US Empire/West Decline

Jan Oberg June 22, 2021 Empires come and go. Innovation, vision and power lead to their establishment. If they have good carrying capacity they spread, grow and mature. Their relative power begins to increase, ascendance in more than one field, then consolidation on top–a very dangerous moment when you are second to none–extension and peak and, sooner or later with over-extension–begins the decline, ’fatigue’, lack of innovation, vision and leadership, dissolution and unavoidable fall. All empires decline and fall none have lasted forever. The next – and last – empire to fall is God’s own exceptionalist country, the United States of America. The indicators are pretty obvious in all sectors including the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, MIMAC: Economic decline with uniquely high debts, muddling through with no vision (not an unclear vision but no vision) and trying to solve problems by just injecting money into a manifestly malfunctioning system instead of investing...

Photo credit: uschinadialogue.georgetown.edu Tom Engelhardt June 10, 2021 Let me start with my friend and the boat. Admittedly, they might not seem to have anything to do with each other. The boat, a guided-missile destroyer named the USS Curtis Wilbur, reportedly passed through the Straits of Taiwan and into the South China Sea, skirting the Paracel Islands that China has claimed as its own. It represented yet another Biden-era challenge to the planet’s rising power from its falling one. My friend was thousands of miles away on the West Coast of the United States, well vaccinated and going nowhere in Covid-stricken but improving America. Published at juancole.com & Tomdispatch.com 06.07.2021 As it happens, she’s slightly younger than me, but still getting up there, and we were chatting on the phone about our world, about the all-too-early first wildfire near Los Angeles, the intensifying mega-drought across the West and Southwest, the increasing nightmare of hurricane season in the Atlantic and so on. We...

About a Senate bill enshrining a zero-sum approach to Beijing that will surely set us on a course of escalation. Michael D. Swaine June 14, 2021 This is the first installment in a multi-part Responsible Statecraft series on the Strategic Competition Act (S. 1169), a bill under consideration that would effectively constitute a declaration of cold war on China by the U.S. Congress. We begin with an overview of the bill’s framing of the threat China poses to the United States and other nations and what to do about it. It will be followed by separate essays delving into greater detail analyzing the inaccurate assessments and policy changes suggested in several critical areas: Taiwan, the South China Sea maritime disputes, North Korea, educational exchanges, influence operations, and the Belt and Road Initiative. Originally published at responsiblestatecraft.org The Strategic Competition Act, recently approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, constitutes a de...

May 23, 2021 Richard Falk, TFF Associate Prefatory Note: The post below is a slightly modified version of Policy Paper #4 RESPONDING TO CHINESE VIOLATIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS, published previously on the website of the Committee for a Sane China Policy. It reflects my view that the protection of human rights is being geopolitically manipulated to mobilize public support for an anti-Chinese foreign policy in the West that risks generating a dangerous geopolitical confrontation. Such a confrontation is costly, amounts to war-mongering, and diverts U.S. attention from self-scrutiny and global peacebuilding. Whether a second cold war is already underway is a matter of interpretation, but even those reluctant to reach such a depressing assessment would have to acknowledge that unless there are strong efforts made to support what I would call ‘inclusive global multipolarity,’ the drift toward such a dismal near-term future will become inevitable. The need to sound the alarm...

Image by Stock File Madison Tang and Jodie Evans May 23, 2021 U.S. President Joe Biden’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year was recently announced, and it requests $715 billion for his first Pentagon budget, 1.6 percent more than the $704 billion enacted under Trump’s administration. The outline states that the primary justification for this increase in military spending is to counter the threat of China, and identifies China as the U.S.’s “top challenge.” Within the proposal is an endorsement of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command head Admiral Philip Davidson’s request for $4.7 billion for the “Pacific Deterrence Initiative,” which will increase U.S. military capabilities in Guam and the surrounding region. The Indo-Pacific Command is also requesting $27 billion in additional spending between 2022 and 2027 to build a network of precision-strike missiles along the islands surrounding Beijing. This article was originally published at Pressenza The U.S.’s unilateral aggression toward China—in...

Cyrus Janssen May 19, 2021 Many Americans view China in a completely wrong way. They only view it from the eyes of an American. But how does a Chinese person view China? Is China a threat to the USA? Is China going to overtake the US? In today’s video I break down my thoughts on the America’s foreign policy towards China and reveal the truth about China. This video was posted at Cyrus Janssens Youtube Channel, May 14. 2021 About the author: Cyrus Janssen is an American Expat that has lived in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Vancouver over the past 14 years. He is passionate about showing a true insight into China and loves sharing about his travels around the world. Here is his amazing YouTube Channel with 137 000 subscribers. A great example of citizens’ media/reporting – much better informed and free than many Western mainstream media reporters. Please...

Alan Macleod May 17, 2021 Aggression, in international politics, is commonly defined as the use of armed force against another sovereign state, not justified by self-defense or international authority. Any state being described as aggressive in foreign or international reporting, therefore, is almost by definition in the wrong. Originally posted on FAIR.org, April 30, 2021 It’s a word that seems easy to apply to the United States, which launched 81 foreign interventions between 1946 and 2000 alone. In the 21st century, the United States has attacked, invaded or occupied the sovereign states of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Despite the US record, Western corporate media overwhelmingly reserve the word “aggression” for official enemy nations—whether or not it’s warranted. In contrast, US behavior is almost never categorized as aggressive, thereby giving readers a misleading picture of the world. Perhaps the most notable internationally aggressive act in recent memory...

William Astore May 6, 2021 Introduction to the article Once upon a time, the Europeans had the copyright on naming lengthy wars: the Hundred Years’ War, the Eighty Years’ War, the Thirty Years’ War. I suspect, however, that it’s past time for the U.S. to enter that competition. After all, soon after we arrive at September 11, 2021, barring a genuine surprise, this country will have been fighting its twenty-first-century wars unsuccessfully for two decades. In other words, the conflict launched as the Global War on Terror in the days after the 9/11 attacks (the one that then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld imagined targeting terror networks in up to 60 countries) has never either faintly succeeded or ended. It’s only spread to ever newer realms of death and disaster in distant lands (while bouncing back on this country in ever stranger ways), even as trillions and trillions of taxpayer dollars went down the drain. Shouldn’t the increasingly riven citizens of...

Photo taken on April 17, 2021 shows the Boao Forum for Asia International Conference Center in Boao Town, South China’s Hainan province. [Photo/Xinhua] Tom Fowdy April 28, 2021 At the Boao Forum for Asia, a regional summit for government, business and academia typically hosted in Hainan province, China said that it does not seek hegemony and that it does not strive to displace the United States, only seeking fairness and justice in the international system. This came amid the Western mainstream media repeatedly framing Washington and Beijing as being in a competition for global dominance. Unfortunately, this view is shared by many politicians in the United States increasingly depicting China as a threat and a strategic competitor – espousing the language of the Cold War. Originally published at china.org.cn What is hegemony? In international relations, a hegemon is a state that wields so much undisputed power that has almost complete...

File photo. A portrait of China’s President Xi Jinping in Beijing, China © AFP / Wang Zhao Tom Fowdy April 28, 2021 Chinese- and Russian-funded journalism is ‘disinformation,’ but when Washington spends millions on ‘independent’ news outlets and buying journalists to get favourable coverage of its policies, it’s called ‘spreading information.’ The US Senate last week passed a bumper anti-China bill titled the S.1169 – Strategic Competition Act of 2021  Backed by Chuck Schumer (Dem, New York) as one of his biggest priorities since becoming the Majority leader, the 270+ page document contains scores of recommendations and provisions on formalizing America’s “geopolitical competition” against Beijing, including in the fields of military, diplomacy, technology, trade and more. There’s little question it will be passed into law, having already cleared the Senate and with the anti-Chinese sentiment in Washington being routinely bipartisan.  Originally published at rt.com The bill also notably pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in various...

Photo credit: The United Nations The UN Security Council is now the battleground for a new Cold War between the US and China Thalif Deen April 23, 2021 UNITED NATIONS, Apr 14 2021 (IPS) – A new Cold War – this time, between the US and China —is threatening to paralyze the UN’s most powerful body, even as military conflicts and civil wars are sweeping across the world, mostly in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. The growing criticism against the Security Council is directed largely at its collective failures to resolve ongoing conflicts and political crises in several hot spots, including Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, Myanmar, Somalia, South Sudan, Ukraine and Libya — and its longstanding failure over Palestine. The sharp divisions between China and Russia, on one side, and the Western powers on the other, are expected to continue, triggering the question: Has the Security Council outlived its...

Photo credit: off-guardian.org Edward Curtin April 22 2021 The Incompetent, Negligent, Mishandling, Miscalculating Elite Blunderers You’ve heard of them, no doubt, the U.S. rulers who can’t rule too well and are always getting surprised by events or fed bad advice by their underlings.  Their “mistakes” are always well intentioned. They stumble into wars through faulty intelligence.  They drop the ball because of bureaucratic mix-ups. They miscalculate the perfidy of the elites whom allegedly they oppose while ushering them into the national coffers out of necessity since they are too big to fail.  They never see the storm coming, even as they create it.  Their incompetence is the retort to all those nut cases who conjure up conspiracy theories to explain their actions or lack thereof.  They are innocent.  Always innocent. Originally published by off-guardian.org They and their media mouthpieces offer Americans, who are most eager to accept, what Lutheran pastor and...