United States – Empire and domestic

Jan Oberg December 13, 2023 One of the enigmatic aspects of international politics is that big and militarily superior countries have systematically lost wars in smaller countries – the last 50 years, from Vietnam to Ukraine. ’Losing’ here means military defeat, being forced out, losing the struggle for the hearts and minds of the people, and facing fiasco when it comes to achieving the presumed noble motives like introducing human rights, democracy, freedom or liberating women. And given the tremendous human costs, particularly in the Middle East, the US’s Global War On Terror since September 11, 2001, is also an intellectual and moral disaster. The United States – the world’s by far largest military spender, interventionist, warrior, occupier, global base-builder with the most militarised foreign policy – is in a class of its own. In losing wars too. It is now rapidly losing legitimacy, relevance and credibility in the eyes...

Richard E. Rubenstein October 23, 2023 Everyone knows that the United States is the world’s leading military power, with an annual “defense” budget approaching one trillion dollars, considerably more than the arms budgets of the next 144 nations combined. The U.S. employs more than 3.5 million active military and civilian personnel and maintains more than 750 military bases located in some 80 nations around the world. The nation’s most profitable and fastest-growing manufacturing sector is the military-industrial complex, which employs more than 4 million workers and supplies approximately 40 percent of the total weaponry used by the world’s armed forces. In the production and deployment of nuclear weapons, of course, the U.S. is absolutely dominant. Originally published at Transcend on October 2, 2023 All this is common knowledge. Yet, in the heartland of arms production and preparation for war, there is virtually no debate about militarism. Only a handful of...

Screenshot from AlJazeera, October 20, 2023 October 20, 2023 This is a shortened version of a must-watch Mearsheimer lecture. You may enjoy his clear-eyed vision as if it was given recently. However… Professor Mearsheimer gave it at the March 24, 2017, Israel Lobby and American Policy conference. One indicator of good versus bad research is the degree to which predictions turn out to be right. Most Western researchers on international affairs whom decision-makers take inspiration from must, therefore, be incompetent, if not lousy, scholars…. Or they listen only to themselves in confrontational echo chambers populated by group thinkers. Be sure they do not listen to the likes of John Mearsheimer.

A collection of relevant articles brought to you by The Transnational Foundation. When will the investigative reports come, if not after one year? Jan Oberg September 26, 2023 The destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines had neither a photogenic character nor a death toll comparable with 9/11, 2001. It also did not provoke a German or Russian response in the vicinity of the totally out-of-proportion US Global War on Terror that has cost millions of innocent lives. That said, one could hypothesise that, as a destructive event and over time, this gigantic infrastructure destruction will have consequences for the international order as comprehensive as 9/11. Be this as it may, we’ve all noticed how this unique destruction disappeared very quickly from the media and has also not been mentioned in, say, statements from NATO, G7, G 20 or the EU. The world has also not heard anything from any formal...

“You must remember that Russia could stop this war right now.” 35 seconds is enough to realise that Jan Oberg 22 September, 2023 This article in Danish on my online home and blog. On 6 September, Denmark’ TV2 Channel ran a 35-second clip with the Prime Minister under the headline “Mette Frederiksen: You don’t win a war with words, you win it with weapons.” Watch and listen to it here. Her brief presentation of her views on Ukraine’s situation testifies to an ignorance – conscious, unconscious or opportunistic – that is not easily reconciled with state leadership in general and war participation in particular. I believe that a doctor of the same intellectual level of medical knowledge would be put out of commission. (1) War versus conflict Mette Frederiksen believes that it is impossible to win a war with words, especially when you are “up against Russia.” By focusing on...

US lawmakers say the alliance’s movement into Asia is “inevitable.” It’s actually a completely avoidable, completely bad idea. Branko Marcetic September 15, 2023 A little over a century ago, rising inter-imperial tensions coupled with a complicated, evidence board–like set of alliances pulled Europe into the most disastrous, pointless war the world had ever seen up to then, World War I. Today, a ’roided-up version of that scenario is looming, as US-China relations deteriorate and the NATO alliance begins to dip several toes in Asia, nearly six thousand miles away from its headquarters in Brussels. Originally published at Jacobin on July 29, 2023 This isn’t an exaggeration. Asked recently at a joint appearance on Meet the Press whether NATO’s expansion into Asia was “inevitable,” Senators Tammy Duckworth (an Illinois Democrat) and Dan Sullivan (an Alaska Republican) answered yes. “Oh, I think it is,” said Sullivan. “I agree with my friend,” said Duckworth. They had good...

Kristin Christman August 24, 2023 In this independent, personal essay about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., what he stands for, and the incredible smear and exclusion campaign against him, TFF Associate Kristin Christman has included all sources with titles, authors, dates, and links at the end of the article. They make it possible for the reader to understand how she arrives at her conclusions, although the details of each case are not elaborated on in the main text. A. Kennedy’s Attraction Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is running for US president. He is the son of Robert Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968 during his campaign for the US presidency, and he is the nephew of President John F. Kennedy, assassinated in 1963. For many Americans, Kennedy’s candidacy kindles a glimmer of hope and pride in the United States for the first time in their lifetimes. The flimsy mainstream media coverage of...

Joint demonstration of the trade unions on May Day in Berlin under the slogan Unbroken Solidarity. Photography K.M.Krause via Reuters Anatol Lieven & George Beebe August 23, 2023 Demonizing Russian culture and people only makes peace in Ukraine harder to achieve and plays into Putin’s propaganda A deeply sinister and dangerous tendency has made its appearance in Western writing about the war in Ukraine. This is the extension of hatred for the Putin regime and its crimes to the entire Russian people, the Russian national tradition, and Russian culture. This tendency is of course bitterly familiar from the history of hostile propaganda, but precisely for that reason we should have learned to shun it. The banning of Russian cultural events and calls for the “decolonization” of Russian literature and Russian studies recall the propaganda of all sides during the First World War, which did so much to embitter that war and make its peaceful resolution...

In the 17th century, Ming China represented roughly one-third of global output, and Mughal India a little less. Together the two countries accounted for more than half of the world’s output, with a corresponding size of populations (as a proportion of the total global population). By the 1950s, Mao China was a mere 5 per cent of global GDP. India only 1 per cent. Today, after several decades of exceptional economic progress, particularly in China, there is now a historic rise of the Global South. The two behemoths – China and India, and others in the South – are now reclaiming their historic economic weight in the world.  The 2013 UNDP Human Development Report documented this rise of the Global South presenting evidence that China, India, and Brazil were collectively in the process of exceeding western developed countries in terms of trade and global output. China is now the largest...

Jan Oberg July 4, 2023 This weekend, Saudi Arabia hosts an international meeting about peace in Ukraine – however, Russia is not invited. At the time of writing, it is not known whether China would – but it must be seen as very unlikely, although some participating countries pretend to say that there is a fair chance it will this time while it stayed away from the preceding Copenhagen meeting. With US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, being there, one can guess that it is, for all practical purposes, part of a US strategy after the fatal NATO Summit in Vilnius at which Ukraine’s NATO membership was cancelled – and all promises to it since 2008 broken. Saudi Arabia has not issued anything about the meeting; for instance, its “Arab News” carries nothing today. If peace in Ukraine were the real purpose of this meeting, it would have been planned...

By Helmut Scheben* July 18, 2023 Mass media are often unreliable, but hardly anyone has time to check the news. If news reports later turn out to be false, they are usually already burned into the hard drive of collective memory as “historical truth”. Originally published at Zeit-Fragen After the Gulf War of 1991, it was forbidden for the media in the US to show pictures of the coffins of American soldiers killed in combat. This prohibition was lifted only in February 2009. Filming dead or wounded US soldiers were also banned, and the ban was enforced with extreme severity, especially during the Iraq war, as cameramen reported. Once, when I was looking for such footage in the vast archives of Swiss television, I found a single sequence that lasted about three seconds. An American soldier was trying to climb out of a burning tank. Three seconds out of thousands...

Edward Curtin July 19, 2023 Social psychosis is widespread. In the words of the British psychiatrist, RD Laing, “The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.” He was not referring to raving, drooling, hitting-your-head-against-the-wall lunacy but a taken-for-granted acceptance of a world long teetering on the edge of nuclear extinction, to take the most extreme example, but surely only one of many.  Originally published at Off Guardian on July 9, 2023 The insouciant acceptance and support of psychotic rulers who promote first-strike nuclear war is very common. First strike nuclear policy is United States policy. I recently wrote an article about the dangers of the fourteen US Trident submarines. These subs constantly cruise under the oceans carrying 3,360 nuclear warheads equivalent to 134,400 Hiroshima bombs. All are on first strike triggers. And of course these are supplemented by all the land...