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Cold War Against Russia – Without Debate A prophetic conversation from 2006 with professor Stephen F. Cohen (1938-2020) Read also, carefully Cold War Against Russia – Without Debate (2014)By Katrina vanden Heuvel & Stephen F. Cohen The Obama administration’s decision to isolate Russia, in a new version of “containment,” has met with virtually unanimous support from the political and media establishment. And then ask yourself why Western mainstream media and politicians start their history on February 24, 2022, and insist that everything is the fault of Russia and Putin, the latter having gone mad on February 23. My conclusion is based on this and lots of conflicts being reported in these media the last 20+ years: • You are being deceived. • There is a purpose behind that. • It serves Western self-righteousness and to cover up the Himalayan Western mistake to a) break all promises to Russia (Gorbachev at...

Jan Oberg March 18, 2022 A few quotes first… • “A report that comprehensively examines nonviolent, cost-imposing options that the United States and its allies could pursue across economic, political, and military areas to stress—overextend and unbalance – Russia’s economy and armed forces and the regime’s political standing at home and abroad.” • “Today’s Russia suffers from many vulnerabilities—oil and gas prices well below peak that have caused a drop in living standards, economic sanctions that have furthered that decline, an aging and soon-to-be-declining population, and increasing authoritarianism under Vladimir Putin’s now-continued rule. Such vulnerabilities are coupled with deep-seated (if exaggerated) anxieties about the possibility of Western-inspired regime change, loss of great power status, and even military attack.” • “Providing lethal aid to Ukraine would exploit Russia’s greatest point of external vulnerability. But any increase in U.S. military arms and advice to Ukraine would need to be carefully calibrated to...

Shubham Dhage on Unsplash Jan Oberg March 4, 2022 The first draft of this article was written in mid-February, ten days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine but while the NATO-Russia conflict centred upon Ukraine was building up. Little could I know that virtually all the examples of conflict and peace illiteracy that I list below should be illustrated so vividly, so quickly and so tragically. Conflict-resolution and peace-making has no relevance if the parties want war. But if th parties want some kind of peace and cooperation and trust – then, perhaps they just don’t know how to get there. And may not even know that there is something they don’t know? Deeply convinced that all this could have been avoided if some little conflict and peace professionalism had been applied, I offer a series of constructive alternatives below. My focus is on ways of thinking and principles and...

Jan Oberg March 3, 2022 I am happy to inform you about my latest column in China’s leading Global Times – with the title above. Read it here and when you are anyhow there, look around: Many different subjects from the Western media and many different angles from a country we all need to know more about. Not the least now when the pluralism and scope have been reduced ad absurdum in the Western mainstream media (MSM). The illustration is, in my view, spot-on – and thus matches my spot-on points 😜

No, these three themes are not directly related to each other, except that they were suggested to me /” target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener”>Schiller Institute in Denmark when she kindly invited me to participate in a longer interview. If you prefer, you may also listen to it as podcast and read it here.

But there’s already a solution. Anatol Lieven January 19, 2022 Amid the public storm in America over the fall of Kabul, it is important not to lose sight of other looming crises around the world – some of them potentially much more dangerous than Afghanistan. For if the US political elites were so surprised by the speed of the Afghan state’s collapse, that was largely because the US media stopped paying attention to developments on the ground in Afghanistan once most US forces withdrew and Americans stopped dying there in large numbers. Originally published at The Nation in November 2021 Of these potential crises, one of the most menacing is the armed standoff between the Ukrainian military and Russian-supported separatist forces in eastern Ukraine. Limited numbers of Russian troops (lightly disguised as “volunteers”) are stationed in the Donbas region, and Russia has deployed large forces in southern Russia to defend...

Please read this carefully because it is essentially important and not on the front page of all media – while Djokovic, Britney Spears, Epstein/Maxwell and the latest Netflix series you just must see all are: “UNITED NATIONS, Jan 17 2022 (IPS) The numbers are unbelievably staggering: the world’s 10 richest men more than doubled their fortunes from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion —at a rate of $15,000 per second or $1.3 billion a day, according to a new study from Oxfam International. These phenomenal changes in fortunes took place during the first two years of a Covid-19 pandemic that has seen the incomes of 99 percent of humanity fall, and over 160 million more people forced into poverty—60 million more than the figures released by the World Bank in 2020. “If these ten men were to lose 99.999 percent of their wealth tomorrow, they would still be richer than 99...

None Dare Call It “Encirclement” Washington Tightens the Noose around China Michael Klare Since he published “War Without End: American Planning for the Next Vietnams” in 1972, Michael Klare has established himself as one of the world’s leading experts on US military foreign policy, warfare, weapons, military intervention, energy policies and the nexus between militarism and climate change. I’ve known and followed him during all these years. Within the last few weeks, Michael has written two analyses pertain to the one-sided US Cold War on China that are frightening. They provide you with cool documentation of the systematic planning and the impossible-to-understand sums the US has now allocated to this destructive – also self-destructive – project for the years ahead. Western mainstream media will keep you in the dark about this perversely world-endangering policy. I call it that for the simple reason that the problems humanity faces which must be...

, as Op-Ed for China Daily * One description of the contemporary world is more accurate and ominous than any other, namely that we live in the nuclear age or the age of nuclearism, i.e. the weapons plus the thinking and power structures that surround these doomsday weapons. In 1946, Albert Einstein stated that “the unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” Even limited use of nuclear weapons would lead to a global human and environmental catastrophe. It is enigmatic that everybody talks about the much slower climate change, while the numerous destructive links between militarism and environmental destruction are hardly ever made even by leading experts, politicians or civil society leaders. Therefore, it must be welcomed that the five nuclear weapons states of the UN Security Council have issued a joint statement. They know there is...

Secretary of State Antony Blinken and NATO’s chief Jens Stoltenberg January 13, 2022 Jan Oberg To deceive, telling half-truths, or a complete lie is nothing new in politics, particularly security in politics. But until some 20-30 years ago, I would – perhaps naively – see it as an exception. Tragically – and perhaps to many readers’ surprise – it is now the rule. At least in U.S. and NATO circles, and that is particularly regrettably since The West professes to be a democratic system with specific values and even a moral leader to The Rest. Lying systematically about facts – historical facts – and other countries and cultures should be incompatible with The West’s perception of itself. But, today, it isn’t. Lies are widespread in so-called security politics when some militarist project doesn’t make any (common) sense to intelligent people, when the real motives have to be covered up and...

By Jan Oberg December 29, 2021 The Summit slogan by Biden was: ”Democracy doesn’t happen by accident. We have to defend it, fight for it, strengthen it, renew it.” The first sentence is empty of meaning. The rest is confrontational – fight, be strong; someone – guess who? – threatens our democracy. And renewal was absent. With no intellectuals or other thinkers invited, the Summit was theoretically and philosophically void. The hours I browsed didn’t reveal any new concepts or visions of democracy – but instead platitudes, tired metaphors, self-congratulatory words by governments leaders on their own achievements and how they meet ”challenges.” Plus the repeated, extremely unfair, appeal to young people to fix what the present generation has so irresponsibly destroyed. A summit could be used to sum it up: Diagnosis + Prognosis + Solutions: What must we do differently in the future? It wasn’t. We learned that democracy...

Collage © Jan Oberg 2021 Fredrik Heffermehl December 9, 2021 The 2021 Nobel Peace Prize honoured press freedom and – no surprise – was welcomed by the world press. As I listened to the announcement, on October 8, an old story from the Cold War kept coming back to me: A Soviet official had been travelling in the US for a couple of weeks. As he left, he remarked to his hosts, in puzzled bewilderment “How can it be that you have such perfect control, even with a completely free press?” He was right. Society makes one huge exception from democracy and press freedom: national security. The Military-Industrial Complex is in control, thoroughly disciplined media see it as a sacred duty to keep their own nation strong and united behind the flag and the forces. Nations are governed by fear that any doubt or deviation from military orthodoxy would harm...