Cold War – Old and New

Illustration: Craig Stephens The US isn’t serious about detente or any form of reconciliation. Instead it has been laying the foundation for a cold war or worse, and fabricating a moral high ground Josef Gregory Mahoney October 2, 2023 American efforts to foster detente with China have failed: it’s time to acknowledge this and move on. This argument has emerged in recent weeks in several important publications, including The Washington Post and Foreign Affairs, expressed by key opinion leaders considered close to the Biden administration and those representing more conservative positions. These views have not been endorsed officially by the administration but suggest a consensus coalescing on both sides of the American political spectrum. They seem to express the next chapter of a dark narrative arc established when Joe Biden took office. The arc points especially to the Xi-Biden meeting on the sidelines of last year’s G20 summit and the...

© Jan Oberg “Biking Mom in Xian” Collage – 2023 Certainly, China has evolved continually and progressively, step by step. My expectations were high when I visited this autumn, my first trip post-pandemic. Between 2015 and 2020, I had visited this vast country almost 20 times. Each visit revealed positive changes and swift progress. Allow me to share some observations from my daily experiences there. Firstly, what remains unchanged is their absence of cheese (!). This tradition stems from their historical lack of cattle farming, prioritizing crops and vegetables. However, cows are now present, particularly in Hebei province’s highlands. They’ve even adapted to the sound of wind windmills, unlike the reindeer in Norway’s Sami-land. Another crucial observation is the deep integration of mobile phones into daily life. You can hardly catch a taxi without a mobile app, and ordering coffee from the highly successful chain, Luckin Coffee, also necessitates an...

“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...

US dependence on Chinese components means defense industry and critical infrastructure could soon be in the line of fire David P. Goldman, Asia Times September 20, 2023 America doesn’t have the factories or skilled labor to replace Chinese imports that support defense contractors and basic infrastructure, leaving the US economy vulnerable to harm in the event of an all-out trade war with China, corporate and government officials told Asia Times. That’s why Biden administration officials are unlikely to heed calls from China hawks to completely cut off China’s semiconductor sector from US technology. A group of 10 prominent House Republicans wrote to the US Commerce Department on September 14 demanding a shutoff of US exports of chip technology to China, claiming that the export controls imposed in October 2022 were ineffective. Originally published by Asia Times on September 16, 2023 The Republicans’ letter cited “recent reports that Huawei Technologies Co. (Huawei)...

It’s an old US playbook. My assessment is that the US attempt to contain China is not only wrongheaded in principle, but destined to fail in practice. Jeffrey Sachs September 18, 2023 China’s economy is slowing down. Current forecasts put China’s GDP growth in 2023 at less than 5%, below the forecasts made last year and far below the high growth rates that China enjoyed until the late 2010s. The Western press is filled with China’s supposed misdeeds: a financial crisis in the real-estate market, a general overhang of debt, and other ills. Yet much of the slowdown is the result of US measures that aim to slow China’s growth. Such US policies violate World Trade Organization (WTO) rules and are a danger to global prosperity. They should be stopped. Originally published on Jeffrey Sach’s homepage on August 22, 2023 The anti-China policies come out of a familiar playbook of...

Jerry Grey August 30, 2023 British born Australian Jerry Grey describes himself in this way on his YouTube Channel “Jerry’s Take On China”: “Over the last 18 years I’ve lived, worked, married, studied and now retired in China. I’ve travelled about 30,000 kilometres on a bike around China and there are only 3 mainland provinces I haven’t visited yet.I may not be an expert, no one is and anyone claiming to be certainly isn’t. However, I have opinions, I research facts and I won’t tell you lies on this, or any other channel.This is my China – the good (mostly) the bad (sometimes) and the Ugly (rarely, China is beautiful and so are the people).” By the way, Jerry Grey is a former police officer in London and has an MA in Cross-Cultural Change Management. He also writes articles – mainly about China – on Medium. In this short video...

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...

Terry Gou July 22, 2023 Editor’s introduction I believe there is great confusion in the minds of many Westerners about Taiwan, its relation to China and the US’s real Taiwan policy. TFF has written about some of it in our Smokescreen Report here but you may also like to read this Wikipedia entry about the 1992 Consensus – and its problems – as well as the Chou Enlai-Nixon talks and agreements in February 1972 here and here. I would like, therefore, to recommend the article below by Terry Gou – a very successful Taiwanese businessman and politician who here promotes a peace and win-win perspective in contrast to his own government leadership and the Biden administration. Interestingly, it was published by The Washington Post (on July 17, 2023). Click! Jan Oberg, TFF director and editor

Einar Tangen on infer July 6, 2023 There is woefully little trust between the world’s two giants – the United States and China. US-born Einar Tangen deals with that issue in a manner that more people should be inspired by – also at the highest level. I would like to alert our readers here also to my own recent analysis of the concept of trust kindly published by China Investment in English and Chinese – “Looking ahead, where does trust come from?” More about Einar Tangen and the Taihe Institute in Beijing that he has recently joined.

Silences filled with a consensus of propaganda contaminate almost everything we read, see and hear. War by media is now a key task of so-called mainstream journalism. John Pilger May 3, 2023 In this new essay, John Pilger recalls the ‘electric’ opposition of writers and journalists to the coming war in the 1930s and investigates why today there is ‘a silence filled by a consensus of propaganda’ as the two greatest powers draw closer to conflict. In 1935, the Congress of American Writers was held in New York City, followed by another two years later. They called on ‘the hundreds of poets, novelists, dramatists, critics, short story writers and journalists’ to discuss the ‘rapid crumbling of capitalism’ and the beckoning of another war. They were electric events which, according to one account, were attended by 3,500 members of the public with more than a thousand turned away.

 Arthur Miller, Myra Page,...

© Oberg PhotoGraphics 2022 Hussein Askary April 27, 2023 American political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared in his “End of History and The Last Man,” published in 1992,that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War era in 1991 marked “not just the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Originally posted on the Belt and Road Institute in Sweden’s website on March 23rd, 2023 A utopian, rosy picture of a world living a submissive, silent, and in Fukuyama’s word “boring” life under what turned out to be a sword of the Western liberal democratic military power. The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 was followed by the U.S. invasion of Panama a month...