepare talking points for a one-hour meeting with a prospective donor or are working toward a grant deadline the following day at noon, but it is in fact the most difficult step. And I believe it's the work that people would relish being part of.

Precious little about our society incentivizes a nuanced approach to designing solutions, because we lack the collective patience to develop consensus around what the problems even are. This is the exciting work that can draw the great, creative minds we need — as long as it is actually valued and not sabotaged by shortchanging the process. No one wants to be a cog in a wheel, and the nonprofit sector risks treating people as cogs as much as any for-profit production line.

A mentor once emphasized that organizations become what they reward. If nonprofits reward overextending and operating in crisis mode, which has been necessary but unsustainable, then they will retain staff who do so until they are burned out. As we move into a distinct era, lessons of a global pandemic still mounting, nonprofits must reward other ways of working and their supporters must stop expecting organizations to function as if every last thing is both urgent and important.

We need to reward people for focusing on the work of understanding problems — we need more research, community engagement, collaboration across issues and ideas from those most affected. We do not need more rewards for solutions that exclude voices necessary for deep understanding, reactive approaches to fundraising or siloed decisionmaking, all of which have been adaptive strategies for survival in the sector, but which work counter to the complex and complicated work of defining problems.

Organizational structures are evolving away from strictly pyramid, top-down hierarchies. There is more recognition of differing lived experiences and how that informs people as leaders, followers, donors, clients, or all of the above. It is not sufficient to assume that people come to an organization with the same set of expectations, motivations or even tolerance for problematic systems rooted in outdated and unspoken values.
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It's true that most people want to earn a living, save for the future, maybe buy a home, take a staycation or visit a new place, all while being mentored and respected as a peer colleague. I wonder if they would also like to be invited into more big conversations that have the potential to redefine and transform the community rather than sustain the status quo. It's a risky proposition, I suppose, but messy work always is.

Kristi Rendahl is an associate professor and director of the Nonprofit Leadership Program at Minnesota State University, Mankato.

Hong Kong: Lee Cheuk Yan Sentenced For Candlelight Vigil

Tuesday, 14 December 2021
Press Release: ITUC

Union leader Lee Cheuk Yan, along with seven others, has been sentenced to 14 months in prison for “inciting, organising and participating” in a candlelight vigil on the 4th of June 2020.

The event, to commemorate the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, was organised by the now-disbanded Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, of which Lee Cheuk-yan was the chair.

This sentence will run concurrently with the 20-month prison sentence Lee Cheuk-yan is already serving.

He pleaded guilty in October and in his mitigation to the court said: “To honour the memory of the June Fourth Massacre is a long-held sentiment of mine. As Milan Kundera wrote in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Kniha smíchu a zapomnění), ‘the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’

“This is the struggle of memory against forgetting, as symbolised by the candlelight vigil in Victoria Park.

“The generation of the people of Hong Kong who witnessed the 1989 Movement intensely loved their nation, its people and hoped for the realisation of democracy in China. Our emotions were intertwined with the students and citizens who fought for democracy in Tiananmen Square. We assembled, marched, sat in, and made dona

tions in hope of the triumph of democracy.“But at the sound of the first gunshot, we wept and despaired. Hong Kong would never be the same. The people of Hong Kong moved on from political apathy to activism for the democratic future of Hong Kong, wishing that the dream of freedom and democracy would one day be enjoyed by our compatriots in the Mainland.”

Lee Cheuk-yan is general secretary of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions that has been forced to disband.

© Scoop Media

AUSTRALIA

He’s not a US citizen and US can’t try Assange for treason

The Sydney Morning Herald, 

LETTERS

December 15, 2021 — 

I have seen Julian Assange portrayed as a journalist, a whistleblower and as a traitor by the US government (“In a decent society, Assange is entitled to justice”, December 14). The fact is that neither he, nor any other Australian citizen, has ever had any formal requirement or commitment of loyalty or allegiance to the US government. It would therefore be an incredible stretch to describe his actions as treasonous. For the US to claim sovereignty over the globe and seek to apply their law to anyone anywhere in the world at will is sheer arrogance. The arrogance succeeds only because of the meek complicity of governments such as ours and that of Britain. Assange released material showing US forces committing atrocities during the Afghan war. This material made the US government look bad. They didn’t like it, expressed confected and selective moral outrage and hunted Assange down. Even if the extradition fails, the US government will have succeeded in warning off any other potential whistleblowers. 

John Slidziunas, Woonona

Congratulations to Joyce for the most rational statement I’ve heard from him in a long time. I applaud his statements such as “rights … apply equally … to those who have been less fortunate” and “you can judge a society on whether the protection … is actively pursued in a form where all are truly equal”. I could not help thinking, though, that it is his government that has denied those rights to whistleblowers, Aborigines, and refugees, many of whom, although guilty of no crime, have been held in prison-like conditions for years. 

Ron Pretty, Farmborough Heights

Maybe if Assange played top tennis, and preferably doubles, he’d currently be getting high-volume support from many more of all our nakedly hypocritical politicians and governments in the “free” West. Apparently, human rights and associated moral outrage are not universal but can be selectively applied when politically expedient – and when it suits. 

Peter Bower, Naremburn

The Deputy PM has said that Julian Assange should either be put on trial in Britain or brought back to Australia. However, a trial outside the US is not likely. The alleged crime was against the United States and courts do not have authority to try someone except for violation of local criminal laws. Julian Assange was indicted in June 2020 by the US Federal Grand Jury in Virginia on multiple counts of criminal conspiracy. It is simply not a crime in Britain or Australia to violate the United States Code and British courts may not try someone for violating American criminal conspiracy laws unless the activity also happens to be a crime in Britain and then the trial would be under British criminal laws. 

Harry Melkonian, Vaucluse

Assange embarrassed the US and is paying a high price for doing so. There is no question deals have been done to keep Assange incarcerated without any conviction. According to the present Australian Coalition government, your Australian passport is not worth the paper it is written on. 

David Goldstein, Balgowlah

Assange broke no law on American soil and should not be tried for a crime there. 

Ron McQuarrie, Budgewoi

The Deputy PM’s stance on Assange is commendable. There is too much political pressure in the US to assure Assange a fair trial in that country. Being tried in Britain or Australia seems a just outcome for all parties.

 Clive Hughes, Freshwater

Judging by the newfound power of logical thinking articulated in Joyce’s opinion piece on Assange, maybe self-isolation and a mild dose of COVID-19 should be mandatory for all politicians.

 Col Burns, Lugarno

Extradiction of Assange Darkens Human Rights Day: Russia Says

WikiLeak founder Julian Assange, London, U.K. | 

Photo: Twitter/ @ToddRoy48029477

Over the last 12 years, the U.S. has persecuted the Australian journalist for having denounced the crimes committed by its troops and security agencies in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On Friday, Russia’s Foreign Affairs Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova harshly criticized the decision of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales to approve the extradition of WikiLeaks Julian Assange to the United States.

RELATED:
British Court Authorizes Extradition Of Assange To The US

"The U.K. High Court has authorized Julian Assange's extradition to the United States. This shameful verdict as part of the political case is yet another manifestation of the Anglo-Saxon tandem's cannibalistic worldview… What a 'fitting' way for the West to mark the Human Rights Day and the end of the 'Summit for Democracy',” Zakharova pointed out.

Previously, the UK High Court upheld a motion presented by the US Department of Justice on the extradition of Assange, who has been held in London's Belmarsh prison since April 2019. Over the last 12 years, the United States has persecuted the Australian journalist for having denounced the crimes committed by U.S. troops and security agencies in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

For defending press freedom, Assange could receive sentences of up to 175 years in the United States, a country which accuses him of crimes against its "National Security."

“Julian Assange's extradition is being sought for such revelations as the collateral murder gunning down of civilians, including children and two Reuters journalists by the U.S. in Iraq for which they tried to evade accountability,” WikiLeaks recalled.

In January, the British courts ruled against his extradition. Now, however, the judges authorized it, arguing that the U.S. government had promised not to subject Assange to harsh detention conditions.

"The English decision to extradite Assange to the United States is ignoble. It is a murder under judicial guise. Shame on those who let it happen," said French socialist leader Jean-Luc Melenchon, who asked his country to grant him political asylum.

 

On Why We Should Oppose The Persecution Of Julian Assange

Tuesday, 14 December 2021
Article: Gordon Campbell

Julian Assange is a polarising personality. Admired by many for his work as a whistle-blower, Assange is famously loathed by other people who still hold him accountable for the sexual assault charges that the Swedish authorities finally dropped back in November 2019. All along, Assange and his legal team argued that the Swedish prosecution had the ultimate aim of getting him extradited back to the United States. At the time, Assange’s critics claimed that those fears of extradition were merely an excuse to evade prosecution in Sweden.

Well, it turns out that Assange’s fears about extradition were soundly based. The US continues to seek his extradition to face charges under the US Espionage Act that on conviction carry up to 175 years in prison. Last week – on December 10, Human Rights Day! - the UK courts took a giant step to making that outcome possible. The High Court overturned a previous ruling that Assange’s health and likely treatment (solitary confinement in a US Supermax facility) were sufficient grounds for refusing his extradition.

Not any more. After receiving cross-your-heart promises from the US (a) that Assange, if convicted, would have his physical and mental health needs adequately met and (b) that he might not be sent to a Supermax and might be allowed to serve some of his sentence in an Australian prison, the same UK judge who had made the earlier decision changed his mind, and gave the extradition the green light. This ruling will now be appealed to the UK Supreme Court where – hopefully – the wider issues raised by his case might be revisited. It will take at least two years to go through this process, during which time Assange will continue to be held in Britain’s Belmarsh prison. Assange has now spent almost ten years in confinement, after he first sought refuge in Ecuador’s embassy in London in 2012.

For those hung up on Assange’s celebrity status – hero or villain, altruist or narcissist? – His personality traits are beside the point. His prosecution, imprisonment and extradition proceedings amount to a wide-ranging attack on freedom of speech, on press freedom and on the ability of the media to hold governments to account. As the Guardian recently pointed out, the High Court decision is not only a blow for his family and friends, who fear he would not survive imprisonment in the US. It is also a blow for all those who wish to protect the freedom of the press:

The case against him relates to hundreds of thousands of leaked documents about the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, as well as diplomatic cables, which were made public by WikiLeaks working with the Guardian and other media organisations. They revealed horrifying abuses by the US and other governments which would not otherwise have come to light

Assange’s alleged “crime” was to publish on Wikileaks a trove of documents and cables obtained by Chelsea Manning, a US soldier stationed in Iraq. The material included evidence of war crimes committed by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The diplomatic cables contained hundreds of examples of US diplomats being engaged in clandestine activities without the knowledge or consent of the public at home, or in the countries affected. The public interest served by revealing such activities should be obvious. Revealing the atrocities, lies and deceptions of the powerful is what journalism exists to do, in a free society.

Uniquely though, Assange has been prosecuted for doing so, as the American Civil Liberties Union pointed out in 2019:

For the first time in the history of our country, the government has brought criminal charges under the Espionage Act against a publisher for the publication of truthful information. This is a direct assault on the First Amendment.

The Columbia Journalism Review made the same point a year ago:

…This case is nothing less than the first time in American history that the US government has sought to prosecute the act of publishing state secrets, something that national security reporters do with some regularity. While many of the charges [contained in the Assange indictment] involve conspiracy or aiding and abetting, three counts are based on “pure publication”—the argument that Assange broke the law just by posting classified documents on the Internet.

And furthermore:

Read literally, the Espionage Act criminalizes the solicitation, receipt, and publication of any government secret, not just the names of informants. The Justice Department has long taken the position that it can prosecute the act of publishing classified information. But it has not done so, until now, because of concerns that it would open a Pandora’s box of media censorship.

With Assange, Pandora's box has now been opened. If Assange can be prosecuted for publishing leaked information – on the grounds it was “stolen” and because the disclosures (in the state’s opinion) damaged “ national security” then any other journalist is at risk of the same fate for doing their job. The CJR article gives an interesting example of how these things used to be handled. In the mid 1970s, the Ford administration decided not to prosecute the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh for revealing (in a front page New York Times story) the full details of a secret US submarine programme. On that occasion, the US Justice Department chose to go straight to the NYT publishers and quietly remind them it would be in everyone’s best interests if they took national security more seriously next time around.

Thankfully, the Internet has made those sort of cosy arrangements impossible. Yet if Assange is successfully extradited, the precedent cannot avoid having a chilling effect on any revelations about government wrong-doing, given that the documents proving it will almost certainly belong to the state. The evidence will always have been “stolen” and “national security” is a conveniently elastic term. Truth and the public interest don’t provide any defence at all. Governments can always claim that what the public may be interested in isn’t always in their best interest to know.

What To Do

To date, the Australian government has refused to make any critical comment about this ongoing abuse of the legal process to prosecute/persecute one of its citizens abroad. This silence allegedly, is out of “respect” for the legal proceedings. No doubt, the New Zealand government would use the same excuse to avoid taking a stand. Let the court process run its course etc. etc.

Yet only last week PM Jacinda Ardern participated in an online democracy summit hosted by US president Joseph Biden, in which Biden posed as a sterling defender of press freedom:

Opening his Summit for Democracy this week, Joe Biden urged his guests to “stand up for the values that unite us”, including a free press. The US president boasted of his new initiative for democratic renewal, including measures to support an unfettered and independent media: “It’s the bedrock of democracy. It’s how the public stay informed and how governments are held accountable. And around the world, press freedom is under threat.”

You bet it is, including by the Biden White House.(At the same online gathering US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken described a free press as an ‘’indispensable” part of a modern democracy.) With those fine words still ringing in her ears, Ardern surely has a mandate to remind Biden that the US needs to practice what it has just preached – by- for instance, dropping the Assange prosecution.

There’s more. Over the course of the past two decades, the Clark and Ardern governments have made much of New Zealand’s reliance on a rules based international order based on shared norms. One of those norms that has existed for the best part of 200 years, is that you don’t extradite people for offences of a political nature, and (especially) you don’t send them back to where they will be treated inhumanely, for actions and expressions arising from their political opinions.

This is a platform readily available to Ardern to comment on the Assange case. Supposedly we look to the United Nations to take the lead in establishing and defending the rules-based international order. Well, in the Revised Draft Model for Extradition Law that the UN recommends that its member states should adopt, Articles 3a, 3b, and 3f say this:

Article 3: MANDATORY GROUNDS FOR REFUSAL
Extradition shall not be granted in any of the following circumstances:
(a) If the offence for which extradition is requested is regarded by the
requested State as an offence of a political nature….

(b) If the requested State has substantial grounds for believing that the
request for extradition has been made for the purpose of prosecuting or
punishing a person on account of that person's race, religion, nationality, ethnic
origin, political opinions, sex or status, or that that person's position may be
prejudiced for any of those reasons; [bolded emphasis mine]

(f) If the person whose extradition is requested has been or would be
subjected in the requesting State to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading
treatment or punishment or if that person has not received or would not receive
the minimum guarantees in criminal proceedings, as contained in the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, article 14…

Sure, this is only a model treaty. No-one has signed it. Yet it strongly indicates what principles with respect to extradition law that the UN wants and expects its member states to adopt and uphold. My point being, our declared support for a rules based international order give us grounds to urge the US to cease its attempts to extradite Assange - because (contrary to UN principles) that extradition is clearly for an offence of a political nature, is held to be motivated by his political opinions, and will result in degrading and inhumane treatment within the US prison system.

Ultimately, if it truly believes in the UN and the international rule of law, New Zealand should not be standing passively on the side-lines while an injustice of this magnitude is being perpetrated - especially given the precedent that Assange’s conviction and continued imprisonment has for the role of the media, here and abroad.

Footnote One: The US government offensive against leakers and journalists who publish leaked information did not begin with Assange, even though his case has taken that campaign to new heights. Barack Obama was the main offender:

President Barack Obama, in fact, set a record for any president with his number of prosecutions against leakers using the Espionage Act. Some observers fear that Obama’s crackdown on leaks paved the way for Trump to do the same.

Footnote Two: Over the years, only a handful of US soldiers have been convicted for war crimes committed during service in Iraq or Afghanistan. See here and also here and also here for some of those examples. Even on the even rarer occasions when a conviction results, the punishment has often been of little deterrent value. For example : the group of US soldiers eventually prosecuted for prisoner torture and maltreatment at Bagram air base in Afghanistan were either acquitted, or fined and demoited, or in the most extreme case, imprisoned for five months.

In a couple of instances (eg Sgt Clint Lorance and Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher) the uniformed murderers in US war zones abroad were pardoned by US President Donald Trump. The rarity of these prosecutions (and the issuing of a presidential pardon to someone as noxious as Gallagher) underlines the double standard being displayed by the dogged US pursuit of Assange:

As Agnès Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty International, has noted: “Virtually no one responsible for alleged US war crimes committed in the course of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars has been held accountable, let alone prosecuted, and yet a publisher who exposed such crimes is potentially facing a lifetime in jail.”

On the evidence, the US regards the publishing of the evidence of its war crimes to be a worse offence than committing such crimes in the first place.

Footnote Three : There’s a lucid brief history here of the “political offence” exemption in extradition requests, and of the three main ways- the US, the UK and the Swiss models – that the exemption has evolved over the centuries.

Footnote Four : You might be wondering why Julian Assange can be held liable for the content on Wikileaks, when the famous section 230 ‘safe harbour ‘provision (Available under US telecommunications law), protects other online platforms like Facebook and Youtube from legal liability for the content they carry, and regardless of any harms caused by that content. Moreover, the case law on section 230 extends that safe harbour protection extraterritorially, regardless of where the Wikileaks “head office” (if there is such a thing) is located.

The difference seems to depend on the “stolen” status of the Wikileaks content, and the “national security” harms allegedly caused. Clearly though, the disclosures by Wikiieaks were in the public interest, and it is open to argument as to whether in the long run they did more good than harm to America’s genuine national security concerns. All too often, government use the claim of “national security” like a blanket thrown over a parrot cage, with the aim being to keep the bird in the dark, and silent.

© Scoop Media

WW3.0

The Narrow Path to Averting War Over Ukraine

Hawks on both sides need to back off. The resolution of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis is a useful analogy.


BY ROBERT KUTTNER
DECEMBER 14, 2021

ALEXEI ALEXANDROV/AP PHOTO

A serviceman walks down a road at the line of separation near Sentianivka, Luhansk region, controlled by Russia-backed separatists, in eastern Ukraine, December 9, 2021.

In addition to Donald Trump’s other legacies, Trump’s disastrous foreign policies have left President Biden with three tough foreign-policy challenges—Iran, China, and Russia—that could all turn into full-blown crises in an election year. Of these, Russia is the most vexing. For four years, Trump made a close alliance with Vladimir Putin and signaled that the Kremlin was free to do pretty much what it wanted.

Putin has always been obsessed with control of what’s called Russia’s near abroad, and the catastrophe from his perspective of the dissolution of the USSR’s satellite empire. The loss of Eastern Europe and the Baltics was humiliating enough, but the independence of states that were long part of Russia proper is totally unacceptable.

Russia de facto controls Belarus through a ham-handed Kremlin stooge and local dictator, Alexander Lukashenko. The problem is Ukraine, where Putin is doubly humiliated by the government’s respect for democratic norms and the popular desire for closer economic and military integration with the West.

More from Robert Kuttner

Putin seems to be gambling that if push comes to shove, the U.S. will not risk World War III over Ukraine. He has massed an estimated 175,000 troops along Ukraine’s border, along with military equipment necessary to support an invasion. This comes on top of previous steps such as Russia’s annexation by force of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine’s Donbas region in 2014. Ukraine did manage to take back most of the Donbas territory.

Biden, for his part, has warned Putin of dire repercussions if Russia invades, but has stopped short of extending a full Western security blanket to Ukraine. Those consequences could include denying Russia access to the global banking system. On Sunday, the Group of Seven leading industrial democracies issued a joint statement warning Putin of “massive consequences” and “severe cost” if Russia invades Ukraine.

Here is the broader problem. The West’s own hands are far from clean.

Putin seems to be gambling that if push comes to shove, the U.S. will not risk World War III over Ukraine.

I wrote an extensive investigative piece in 2020 titled “Was Putin Inevitable?” Conducting upwards of 50 interviews, I found that the Clinton administration was substantially culpable in wrecking what was then a fragile Russian democracy and an emerging mixed economy.

On one flank, the ultra-free-marketeers, led by Larry Summers—another of Summers’s enduring gifts to posterity!—pressed the Russians to privatize state economic assets long before Russia had a stable capitalist infrastructure. Summers, as Treasury undersecretary for international economic affairs, was the U.S. liaison with the International Monetary Fund. Summers, with no expertise on Russia or its economy, used that leverage to make sure that Russia’s desperately needed IMF aid would be held in abeyance unless Russia rapidly privatized state assets.

This policy led to a fire sale of assets, and the origin of Russia’s current kleptocracy. That disastrous course, coupled with premature liberalization of the ruble, led to speculation, hyperinflation, and an economic near-collapse. Popular Russian support for Western democracy and capitalism collapsed. Meanwhile, Clinton’s national-security hawks reversed the U.S. pledge to Gorbachev and Yeltsin not to expand NATO. So wounded national pride combined with pocketbook distress, and Putin picked up the pieces.

Here is part of what I wrote:

Russia was not just floundering economically but attempting a transition from dictatorship to democracy and the rule of law, as well as from communism to capitalism—goals that are by no means synonymous. The abrupt imposition of marketization, full price decontrol, and crony privatization on an unprepared Russia, as a condition of desperately needed goodwill and aid from the West (little of which materialized), drove Russia in the 1990s into two cycles of hyperinflation, austerity, depression, unemployment, corruption, and then ultranationalist reaction. Approval of the U.S. in Russian opinion polls peaked at 80 percent in 1990. By 1999, it was around 32 percent.

When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl sought to annex the former DDR, he needed and obtained the USSR’s formal approval. The Soviet Union under Gorbachev was a full party to the agreement. Secretary of State James Baker personally assured Gorbachev that no NATO troops would be stationed in eastern Germany, and promised no further expansion of NATO eastward (“not one inch” according to the official transcript). There was even serious talk of inviting Russia to become a NATO member.

But the backpedaling from Baker’s pledge began almost immediately. By the late 1990s, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic were in NATO, with the three Baltic nations soon to follow. After Putin succeeded an ailing and politically discredited Yeltsin in 2000, the George W. Bush administration added insult to injury by proposing NATO membership not just for all of Eastern Europe but for the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine, prompting a much more bellicose policy by Putin with respect to both.

All that said, however, the logical conclusion is not that the U.S. should simply let Putin have his way with Ukraine. The terms of the Versailles Treaty of 1919 were also a travesty that needlessly pushed Germany into depression and hyperinflation. But that history hardly excuses Hitler.

The current brinkmanship between Moscow and Washington is reminiscent of innumerable close-call incidents during the Cold War. The most dire of these was the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. That crisis was resolved when Nikita Khrushchev, facing a U.S. naval blockade, turned around ships carrying nuclear missiles to Cuba. In return, President Kennedy made a secret deal to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey.

The analogy is some kind of deal in which Russia stands down from its threat to invade Ukraine, and in return the U.S. quietly rescinds its offer to bring Ukraine into NATO. The sticking point is that as long as Ukraine is a democracy, it is an acute affront to Putin’s dictatorship.

The other problem is that U.S. hawks are spoiling for a more direct confrontation with Putin. Alexander Vindman, the former director of European and Russian affairs at the National Security Council, who heroically broke with Trump and his policies on Russia and Ukraine, recently wrote an op-ed titled “How the United States Can Break Putin’s Hold on Ukraine,” calling for a much harder U.S. line, and imagining that a prosperous and democratic Ukraine could lead the Russian people “to eventually demand their own framework for democratic transition.” That, of course, is just what worries Putin, and this kind of saber-rattling is not helpful.

Ukraine raises the old tension between U.S. support for fledgling democracies attempting to practice the democratic ideals that America espouses, and U.S. appreciation of realpolitik. Putin, having watched Biden abandon Afghanistan, is calculating that at the end of the day, he cares a lot more about Ukraine than Biden does.

There is a very narrow path to a mutual stand-down, and it may well lead through Brussels or Berlin. That would also be good for the Biden project of improving relations with Europe.

The Europeans, even more than the U.S., need to avert the twin perils of either a capitulation to Putin or a shooting war over Ukraine. Angela Merkel, who speaks fluent Russian, has a good diplomatic relationship with Putin. She is recently unemployed. Merkel for special envoy?

The best case, also reminiscent of the Cold War, is crisis averted, but long-term Russian pressure on Ukraine and Western pushback continues. If Biden can pull that off, it will be another policy success—that an ungrateful public will probably dismiss as insufficient.

ROBERT KUTTNER
Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School.

WW3.0

How Do We Stop The Neocons From Starting Another Disaster In Ukraine

Wednesday, 15 December 2021

Article: Globetrotter

By James W. Carden / Globetrotter

If anything, Washington’s neoconservatives have an unerring instinct for survival. Having brought about multiple disasters in the two decades since 9/11—from the Iraq War to the twin debacles in Libya and Syria—the neoconservatives seem to have perfected the art of failing up.

Harvard University’s Stephen Walt once quipped that “Being a Neocon Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry.” And in this regard, the story of the Kagan family is instructive. Robert Kagan, a contributing columnist for the Washington Post, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and author of pseudohistories such as The Jungle Grows Back, has for years been a leading advocate of American militarism.

His brother, Frederick, is a resident scholar at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute. Writing in the Hill on December 7, Frederick Kagan claimed that Russian control of Ukraine, “would create an existential threat to Poland and even to Romania—one that could be met only by major deployments of U.S. and European ground and air forces to what could become a new Iron Curtain.” He and his wife, Kimberly, who heads the Institute for the Study of War—another pro-war Washington think tank—were close advisers to the disgraced General and former CIA Director David Petraeus. Indeed, both Frederick and his wife are frequently cited as the brains behind the surge strategy pursued by George W. Bush’s administration in 2007-2008.

But the most powerful member of the Kagan clan is Victoria Nuland, who is the wife of Robert and is the U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs. Under Obama, Nuland served as the State Department spokesperson, a position for which she was manifestly overqualified (and that becomes especially clear if one takes the qualifications of the current spokesman into consideration), before assuming the role of the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. It was in this role that Nuland helped orchestrate the overthrow of a democratically elected president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014 that led to a civil war in Ukraine, in which more than 13,000 people have died, according to the United Nations.

Part of the reason the U.S. is at grave risk of a war with Russia—and there is precious little debate about the policies that have brought us to this point—is that foreign policy in Washington is conducted by a virtually closed circle.

And that circle is dominated by people like the Kagans.

Washington’s legacy media organizations play their part in perpetuating these foreign policies as well by functioning as the permanent bureaucracy’s echo chamber. For proof, look no further than the Washington Post editorial page, which from the very start of the Ukraine crisis has been cavalierly dismissing calls for diplomacy and engagement and, instead, has been calling for outright war.

An example of this is the Washington Post view published on their editorial page on August 21, 2014:

“…it is tempting to look for a cease-fire or some kind of time out that would lead to a period of diplomatic negotiation. But what would a pause and diplomacy accomplish? Any negotiations that leave this blight festering in Ukraine must be avoided. The only acceptable solution is for Mr. Putin’s aggression to be reversed.”

As Jacob Heilbrunn, the editor of the National Interest, and I

commented

at the time, “Almost as bad as the callousness on display is the lack of candor. At no point did the [Washington] Post actually explain how it would propose to go about reversing Putin’s aggression.”

This remains the case even today. At no point do the armchair warriors braying for war with Russia over Ukraine discuss how such a “reversal” might be carried out, or, even more tellingly, what the odds might be of a successful outcome of a war between the U.S. and Russia.

Not much has changed since the start of the Ukrainian crisis nearly eight years ago. Consider for a moment the testimony on “Update on U.S.-Russia Policy” by Nuland made before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC) on December 7.

Nuland

testified

that:

“We don’t know whether Russian President [Vladimir] Putin has made a decision to attack Ukraine or overthrow its government but we do know he is building the capacity to do so. Much of this comes right out of Putin’s 2014 playbook but this time, it is on a much larger and more lethal scale. So despite our uncertainty about exact intentions and timing, we must prepare for all contingencies, even as we push Russia to reverse course.”

Nuland went on to note that the U.S. government has given $2.4 billion to Ukraine since 2014 “in security assistance,” which included $450 million that was given in 2021 alone.

What, one wonders, has been the United States’ return on this massive investment?

SFRC Chairman Bob Menendez, who, in 2015, was indicted on federal corruption charges, seems to be under the impression that Russians do not have the overwhelming military advantage on their own border. Likewise, Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) intoned that a Russian invasion of Ukraine would “require us [the U.S.] to escalate.”

Senator Todd Young (R-IN), meanwhile, pressed

Nuland on “what measures are being considered by the administration to counter Russian aggression,” while Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) indicated

that during her conversations with members of parliament (MP) from Estonia, they spoke about the importance of “European unity with respect to Ukraine.” Also, the MPs from Estonia along with Poland and other Eastern European countries expressed anxiousness about “whether or not to station more troops in the Baltic nations,” Senator Shaheen said.

The most astute comment of the day came from Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), who was clearly proud that the committee had achieved a rare bipartisan agreement for a change. He further emphasized that the U.S. stands “united” in support of Ukraine and against Russia.

And Johnson was absolutely correct: The committee was completely united in its desire for conflict over Ukraine, with whom the U.S. has no treaty obligations whatsoever.

Indeed, both Nuland and the SFRC seem to see U.S. national interests where none exist. More worrying still, they seem to possess a kind of blind faith in America’s ability, indeed duty, to shape outcomes of conflicts that are taking place thousands of miles from our shores through a combination of sanctions and military threats.

The SFRC hearing showed, if nothing else, that American foreign policy is held hostage by a venal, avaricious and, above all, reckless claque of elites: From the members of the SFRC to the high U.S. government officials who testify before them; from the staffers who brief them to the scholars and policy hands on whom the staffers rely; right down to the reporters and journalists who uncritically regurgitate what they are told by their ‘anonymous’ administration sources.

As such, one of the most urgent questions before us is: How do Americans of good conscience finally break their stranglehold on power before it’s too late?

This article was produced by Globetrotter in partnership with the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord

 

 

© Scoop Media

US Exit from Weapons Treaty Built Up Russia's Defense Industry

Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of Russia Dmitry Medvedev declared on Tuesday the development of Russia's Defense and Arms industries occurred after US quit the ABM.

 | Photo: Twitter/@MedvedevRussiaE

Published 14 December 2021 

In June 2002 the U.S under former President George W. Bush's administration decided to exit the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM), putting an end to the accord that limited Washington and Moscow to only having two ABM complexes.

According to the Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of Russia Dmitry Medvedev, the U.S. decision to quit the ABM Treaty, Russia has stimulated the development of its Defense and Arms industries.

This event, as expected, brought the increase of tensions between Washington and Moscow, he added.

"The Americans still do not have a reliable shield against other countries possessing nuclear weapons, including those whom they tried to make outcasts with the use of sanctions," Medvedev posted on his social media.

U.S. President George W. Bush decided to pull Washington out of the ABM Treaty in 2002, an accord which limited the United States and Russia from having more than 100 anti-ballistic missiles, the reason why the exit of Washington from the treaty de facto ended with the arrangement.

Medvedev highlighted Russia's commitment to strengthening global strategic stability and its willingness to work alongside the United States in this area, over the basis of "the principle of the indissolubility and interconnectedness of strategic offensive and defensive weapons."

"It is important that Washington, too, remains faithful to this course, open to joint work with partners, including within the framework of key strategic agreements, instead of trying to push NATO eastward thoughtlessly or deploy offensive weapons near Russia's borders," Medvedev decreed.

On Tuesday, the Chairman noted the continuous accusations over Russian troops near Ukrainian borders and the presumptions about Moscow's intentions to invade Ukraine.

Russia has been clear that they have no intentions to invade anyone. The Kremlin clarified the concept of "red lines," which Moscow considers included the NATO alliance's expansion eastward.