United States – Empire and domestic

Everything gets said, nothing gets done. When President Donald Trump met President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki last month we were promised all sorts of goodies- progress in reconciliation in Ukraine and Syria, and not least nuclear disarmament. If there is progress behind the scenes it’s not noticeable to the naked eye. People talk about Trump being in Putin’s pocket yet when, soon after Trump became president, Putin suggested major cuts in nuclear weapons Trump turned him down. This would have been a fantastic way to start his presidency. He could have upped Barack Obama’s achievement of getting the arsenal down to 1550 warheads each. In nearly everything else he wants to destroy Obama’s legacy or minimize it. This would have been a way to do it. This doesn’t sound to me like Putin, the supposed puppet master, was pulling the strings on his marionette, Trump. Let that be, maybe we’ll...

  Two mistakes, committed on President Barack Obama’s watch, were the triggers for the end of the long post-Cold War period of good relations with Russia. They were the attack on Libya by the US, France and the UK and the subsequent killing of its long-time dictator, Muammar Gadhafi. The second was the crisis in Ukraine. Russia was very angry about the first. Having been persuaded by Western diplomacy that the reason for their would-be intervention was essentially humanitarian to forestall any more mass killing in the Libyan civil war, the US and NATO double-crossed Russia. After having gained Russia’s abstention in a UN Security Council vote on a resolution authorizing military intervention the Western powers set about hunting Gadhafi. With the second, Ukraine, Russia felt undermined. This was the result of the twin policies of NATO expansion up to Russia’s border – which the US, Germany, France and the...

  By Gunnar Westberg TFF Board member June 24, 2018     • At last, the leader of North Korea, DPRK, has been “allowed” to meet in person with the US president! Since the time of the grandfather of the present leader of North Korean leader that country has had three major objectives in its foreign policy: 1. A peace agreement; 2. A recognition of the leader of the country with respect, or, concretely, a meeting with the US president; 3. Guarantees of peace and security. In recent years there is also a demand for a nuclear weapons-free Korean peninsula. These demands were repeated to us at our two visits to to Pyongyang, DPRK, as representatives of IPPNW, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, and in discussions with North Korean representatives when we have met them in other countries. • • In 1972 President Nixon went to Beijing....

  By Gunnar Westberg TFF Board member August 8, 2018 • Oh, my dear USA – the country where I spent six of the best years of my life, where I have paid so many visits, where I have so many friends – are you still alive, behind the Trump Curtain, or are you hiding in despair and disbelief? Two weeks I spent there. Two weeks is an ideal time to confirm your prejudices and to reach premature conclusions. If you stay longer, you will understand that you have understood very little. I went to places I know well: to rural Minnesota, to the civilized big city of Minneapolis and to the Capital of the World, New York. And yes, you are still there, the real USA, the real Americans! Trump does not reign over your hearts. Everyone talks of him, tries to understand who he is, and how he...

  The news came a few days ago: “UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned member states that the organization is facing “troubling funding issues as a result of delayed dues payments that will force reductions in non-staff costs.” But who really cares? Any Trump tweet or football result is more important to our media and politicians. The members of the UN still give the world’s military about 340 times more than the UN for its core budget.   s: The UN will never be stronger or better than the member states want it to be. That is the essential – and in some sense also existential – truth about the world’s potentially most important and visionary organisation. A second truth is that the UN is not, at least not predominantly, the power house in New York (which, in passing, ought to be moved out of the US given the decade-long contempt...

The MEK’s Maryam Rajavi with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani By Paul R. Pillar President Trump’s belligerent, all-caps tweet about Iran this past weekend is hardly a natural response to anything the Iranians have been saying or doing lately. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani did make a speech on Sunday in which he stated, “America should know that peace with Iran is the mother of all peace, and war with Iran is the mother of all wars,” while advising Trump that “to play with the lion’s tail” would become a source of “regret.” So, Rouhani was saying that he wants peace with America and that moving toward war would be a bad idea. Hardly the stuff that ordinarily would provoke a flaming riposte. To the extent Iranian leaders might be sounding a little testy these days, no one should be surprised. In response to Iran’s internationally certified compliance with an agreement in...

  TFF PressInfo # 470 Lund, Sweden – July 27, 2018 Forgive us for saying it but the coverage of the Putin-Trump meeting in the mainstream press has been painful to witness – the US media in particular. Navel-gazing in the extreme and turning the Presidential Summit meeting about their relations and international affairs into a US domestic policy affair. The Western media questions -also the so-called respected media – matched the rest in their narrow-minded tabloid attitude – one super fool believing he could get Putin to talk about what he “has” on Trump concerning alleged prostitute hiring in Moscow years ago – prestitutes about prostitutes! Write to tff@transnational.live and get TFF PressInfo from now on – it’s free because TFF is free And – which your free press has hardly mentioned – one journalist, Sam Husseini, who intended to ask about nuclear disarmament was forcefully ejected from the...

  By Lyle Jeremy Rubin July 26, 2018  Any Russian interference is only a small part of the “election meddling” we should care about… I think we are due for a little perspective on Russia. I was trained at NSA headquarters as a signals intelligence officer in the Marines. This was about a decade ago, and I was by no means an area specialist. That said, I was privy to relevant briefs. At the time I learned that U.S. cyber operations in Russia, across Russia’s periphery, and around the world already dwarfed Russian operations in size, capability, and frequency. It wasn’t even close, and the expectation was that the gap was about to grow a whole lot wider. Published at currentaffairs.org This should hardly come as a surprise. Just compare the defense budgets of the United States and Russia. The president recently signed a gargantuan $700 billion gift to the Pentagon,...

I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed in all my years of journalism such an hysterical outpouring against a presidential statement as I’ve seen the last week. President Donald Trump has even been accused of treason by prominent columnists and politicians. There’s barely a voice of dissent in the media. (Maybe it’s written but not published.) No wonder that even some of my normally open-minded friends feel that things are as bad as they are made out to be. Sorry to say it, as I’ve told them, they are being brainwashed. The issue is Trump’s dishing of his intelligence services during his press conference with President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. He denied their conviction that Russia had meddled in the election that brought Trump to power. In standing by Putin’s denial on this he speared the sacred heart of the American foreign policy establishment, the so-called “Blob”. Only Republican voters stood...

Russian president Vladimir Putin has been in a benign mood after a perfectly organized World Cup which gave Russians and foreigners the rare freedom to mass in the street. In response the world TV audience has looked at Russia with new eyes. Maybe there’s a new Russia coming to the boil which, if the West could seize the chance, could help the two countries make a pot of very tasty and good tea! Maybe. The Donald Trump/Vladimir Putin encounter is as convoluted as they come. There seem to be two American policies towards Russia – one led by the president, the second led by his advisers. On nearly every issue, bar two, Trump appears to be more dovish than his Administration. He never criticizes Putin publically. Trump hasn’t made a great fuss about the Russian presence in Syria, nor its coziness with Iran and China. He hasn’t criticized the crackdown...

  By Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev June 16, 2018 • Russia and the United States are not condemned to confrontation. We must now make up for lost time! Mikhail Gorbachev’s Address to Participants in the Conference Marking the 30th Anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s Visit and the Moscow Summit. Originally published at the homepage of the Gorbachev Foundation on June 4, 2018 I welcome all who have gathered to mark the thirtieth anniversary of President Ronald Reagan’s visit to Moscow and the US-Soviet summit. I think it was a truly historic event. It was a kind of summing up of the work we had done, starting in Geneva and then going through Reykjavik and Washington to Moscow. It was not an easy path. Its first major milestone was the Joint US-Soviet Statement which declared that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” and that “the two sides will...

(Russia President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump shake hands during a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in 2017. Photo: Mikhail Metzel/TASS via Getty Images) By Gordon M. Hahn 5 July, 2018 The Trump-Putin summit was successfully delayed by the liberal/neocon, Washington/NATO deep state network. By the time, Trump fought his way free from the morass of the collapsing ‘Russiagate’ investigation, relations were so bad that Putin rejected Trump’s invitation to the White House and agreed to meet in neighboring Finland. This suggests the level of distrust Putin has towards Washington, his low expectations for a successful summit, and the high price he is likely to demand for concessions on his part. With the summit at hand, it is important for the Trump administration to understand what are the key problems that have tightly wound the Russian-Western knot, for only by understanding the way the...