By Juan Cole, Informed Comment September 9, 2019 Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu is one of the world players who pushed Trump to breach the 2015 treaty with Iran. Trump then slapped the severest economic sanctions on Iran ever imposed on any country in the absence of war. Trump […]
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif (L) shakes hands with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing on August 26, 2019. Photo by IRNA. By Juan Cole September 9, 2019 Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif was in Beijing recently for what turns out to […]
By Jonathan Power September 5, 2019 The gloves are off in Hong Kong. Judging from the pictures on today’s BBC News the police no longer have any compunction about beating protestors. Ironically, they don’t appear to get close to the fringe of protestors who are using violent tactics. Rather they are swinging their batons left […]
By Ellen Brown September 1, 2019 When the Federal Reserve cut interest rates on July 31st for the first time in more than a decade, commentators were asking why. According to official data, the economy was rebounding, unemployment was below 4%, and GDP growth was above 3%. If anything, by the Fed’s own reasoning, it should […]
By Martin Jacques, Cambridge University August 28, 2019 A delightful conversation about the essential difference between the West and China and why they have vitally different ways of relating to other countries and cultures. If you do business in China, travel as a tourist – which far too few Westerners do – teach international relations […]
Riot police fire tear gas at protesters as they head towards the central government’s liaison office in Sai Ying Pun on Sunday. Photo: Sam Tsang in SCMS By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers Directors of Popular Resistance August 20, 2019 Hong Kong is one of the most extreme examples of big finance, neoliberal capitalism in […]
August 16, 2019 There is a permanent, more or less intensive, narrative that China is the Enemy # 1 of the West. We have the permanent US/Western assertion that China is the new military super enemy. There is the argument that the world’s – if not history’s – largest co-operative project, the Chinese-initiated Belt and […]
By People’s Daily Online July 28, 2019 This is an explainer from a Chinese perspective and it is the kind of information and perspective we get far too little of in the West – in spite of it being so diverse, so big and so visionary. What – one may ask – is the West […]
By Chandra Muzaffar May 16th, 2019 The Belt Road Initiative (BRI) also known as the One Belt One Road (OBOR) project could well emerge as the obor (the flame in Indonesian or Malay) that will blaze the trail in the evolution of a new epoch in history. Chinese President Xi Jinping must have sensed its historical significance […]
By Gordon M. Hahn April 26, 2019 Three almost uninterrupted centuries of Russian self-comparison, self-assessment, self-identification with the West and ever deeper involvement in the intra-Western geopolitical and imperial competition have come to an end. Harsh lessons Russians have drawn from its three centuries of intimate interaction with the West — its Occidental Era — […]