International law

– the author Peter Peverelli TFF Associate September 22, 2022 This article was originally published by Chinasquare on September 21, 2022. In her annual speech (State of the Union), the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, further sharpened the relationship between the EU and China. She noted that democracy in the EU is under threat as hostile countries, notably Russia and China, fund organizations within the EU to carry out propaganda. She announced a package to defend democracy. von der Leyen had, unfortunately, constructed her entire speech from a negative perspective. A significant part was devoted to the war in Ukraine. It is certainly true that this has a strong negative effect on the lives of EU citizens, but instead of going into the background of this conflict and the possibilities of ending this war as soon as possible, she turned her focus on the enemy who...

Abolish NATOOr Convert ItTo ServePeace 30 Arguments & 100s of Inspirations This report can be reproduced or quoted freely,but only when referring clearly to TFF, the author and the link Read and download as PDF at the end of the catalogue • Read as Flipbook Media & other inquiries to tff@transnational.live or +46 738 52 52 00 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This Catalogue contains 30 arguments for the abolition of NATO. Each argument is based on rational peace research analysis, in contrast to the fact-resistant propaganda that NATO and mainstream politics and media promote about the ’defensive’ peace alliance. The Catalogue is based on the democratic assumption that diverse perceptions and concepts can exist – for instance, about what peace is – and that this hugely influential Western organisation is not sacrosanct and shall, therefore, not be exempt from critical analysis. While set up in 1949, NATO passed its ”best before” date long ago. The alliance of...

Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Anis Chowdhury June 17, 2022 Food crises, economic stagnation and price increases are worsening unevenly, almost everywhere, following the Ukraine war. Sanctions against Russia have especially hurt those relying on wheat and fertilizer imports. Unilateral sanctions illegal Unilateral sanctions – not approved by the UN Security Council – are illegal under international law. Besides contravening the UN Charter, unilateral sanctions inflict much human loss. Countless civilians – many far from target countries – are at risk, depriving them of much, even life itself. Sanctions, embargos and blockades – ‘sold’ as non-violent alternatives to waging war by military means – economically isolate and punish targeted countries, supposedly to force them to acquiesce. But most sanctions hurt the innocent majority, much more than the ruling elites. Originally published at Human Wrongs Watch on June 7, 2022 Like laying siege on enemy settlements, sanctions are ‘weapons of mass starvation’. They “are...

Jack F. Matlock, Jr. May 27, 2022 An avoidable crisis that was predictable, actually predicted, willfully precipitated, but easily resolved by the application of common sense, writes Jack Matlock, the last U.S. ambassador to the U.S.S.R. We are being told each day that war may be imminent in Ukraine. Russian troops, we are told, are massing at Ukraine’s borders and could attack at any time. American citizens are being advised to leave Ukraine and dependents of the American Embassy staff are being evacuated. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian president has advised against panic and made clear that he does not consider a Russian invasion imminent. Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, has denied that he has any intention of invading Ukraine. His demand is that the process of adding new members to NATO cease and that in particular, Russia has assurance that Ukraine and Georgia will never be members. President Joe Biden has...

Even during wartime – maybe especially during wartime – you should be allowed to ask uncomfortable questions Robert Wright at Nonzero Newsletter March 7, 2022 Twice over the past two decades I’ve felt outraged by a massive invasion that violated international law. One time was last week, when Russia invaded Ukraine. The other time was in 2003, when the US invaded Iraq. This post is originally from Nonzero Newsletter You’re not supposed to talk like that! To bring up America’s past wrongdoing as if it’s comparable to some other country’s wrongdoing is called “whataboutism”—as in “Yeah, they did something bad, but what about the time America did something that was bad in kind of the same way?” Most American foreign policy elites hate whataboutism, and they especially hate it at times like this, when a war is going on and you’re expected to focus all your rhetorical firepower on the enemy. Consider...

Alfred De Zayas February 11, 2022 The current tensions between the United States and Russia with regard to Ukraine goes back to a series of NATO actions and omissions following the demise of the Soviet Union in 1989/91.  On the Russian side, there is a widespread perception of having been misled by the US and NATO, a pervasive malaise about a breach of trust, a violation of a “gentleman’s agreement” on fundamental issues of national security. While the US protests that it never gave assurances to Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastwards, declassified documents prove otherwise.  But even in the absence of declassified documents and contemporary statements by political leaders in 1989/91 including Secretary of State James Baker and German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher (which can be consulted in YouTube), it is all-too-obvious that there is a festering wound caused by NATO’s eastward expansion over the past 30 years,...

The embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the United States of America 10 December 2021 This Joint Article was published on ”The National Interest”. Qin Gang is the Chinese Ambassador to the United States. Anatoly Antonov is the Russian Ambassador to the United States. We publish it here on The Transnational because we believe it is a historic document both because of China-Russia cooperation which is increasing rapidly and because it makes the important point that the US no longer has any legitimate – or exceptionalist – right to tell others how to operate. The upcoming American-led online Summit for Democracy will stoke ideological confrontation. Faced with an array of global challenges, countries urgently need to strengthen coordination and cooperation for common progress. The United States will be hosting the online Summit for Democracy on December 9-10, 2021, empowering itself to define who is to attend the event and who is not, who is a “democratic country” and who is not eligible for such status. An evident...

Daniel Ellsberg November 8, 2021 Given the intellectual and ethical status of many leaders in today’s world, this is not – as it may seem – a far-fetched question. It must be raised and discussed since the shocking revelation made by Daniel Ellsberg (1) earlier this year. In 1958, the US had a president – Dwight D. Eisenhower – who was himself a military man. Military people are often more cautious about war because they know much better than politicians what it would mean to start and fight a real war. What would Western leaders do today if a hard dilemma came up? The 12-min documentary below should – together with other articles we have published on this issue – serve as a wake-up call for those who believe that nuclear war is something that belongs only to the past. Young people who engage wonderfully in climate issues seem not...

A Critical Analysis Of A Report By The Newlines Institute And The Raoul Wallenberg Center On March 8, 2021, the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy in Washington published a report, The Uyghur Genocide: An Examination of China’s Breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention in cooperation with the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights in Montreal. It states that ”This report is the first independent expert application of the 1948 Genocide Convention to the ongoing treatment of the Uyghurs in China. It was undertaken by the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, in cooperation with the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, in response to emerging accounts of serious and systematic atrocities in Xinjiang province, particularly directed against the Uyghurs, an ethnic minority, to ascertain whether the People’s Republic of China is in breach of the Genocide Convention under international law.” The Report – hereafter The Report – has been produced with the contributions of, and upon...

Photo Oscar Keys, Unsplash Peter J. Peverelli October 5, 2021 Given that human rights issues have always been central in the international discourse and in the Cold Wars between NATO and the Soviet Union/Russia and now in the new US/NATO China Cold War Agenda, we believe it is important to discuss how the concept of human rights – and the Universal Declaration – is itself a cultural construct based on certain values and how the implementation of human rights must vary according to history, cultural values and ways of thinking, or social cosmology. Peter Peverelli has worked with and in China for about 45 years and is also a leading expert on human rights at the Cross-Cultural Human Rights Centre at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. We are grateful for his permission to publish this research paper from 2016. Abstract The title of the official document of what is generally known...

, in Washington and New York, everybody talked about who could have done it, how they did it and with what means. The only thing never brought to the fore was: WHY would somebody want to do something like 9/11 to the United States of America? By not asking the Why question, the US could stand as the innocent victim of cataclysmic violence. It would not have to do any soul searching and therefore no change of its global militarist policy. 9/11 was not a response to US foreign policy – but it needed a response. The world felt sympathy for the American suffering – much more so than for the suffering and deaths in other countries around the world. The fact is that the 9/11 attack targeted the US’ global finance-capital (World Trade Center), its global military (Pentagon) and its political (White House, however not hit) centres – not...

Iconic image of Taliban fighters in the Presidential Palace on August 15, 2021 Farhang Jahanpour TFF Associate August 16, 2021 I do not wish to rub salt into the wounds of US and British officials who are responsible for the humiliating debacle in Afghanistan, but there is no way of sugar-coating this appalling tragedy, especially for hard-pressed Afghans who have experienced war and occupation for over 40 years. In my contacts with various senior Afghan officials and ordinary civilians, especially women, during the past 40 years, I had been very encouraged and impressed by how they used a short period of peace to get educated, to establish a civil society, to serve their country and to assume positions of responsibility with relative ease, only for all those hopes and dreams to come tumbling down in a matter of few weeks. The hasty withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan in the...