Military

Unknown cartoon from the Internet Jan Oberg March 31, 2023 The thing NATO and EU countries persistently deny when talking about the war in Ukraine is – yes, exactly – NATO’s expansion. But that is the conflict basis that caused Russia to start a war on Russia. This very precise formulation is not an endorsement of that war – I wrote against it on February 25, 2022. Only fools believe that an explanation is the same as legitimisation and endorsement. The underlying conflict – not the violence that grows out of it, is always the key to peace. Peace comes from dealing with the conflict and finding a solution. It is not called war resolution; it is called conflict resolution. Like the doctor doesn’t just look at the point of pain but goes deeper and asks: What is the cause? What is the problem? So do people who are professionals...

All photos © Jan Oberg Writing this, I must admit that my rage and pain build up inside, still twenty years later. Below, see what TFF and I wrote back then and why we were, simply put, making better predictions on a shoestring budget than the US and other NATO decision-makers on multi-billion-dollar budgets. Like other wars and interventions, this was no “mistake”. It was an unavoidable consequence of Western MIRE – Militarism, Imperialism, Racism and Exceptionalism. The West has learned nothing. Militarism is now its main cohesive force into its manifest destiny: Decline and fall. President George W. Bush announcing that he has just started the war on Iraq. Listen carefully! All the arguments and aims he presents were either false, mistaken or outright lies. And sanctimonious. Jan Oberg March 19, 2023 TFF’s fact-finding missions and scattered memories Permit me start out with a quotation from the British Stop...

Photo by Master Sgt. Sean M. Worrell, U.S. Air Force via ABACAPRESS.COM Branko Marcetic February 22, 2023 The Biden team has quietly blown past red lines of involvement. The question now, is how far is it willing to go. When the United States involves itself militarily in a conflict, it often finds it hard to get itself out, let alone avoid deep entanglements that blow well past lines it had drawn at the start of the intervention.  It happened in Vietnam, when U.S. military advisers helping the South Vietnamese fight Viet Cong eventually became U.S. soldiers fighting an American war. It happened in Afghanistan, when an initial invasion to capture al-Qaida and overthrow the Taliban morphed into a nearly two-decade-long nation-building project. And it could be happening right now in Ukraine.  Originally published at Responsible Statecraft Little by little, NATO and the United States are creeping closer to the catastrophic scenario President...

USA versus China trade war concept. Statue of Liberty and Chinese Dragon prepared for battle. National symbols show international relations. Vector illustration in comic style.  John Menadue February 22, 2023 Originally posted on John Menadue’s Public Policy Journal “Pearls and Irritations” on February 11th, 2023. h As China grows and prospers many in the US want us to believe that China will follow the same path that the US itself pursued- global military aggression, the overthrow of numerous governments around the world and persecution of minorities at home. But the record so far suggests that China is different. As former US senior diplomat Chas Freeman in Brown Political Review of 14 March 2022 put it, China does not have a Monroe Doctrine like the US and does not think and behave like the US. There’s not much evidence of China wanting to replace us. They are displacing us in some spheres because they’re big and growing and...

Gordon M Hahn February 14, 2023 We are entering the most dangerous phase of the NATO-Russian Ukraine war up till now. The West is undertaking a major escalation in the war by increasing the lethality of weapons it is supplying Ukraine to include tanks and the largest tranche of military equipment supplied to Kiev so far. Meanwhile, Russia is on the verge of an offensive on the background of slow but steady gains in the east, taking Soledar, moving into Vugledar (Ugledar) and the outskirts of Bakhmut (Atemevsk), threatening Ukrainian forces with operational encirclements in several areas. Russia now has available in and around Ukraine 5-600,000 regular troops, almost none of which have been used so far, with Moscow having been relying on the DPR and LNR forces, the Wagner troops, Chechens, and massive attacks from the air by artillery, rockets, drones and such in previous phases of the war....

President Bush and Russian President Yeltsin announce the end of the cold war during a press conference at Camp David, February 1, 1992. Source: Bush Library on Twitter @Bush41Library. Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton February 7, 2023 Russian President Proposed Far-Reaching Nuclear Reductions, Bush Not So Sure U.S. ambassador on Yeltsin: Russians “want a tsar with a common touch” Russian leaders sensitive to Ukrainian concerns but saw Ukraine as the “main destabilizing factor” Washington D.C., January 30, 2023 – The George H.W. Bush administration was reluctant to embrace the “relations of deep mutual trust and alliance” proposed by the newly independent Russian Federation and its leader, Boris Yeltsin, in early 1992, according to declassified U.S. documents published today by the National Security Archive. The Bush administration’s cautious management of U.S.-Soviet relations at the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 had focused primarily on command and control of the remaining Soviet...

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida rides on a Japan Ground Self-Defense Force Type 10 tank during a review at JGSDF Camp Asaka in Tokyo on November 27, 2021. Photo: JiJi Richard Javad Heydarian February 5th, 2023 Prime Minister Kishida goes on a diplomatic offensive in the West as Tokyo cranks up defense spending to counter China Originally posted on Asia Time on January 23, 2023 here MANILA – Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida kicked off the new year with a series of high-profile visits across key Western allied nations, including the United States. In Washington, he held “very productive” talks with US President Joe Biden on strengthening bilateral cooperation in critical industries, particularly semiconductors, as the West contemplates decoupling from its decades-long dependence on China.  Earlier, the Japanese leader also met counterparts in Europe where he signed new defense agreements to augment military interoperability and joint exercises in the Indo-Pacific. Together with the United...

The Danish foreign, defence and the prime minister is greeted by President Zelensky (right) Jan Oberg February 2, 2023 In Danish here The West/NATO has always lacked a long-term strategy. After all, it was militarily, economically and politically superior and could impose its will. Didn’t have to think. Hoping Ukraine would join NATO without fuss was hubris-ridden wishful thinking, and stupid to boot, in that it’s been convincingly documented that Russia’s leaders, from Gorbachev to Putin for the past 30 years, have said that NATO expansion was: a) a clear violation of the promises made by all important Western leaders to Gorbachev – and it’s true; b) a humiliation and counterproductive if you want common security; and c) that if it could be no other way, then Ukraine would be Russia’s definitive red line. No one listened. Because, as former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen so aptly put it:...

The estimated cost of the humanitarian response going into 2023 is US$ 51.5 billion, a 25% increase compared to the beginning of 2022. That is less than one-tenth of the total sales of weapons which reached 592 billion US dollars just in one year: 2021. Baher Kamal January 30, 2023 MADRID, Dec 22, 2022 (IPS) – Day after day, international humanitarian organisations launch desperate appeals for funding to continue saving some of the many lives at high risk. When they get a handful of dollars –even just one million– from a rich country, they welcome it as manna from heaven. Not only the available funding for humanitarian aid is already short, but 2023 will also set another record for humanitarian relief requirements, with 339 million people in need of assistance in 69 countries, an increase of 65 million people compared to the same time last year, the United Nations and...

May others avoid that fate… The first Cold War played out between the East and the Western Occident and the East lost with the demise of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. Both built – more or less faithfully – on Western mechanical thinking, one on Marx and other socialist/communist philosophers, the other on twisting moral philosopher Adam Smith into a God’s hand individualist utility market prophet and pair him with various types of liberal, parliamentary democracy thinking. The Soviet and East European system had come to the end of its history, but what about the twin Occidental brother, the US-EU system? The latter had not only survived or ”won;” it had also forced the Soviet Union to spend an unsustainable proportion of its resources on the military. And now the Second West is destined to follow suit. The point I shall make is that the West – US-EU-based...

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (on screen) of Ukraine, addresses the Security Council meeting on the situation in Ukraine. “We are dealing with a State that is turning the veto of the United Nations Security Council into the right to die”, President Zelynskyy warned. If it continues, countries will rely not on international law or global institutions to ensure security, but rather, on the power of their own arms. April 2022. Credit: UN Photo/Loey Felipe Thalif Deen January 24, 2023 UNITED NATIONS, Jan 2 2023 (IPS) – A US Senator once described Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, perhaps facetiously, as “a Winston Churchill in a tee shirt”. And last month, when he addressed the US Congress – with the presence of about 100 Senators and 435 Congressmen – he tried to re-live that moment. While most of the Senators and Congressmen were in business suits for the formal occasion, Zelensky opted for green military fatigues and...

In advance of the invasion of Iraq 20 years ago, the UK media parroted government lies and fabrications uncritically and became an enthusiastic part of the state’s propaganda machine. An inquiry into British reporting of the Iraq war is well past due. Peter Oborne January 24, 2023 Intro Peter Oborne’s article published by the very interesting online Declassified UK magazine on January 18, 2023, convincingly documents how the mainstream media use fake and omissions to legitimize their country’s war adventures. In this case, the run-up to the US/UK-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. I believe it is important to ask: Could media consumers be the object of the same gross deceit now when it comes to Ukraine? Is there any real reason to believe that that conflict is covered differently – not the least given the suspicious homogenisation across the media spectrum and the cancelling of Russian media? Oborne starts...