Cold war

“You must remember that Russia could stop this war right now.” 35 seconds is enough to realise that Jan Oberg 22 September, 2023 This article in Danish on my online home and blog. On 6 September, Denmark’ TV2 Channel ran a 35-second clip with the Prime Minister under the headline “Mette Frederiksen: You don’t win a war with words, you win it with weapons.” Watch and listen to it here. Her brief presentation of her views on Ukraine’s situation testifies to an ignorance – conscious, unconscious or opportunistic – that is not easily reconciled with state leadership in general and war participation in particular. I believe that a doctor of the same intellectual level of medical knowledge would be put out of commission. (1) War versus conflict Mette Frederiksen believes that it is impossible to win a war with words, especially when you are “up against Russia.” By focusing on...

This is one of the most elucidating – and thanks also to the author’s special background, convincing – analyses I have seen of why there is war in Ukraine and how it could all have been avoided had the US/NATO not, over the last 19 years, been cynically manipulating Ukraine, conducted two reckless government changes and armed the country – not to help it but to use it to weaken Russia. Incidentally, it connects very well with another recent article published by TFF that shows that the Ukrainian people does not trust NATO and the EU. If there is one short article that can advance the intellectual and moral struggle to reveal the cynicism of the US/Western orchestrated media campaign and systematic lying in the service of rampant militarism, it is this. I ask you to share it widely. I have italicised a few paragraphs to enhance your reading. Jan...

71% of the respondents said NATO and the EU only follow their own interests and simply use Ukraine for their own purposes. The survey below should be a shocking story to Western decision-makers: A large majority of Ukrainians don’t believe them at all. They are clearly aware that it is not Ukraine’s best that is in focus, it is the interest only of NATO and the EU – using Ukraine for their own interests. This is even more significant when you consider that the survey reported below does not include the opinions of Ukrainian people who live in the areas that Russia now controls. Their voice would likely be vastly more negative to the West’s policies. Furthermore, one must draw the conclusion that the economic, military and political elite groups in Kiev have very little backing from the people they rule – but they hardly notice because all opposition media...

Joint demonstration of the trade unions on May Day in Berlin under the slogan Unbroken Solidarity. Photography K.M.Krause via Reuters Anatol Lieven & George Beebe August 23, 2023 Demonizing Russian culture and people only makes peace in Ukraine harder to achieve and plays into Putin’s propaganda A deeply sinister and dangerous tendency has made its appearance in Western writing about the war in Ukraine. This is the extension of hatred for the Putin regime and its crimes to the entire Russian people, the Russian national tradition, and Russian culture. This tendency is of course bitterly familiar from the history of hostile propaganda, but precisely for that reason we should have learned to shun it. The banning of Russian cultural events and calls for the “decolonization” of Russian literature and Russian studies recall the propaganda of all sides during the First World War, which did so much to embitter that war and make its peaceful resolution...

Jan Oberg August 21, 2023 For Danish/Nordic readers, there is a Danish-language version here. The unity is as uncompromising as it is dangerous in its consequences. No Danish politician, diplomat, researcher or journalist dares to take on the role of the little boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes. Not even to get a debate going. About Denmark’s Ukraine/Russia/NATO policy. The government, parliamentary parties and media suffer from extreme groupthink – a well-known social psychological concept. Groupthink rejects any alternative expertise, information and interpretation, and gradually convinces decision-makers that they are on the only possible right course – and that everyone else is uninformed, stupid or – in this case – “Putinists.” Over time, groupthink leads to overconfident and catastrophic decisions because reality has been kept outside the group’s walls of infallibility, moral superiority and we-know-it-all for far too long. There is only one narrative here:...

Harold Pinter in 1970. / Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images. Lessons in Western self-sabotage from the Ukraine War Seymour Hersh August 16, 2023 The British playwright and Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter was an early critic of the Bush administration’s decision, endorsed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, to declare a worldwide war on Islamist terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11. In the fall of 2002, Pinter was invited to make his case against the war before the House of Commons. He began his talk with a bit of embellished British history about an earlier wave of terror in Ireland: There’s an old story about Oliver Cromwell. After he had taken the town of Drogheda, the citizens were brought to the main square. Cromwell announced to his Lieutenants: ‘Right! Kill all the women and rape all the men.’ One of his aides said: ‘Excuse me General. Isn’t it the other way...

A video conversation with Chas Freeman August 10, 2023 Chas Freeman is a legend of US diplomacy – since he served as interpreter for Kissinger and Nixon during their visit to China in 1972. He is also an academic and prolific writer and commentator. An intellectual that offers so much more than anybody serving as an ambassador in today’s NATO countries. You will find his homepage here with much about him and his thoughts. Although a staunch American, he is not the type Western mainstream media would turn to since he has the ‘wrong’ views on several essentially important things. I’ve also come to appreciate Neutrality Studies’ YouTube Channel. Browse it when you are anyhow there, but – first – listen carefully to this conversation that starts out with Henry Kissinger’s visit to China and moves on to very important aspects of Taiwan and beyond. Jan Oberg, Editor

Jan Oberg July 4, 2023 This weekend, Saudi Arabia hosts an international meeting about peace in Ukraine – however, Russia is not invited. At the time of writing, it is not known whether China would – but it must be seen as very unlikely, although some participating countries pretend to say that there is a fair chance it will this time while it stayed away from the preceding Copenhagen meeting. With US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, being there, one can guess that it is, for all practical purposes, part of a US strategy after the fatal NATO Summit in Vilnius at which Ukraine’s NATO membership was cancelled – and all promises to it since 2008 broken. Saudi Arabia has not issued anything about the meeting; for instance, its “Arab News” carries nothing today. If peace in Ukraine were the real purpose of this meeting, it would have been planned...

• 1 NATO is not going to let Ukraine in as a full member. Probably never. All the statements about getting it in and its rightful place in NATO is sugar-coating. NATO cannot say that but knows now that its ill-considered promise in 2008 to make Ukraine a member is as dead as the promises made to Gorbachev that the alliance would not expand one inch. All the NATO words about military packages, G7 security assistance, reform path to be drawn up but no timetable, the new NATO-Ukraine Council with so-called ’equals,’ long-term commitments, etc. – all were words of cruel diplomacy serving to soothe a very disappointed Zelensky. • 2 The Ukrainian president will also have understood by now that the US has achieved what it wants: Economic deals with Ukraine about its resources, huge debts and a very high price to be paid by Ukraine and European NATO...

A basic document for understanding the last 30 years of US imperialist policies US Independence Day, July 4, 2023 The obsession with being # 1 and letting no other country ever challenge that position has dominated the thinking behind virtually everything the US has done, including NATO’s reckless and imprudent expansion and the new Cold War on China. We believe it is useful for our readers to have direct asses to this 1992 strategic – short-visioned and narrow-minded – document. You may read more about it on Wikipedia here and about Paul Wolfowitz and his record here. It should be observed that parts of the doctrine was written by another neo-conservative with another – dark – track record, Zalmay Khalilzad.

The US/Western media of various kinds increasingly raise critical questions about the NATO expansion and the NATO/EU countries’ response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Although it is “too little and years too late,” one must appreciate this trend – if for no other reason than that it may eventually contribute to stopping the militarist madness. Jan Oberg, editor Benjamin Schwarz & Christopher Layne Harper’s Magazine, June 2023 Issue June 5, 2023 From Murmansk in the Arctic to Varna on the Black Sea, the armed camps of NATO and the Russian Federation menace each other across a new Iron Curtain. Unlike the long twilight struggle that characterized the Cold War, the current confrontation is running decidedly hot. As former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and former secretary of defense Robert Gates acknowledge approvingly, the United States is fighting a proxy war with Russia. Thanks to Washington’s efforts to arm and...

Andrey Kortunov June 5, 2023 A Quad summit meeting in Sydney scheduled for May 24 was abruptly cancelled. The US president had to pull out of his long-anticipated trip to Australia and Papua New Guinea. Instead, the heads of the four Quad member states got together on the margins of the G7 Summit in Hiroshima on May 20.  The main reason for the change of plans was the continuous struggle between the White House and Republicans on the Hill over the national debt ceiling. [This issue has now been solved by raising once again the debt ceiling – The editor]. This rather awkward last-minute cancellation of the Quad summit reflects a fundamental US problem – a growing imbalance between the US geopolitical ambitions and the fragility of the national financial foundation to serve these ambitions.  This article was originally published by Gobal Times on May 25, 2023 The Biden administration appears...