United States – Empire and domestic

Baher Kamal, Human Wrongs Watch January 23, 2023 Or the perversities of the nuclear age priorities. We could help hundreds of millions of children with a fraction of the money that goes into warfare and nukes As if the 100 billion dollars that the United States has so far provided to Ukraine in both weapons and aid were not enough, the US has now started to install in Europe its brand new, more destructive nuclear warheads. The US 100 billion dollars are to be added to all the weapons and aid that 40 Washington’s ‘allies’ –Europe in particular– have been sending to Ukraine since it was invaded by Russia in February 2022. The US spending on the Ukrainian war in less than a year amounts to the desperately needed funding that the United Nations require to partially alleviate some of the horrifying suffering of over one billion human beings over...

Illustration: Craig Stephens Li Xing 19 January 2023 – The West likes to argue that market capitalism and political liberalism go hand in hand; in reality, the former has proved far more powerful than the latter – Having made countries around the world economically interdependent, the West should not expect them to jeopardise their global links by taking political sides US President Joe Biden has framed the Ukraine war as a battle between “democracy and autocracy”, while also claiming that “the West is now stronger, more united than it has ever been”. During a recent visit to Taiwan, former Danish leader and Nato secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen said that, when combined, the world’s democracies represent 60 per cent of the global economy, providing an overwhelming deterrence to Beijing’s ambitions regarding Taiwan. The irony is that, if we applied this logic to the Ukraine war, the US and Europe would have already...

Peter Cronau – Declassified Australia January 11, 2023 An Australian university has unearthed millions of Tweets by fake accounts pushing disinformation on the Ukraine war, Peter Cronau reports. The sample size dwarfs other studies of covert propaganda about the war on social media.  Originally published at Consortium News on November 6, 2022 A team of researchers at the University of Adelaide have found that as many as 80 percent of tweets about the 2022 Russia-Ukraine invasion in its early weeks were part of a covert propaganda campaign originating from automated fake “bot” accounts. An anti-Russia propaganda campaign originating from a “bot army” of phony automated Twitter accounts flooded the internet at the start of the war. The research shows that of the more than 5 million tweets studied, 90.2 percent (both bot and non-bot) came from accounts that were pro-Ukraine, with fewer than 7 percent of the accounts being classed as pro-Russian. The university researchers...

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov attending a meeting in Yerevan, Armenia, November 23, 2022. /CFP Glenn Diesen January 3, 2022 The 29th Ministerial Council of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) took place from December 1-2 in Poland. Established in 1994 to develop a common peace in an inclusive Europe, the OSCE has become the largest regional security organization in the world, which includes the U.S. on its western edge and Russia on its eastern. Therefore it could have played a key role in restoring peace amid the Ukraine conflict. However, the peace initiative was abandoned in favour of a hegemonic project facilitated by NATO expansionism. The war in Ukraine and the decline of the OSCE are both symptoms of the collapsing pan-European security order. Originally published at CGTN, December 1, 2022 A common Europe versus continued bloc politics In 1989, then Soviet Union leader Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev...

Maria Popova December 20, 2022 “No matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough … to cover the immensity of actuality.” The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her beautiful 1975 speech on lying and what truth really means, “are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities.” Nowhere is this liar’s loss of perspective more damaging to public life, human possibility, and our collective progress than in politics, where complex social, cultural, economic, and psychological forces conspire to make the assault on truth traumatic on a towering scale. Those forces are what Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975), one of the most incisive thinkers of the past century, explores in a superb 1971 essay titled “Lying in...

Paul Krugman June 19, 2018 – published here on December 15, 2022 Committing atrocities at the border, attacking the domestic rule of law, insulting democratic leaders while praising thugs and breaking up trade agreements are all about turning our back on the ideals that made us different from other powerful nations. The U.S. government is, as a matter of policy, ripping children from the arms of their parents and putting them in fenced enclosures (which officials insist aren’t cages, oh no). The U.S. president is demanding that law enforcement stop investigating his associates and go after his political enemies instead. He has been insulting democratic allies while praising murderous dictators. And a global trade war seems increasingly likely. What do these stories have in common? Obviously, they’re all tied to the character of the man occupying the White House, surely the worst person ever to hold his position. But there’s...

John F. Copper December 15th, 2022 US intelligence agencies do not say China is preparing for an invasion of Taiwan. Why? Taiwan’s role as the ‘reverse great wall’ in US containment policy and Xi’s 2049 reunification deadline are missing from Western narratives. They explain why the US is provoking war with China in Taiwan and why China refuses to be provoked. Originally posted by Pearls and Irritations on October 26th, 2022 The US-Taiwan relationship is a long-discussed subject. Now it is even more a topic in the news with experts and government officials speaking of it being an immediate cause of a war between the United States and China. There are two issues, however, considering their importance, are not a central part of the narrative about US Taiwan policy but should be. One is Taiwan’s strategic importance to the United States. The other is China’s President Xi Jinping’s declaring a...

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin welcoming Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to a meeting at the Pentagon, Aug. 31, 2021. (DoD, Jack Sanders) In addition to advancing longstanding U.S. geo-strategic aims, it seems the proxy war in Ukraine is also being used to sharpen the imperial war machine’s claws for a looming hot war with China and/or Russia. Caitlin Johnstone December 5, 2022 Listen to a reading of this article. A surprisingly frank article in The New York Times, “Western Allies Look to Ukraine as a Testing Ground for Weapons” describes how the imperial war machine is capitalising on the U.S. proxy war to test its weapons for future use. “Ukraine has become a testing ground for state-of-the-art weapons and information systems, and new ways to use them, that Western political officials and military commanders predict could shape warfare for generations to come,” writes Lara Jakes. Jakes says “new advances in technology and...

Kenny Stancil November 28th, 2022 This escalation of U.S. hostility comes just days after the Biden administration released a Nuclear Posture Review that nonproliferation advocates said makes catastrophe more, rather than less, likely. Originally posted on Consortium News on October 31st 2022 here In what critics are calling a “dangerous escalation,” the United States is reportedly preparing to deploy up to six nuclear-capable B-52 bombers to northern Australia, where they would be close enough to strike China. “The ability to deploy U.S. Air Force bombers to Australia sends a strong message to adversaries about our ability to project lethal air power,” the U.S. Air Force told “Four Corners,” a television program of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), on Sunday. Becca Wasser, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington D.C.-based think tank, told ABC that “having bombers that could range and potentially attack mainland China could be very important in sending a...

Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta, February 1945. Photo: US Army. Richard Falk – TFF Associate November 23, 2022 Disdaining Diplomacy, Seeking Victory Ever since the Ukraine War started on February 24, 2022, the NATO response, mainly articulated and materially implemented by the U.S., has been to pour vast quantities of oil on the flames of conflict, taunting Russian and its leader, increasing the scale of violence, the magnitude of human suffering, and dangerously increasing the risk of a disastrous outcome. Not only did Washington mobilize the world to denounce Russia’s ‘aggression’, but supplied a steady stream of advanced weaponry in great quantities to the Ukrainians to resist the Russian attack and even mount counterattacks. The U.S. did all it could at the UN and elsewhere to build a punitive coalition hostile to Russia but coupled this with a variety of sanctions and the demonization of Putin as a notorious...

Tufts University November 11, 2022 The United States (US) ‘‘spends roughly as much on defense as the rest of the world put together…and remains the only country able to project military power globally.’’[1] With its extensive defense budget and capabilities, the US remains a military leader in contemporary international politics – but can this military advantage ever become a long-run disadvantage for our foreign policy? According to our data, the US has undertaken over 500 international military interventions since 1776, with nearly 60% undertaken between 1950 and 2017. What’s more, over one-third of these missions occurred after 1999.[2]  With the end of the Cold War era, we would expect the US to decrease its military interventions abroad, assuming lower threats and interests at stake. But these patterns reveal the opposite – the US has increased its military involvements abroad. Originally posted on Tufts University’s homepage here Perhaps as we exclusively...

Caitlin Johnstone November 9, 2022 Listen to a reading of this article Mainstream punditry in the latter half of 2022 is rife with op-eds arguing that the US needs to vastly increase military spending because a world war is about to erupt, and they always frame it as though this would be something that happens to the US, as though its own actions would have nothing to do with it. As though it would not be the direct result of the US-centralized empire continually accelerating towards that horrific event while refusing every possible diplomatic off-ramp due to its inability to relinquish its goal of total unipolar planetary domination. Originally published in Caitlin Johnstone’s newsletter on October 28, 2022 The latest example of this trend is an article titled “Could America Win a New World War? — What It Would Take to Defeat Both China and Russia” published by Foreign Affairs, a magazine that...