Military

Listen to this on Spotify September 22, 2021 Interview by Andrea Turi for the website of Centro Studi Eurasia e Mediterraneo on whose pages the Italian translation has been published: Charles “Chas” Freeman: “Il mondo sta tornando alla situazione in cui era prima che il Rinascimento europeo e l’Illuminismo, insieme alla rivoluzione industriale, consentissero al mondo atlantico di dominare il resto.” The interview was carried out by email. q. Mr Freeman, good morning, by thanking you for your willingness to answer my questions, I ask you the first question: In 1972, you were part of the US delegation following President Nixon who went to Beijing for the first time. How important was that event for your country, for the People’s Republic of China and for the whole world? It changed the world geopolitically at once. In the longer term, it facilitated the restoration of China to wealth and power, helped bring down the...

U.S. Army NATO, the United States and its vassal-states in Afghanistan Håkan Wiberg †2010 Former TFF Board member and Associate 9 september, 2021 AS FAR BACK as it is possible to trace the history of what is now Afghanistan, it has alternately been invaded — by among others the Median, Persian, Mongol, British and U.S. empires — and served as the base of expanding regional powers. The history of modern Afghanistan begins in 1747, with the coronation of Ahmed Abdali of the Durrani clan. Re-published online at Nordic News Network British expansion in India soon presented Afghanistan with a new threat — which became a reality in 1839 with the first large-scale British invasion. Shortly thereafter came the Russian expansion into Central Asia, leading to the “Great Game” between the two empires for control of the region. Afghanistan was drawn into minor clashes and some major wars with both of...

It’s far from the longest U.S. war. There was no peace before or after it. There is no after it until they end it — and bombing has always been most of what it is. It has had nothing to do with opposing terrorism. It has been a one-sided slaughter, a mass killing over two decades by a single invading army and air force dragging along token mascots from dozens of vassal states. After 20 years Afghanistan was one of the worst places to be on Earth, and the Earth as a whole was a worse place to be — the rule of law, the state of nature, the refugee crises, the spread of terrorism, the militarization of governments all worsened. Then the Taliban took over. When the U.S. armed the Afghan military with weapons costing enough to cause panic attacks in U.S. Senators had the expense been for anything...

Pepe Escobar August 24, 2021 At one point last week, the price of a barrel of crude oil — which had risen as high as $147 last July and, with the global economic meltdown, hit a low of $32 in 2009 — rebounded above $51. Prices at the local gas pump are expected to rise as well in the coming weeks. However, given a worldwide falloff in oil use, these price jumps may not hold for long. Still, cheap or not, oil and natural gas (as well as coal) are what drives global civilization, and that’s clearly not going to change any time soon. Originally posted on Tom Dispatch on March 24, 2009 That, in turn, means the major powers are going to be no less eager to secure key energy reserves and control the flow of energy in bust times as they were in boom times, which is where Pepe Escobar comes in. In a...

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...

“There is virtually zero knowledge or understanding of the Chinese Communist Party in the West. It is seen as a clone of the Soviet Communist Party. In reality, it is entirely different. It has been extraordinarily successful, not just transforming China but is also in the process of changing the world. Everyone needs to know about CPC and understand the reasons that lie behind its extraordinary success.” This is very true – the intro to this video on Martin Jacques’ YouTube channel. Martin Jacques is one of the most important experts around and will give you more food for thought per minute than most others. Voices like his are immensely important in these years when the US/West does nothing significant for the future but developing its utterly destructive China Cold War Agenda, CCWA. Please watch, discuss and share. We desperately need to improve the Western discourse on China as it...

Gordon Hahn on Guadalajara Geopolitics Institute August 10, 2021  Professor Gordon Hahn is interviewed by Hrvoje Morić of Geopolitics & Empire Gordon Hahn discusses what he calls the New East-West Cold War or Russia-West Tinderbox, which can potentially escalate into a WWIII scenario. He examines the key drivers between the Russia-West divide which is primarily EU/NATO expansion (e.g. Belarus, Ukraine, Donbass), a situation that will continue to fester and could explode at any moment unless it is resolved. He comments on China’s rise as a global hegemon and believes Russia and China will make Afghan inroads as the U.S. withdraws and the Taliban likely come to power. Finally, he looks at the “authoritarian-ization” or “Putin-ization” of America, where neo-liberals, leftists, and big tech have melded with the military-industrial-complex and oligarchic globalists who are pushing the U.S. toward a one-party state. Beyond that, these forces are pushing for some form of...

American economist Professor, Jeffrey Sachs exposes how America, its Western allies, the CIA and the defence industry have rigged the system to keep Africa from being prosperous. It is a stunning expose and rebuke to the present world order and why it must change. Jeffrey David Sachs is an American economist, academic, public policy analyst and former director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, where he holds the title of University Professor. He is also a renowned leader in sustainable development, a senior UN advisor and a bestselling author. TFF’s work with global structural change, abolition of militarism and our long-term engagement with Somalia and Burundi has always emphasised one or more of the dimensions Sachs highlights so brilliantly – with both knowledge, eloquence and passion. Please share widely!

Photo: Martin Luther King. [bswise / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0] Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon June 29, 2021 The MLK tributes are sure to pour on the anniversary of the civil rights hero’s death, but don’t expect them to acknowledge his anti-militarist ideals. The anniversary of his assassination always brings a flood of tributes to Martin Luther King Jr., and this Sunday will surely be no exception. But those tributes — including from countless organizations calling themselves progressive — are routinely evasive about the anti-militarist ideals that King passionately expressed during the final year of his life. You could call it evasion by omission. The standard liberal canon waxes fondly nostalgic about King’s “I have a dream” speech in 1963 and his efforts against racial segregation. But in memory lane, the Dr. King who lived his last year is persona non grata. Originally published April 21. 2021 at scheerpost.com The pattern is positively Orwellian....

Jan Oberg June 22, 2021 Empires come and go. Innovation, vision and power lead to their establishment. If they have good carrying capacity they spread, grow and mature. Their relative power begins to increase, ascendance in more than one field, then consolidation on top–a very dangerous moment when you are second to none–extension and peak and, sooner or later with over-extension–begins the decline, ’fatigue’, lack of innovation, vision and leadership, dissolution and unavoidable fall. All empires decline and fall none have lasted forever. The next – and last – empire to fall is God’s own exceptionalist country, the United States of America. The indicators are pretty obvious in all sectors including the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, MIMAC: Economic decline with uniquely high debts, muddling through with no vision (not an unclear vision but no vision) and trying to solve problems by just injecting money into a manifestly malfunctioning system instead of investing...

Photo credit: uschinadialogue.georgetown.edu Tom Engelhardt June 10, 2021 Let me start with my friend and the boat. Admittedly, they might not seem to have anything to do with each other. The boat, a guided-missile destroyer named the USS Curtis Wilbur, reportedly passed through the Straits of Taiwan and into the South China Sea, skirting the Paracel Islands that China has claimed as its own. It represented yet another Biden-era challenge to the planet’s rising power from its falling one. My friend was thousands of miles away on the West Coast of the United States, well vaccinated and going nowhere in Covid-stricken but improving America. Published at juancole.com & Tomdispatch.com 06.07.2021 As it happens, she’s slightly younger than me, but still getting up there, and we were chatting on the phone about our world, about the all-too-early first wildfire near Los Angeles, the intensifying mega-drought across the West and Southwest, the increasing nightmare of hurricane season in the Atlantic and so on. We...

The famed source of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, has made another unauthorized disclosure — and wants to be prosecuted for it. By Charlie SavagePublished May 22, 2021 • Updated May 23, 2021 • 阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版 WASHINGTON — When Communist Chinese forces began shelling islands controlled by Taiwan in 1958, the United States rushed to back up its ally with military force — including drawing up plans to carry out nuclear strikes on mainland China, according to an apparently still-classified document that sheds new light on how dangerous that crisis was. American military leaders pushed for a first-use nuclear strike on China, accepting the risk that the Soviet Union would retaliate in kind on behalf of its ally and millions of people would die, dozens of pages from a classified 1966 study of the confrontation show. The government censored those pages when it declassified the study for public release. The document...