TFF global posts 2020

Julian Assange of Wikileaks languishes in a British jail during a too-long wait for a court to decide if he can be extradicted to the US where the government has made clear that it wants to put him on trial on charges that could land him in prison for the rest of his life, even though President Donald Trump was happy to quote from Wikileaks research on his opponent, Hillary Clinton, during his campaign for president. “I love Wikileaks”, he said. The British and to a lesser extent the US press have done a poor job in uncovering state secrets in their country’s foreign policy until The Guardian and The New York Times linked up with Assange to publish his most damning revelations. And now after a long winding series of events Assange is being punished by a type of confinement that persuaded Nils Melzer, the UN’s rapporteur on torture,...

Text in TFF PressInfo # 560 It was NATO’s first out-of-area operation, against its own Treaty and without a UN mandate. On March 24, 1999. Independent Kosovo was established – against UN SC resolution 1244. Thanks to the Clinton administration and Madeleine Albright. CNN’s Amanpour endorsed it generously on TV with her State Department husband, James Rubin, a chief operator in the non-negotiations at Rambouillet. And TIME, of course, knew the truth too. Serbia suffered tremendously from the 78 days of indiscriminate, hard bombing. I know because I was there. Finally, Serbia and its president Milosevic was threatened with total destruction of Belgrade. And gave in. Western hubris after the Cold War was won? Of course! Russia was on its knees. International law and the UN Charter sidelined. Militarism embraced. Full-spectrum dominance. The winner takes it all! Right – but with the risk of losing it all later. It’s called...

By Liu Jian, TFF Associate in Beijing Read the author’s first article here March 30, 2020 On January 18, after attending a meeting in Hangzhou, I planned to return to my home in Beijing. At that time, the Spring Festival in China was approaching. Although I had started buying tickets one week in advance, I still did not get a high-speed train ticket from Hangzhou to Beijing so I had to go from Hangzhou to Shanghai and wait for several hours before changing to a later train to return to Beijing. There are high-speed trains between Beijing and Hangzhou and Shanghai every five to ten minutes. Even so, it can’t meet people’s travel needs during the Spring Festival. High-speed railway stations and airports in all major cities were overcrowded and at security checkpoints, people lined up in long queues. China’s transportation sector is doing its best to ensure the world’s...

People line up to buy face masks from a medical supply company in Nanning, southern China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region on Wednesday, January 29, 2020. © 2020 Chinatopix. By Liu Jian, TFF Associate in Beijing Read the author’s second article here March 30, 2020 What we have experienced in the past two months is too dreamy and now, in retrospect, it seems not so real. On January 23, the day before Chinese New Year’s Eve, people who were ready to celebrate the New Year were shocked by the sudden outbreak of the virus. Wuhan, a super big city with a population of 11 million, was declared closed by the government. Anxiety and unease quickly enveloped the whole country. According to the government’s guidance, people cancelled New Year’s travels and family reunions one after another, stayed in their own homes according to experts’ suggestions, and kept updating the news with anxiety. Usually,...

According to the New York Times, President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign is investing more money and resources in an attempt to attract African-American voters than any previous Republican presidential campaign. The Trump camp believe that with eight months of continuous advertising coupled with the opening of field offices in black communities it can peel off enough black voters to improve his standing by a crucial couple of points. Are black votes so critical? Indeed they are as they are clustered in the denser populated states where they tend to vote as a more of a block than any other group. They can swing the election in several crucial states. It’s strange that the pundits didn’t see South Carolina coming. In that primary, Joe Biden soared ahead of his rival Bernie Sanders after having been written off because of his failures in earlier primaries. South Carolina not only has a large...

TFF PressInfo # 559 An example of what you get when you subscribe to it here on your right. And of course, it is free. Jan Oberg Lund, Sweden – March 20, 2020 This little girl’s face expresses both sorrow and hope. It’s been with me ever since I took the picture at the liberation of Eastern Aleppo in December 2016 after 4,5 years of terrorist occupation. These days, it is 9 years ago, violence broke out in Syria. The underlying conflict with the West is much older. Our leaders and media are still so peace illiterate that they don’t know the distinction between conflict and violence. I’ve seen no mention in the Western mainstream media of Syria. While COVID-19 has so far claimed about 10.000 lives worldwide, 400.000 have died in Syria. Today, it is 17 years since US President George W. Bush used shock and awe on Iraq...

Is Bernie Sanders still in with a chance? It is a slim one, but in these primary elections one never knows. There have been a number of surprising upsets. Even if Joe Biden comes out on top and has to face Donald Trump for the presidency the Democratic Party has been pushed to the left by Senator Sanders. That is all to the good. Biden needs to be more critical of capitalism, more prepared to encourage unionism among workers and more prepared to push for universal health coverage, more taxes for the wealthier classes, among many other things that Sanders has pointed out as necessary if the US is not going to shoot itself in the foot with a disintegrating body politic. If it wants a fair and stable society this is the way to go. On foreign policy Sanders has also pushed Biden to be more explicit about the...

By Jan Oberg March 17, 2020 Defender Europe 20 is a huge, basically US military exercise, on European soil between February and May this year. It has already started. In the midst of a closed-down coronavirus Europe. And it is war-preparing, not peace- or confidence-building. The diagram above from the British Army offers you details of this perverse, surreal idea – take note of Italy being one of the planned participants! Most likely, you have not heard about Defender Europe 20. When it comes to US foreign and war policies, all Western mainstream media practise self-censorship. The media would hardly be able to write about this exercise of militarist madness in a way that would not cause an uproar and moral condemnation in these times of deep, widespread concerns about war risks, climate change and the coronavirus. So better not write at all and cause diplomatic troubles with the unpredictable,...

We hear next to nothing about these sanctions in the so-called free media – primary sanctions by the US hitting Iran directly, secondary sanctions by the US demanding other countries – the EU and NATO allies in particular – to implement its sanctions, i.e. to accept that US sanctions laws shall apply to them as sovereign states. The EU has not been able to get its acts together and respect the nuclear deal, or JCPOA: not in autumn 2015 when it could not find a way to temporarily host 1,5 million refugees arriving as asylum seekers from countries destroyed predominantly by the EU/NATO members themselves – and not now when the coronavirus hits Europe and they have let China be the one who helps their neighbour Italy. On March 15, 2020, I was asked by Iran’s PressTV to comment on these matters in the wake of Iranian foreign minister, Dr...

Illustration by Shenuka Corea By Richard Falk, TFF Associate March 12, 2020 Prefatory Note International law – as so much else of value – has fallen on hard times, violated and ignored, where applicable and needed. Although this is a deplorable state of affairs as the planet burns and vulnerable people suffer from ecological hazards and predatory geopolitics, it is the time to heighten struggle, and not sit home in despair. This essay in a slightly modified form was written at the request of Fikir Turu, an online source of commentary operating from Turkey, and published in Turkish. An English version was also published in Transcend Media Service, TMS, 17 February 2020. Published at Richard Falk’s personal blog  Respecting International Law: A Practical Argument International law disappoints in so many ways, making it easy to overlook why, despite its flaws, it remains valuable and indeed vital for human wellbeing. I put here...

By Richard Falk, TFF Associate March 16, 2020 Prefatory Note This post is something new for me, an autobiographical fragment written at the request of an online listserv as a suggestive model for academics at the start of their careers as diplomatic historians. I publish it here on my blog. It was found unsuitable for publication by the group that made the initial solicitation for unspecified reasons. Maybe because my work and career were not relevant to the scholarly life of a diplomatic historian, maybe because I seemed too flaky professionally to serve as a heuristic model, maybe because what I wrote risked an angry reaction from those who have weaponized anti-Semitism as (mis)defined by the IHRA definition, maybe because…a hundred other good reasons, including what was most plausible, least paranoid, that I was in a different lane when it came to a scholarly career, making my condensed narrative a...

PhotoPainting by the author Diagnosis, prognosis and treatment in the light of Turkey’s invasion and the risk of a larger catastrophic war. By Jan Oberg March 7, 2020 Diagnosis The world looked at the violence but didn’t have the capacity to analyze the underlying conflicts in and around Syria. For sure, it is a civil war but, to a much larger extent, it is an international regime-change war. In 2006 William Roebuck, US chargé d’affaires in Damascus, advocated that US policy should focus on destabilizing the Syrian government and al-Assad. At a meeting in Marrakech on December 12, 2012, lots of countries under Western leadership – perversely calling themselves Friends of Syria on the initiative of French President Sarkozy – decided to oust President Assad by decree and establish a National Council which, from then on, was supposed to be the only legitimate Syrian governing body and representative of the...