Cold War

• 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...

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.

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...

Waving goodbye? Not agreeing whether to wave at the world or not… Words. Words. Words. And words missing. Jan Oberg June 1, 2023 The G7 countries’ share of the global GDP has fallen from about 70% in the 1960s, to 46% in 2019, to 31% in 2021 and is projected to fall to 28% in 2027. They make up less than 10% of the world’s people. According to the World Bank, between 2013 and 2021, all the G7 countries contributed 26% to world economic growth, and China 39%. I shall argue here that the G7s are in denial and need a reality check. The Hiroshima summit will, I predict, be seen in the future as a milestone of Western decline and militarism’s self-destructive role in it. These countries had agreed in advance on a statement of no less than 19 000 words, 40 pages. It contains all kinds of things...

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...

Gordon Hahn April 17, 2023 I have written several pieces on the causes of the NATO-Russian Ukrainian War. In them, I focused on the long-term as well as the immediate causes in the run-up to Putin’s decision to invade. However, all this needs to be put together with new revelations in order to understand the mood in the Kremlin in late January-early February (most likely mid-February) when Putin decided to pull the trigger. We have the background causes: • decades of NATO expansion; • NATO’s attack on Serbia, • Western recognition of Kosovo’s independence from Serbia despite a UN resolution it sponsored stipulating Serbia’s territorial inviolability; • ‘democracy promotion’ colour revolutionism in Ukraine and other states neighbouring Russia; • Western financial and moral support for a colour revolution in Russia; • the Western-backed February 2014 Maidan color revolution; • the cover-up of the Maidan ultranationalist, neofascist wing’s snipers’ flag terrorist...

Andi Olluri April 12, 2023 A recent Pentagon conference on psychological warfare noted that the forces of indoctrination “cannot wait until a crisis begins”. A high-ranking chief at the Department of Defence suggested a model for propaganda, in no way new: “Look at marketing … What makes people drink Coke, what makes people drink Pepsi?” In short, public “marketing”. “I think”, the chief lauded, that “the private sector has used the information domain through marketing to the Nth degree … And I think we, as a department and in the national security enterprise, need to be able to pull some of those lessons”. (1) In fact, the “lessons” of effective indoctrination and public persuasion have been perfected in the domain of US government propaganda in conjunction with a servile ‘free’ press. A natural prediction of this is that in discussions of war, peace, diplomacy, violence and so on, essentially any...

He Jun April 11th, 2023 The policy of decoupling and containment towards China pushed by the United States is most aggressive in the technology field. Although the current state of U.S.-China relations has not yet reached the level of a cold war, researchers at ANBOUND believe that in the technology field, the competition between the two countries has become similar to a “technology cold war”. Due to the difference in the levels of technological and industrial development between the two, this is an asymmetric game, with the U.S. having a significant advantage. Originally posted on Eurasia Review’s official website on March 30, 2023 The Institute of International Technology and Economy (IITE), a think tank of China’s State Council, has recently published an article titled “Systematic Trends of U.S. Technology Containment towards China”. This article shows the understanding, analysis, and judgment of Chinese official research institutions on the technological competition between...

Nicolai Petro April 10, 2023 (original 2019) HARD LESSONS TO LEARN FROM THE CLASSICS “Tragedy rests not in the individual destiny…but in the general condition, of a people reducing or destroyingitself because it is not conscious of its true condition” – Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy Abstract As the war in Ukraine enters its fifth year,  the country remains mired in debt, corruption, and strife. The country seems to be caught up, again, in a vicious cycle that has been repeating itself for decades, if not centuries. Classical Greek tragedy gives us a deeper look at the reasons behind Ukraine’s persistent failure to achieve social stability, and suggests remedies. The tragic cycle can be broken through a compromise in which individual, social and divine aspirations for justice are reconciled. As long as Ukrainian leaders seek to achieve justice without compromise, the nation’s self-destructive cycle is likely to persist. Originally published in...