The NATO Declaration and the Deadly Strategy of Neoconservatism

For the sake of America's security and world peace, the U.S. should immediately abandon the neocon quest for hegemony in favor of diplomacy and peaceful co-existence.

by Jeffrey D. Sachs Posted onJuly 16, 2024

Reprinted from CommonDreams.

In 1992, U.S. foreign-policy exceptionalism went into overdrive. The U.S. has always viewed itself as an exceptional nation destined for leadership, and the demise of the Soviet Union in December 1991 convinced a group of committed ideologues – who came to be known as neoconservatives – that the U.S. should now rule the world as the unchallenged sole superpower. Despite countless foreign policy disasters at neocon hands, the 2024 NATO Declaration continues to push the neocon agenda, driving the world closer to nuclear war.

The neoconservatives were originally led by Richard Cheney, the Defense Secretary in 1992. Every President since then – Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden – has pursued the neocon agenda of U.S. hegemony, leading theU.S. into perpetual wars of choice, including Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Ukraine, as well as relentless eastward expansion of NATO, despite a clear U.S. and German promise in 1990 to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move one inch eastward.

The core neocon idea is that the U.S. should have military, financial, economic, and political dominance over any potential rival in any part of the world. It is targeted especially at rival powers such as China and Russia, and therefore brings the U.S. into direct confrontation with them. The American hubris is stunning: most of the world does not want to be led by the U.S., much less led by a U.S. state clearly driven by militarism, elitism and greed.

The neocon plan for U.S. military dominance was spelled out in the Project for a New American Century. The plan includes relentless NATO expansion eastward, and the transformation of NATO from a defensive alliance against a now-defunct Soviet Union to an offensive alliance used to promote U.S. hegemony. The U.S. arms industry is the major financial and political backer of the neocons. The arms industry spearheaded the lobbying for NATO’s eastward enlargement starting in the 1990s. Joe Biden has been a staunch neocon from the start, first as Senator, then as Vice President, and now as President.

To achieve hegemony, the neocon plans rely on CIA regime-change operations; U.S.-led wars of choice; U.S. overseas military bases (now numbering around 750 overseas bases in at least 80 countries); the militarization of advanced technologies (biowarfare, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, etc.); and relentless use of information warfare.

The quest for U.S. hegemony has pushed the world to open warfare in Ukraine between the world’s two leading nuclear powers, Russia and the United States. The war in Ukraine was provoked by the relentless determination of the U.S. to expand NATO to Ukraine despite Russia’s fervent opposition, as well as the U.S. participation in the violent Maidan coup (February 2014) that overthrew a neutral government, and the U.S. undermining of the Minsk II agreement that called for autonomy for the ethnically Russian regions of eastern Ukraine.

The NATO Declaration calls NATO a defensive alliance, but the facts say otherwise. NATO repeatedly engages in offensive operations, including regime-change operations. NATO led the bombing of Serbia in order to break that nation in two parts, with NATO placing a major military base in the breakaway region of Kosovo. NATO has played a major role in many U.S. wars of choice. NATO bombing of Libya was used to overthrow the government of Moammar Qaddafi.

The U.S. quest for hegemony, which was arrogant and unwise in 1992, is absolutely delusional today, since the U.S. clearly faces formidable rivals that are able to compete with the U.S. on the battlefield, in nuclear arms deployments, and in the production and deployment of advanced technologies. China’s GDP is now around 30% larger than the U.S. when measured at international prices, and China is the world’s low-cost producer and supplier of many critical green technologies, including EVs, 5G, photovoltaics, wind power, modular nuclear power, and others. China’s productivity is now so great that the U.S. complains of China’s “over-capacity.”

Sadly, and alarmingly, the NATO declaration repeats the neoconservative delusions.

The Declaration falsely declares that “Russia bears sole responsibility for its war of aggression against Ukraine,” despite the U.S. provocations that led to the outbreak of the war in 2014.

The NATO Declaration reaffirms Article 10 of the NATO Washington Treaty, according to which NATO’s eastward expansion is none of Russia’s business. Yet the U.S. would never accept Russia or China establishing a military base on the US border (say in Mexico), as the U.S. first declared in the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 and has reaffirmed ever since.

The NATO Declaration reaffirms NATO’s commitment to biodefense technologies, despite growing evidence that U.S. biodefense spending by NIH financed the laboratory creation of the virus that may have caused the Covid-19 pandemic.

The NATO Declaration proclaims NATO’s intention to continue to deploy anti-ballistic Aegis missiles (as it has already done in Poland, Romania, and Turkey), despite the fact that the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and placement of Aegis missiles in Poland and Romania has profoundly destabilized the nuclear arms control architecture.

The NATO Declaration expresses no interest whatsoever in a negotiated peace for Ukraine.

The NATO Declaration doubles-down on Ukraine’s “irreversible path to full Euro-Atlantic integration, including NATO membership.” Yet Russia will never accept Ukraine’s NATO membership, so the “irreversible” commitment is an irreversible commitment to war.

The Washington Post reports that in the lead-up to the NATO summit, Biden had serious qualms about pledging an “irreversible path” to Ukraine’s NATO membership, yet Biden’s advisors brushed aside these concerns.

The neoconservatives have created countless disasters for the U.S. and the world, including several failed wars, a massive buildup of U.S. public debt driven by trillions of dollars of wasteful war-driven military outlays, and the increasingly dangerous confrontation of the U.S. with China, Russia, Iran, and others. The neocons have brought the Doomsday Clock to just 90 seconds to midnight (nuclear war), compared with 17 minutes in 1992.

For the sake of America’s security and world peace, the U.S. should immediately abandon the neocon quest for hegemony in favor of diplomacy and peaceful co-existence.

Alas, NATO has just done the opposite.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (2020). Other books include: Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable (2017), and The Age of Sustainable Development, (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.

 

War on Farmers: World Bank Sowing Seed Colonialism in Africa

by Colin Todhunter / July 10th, 2024

In Kenya, a law was passed in 2012 that prohibits farmers’ rights to save, share, exchange or sell unregistered seeds. Farmers could face up to two years in prison and a fine of up to 1 million Kenyan shillings (equivalent to nearly four years’ wages for a farmer).

However, in 2022, Kenyan smallholder farmers launched a legal case against the government calling for reform of the 2012 seed law to stop criminalising them for sharing seeds. There is a hearing scheduled for 24 July 2024.

Agroecologist and environmentalist Claire Nasike Akello says that, in legal terms, the sharing and selling of indigenous seeds is a criminal offence in Kenya. In effect, Kenya’s Seed and Plant Varieties Act demolishes self-sufficiency among smallholder farmers who use indigenous seeds to grow food.

Writing on her website, she says that the legislation seeks to create a dependency on multinational companies by smallholder farmers for seeds thus giving an upper hand to these firms that continue to steal biological resources from local communities with a profit-driven mindset.

It is, in effect:

A move designed to impoverish smallholder farmers and lock them out of farming.

Gates, Rockefeller and big agribusiness

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) initiative, funded by the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, has been intervening directly in the formulation of African governments’ agricultural policies on issues like seeds and land, opening up African markets to US agribusiness.

Around 80% of Africa’s seed supply comes from millions of small-scale farmers recycling and exchanging seed from year to year. But AGRA is supporting the introduction of commercial (chemical-dependent) seed systems, enabling a few large companies to control seed research and development, production and distribution.

Since the 1990s, national seed law reviews have taken place, sponsored by USAID and the G8 along with Gates and others, opening the door to multinational corporations’ involvement in seed production.

Regulations and ‘seed certification’ laws are often brought in by governments on behalf of industry that are designed to eradicate traditional seeds by allowing only ‘stable’, ‘uniform’ and ‘novel’ seeds on the market (meaning corporate seeds). These are the only ‘regulated’ seeds allowed: registered and certified. It is a cynical way of eradicating indigenous farming practices at the behest of corporations.

Thousands of seed varieties have been lost and corporate seeds have increasingly dominated agriculture as peasant farmers have been prevented from freely improving, sharing or replanting their traditional seeds. It amounts to the privatisation of a common heritage. The privatisation and appropriation of inter-generational farmer knowledge embodied by seeds whose germplasm is ‘tweaked’ and stolen by corporations who then claim ownership.

Seed has been central to agriculture for 10,000 years. Seeds have been handed down from generation to generation. Peasant farmers have been the custodians of seeds, knowledge and land.

The corporate control over seeds is also an attack on the survival of communities and their traditions. Seeds are integral to identities because, in rural communities, people’s lives have been tied to planting, harvesting, seeds, soil and the seasons for thousands of years.

The privatisation of seeds is a global issue, of course. In Costa Rica, for example, the battle to overturn restrictions on seeds was lost with the signing of a free trade agreement with the US, although this flouted the country’s seed biodiversity laws.

Seed laws in Brazil created a corporate property regime for seeds which effectively marginalised all indigenous seeds that were locally adapted over generations. This regime attempted to stop farmers from using or breeding their own seeds.

What we are seeing is a drive towards the corporate commodification of knowledge and seeds, the erosion of farmers’ environmental learning, the undermining of traditional knowledge systems and an increase in farmers’ dependency on corporations.

Such dispossession and dependency are sold by Gates and the agribusiness sector as meeting the needs of modern agriculture. What it really means is a system adapted to meet the demands of global agri-capital, institutional investors like BlackRock and corporate-controlled international markets and supply chains.

Meanwhile these vested interests try to depict Africa as a basket case in need of ‘intervention’.

It’s a convenient smokescreen that diverts attention from the political economy of food and agriculture, not least how contrived debt traps and predatory lending practices led African nations into succumbing to ‘structural adjustment’ programmes, turning the continent from being a net food exporter into a net food importer, undermining indigenous crop diversity and, with it, food security and food sovereignty.

Prof Walden Bello and John Feffer argue that, in this respect, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization (WTO) are key to understanding the processes involved in destroying African agriculture. Neoliberal shock therapy left poor African farmers more food insecure and governments reliant on unpredictable aid flows.

Bello and Feffer argue that the social consequences of structural adjustment cum agricultural dumping were predictable:

… the number of Africans living on less than a dollar a day more than doubled to 313 million people between 1981 and 2001 – or 46% of the whole continent. The role of structural adjustment in creating poverty, as well as severely weakening the continent’s agricultural base and consolidating import dependency, was hard to deny.

And now we have AGRA stepping in to apparently save the day. But what we have seen thus far with that initiative is more of the same: according to the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, AGRA is failing Africa’s farmers

World Bank and the seeds of neocolonialism 

The UN FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) estimates that globally just 20 cultivated plant species account for 90% of all the plant-based food consumed by humans.

In addition to this narrow genetic base putting global food security at serious risk, Graham Gordon, head of policy at the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD), also says that small-scale agriculture is central in reducing extreme poverty, since 80 per cent of people living below the global poverty line are based in rural areas, and the vast majority of these depend on agriculture for their livelihoods.

Farmers have been growing crops and selecting seeds from the plants that grow best in their fields for thousands of years. Gordon notes that this ‘farmer seed system’ or the ‘informal’ seed sector has contributed to a nutritious and diverse household diet.

However, this farmer seed system exists alongside the commercial seed system. Hybrid seeds are usually developed by large agricultural companies for commercial purposes, are often dependent on artificial fertilisers and, as already noted, are protected through patents, backed by seed certification legislation.

Indeed, CAFOD’s 2023 report ‘Sowing the Seeds of Poverty: How the World Bank Harms Poor Farmers’ describes how the farmer seed system is systematically being undermined by the concentration of power held by large-scale agribusiness and the promotion of the industrial agricultural model.

Gordon notes that seed markets are highly concentrated, with Bayer, Corteva, BASF and ChemChina/Syngenta controlling more than 50 per cent of the global commercial seed market. These same four companies also control more than 60 per cent of global agrochemical sales.

Gordon says:

Using their monopolies, these companies concentrate on producing seeds for crops with large markets – mainly staples such as maize, wheat, soy and rice. This is having devastating impacts on crop diversity. Of the more than 6,000 edible plant species that we have cultivated over centuries, just nine crops now account for more than 65 per cent of all crop production. This has led to increased prices, and has significantly reduced farmers’ choice, and the resilience of farmers to shocks such as climate change.

CAFOD found that the World Bank promotes the interests of global agribusiness and intensified industrial agriculture by linking subsidies to farmers buying hybrid seeds and corresponding chemical fertilisers and requiring the implementation of seed certification laws that limit small farmers’ ability to grow, save, share and sell seeds.

The solution is to shift funding away from industrial agriculture and abandon notions of a Green Revolution for Africa in favour of prioritising small-scale farmers, agroecology, and public investment in farmers’ seed systems to improve nutrition, increase food diversity and strengthen rural communities and local economies.

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Colin Todhunter is an independent writer specialising in development, food and agriculture. You can read his new e-book Food, Dependency and Dispossession: Resisting the New World Order for free here. Read other articles by Colin.

 

All Roads Lead to War

by Dan Lieberman / July 11th, 2024

Yogi Berra, famous as a baseball catcher and a wandering philosopher, is credited with the statement, “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Uncle Sam, famous for initiating endless wars and philosophizing about democracy and human rights follows Yogi’s pronouncement in only one direction ─ the road to war.

The endless wars, one in almost every year of the American Republic, are shadowed by words of peace, democracy, and human rights. Happening far from U.S. soil, their effects are more visual than visceral, appearing as images on a television screen. The larger post-World War II conflagrations, those that followed the “war to end all wars,” in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan have not permanently resolved the issues that promoted the wars. From their littered battlefields remain the old contestants and from an embittered landscape new contestants emerge to oppose the U.S. “world order.” The U.S. intelligence community said, “it views four countries as posing the main national security challenges in the coming year: China, followed by Russia, Iran and North Korea.” Each challenge has a fork in the road. Each fork taken is leading to war.

China
“China increasingly is a near-peer competitor, challenging the United States in multiple arenas — especially economically, militarily, and technologically — and is pushing to change global norms,” says a report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Interpretation ─ China has disrupted the United States’ world hegemony and military superiority. Only the U.S. is allowed to have hegemony and the military superiority that assures the hegemony.

Foreign Policy (FP) magazine’s article, “How Primed for War Is China,” goes further: “The likelihood of war with China may be the single-most important question in international affairs today.”

If China uses military force against Taiwan or another target in the Western Pacific, the result could be war with the United States—a fight between two nuclear-armed giants brawling for hegemony in that region and the wider world. If China attacked amid ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the world would be consumed by interlocking conflicts across Eurasia’s key regions, a global conflagration unlike anything since World War II. How worried should we be?

No worry about that. Beijing will not pursue war. Why would it? It is winning and winners have no need to go to war. The concern is that the continuous trashing will lead the PRC to trash its treasury holdings that finance U.S. trade debt (already started), use reserves to purchase huge chunks of United States assets, diminish its hefty agricultural imports from Yankee farms, and enforce its ban of exports of rare earth extraction and separation technologies  (China produces 60 percent of the world’s rare earth materials and processes nearly 90 percent). The U.S. should worry that, by not cooperating, the Red Dragon may decide it is better not to bother with Washington and use its overwhelming industrial power, with which the U.S. cannot compete, to sink the U.S. economy.

China does not chide the U.S. about its urban blight, mass shootings, drug problem, riots in Black neighborhoods, enforcing the Caribbean as an American lake, campus revolution, and media control by special interests. However, U.S. administrations insist on being involved in China’s internal affairs — Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet, South China Sea, Belt and Road, Uyghurs — and never shows how this involvement benefits the U.S. people.

U.S. interference in China’s internal affairs has not changed anything! The United States is determined to halt China’s progress to economic dominance and to no avail. China will continue to do what China wants to do. With an industrious, capable, and educated population, which is four times the size of the U.S. population, arable land 75 percent of that of the U.S. (295,220,748 arable acres compared to 389,767,633 arable acres), and a multiple of resources that the world needs, China, by default will eventually emerge, if it has not already, as the world’s economic superpower.

What does the U.S. expect from its STOP the unstoppable China policy? Where can its rhetoric and aggressive actions lead but to confrontation? The only worthwhile confrontation is America confronting itself. The party is over and it’s time to call it a day, a new day and a new America ─ not going to war to protect its interests but resting comfortably by sharing its interests.

Russia
Western politicos responded to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s comment, “The breakup of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century,” with boisterous laughter. Go to Ukraine and observe the tragedy and learn that Putin’s remark has been too lightly regarded. It’s not a matter of right and wrong. It’s a matter of life and death. The nation, which made the greatest contribution in defeating Nazi Germany and endured the most physical and mental losses, suffered the most territorial, social, and economic forfeitures in post-World War II.

From a Russian perspective, Crimea had been a vital part of Russia since the time of Catherine the Great ─ a warm water port and outlet to the Black Sea. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s attachment of Crimea to The Ukraine Republic was an administrative move, and as long as Ukraine allowed Russia free entry to Crimea, Moscow did not seek annexation. To the Russia government of year 2014, the Euromaidan Revolution changed the arrangement. Putin easily rationalized annexing a Ukraine region whose population was 2/3 Russian, considered a part of Russia, and was under attack by Ukrainian nationalists.

Maintaining Ukraine in the Russian orbit, or at least, preventing it from becoming a NATO ally, was a natural position for any Russian government, a mini Monroe Doctrine that neutralizes bordering nations and impedes foreign intrusions. Change in Ukraine’s status forecast a change in Russia’s position, a certain prediction of war. Ukraine and Russia were soul mates; their parting was a trauma that could only be erased by seizure of the Maiden after the Euromaidan.

Ukraine has lost the war; at least they cannot win, but don’t tell anybody. Its forces are defeated and depleted and cannot mount an offensive against the capably defended Russian captured territory. Its people and economy will continue to suffer and soldiers will die in the small battles that will continue and continue. Ukraine’s hope is having Putin leave by a coup, voluntarily, or involuntarily and having a new Russian administration that is compliant with Zelensky’s expectations. The former is possible; the latter is not possible. Russian military will not allow its sacrifices to be reversed.

For Ukrainians, it is a “zero sum” battle; they can only lose and cannot dictate how much they lose. A truce is impeded by Putin’s ambition to incorporate Odessa into Russia and link Russia through captured Ukraine territory to Moldova’s breakaway Republic of Transnistria, which the Russian president expects will become a Russian satellite, similar to South Ossetia and Abkhazia. This leaves Ukraine with two choices: (1) Forget the European Union, forget NATO, and remain a nation loosely allied with Russia, or (2) Solicit support from the United States and Europe and eventually start a World War that destroys everybody.

As of July 8, 2024, Ukraine and United States are headed for the latter fork in the road. After entering into war, the contestants find no way, except to end it with a more punishing war. That cannot happen. Russians crossing the Dnieper River and capturing Odessa is also unlikely. The visions of the presidents of Russia and Ukraine clash with reality. Their visions and their presence are the impediments to resolving the conflict. Both must retire to their palatial homes and write their memoirs. A world tour featuring the two in a debate is a promising You Tube event.

Commentators characterized the Soviet Union as a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. After it became scrambled eggs, Russia’s characterization became simplified; no matter what Putin’s Russia does, it is viewed as a cold, icy, and heartless land that preys on its neighbors and causes misery to the world. Apply a little warmth, defrost the ice, and Russia has another appearance.

Iran
Ponder and ponder, why is the U.S. eager to assist Israel and act aggressively toward Iran? What has Iran done to the U.S. or anybody? The US wants Iran to eschew nuclear and ballistic weapons, but the provocative approach indicates other purposes — completely alienate Iran, destroy its military capability, and bring Tehran to collapse and submission. Accomplishing the far-reaching goals will not affect the average American, increase US defense posture, or diminish the continuous battering of the helpless faces of the Middle East. The strategy mostly pleases Israel and Saudi Arabia, who have engineered it, share major responsibility for the Middle East turmoil, and are using mighty America to subdue the principal antagonist to their malicious activities.

Although Iran has not sent a single soldier cross its borders to invade another nation and has insufficient military power to contest a United States’ reprisal, the Islamic republic is accused of trying to conquer the entire Middle East. Because rebellions from oppressed Shi’a factions occur in Bahrain and Yemen, Iran is accused of using surrogates to extend their power ─ guilt by association. Because Iraq, Syria and Hezbollah have extended friendship (who does not want to have friends), Iran, who cannot even sell its pistachio nuts to these nations, is accused of controlling them.

Iran is an independent nation with its own concepts for governing. The Islamic Republic might not be a huggable nation, but compared to Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, it is a model democracy and a theocratic lightweight. Except for isolate incidents, Iran has never attacked anyone, doesn’t indicate it intends to attack anyone, and doesn’t have the capability to wage war against a major nation.

Defined as Iran, the world’s greatest sponsor of terrorism, the Iranian government has not been involved in terrorist acts against the United States, or proven to have engaged in international terrorism. There have been some accusations concerning one incident in Argentina, one in the U.S. and a few in Europe against dissidents who cause havoc in Iran, but these have been isolated incidents. Two accusations go back thirty to forty years, and none are associated with a particular organization.

If the US honestly wants to have Iran promise never to be a warring nation, it would approach the issues with a question, “What will it take for you (Iran) never to pursue weapons of mass destruction?” Assuredly, the response would include provisions that require the U.S. to no longer assist the despotic Saudi Kingdom in its oppression of minorities and opposition, in its export of terrorists, and interference in Yemen. The response would propose that the U.S. eliminate financial, military and cooperative support to Israel’s theft of Palestinian lands, oppressive conditions imposed on Palestinians, and daily killings of Palestinian people, and combat Israel’s expansionist plans.

The correct question soliciting a formative response and leading to decisive US actions resolves two situations and benefits the U.S. — fear of Iran developing weapons of mass destruction is relieved and the Middle East is pointed in a direction that achieves justice, peace, and stability for its peoples. The road to war is a tool for Israel’s objectives. The U.S. continues on that road, willingly sacrificing Americans for the benefit of the Zionist state. Tyranny and treason in the American government and the American people either are not observant or just don’t care.

Democratic Republic of North Korea (DPRK)
Nowhere and seemingly everywhere, North Korea stands at a fork in the road. The small and unimportant state that wants to be left alone and remain uncontaminated by global germs, is constantly pushed into responding to military maneuvers at its border, threats of annihilation, and insults to its leaders and nation. From United States’ actions and press coverage, North Korea assumes the world stage as a dynamic and mighty nation and exerts a power that forces respect and response. How can a nation, constantly described as an insular and “hermit kingdom,” cast a shadow that reaches 5000 miles to the United States mainland and speak with a voice that generates a worldwide listening audience?

The world faces a contemporary DPRK, a DPRK that enters the third decade of the 21st century with a changed perspective from the DPRK that entered the century. Rehashing of old grievances, reciting past DPRK policies that caused horrific happenings to its people, and purposeful misunderstanding of contemporary North Korea lead to misdirected policies and unwarranted problems. Purposeful misunderstanding comes from exaggerations of negative actions, from not proving these negative actions, from evaluating actions from agendas and opinions and not from facts, from selecting and guessing the facts, and from approaching matters from different perspectives and consciences.

Instead of heading away from North Korea, the U.S. speeds toward a confrontation and North Korea makes preparations — developing nuclear weapons and delivery systems and signing a mutual defense pact with Russia. The U.S. State department paves the road to war and, as a favor to its antagonist, induces it to develop the offensive and defensive capabilities to wage the war. Apparently, the U.S. defense department has orders not to attack the DPRK before it has ICBMs and warheads that can demolish the U.S. Unlike Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, let’s make this a fair fight.

North and South Vietnam have only one problem ─ U.S. interference in their internal affairs. Stop the joint maneuvers and remove the U.S. troops and the North and South will learn how to get along and realize they must get along. If they do not find friendship and engage in hostilities, they will resolve the issue in a way that badly affects both and does not affect the U.S. Why internationalize an issue that is national and can be contained? Why make the U.S. land subjected to possible attack because two miscreants cannot behave?

North Korea might go down in history as the nation that awakened the world to the consequences of global saber rattling. It has shown that the nuclear world can become one big poker game, in which a challenge to a bluff can be an ‘all win’ and ‘all lose’ proposition. Which gambler is willing to play that game when an ‘all win’ doesn’t add much more to what the gambler already has, and an ‘all lose’ means leaving the person with nothing? The odds greatly favor America, but the wager return is not worth taking the bet, despite the odds. Keep it sweet and simple, let the Koreans settle their problems, and we will see doves flying over the Korean peninsula.

The Road to War
The U.S. does not develop foreign policies from facts and reality; they are developed from made-up stories that fit agendas. Those who guide the agendas solicit support from the population by providing  narratives that rile the American public and define its enemies. This diversion from facts and truth is responsible for the counterproductive wars fought by the U.S., for Middle East turmoil, for a world confronted with terrorism, and for the contemporary horrors in Ukraine and Gaza. U.S. foreign policy is not the cause of all the problems, but it intensifies them and rarely solves any of them.

Because violence and military challenges are being used to resolve the escalating conflicts throughout the globe, should not more simplified and less aggressive approaches be surveyed and determined if they can serve to resolve the world conflagrations. Features of that determination modify current U.S. thinking:

(1) Rather than concluding nations want to confront U.S. military power, realize nations fear military power and desire peaceful relations with the powerful United States.

(2) Rather than attempting to steer adversaries to a lose position, steer them to a beneficial position.

(3) Rather than denying nations the basic requirements for survival, assist their populations in times of need.

(4) Rather than provoking nations to military buildup and action, assuage them into feeling comfortable and not threatened.

(5) Rather than challenging by military threat, show willingness to negotiate to a mutually agreed solution.

(6) Rather than interfering in domestic disputes, recognize the sovereign rights of all nations to solve their own problems.

(7) Rather than relying on incomplete information, purposeful myths, and misinterpretations, learn to understand the vagaries and seemingly irrational attitudes of sovereign nations whose cultures produce different mindsets.

Recent elections in the United Kingdom indicate a shift from adventurism to attention with domestic problems. The Labor Party win over a Conservative government that perceived Ukraine as fighting its war and the election advances of the far right National Rally and the far-left Unbowed Parties in France show a trend away from war. A win by Donald Trump, whose principal attraction is his supra-nationalist antiwar policy, will emphasize that trend and indicate that the most disliked of two disliked is due to the abhorrence to war.

From ever war to war no more.
A pleasant thought
that U.S. administrations thwart.
All roads still lead to war.Facebook

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Dan Lieberman publishes commentaries on foreign policy, economics, and politics at substack.com.  He is author of the non-fiction books A Third Party Can Succeed in America, Not until They Were Gone, Think Tanks of DC, The Artistry of a Dog, and a novel: The Victory (under a pen name, David L. McWellan). Read other articles by Dan.

 

Responsibility for the Kenya Crisis Lies at the Feet of US Neo-Colonialism  

by Black Alliance for Peace / July 11th, 2024

The excessive support and public adoration the U.S. government has given to Kenya’s President William Ruto represents the racist contempt this settler state has for all of Africa and the domestic population of descendants from the continent. Two days before African Liberation Day on May 25th and one month before the Kenyan police’s brutal crackdown on protests against the US-IMF backed Finance Act that increases taxes up to 35% on essential goods, U.S. President Biden rolled out a red carpet for Ruto at a White House state dinner.

The debt this bill is supposed to address only exists because of the incessant and indiscriminate borrowing by the previous government of Kenya, for which Ruto was vice president. Ruto is a Grade A lackey for U.S. interests reminiscent of the dictator Mobutu of the Democratic Republic of Congo (then Zaire) who U.S. imperialism supported for 32 years in order to plunder the Congo.

U.S. neo-colonialism praised as an “endearing” and “enduring” democracy, the Ruto presidency, a puppet government that unleashed its notoriously vicious police to reportedly arrest more than 300, kill as many as 23 and injure dozens of Kenyan citizens in the demonstrations over the past week. These police are the same force U.S. imperialism has maneuvered into being dispatched to Haiti to contain the people’s resistance against imperialism in that Caribbean nation.

An elevation in the parlance of U.S. statecraft is the paternalistic promise of granting Kenya the status of a “Major Non-NATO Ally,” a role granted to the African Union’s African Standby Force. This designation is in sharp contrast to the Alliance of Sahel States newly formed confederation, a declaration of African self-determination.

The Africa Team of the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) and the organizing arm U.S. Out of Africa Network (USOAN) stand in uncompromising solidarity with the masses of Kenyans fighting against the proposed Finance Bill 2024. We denounce in the strongest terms the complicity of the U.S., especially its Black misleaders in Congress, in passing this legislation. In fact, on the day the bill was introduced in the Kenyan parliament, members of the U.S. Congress including Barbara Lee.

Ruto must go! U.S. Out of Africa! BAP and USOAN salute the courage and determination of the masses of youth throughout Kenya “Gen Z”! The blood spilled will not be in vain. Our martyrs are alive alongside the living. We stand unwaveringly with the Gen Z Movement, our people of Kenya!Facebook

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The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) seeks to recapture and redevelop the historic anti-war, anti-imperialist, and pro-peace positions of the radical black movement. Read other articles by Black Alliance for Peace, or visit Black Alliance for Peace's website.

 

Popcorn, Pizza and the Theater of Debate

Biden v Trump 2024

by Daniel Borgström / July 12th, 2024

As the evening of June 27, 2024 approached, I wondered if the debate was really going to happen. For months now, we’d been seeing videos of President Joe Biden spacing out, drifting off into a fog at official events. At the G7, he’d wandered off and Italian PM Meloni had to gently guide him back; that was only two weeks before this debate, and the video of it went viral. Donald Trump would demolish him, some predicted, a spectacle Democratic Party power brokers could not allow; they’d cancel the debate with some face-saving excuse, and gracefully usher Biden off into retirement. His replacement would be another apologist for Palestinian mass-slaughter, somebody just as vicious as Genocide Joe, but clear-headed.

If the debate did actually take place, it would be an historical event. My friends and I wanted to watch it together with an audience and see the responses of people around us. The day came, and we headed off to the New Parkway Theater in Oakland.

People were lining up at the snack bar for popcorn and drinks as we went in to take our seats. Within minutes two CNN moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, appeared on the screen and explained the format. There was no studio audience, they told us. So in effect, we and the whole world in dozens of countries around the globe had virtual ringside seats to this event, now being broadcast live.

Seconds later candidates President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump appeared on the screen in front of us. Okay, so it was really happening.

Biden took the first question, one about the economy. He started off well, far better than I had ever expected.. I was impressed at how he could rattle off (alleged) facts, figures, and policies at such amazing speed that I could barely follow.

Wow! I thought to myself. He’s really cranking that stuff out!

Another round of questions. A moderator had asked Trump about the national debt, and after his response, turned to Biden.

“He (Trump) had the largest national debt of any president’s four-year period,” Biden said, and reminded us of Trump’s tax cut which “benefited the very wealthy. What I’m going to do is fix the taxes.”

Great! I thought, but he’d already had nearly four years without doing much about it. Well, that’s Biden. Promises, promises. He went on, promising to correct the tax inequalities and do “all those things we need to do, childcare, elder care, . . . strengthen our healthcare system. . .”

There he seemed to skip a beat, then picked up again. “With dealing with everything we have to do with –.” Having gotten that far, he froze up went silent.

He stood there, zombie-like, a vertical cadaver; he seemed to be struggling, agonizing to come back to the studio, back to the audience. Seconds ticked by, seeming like hours.

“See there!” came a voice from the audience. It was a guy sitting in the row in front of me, off to the right. “He’s zoning out!” Some others were also saying, “Biden’s lost it!”

Till then he’d been soaring through the sky as though on automatic pilot — but woops, a device made by Boeing, perhaps. Now he was stalling out. This lasted only about two or three seconds, but long enough for us in the theater — along with the rest of the worldwide audience — to see and know that the guy who nominally runs the U.S. empire might be non compos mentis. It was an eternal moment that few of us will ever forget.

It got even worse as he partially reconnected and gasped out the words:

“We finally beat Medicare!”

“Thank you, President Biden,” said the moderator, and turned to Trump who gleefully pounced on Biden’s misspoken words, saying:

“Well, he’s right! He did beat Medicaid. He beat it to death. And he’s destroying Medicare.”

Poor Biden had pulled himself out of a nosedive, only to crash into a mountainside.

This was only about ten minutes into the event. There was almost another hour and a half yet to go. Biden did not attempt to correct his “beat Medicare” slip; whether he was even aware of having said it is not certain. He seemed to come out of it and went on for the rest of the debate as though nothing strange had happened, though he continued to have a slightly cadaver-like appearance. Nevertheless, at times he did quite well, and drew occasional loud applause from about a third of the New Parkway audience.

I’m guessing that most of the people here were Democrats, though not necessarily Biden supporters. It isn’t only Biden’s senility which causes people to consider him unfit; there was also his role in the Iraq invasion, and now his policy of supplying arms to the Israelis, which has earned him the epithet “Genocide Joe.” (Trump promises to be even worse on that issue. “Let [Israel] finish the job,” he said.)

Biden’s not the first president who became senile, Ronald Reagan did too, but that didn’t seem to disturb anyone. Perhaps Journalist Caitlin Johnstone was right when she said: “A dementia patient can be president because it doesn’t matter who the president is.” The government is run by unelected empire managers who are chosen undemocratically by the power elite. “Biden is just the official face on the operation,” she wrote. Well it sure does look that way, though I do think there have been some exceptional presidents who took the reins of power into their hands — JFK for one, and we saw what happened to him when he refused to carry out the wishes of the power elite.

The debate went on. Both Biden and Trump both scored some points, though not many. Mostly they were regurgitating stuff we’ve been hearing for years. Biden boasted his achievements, and Trump told us what a great job he did and is going to do again after he’s elected. “I’m going to make America great again!”

Among the New Parkway audience, nobody cheered for Donald Trump, or booed him either. To the contrary, Trump’s preposterous lies occasionally drew explosions of laughter.

This non-support for Trump was to be expected since Oakland, and the San Francisco Bay Area in general, is generally progressive. We can assume that in other parts of the country, there would’ve been many screen-viewing gatherings where Donald Trump was being applauded as hero of the evening.

Trump’s default talking point was to hammer on immigrants, and accuse Joe Biden of letting them in. “He allowed millions of people to come in here from prisons, jails and mental institutions to come into our country and destroy our country,” Trump asserted. He repeated that several times in the course of this debate.

I wonder how anybody can forget that except for Native Americans we’re all immigrants in this country. But when Trump says “immigrants,” it sounds like he’s really using that as a code word meaning non-white.

Nevertheless, Biden has continued some of Trump’s policies that abuse immigrants. And this spring Biden supported a Border Act which he said would be “the toughest, most efficient, most effective border security bill this country’s ever seen.” When Republicans come up with some odious thing that seems to gain them popularity, Biden seems all too ready to borrow it.

For about an hour and a half, they each got their turns, blasting away at each other, trading insults. Biden called Trump a criminal, “The only person on this stage that is a convicted felon is the man I’m looking at right now!” Biden said. Trump countered with reminding Biden of the criminal activities of his son Hunter Biden, and of Joe Biden’s role in supporting his son’s Burisma affair.

“You have the morals of an alley cat!” Biden said, mentioning Trump’s affair with a porn star. Throughout the event the called each other liars and other names. “You are a child,” Biden declared. He also called Trump a “whiner,” and even hinted that Trump was too fat.

People in the audience around me were munching popcorn and sipping soft drinks, beer and wine. My friends and I ordered a pizza.

Some of this was funny. Some was not. On the topic of the Middle East, Trump used ‘Palestinian’ as a pejorative, and said, “He’s become like a Palestinian. But they don’t like him, because he’s a very bad Palestinian. He’s a weak one.”

“I’ve never heard so much foolishness!” Biden shot back.

And that was foolishness. After all, Joe Biden has been supporting the Israeli genocide with weapons and diplomatic cover. We need to give discredit where discredit is due.

Regarding Gaza Biden said:

“Hamas cannot be allowed to be continued. We continue to send our experts and our intelligence people to how they can get Hamas like we did Bin Laden.”

Was Biden referring to our 20-year-long adventure in Afghanistan? The empire lost that war, and the Taliban is back in charge. Or maybe he meant that the U.S. and Israel working together can achieve anything they set out to do and all will turn out well? In reality Israel is now in the ninth month of its war on a rag-tag militia, and though it has massacred some 40,000 civilians, it doesn’t seem to be winning. Does Biden know that? Haaretz is available in English, but maybe he doesn’t read it.

Biden didn’t really explain exactly what he meant, but further on he told us:

“We are the most admired country in the world. We’re the United States of America. There’s nothing beyond our capacity. We have the finest military in the history of the world.

Nobody cheered. Nobody laughed either.

“We’re the strongest country in the world,” he reiterated a few minutes later.

Really? Looking at declining U.S. fortunes in the forever-wars and proxy-wars — eastern Europe, the Middle East, and above all in Palestine — we gotta wonder if those glory days aren’t about over.

“We’re a country in the world who keeps our word and everybody trusts us.” Biden went on. “. . . Right now, we’re needed. We’re needed to protect the world.”

Was Biden debating Trump? — or was he fending off some ghostly voices of doom?

Our pizza arrived. But what were we watching? — an end-of-empire drama? We were sitting in a movie theater, but this was not a movie. It was history being played out, presented live, on the screen in front of us.

For these 90 minutes, Biden continued on at full speed except for that one blackout. Some of what he said was a bit scrambled and out of sequence, but in general I felt he did much, much better than I had ever expected, though I do hope they’ll revoke his driver’s license.

The debate ended, and the moderator announced, “Stay with us because we have full analysis of this debate.”

A panel of pundits came up on the screen, and immediately they laid into Biden’s performance, mercilessly ripping the poor guy to shreds. Their evaluation was so instantaneous, so unanimous, I was totally caught by surprise. I could hardy believe what I was hearing. Was the pundits’ response pre-planned? My first thought was to suspect that Biden had stumbled into an ambush. Although Biden had called for this debate, it was strange that his Democratic Party handlers had let him go through with it. Maybe they’d decided this was the only way they could get rid of their candidate who was unlikely to win the upcoming election.

I almost felt sorry for Joe Biden — even though he’s not some kindly old gentleman who deserves a lot of sympathy. “Don’t feel sorry for him,” a friend chided me. “He’ll be remembered as ‘the genocide president,’ and not only that, he makes elderly people look incompetent.”

• Virginia Browning and Steve Gilmartin contributed to this articleFacebook

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Daniel Borgström is a member of the KPFA Local Station Board Rescue Pacifica Caucus. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps during the Kennedy years, and now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and writes on various topics including travel, history, and struggles against corporate dominance.  He can be reached at danielfortyone@gmail.com Read other articles by Daniel, or visit Daniel's website.

 

U.S. divide and rule no more… Washington’s Gulf allies embrace Iran

The days of Washington and its Western minions playing divide and rule are over because they have discredited themselves irreparably.

by Finian Cunningham / July 12th, 2024

In a sign of major geopolitical realignment, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab states sent warm congratulations to Iran on its newly elected President Masoud Pezeshkian.

Saudi King Salman welcomed the news of Iran’s election winner last weekend and said he hoped that the two Persian Gulf nations would continue developing their relations “between our brotherly people”.

That olive branch from Saudi Arabia to Iran is an unprecedented diplomatic development – one that will trigger alarm in Washington whose primary goal in the Middle East has been to isolate Iran from its neighbors.

There were similar cordial official messages from Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Bahrain. Together with Saudi Arabia, these oil-rich states comprise the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). There is much talk now of the Gulf Arab bloc normalizing relations with its Persian neighbor.

For his part, President Pezeshkian – a heart surgeon by profession – says he wants to prioritize peaceful regional relations.

For decades, since the Iranian revolution in 1979, the Gulf Arab states have viewed the Islamic Republic with deep suspicion and hostility. For one thing, there is the sectarian tension between Shia Islam as professed mainly by Iran and the Sunni Islam that dominates the Gulf Arab states.

There is also the visceral fear among the Arab monarchies that the revolutionary politics espoused by Iran might infect their masses thereby threatening the rigid autocracies and their system of hereditary rule. The fact that Iran holds elections stands in stark contrast to the Gulf kingdoms ruled by royal families. So much for President Joe Biden’s mantra about the U.S. supposedly supporting democracy over autocracy.

The United States and its Western allies, in particular, the former colonial power Britain, have exploited the tensions in the Persian Gulf to exercise a divide-and-rule policy. The British are past masters at playing the sectarian game in all their former colonies from Ireland to Myanmar and everywhere in between, including the Middle East.

Taking a leaf out of that imperialist playbook, Washington has historically fuelled fears of Iranian expansionism. This has ensured Saudi Arabia and its Gulf neighbors remain under U.S. “protection” which is vital for maintaining the petrodollar system that underpins the American dollar as the international reserve currency. Without the petrodollar privileges, the U.S. economy would implode.

Secondly, the Gulf is an eye-watering huge market for American weapons exports, from overrated Patriot air defense systems to overpriced fighter jets.

In short, the policy of the U.S. and its Western allies was and is to promote a Cold War in the Gulf between the Arab states and Iran.

The schismatic animosity cannot be overstated. The Arab monarchies were habitually paranoid about Iran infiltrating their societies. Saudi Arabia and the other Sunni rulers conducted severe repressive policies towards their Shia populations.

In 2010, an explosive exposé by Julian Assange’s Wikileaks organization showed the then Saudi ruler King Abdullah pleading with the United States to launch military attacks on Iran. The Saudi monarch described Iran as “the head of the snake” and he implored the U.S. to decapitate the Islamic Republic.

Fast forward to the present Saudi ruler, King Salman, a half-brother of the deceased Abdullah, who is now calling for fraternal relations with Iran – as are other Gulf Arab states.

Saudi heir to the throne, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also extended his congratulations to Iran’s new president and went further to propose regional security cooperation. The Saudi heir reportedly told President Pezeshkian: “I affirm my keenness on developing and deepening the relations that unite our countries and peoples and serve our mutual interests.”

This is an astounding turnaround for positive relations. Crown Prince MbS was the main instigator of Saudi’s disastrous war on Yemen in 2015 which was prompted by his fear of Iran’s alliance with the Houthis in Saudi’s southern neighbor following the landmark international nuclear deal with Tehran.

Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Sunni states were also instrumental in pursuing the U.S.-led covert war for regime change in Syria against Iranian ally Bashar al Assad. That proxy war effort was a defeat for the U.S. side after Russia and Iran stepped in to defend Syria.

What’s happening here is a major geopolitical realignment. Russia, Iran, China and others have put a decisive marker down spelling the end of U.S. and Western hegemony.

It is clear that the U.S.-led so-called “rules-based global order” is nothing more than a dead-end scam imposed on the rest of the world. All empirical evidence shows that the primary enemy of international peace and security is the U.S. hegemon and its Western vassals.

The U.S.-instigated proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is recklessly pushing the world to the abyss of a nuclear catastrophe. Elsewhere, in the Middle East with the Western-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza and the relentless belligerence of NATO in the Asia-Pacific toward China, it is increasingly evident what is the source of international conflict and chaos – U.S.-led Western imperialism.

The Gulf Arab leaders may not be reacting out of democratic sensibilities. But they must surely know that the writing is on the wall for American hegemony and its destructive death wish to survive at all costs.

The world is changing dramatically to a new multipolar order where the majority of nations are trying to come to a peaceful coexistence.

Last year, China brokered a historic rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran. All of these parties know that the U.S. disorder of hegemonic Cold War division is unsustainable and ultimately self-defeating for those who adhere to it.

The Saudis know that the Eurasian economic engine is driving the world economy and the embrace of the Global South of a multipolar order is hammering nails into the coffin of Western hegemony.

Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Arab states are signing up as new members of the Shanghai Cooperation Council which also includes Russia, China, Iran, India and Pakistan, among others.

King Salman and other Arab leaders are finally realizing that Uncle Sam’s patronage is like putting a loaded gun to your head. As that old American war criminal Henry Kissinger once reputedly remarked with his trademark cynicism: being an enemy of the U.S. can be dangerous but to be an ally of Uncle Sam is absolutely fatal.

The days of Washington and its Western minions playing divide and rule are over because they have discredited themselves irreparably.

• First published in Strategic Culture FoundationFacebook

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Finian Cunningham is a former editor and writer for major news media organizations. He has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages Read other articles by Finian.