US Empire decline

Dennis Argall February 13th, 2023 The US is at war, and the dollar is at risk of imminent collapse. Australia’s lobbying of the United States as a good ally should focus on these issues above all else. Originally posted on John Menadue’s journal Pearls and Irritations on January 19th, 2023 I am aware that many readers will say oh dear, you must not talk like that. But it’s sensible to discuss the distance to the ground before we jump off the cliff. And a lot has already gone over the cliff. In the narrow spectrum of security, focused on war and peace, the largest problems we cannot afford to ignore right now are as follows: War elements are increasingly out of control, In Europe and elsewhere. Clausewitz was right, war drives out policy and pursues its own ends. We are effectively in a world war, and the barrier to nuclear...

Cover of Seymour Hersh’s article on Substack Jan Oberg February 12, 2023 The Chinese news agency, Xinhua, asked me to comment – in text and video form – on Seymour Hersh’s analysis of how the Nordstream pipelines were destroyed. You’ll find this analysis on Substack, which means that no American mainstream media has been willing to publish it. After five days, this bombshell report goes virtually unmentioned in the Western mainstream press. Imagine if he had documented that Russia did it… Pulitzer Prize awarded Hersh has a series of now classical investigations behind him. He is seen by many as the finest living investigative reporter. Read about this man who every decent media should be proud of publishing. Seymour Hersh’s fine analysis tells how the destruction was planned and done, but the conclusion is unsurprising if you apply an interest analysis: The US, with very important Norwegian assistance, committed the...

President Bush and Russian President Yeltsin announce the end of the cold war during a press conference at Camp David, February 1, 1992. Source: Bush Library on Twitter @Bush41Library. Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton February 7, 2023 Russian President Proposed Far-Reaching Nuclear Reductions, Bush Not So Sure U.S. ambassador on Yeltsin: Russians “want a tsar with a common touch” Russian leaders sensitive to Ukrainian concerns but saw Ukraine as the “main destabilizing factor” Washington D.C., January 30, 2023 – The George H.W. Bush administration was reluctant to embrace the “relations of deep mutual trust and alliance” proposed by the newly independent Russian Federation and its leader, Boris Yeltsin, in early 1992, according to declassified U.S. documents published today by the National Security Archive. The Bush administration’s cautious management of U.S.-Soviet relations at the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 had focused primarily on command and control of the remaining Soviet...

“Ingsoc. The sacred principles of ingsoc. Newspeak, double-speak, the mutability of the past.” – George Orwell, 1984 Edward Curtin January 24, 2023 As today dawned, I was looking out the window into the cold grayness with small patches of snow littering the frozen ground.  As light snow began to fall, I felt a deep mourning in my soul as a memory came to me of another snowy day in 1972 when I awoke to news of Richard Nixon’s savage Christmas bombing of North Vietnam with more than a hundred B-52 bombers, in wave after wave, dropping death and destruction on Hanoi and other parts of North Vietnam.  I thought of the war the United States is now waging against Russia via Ukraine and how, as during the U.S. war against Vietnam, few Americans seem to care until it becomes too late.  It depressed me. Soon after I was greeted by...

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (on screen) of Ukraine, addresses the Security Council meeting on the situation in Ukraine. “We are dealing with a State that is turning the veto of the United Nations Security Council into the right to die”, President Zelynskyy warned. If it continues, countries will rely not on international law or global institutions to ensure security, but rather, on the power of their own arms. April 2022. Credit: UN Photo/Loey Felipe Thalif Deen January 24, 2023 UNITED NATIONS, Jan 2 2023 (IPS) – A US Senator once described Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, perhaps facetiously, as “a Winston Churchill in a tee shirt”. And last month, when he addressed the US Congress – with the presence of about 100 Senators and 435 Congressmen – he tried to re-live that moment. While most of the Senators and Congressmen were in business suits for the formal occasion, Zelensky opted for green military fatigues and...

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...

This article was published on January 5, 2023, by the very important Chinese “Global Times” under the headline, Two reasons that Europe would be forced to decouple from the US. Please read it directly there and, when you are anyhow there, browse a bit, see various menus and articles – and ask yourself why Global Times is consistently called a “tabloid” by Western mainstream people and media.

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...

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...

Institut Montaigne’s broad-spectrum interview, on October 13, 2022, with Fyodor A. Lukyanov, Chairman of the Russian Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy and editor-in-chief of the “Russia in Global Affairs” journal. Note to our readers We intend in the future to publish more materials by Russian scholars and intellectuals because the de facto cancellation by NATO/EU countries of such views and of access to leading Russian media is both unfair, a violation of human rights and an element in a self-serving media warfare which, regrettably, only makes a peaceful, negotiated resolution even more difficult. We believe it is necessary to hear all conflict participants’ motives and views to be able to help solve a conflict peacefully. Any professional conflict analyst and mediator knows that and also that that does not mean an implicit endorsement of everything stated. Earlier ones are published here, here and here. – Jan...

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...