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...

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...

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...

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