Cold War

Martin Jacques December 28, 2022 The West could learn a great deal from China’s system of governance. It is highly unlikely this will happen, at least anytime soon. On the contrary, the West believes that its governance system is the best in the world, cannot be improved upon, and is incomparably superior to that of China. Why then is the West in rampant decline? And why has China, in contrast, enjoyed a dramatic rise over the last four decades. Have these contrasting fortunes got nothing to do with their respective governing systems? Are national success and the system of governance utterly disconnected from each other? Is the system of governance little more than an ornament of decoration, with little bearing on the performance of a nation? This is obviously nonsense. The quality of governance is fundamental to the success or failure of a country. If a country is doing well, then...

Dan Kovalik December 16, 2022 Once a Pittsburgh sister city also known for its steel industry, Donetsk, and the greater Donbas region in which it is located, has been at war since 2014. According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, 14,000 people died in this conflict, even before Russia began its military operations in February. I’ve just returned from there. Before Russia’s intervention, the conflict had been between the people of that region and the government in Kiev, after an unconstitutional coup took 2014. This coup, known as “Maidan,” was — as then US Ambassador to Ukraine Victoria Nuland explained in a recorded telephone conversation — managed by the United States. Originally published by the Pittsburgh Post Gazette on November 30, 2022 The coup brought to power a pro-Western, anti-Russian, government, which contained elements which were far-right and even Nazi. The best-known element, as the Nation Magazine reported...

Institut Montaigne’s broad-spectrum interview, on October 13, 2022, with Fyodor A. Lukyanov, Chairman of the Russian Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy and editor-in-chief of the “Russia in Global Affairs” journal. Note to our readers We intend in the future to publish more materials by Russian scholars and intellectuals because the de facto cancellation by NATO/EU countries of such views and of access to leading Russian media is both unfair, a violation of human rights and an element in a self-serving media warfare which, regrettably, only makes a peaceful, negotiated resolution even more difficult. We believe it is necessary to hear all conflict participants’ motives and views to be able to help solve a conflict peacefully. Any professional conflict analyst and mediator knows that and also that that does not mean an implicit endorsement of everything stated. Earlier ones are published here, here and here. – Jan...

Peter Peverelli, TFF Associate December 7, 2022 (The text is an adaption of an earlier article on Chinasquare.be) As one of the editors of chinasquare.be, the Dutch language site for neutral news about China, I recently set out to write about the possible prohibition by the Dutch government for ASML to export chip-making machines to China, based on a directive from Washington. The Dutch Minister of Foreign Trade has publicly stated about that directive that ‘the Netherlands will not copy the US policy completely’. It is heartening to see that an EU politician is at least willing to give the impression that she is not on an American leash, but I need to add to this statement that the Dutch government had already stopped ASML from selling its high-end Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) technology to China in 2020. This is already hurting ASML’s China business. Reportedly, the number of orders from...

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin welcoming Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to a meeting at the Pentagon, Aug. 31, 2021. (DoD, Jack Sanders) In addition to advancing longstanding U.S. geo-strategic aims, it seems the proxy war in Ukraine is also being used to sharpen the imperial war machine’s claws for a looming hot war with China and/or Russia. Caitlin Johnstone December 5, 2022 Listen to a reading of this article. A surprisingly frank article in The New York Times, “Western Allies Look to Ukraine as a Testing Ground for Weapons” describes how the imperial war machine is capitalising on the U.S. proxy war to test its weapons for future use. “Ukraine has become a testing ground for state-of-the-art weapons and information systems, and new ways to use them, that Western political officials and military commanders predict could shape warfare for generations to come,” writes Lara Jakes. Jakes says “new advances in technology and...

Edward Curtin December 6, 2022 My title comes from a song sung by soldiers as they marched to hell in the trenches of World War I and the same song my sisters and I sang in the car as our parents drove us to our summer vacation in paradise at Edgewater Farm. I think of this as we march to WWIII. The soldiers, who would be slaughtered by the millions as pawns in the great game, sardonically sung it to the tune of Old Lang Syne to express their bewilderment at why they were fighting in the so-called “War to End All Wars” or “the Great War.” We children sang it because we had heard the words but had no idea where they came from, yet they seemed playful and weird and easy to remember and we were celebrating our good fortune in leaving the city and arriving at the farm for a week’s...

Vijay Prashad December 5th, 2022 Ukrainians have been paying a terrible price for the failure of ensuring sensible and reasonable negotiations from 2014 to February 2022 – which could have prevented the invasion by Russia in the first place, and once the war started, could have led to the end of this war. Originally posted on People’s Dispatch homepage on October 25th 2022, here Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. This war has been horrendous, though it does not compare with the terrible destruction wrought by the US bombardment of Iraq (“shock and awe”) in 2003. In the Gomel region of Belarus that borders Ukraine, Russian and Ukrainian diplomats met on February 28 to begin negotiations toward a ceasefire. These talks fell apart. Then, in early March, the two sides met again in Belarus to hold a second and third round of talks. On March 10, the foreign ministers of Ukraine and Russia met in Antalya, Turkey, and...

Three experts on warfare, weapons and underlying conflicts – and even some views on peace-making – after NATO foreign ministers’ summit in Bucharest. Today I participated in CrossTalk, edited and performed by Peter Lavelle on RT, formerly Russia Today. It was a delightful preparation process that made clear what it would be about, length, participants etc – and treated the invited persons with respect and asked also – professionally – how we wanted to be presented. My praise goes to Aleksandra Danilova, RT, in this regard. You may think that is only natural, but not everybody does it the professional way, I can tell. Please see this half an hour below. You may also enjoy Peter Lavelle’s and my “pushbacks” at each other when I talked about the MIMAC – Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex and militarism. But it ends very nicely. The video – and all of RT’s programs – are on...

Kenny Stancil November 28th, 2022 This escalation of U.S. hostility comes just days after the Biden administration released a Nuclear Posture Review that nonproliferation advocates said makes catastrophe more, rather than less, likely. Originally posted on Consortium News on October 31st 2022 here In what critics are calling a “dangerous escalation,” the United States is reportedly preparing to deploy up to six nuclear-capable B-52 bombers to northern Australia, where they would be close enough to strike China. “The ability to deploy U.S. Air Force bombers to Australia sends a strong message to adversaries about our ability to project lethal air power,” the U.S. Air Force told “Four Corners,” a television program of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), on Sunday. Becca Wasser, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington D.C.-based think tank, told ABC that “having bombers that could range and potentially attack mainland China could be very important in sending a...

Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta, February 1945. Photo: US Army. Richard Falk – TFF Associate November 23, 2022 Disdaining Diplomacy, Seeking Victory Ever since the Ukraine War started on February 24, 2022, the NATO response, mainly articulated and materially implemented by the U.S., has been to pour vast quantities of oil on the flames of conflict, taunting Russian and its leader, increasing the scale of violence, the magnitude of human suffering, and dangerously increasing the risk of a disastrous outcome. Not only did Washington mobilize the world to denounce Russia’s ‘aggression’, but supplied a steady stream of advanced weaponry in great quantities to the Ukrainians to resist the Russian attack and even mount counterattacks. The U.S. did all it could at the UN and elsewhere to build a punitive coalition hostile to Russia but coupled this with a variety of sanctions and the demonization of Putin as a notorious...

Most likely, the fighting will continue into 2023, and quite probably beyond, until either Moscow or Kiev is exhausted, or one side claims a decisive victory Dmitry Trenin November 30, 2022 Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin commented, during a meeting with soldiers’ mothers, that he now regards the Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015 as a mistake. This concession was stark in the context of the possibility of peace negotiations to end the fighting in Ukraine. It is worth remembering that in 2014, Putin acted on a mandate from the Russian parliament to use military force “in Ukraine,” not just in Crimea. In fact, Moscow did save the cities of Donetsk and Lugansk from being overrun by Kiev’s army, and defeated Ukraine’s forces, but rather than clearing the whole region of Donbass, Russia stopped and agreed to a cease-fire brokered in Minsk by Germany and France.  Putin explained to the...

Jan Oberg November 20, 2022 Perhaps you have no time to read thick analytical books, but you are interested in macro-history and how the world changes right before our eyes? If so, the two clips below from 2021 and 2022 are loaded with content that speaks volumes of history, conflict and world order change. And the decline of the West. Watch – and, in particular – listen carefully (here is The Guardian’s longer text with quotes): Something is happening, and we do know what it is, don’t we, Mr Jones…?