US Empire/West Decline

Tom Switzer September 25, 2020 CIS Executive Director, Tom Switzer interviews John Mearsheimer and Kishore Mahubani to ask Has China Won? At a time when tensions are running high, CIS Executive Director Tom Switzer asked Has China Won? Our debate between John Mearsheimer and Kishore Mahbubani, two of the world’s leading foreign policy intellectuals. Covid-19 has greatly raised tensions between China and the West. Washington and its allies express outrage at the Communist regime’s opacity concerning the outbreak of the coronavirus. Meanwhile, fears are growing that a pandemic that began in the Chinese city of Wuhan may end by increasing Beijing’s international influence and power. Kishore Mahbubani is author of Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy (just out, PublicAffairs) A former Singaporean ambassador to the United Nations (twice), he was the founding dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. He was a guest of...

Photograph Source: Pete Souza, White House Official Photograph – CC BY 2.0 Eric Draitser September 15, 2020 The scorching desert sun streams through narrow slats in the tiny window. A mouse scurries across the cracked concrete floor, the scuttling of its tiny feet drowned out by the sound of distant voices speaking in Arabic. Their chatter is in a western Libyan dialect distinctive from the eastern dialect favored in Benghazi. Somewhere off in the distance, beyond the shimmering desert horizon, is Tripoli, the jewel of Africa now reduced to perpetual war. But here, in this cell in a dank old warehouse in Bani Walid, there are no smugglers, no rapists, no thieves or murderers. There are simply Africans captured by traffickers as they made their way from Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, Eritrea, or other disparate parts of the continent seeking a life free of war and poverty, the rotten fruit of Anglo-American...

A demonstrator raises a fist after clashes with police in the US city of Seattle on 8 June (AFP) As calls for racial justice reverberate across the country, the field of American Studies requires a radical rethink – namely, the active engagement of people around the globe at the receiving end of US militarism.  By Hamid Dabashi September 15, 2020 “The majority lives in the perpetual practice of self-applause, and there are certain truths which the Americans can only learn from strangers or from experience.”  – Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America “Americans are the unhappiest they’ve been in 50 years,” according to recent polls. “It’s been a rough year for the American psyche.”    The deeply troubling presidency of Donald Trump has led to severe consequences of the coronavirus pandemic in the US, where the per-capita mortality rate is among the highest in the world, exacerbated by claustrophobic despair over lockdowns and social distancing, alongside...

John Scales AveryTFF Associate September 16, 2020 Why the 2020 election is so important Why did Prof. Noam Chomsky call the US Republican Party “The most dangerous organization in the history of the world”? He did so because the party is characterized by climate change denial and by support for giant fossil fuel corporations. According to the 2018 IPCC Report, the world has only a very short time left in which to stop the extraction and use of fossil fuels. If we collectively fail to do this within a decade or so, feedback loops may be initiated which will make human efforts to avoid catastrophic climate change useless. Much of the world could become uninhabitable, and a very large-scale mass extinction could be initiated. Although the worst effects of global warming lie in the long-term future, children alive today are at risk. We give our children loving care, but it...

Chris Hedges September 4, 2020 Chris Hedges discusses “Ghost Riders of the Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge,” with author Danny Sjursen, combat veteran and West Point. It’s RT’s “On Contact”. If you want to know more about Sjursen, here is his SceptialVet homepage. Originally posted on Scheerpost’s website on August 17, 2020. Please help TFF remain truly independent by contributing if you benefited from this article Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show On Contact. He has written 12 books, including the New York Times best-seller “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” (2012), which he co-authored with the cartoonist Joe...

Designer: Yu Jiansu at CGTN.com Martin Powers September 4, 2020 Ann Arbor (Special to Informed Comment) – On the left, there is widespread agreement that Trump’s immigration policies are informed by white supremacist doctrines. His travel ban on Middle Eastern nations was racially charged, not to mention restricting aid to Puerto Ricans ravaged by a hurricane. Combined with the utter absence of sympathy for families of murdered Americans, it would appear that race connects the dots in this administration’s policy puzzle, yet Trump-team’s hysterical China-bashing is often accepted as a legitimate response to an existential threat. Can we be certain that race plays no part in that drama? Originally posted on Informed Comment on August 29, 2020. Many recognize crude name-calling, like “Kung-flu,” as racist, but apart from that, a common give-away is contempt for outstanding performance by members of supposedly inferior groups. Kamala Harris is too “ambitious” (for a...

August 24, 2020 Michael Wong Vice President of Veterans For Peace, Chapter 69 America vs. China: “A Clash of Civilizations” Hillary Clinton famously said, “’I don’t want my grandchildren to live in a world dominated by the Chinese.”   During his tenure, President Obama launched his “Pivot to Asia,” moving 60% of US naval power to bases surrounding China, developing the Trans Pacific Partnership treaty specifically to economically isolate China, making Air-Sea Battle the official US doctrine explicitly to contain China militarily, and announcing boldly that his aim was to contain China’s economic rise.  Not surprisingly, China reacted with alarm. The Cold War was long over, China’s economic rise was a peaceful one, it had no aggressive intentions towards the US or anyone, and prior to Obama’s “Pivot to Asia,” relations had been stable and tension low, China argued. Such arguments from China, however, were dismissed by US leaders.    Originally published at peacepivot.org...

Photo: U.S. President Richard Nixon and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai toast, Feb. 25, 1972. (White House/Wikimedia Commons) A rant by Mike Pompeo regarding what the U.S. should do with China led to a fruitful exchange between an old China, and an old Soviet hand, writes Ray McGovern. August 24. 2020 Ray McGovern Quick. Somebody tell Mike Pompeo. The secretary of state is not supposed to play the role of court jester — the laughing stock to the world. There was no sign that any of those listening to his “major China policy statement” last Thursday at the Nixon Library turned to their neighbor and said, “He’s kidding, right? Richard Nixon meant well but failed miserably to change China’s behavior? And now Pompeo is going to put them in their place?” Originally published at consortiumnews.com Yes, that was Pompeo’s message. The torch has now fallen to him and the free world. Here’s...

Dilip Hiro August 20, 2020 (Tomdispatch.com) – For the Trump administration’s senior officials, it’s been open season on bashing China. If you need an example, think of the president’s blame game about “the invisible Chinese virus” as it spreads wildly across the U.S. When it comes to China, in fact, the ever more virulent criticism never seems to stop. Between the end of June and the end of July, four members of his cabinet vied with each other in spewing anti-Chinese rhetoric. That particular spate of China bashing started when FBI Director Christopher Wray described Chinese President Xi Jinping as the successor to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. It was capped by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s clarion call to U.S. allies to note the “bankrupt” Marxist-Leninist ideology of China’s leader and the urge to “global hegemony” that goes with it, insisting that they would have to choose “between freedom and...

Here’s what a new President ought to do in the first two weeks to put the US on a fundamentally new course, not the least in terms of White House dignity and a new foreign policy Andrew Bacevich Assume Joe Biden wins the presidency. Assume as well that he genuinely intends to repair the damage our country has sustained since we declared ourselves history’s “Indispensable Nation,” compounded by the traumatic events of 2020 that demolished whatever remnants of that claim survived. Assume, that is, that this aging career politician and creature of the Washington establishment really intends to salvage something of value from all that has been lost. If he seriously intends to be more than a relic of pre-Trump liberal centrism, how exactly should President Biden go about making his mark?Here, free of charge, Joe, is an action plan that will get you from Election Night through your first...

Gregory Shupak August 20, 2020 Corporate media are laying the ideological groundwork for a new cold war with China, presenting the nation as a hostile power that needs to be kept in check. Mitt Romney (Washington Post,  4/23/20) says “Covid-19 has exposed China’s dishonesty for all to see.” The Washington Post (4/23/20) ran an article by Republican Sen. Mitt Romney, the second sentence of which said, “The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed that, to a great degree, our very health is in Chinese hands; from medicines to masks, we are at Beijing’s mercy.” America, in this conception, is under Chinese domination, a tyranny that’s evidently imposed not only by the Chinese government, but by Chinese people generally. Originally published by FAIR on May 15, 2020 here Details like the US having more than 21 times as many nuclear warheads as China, or the fact that it’s the US dollar and not...

During the height of the Cold War when it was viewed as disloyal and compromising to show a sympathetic interest in Marxism or sympathies with Soviet ideology, someone at the U.S. military base at Frankfurt distributed to the soldiers stationed there, a handwritten version of the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments of the U.S. Constitution, in the form of petition. Very few of the soldiers approached were willing to affix their signatures, most alleging that this seemed a subversive document circulated by enemies of the United States, and was Soviet propaganda. Somehow the Western propaganda message that the Cold War was about the defense of ‘the free world’ against a totalitarian enemy had made no impact, or alternatively, that the free world had nothing to do with the substantive elements of freedom as social practice. Originally posted on Richard Falk’s personal blog on August 8, 2020 here For...