US Empire/West Decline

In 2021 the administration said it would pursue ‘relentless diplomacy.’ They call it something else today in Ukraine. Ted Snider October 9, 2024 It is said that Henry Kissinger asserted that little can be won at the negotiating table that isn’t earned on the battlefield. In several wars in recent weeks, U.S. officials have echoed that approach. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller recently said that the U.S. “supports[s] a ceasefire” in Lebanon while simultaneously recognizing that “military pressure can at times enable diplomacy.” Meanwhile, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has expressed the doctrine as doing “all that we can to strengthen Ukraine’s position on the battlefield so it has the strongest possible position at the negotiating table.” This article was published first by Responsible Statecraft on October 8, 2024 here But during the Biden administration, the iteration of Kissinger’s doctrine has gone well beyond the generals supporting the diplomats. The...

Jan Oberg July 26, 2024 In its recent analysis – “How Four US Presidents Unleashed Economic Warfare Across the Globe” – The Washington Post illustrates what I have called “sanctionitis” – the disease of (over)using sanctions as a means to conduct foreign policy and cause great harm to the world economy, the US economy but also to millions of innocent people who suffer from the consequences of them. But the WP merely points out that sanctions are inefficient from a US point of view in that they have not achieved what was intended, indeed sometimes the opposite. It uses various kinds of pejoratives like “dictator” about leaders of states the US sees as enemies. It fails completely to point out that sanctions – particularly long-term sanctions – are, mostly, grossly immoral because of their humanitarian consequences. Be this as it may, something has happened when Washington Post does publish such...

Photo by Tim Mossholder “We’re the greatest nation on the face of the earth… I have never been more optimistic about the future of our country… There’s no country in the world better positioned to lead the world than America… Just remember who we are. We are the United States of America, for God’s sake.” Joe Biden, US President Richard Falk July 11, 2024 The Democratic Party is waging its 2024 electoral campaign by focusing on two themes: first, a denunciation of all that Trump proposes to bring to the presidency, centering on the destruction of American democracy if elected, and secondly, a positive domestic record of the Biden years with several notable benefits for the American people including jobs and wages, climate, energy policy, social protection, gun control, and a stock market at record highs. What is missing from this rosy picture of America and even more so from...

Michael Brenner June 4, 2024 Is the West launching an all-out war against global ‘South,’ against the BRICS – plus, against the ‘other’? Are we in the first stages of a civilizational struggle initiated by the U.S.-led assemblage we call the “collective West”? That would have seemed an absurd idea until very recently. How can one reconcile such a dire proposition in the age of Globalization, of inter-dependence? Where is the threat of a magnitude and immediacy that might stir that kind of thinking? Yet, there are remarkable developments on the world scene that suggest that dramatic alterations indeed are in the offing. Let us examine them; then interpolate what systemic meaning they might auger.  • Palestine is the most revealing, graphic indicator that something is badly askew in the mentality of political elites in North America and Europe – with resonance among their accommodating publics. Complicity in the genocidal actions of Israel...

Or how Ukraine will end Western hegemony Glenn Diesen talks with Pascal Lottaz May 16, 2024 In his new book “The Ukraine War and the Eurasian World Order”, Professor Glenn Diesen argues compellingly that the way the world used to work not only for the past century, but for the past 500 years is over and done with. From here on, the global system will be much more dynamic, multi-polar, and much more complex. Professor Diesen also shows how Ukraine has been a pawn in the hands of NATO warmongers who despite their best efforts, however, have not been able to break even one of their strategic rivals in the system. The time of Western impunity is ending. The question is, what comes next? Glenn Diesen is a professor at the University of Southeast Norway and an associate editor at the Journal “Russia in Global Affairs”. Many of you certainly...

Liberal democracies remain shamefully complicit with Israel, despite its ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people Students of world politics have long understood that when it comes to the strategic interests of leading states, international law is marginalised unless it is useful in waging a propaganda war against adversaries.  Indeed, the United Nations was designed in ways that recognised this feature of international political life. Otherwise, giving the winners of World War II a right of veto would make no sense.  Such an exemption from international law was also evident at the war crimes trials held in Nuremberg and Tokyo after World War II, at which only the crimes of the losers were scrutinised for legal accountability, and obvious crimes of the victors – such as the indiscriminate bombing of Dresden and the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – were not prosecuted.  To this day, for understandable reasons, many...

A major publishing event in the field of security studies A unique and very thorough 11-part analysis of the US National Security Strategy from October 2022. Christman began publishing it at the beginning of May 2023. If you want to know what the United States is up to in terms of its ‘national security’ and what the costs and risks will likely be – to itself and to the world – this is where you begin. Kristin Christman’s eleven articles were originally published by Countercurrents. Note that they were not published by a leading American magazine or the weekend edition of a large daily; they were not in any mainstream media in the US or Europe. And we know why. TFF is proud to follow up and give her genuinely independent and tremendously knowledgeable research a further boost. All her texts are also published on Christman’s YouTube Channel. The links to the following ten...

Farhang Jahanpour Professor emeritus & TFF Associate* April 10, 2024 The world is in turmoil and perhaps closer to the possibility of a devastating nuclear war than at any time since the Second World War. There are at least three ongoing conflicts that have the potential of expanding into something much more serious that will lead to regional or even global wars. Wars are raging in the heart of Europe, the Middle East and, if some US hawks can get their way, soon there will be another disastrous war between the West and China. Yet, world leaders seem to be asleep and are moving blindly towards the precipice. War in Ukraine On 25 March 2024, in a letter to President Joe Biden, a large number of the members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity warned that in the light of the reports that France was preparing to dispatch a force...

With the superego dissolved, there is no felt obligation to judge oneself in reference to any external or abstract standard. Narcissistic tendencies flourish. A similar psychology removes the requisite for experiencing shame. Is there now a moral void at the heart of Western societies?  That question haunts us as governments in the United States and Europe act as accomplices in Israel’s atrocious crimes against the Palestinians. The Jewish state’s conduct meets the standard of genocide as stated in the United Nations Convention on Genocide, of which they all are signatories. Confirmation is likely to come soon in a conclusive determination by the International Court of Justice. The ICJ already in January recognized a prime facie case for genocide. The UN’s top court ordered Israel to take all measures to prevent genocidal acts in Gaza. The ICJ found it did have jurisdiction on the matter, and decided there was a plausible case under the 1948 Genocide Convention. At...

Jan Oberg April 8, 2024 This 7-minute video was shot by The China Academy in January 2024, posted on Wave Media on YouTube and then picked up by Taiwan’s CTi News and the Chinese Global Times magazine. This means a very large audience. Here is the link to see the many comments it created. I’m simply trying, in the shortest possible manner, to summarise what is happening these years from a macrohistorical perspective. If you think this way of thinking is interesting, why not reward TFF for bringing you fresh, different perspectives and always with a touch of a better future and a more peaceful world? It’s fast, simple and safe. Just hit this Big Red Button

Jan Oberg February 28, 2024 Jeffrey D. Sachs has recently written a short and highly informative article about the decades-long, disgustingly destructive activities of the Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, in every corner of the world. Below, we bring you here the first part of that and then direct your attention to a very well-researched article by investigative reporters of the New York Times that documents how the CIA has been playing its dirty games in Ukraine the last ten years since the US-orchestrated and -financed regime change – which is when the present NATO-Russia conflict and the war in Ukraine can be said to have started (although it can also be seen as having much older roots. There are facts that, generally speaking, most people have probably heard very little of. One must appreciate that both authors below are Americans. That this type of activity can continue virtually without attention...

NATO now holds its largest military exercise for decades, Steadfast Defender, involving 90 000 troops from all 31 NATO members and Sweden Jan Oberg February 19, 2024 Over the last 70 years, we have heard here in Europe that ”the Russians are coming.” During the old Cold War ending in 1991, they did come to Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968) – and Afghanistan (1979). But they came neither to any of the neutral countries – Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, Yugoslavia or Austria – nor to any NATO member. NATO’s militarist predictions and enemy images have proven consistently wrong over seven decades. During the First Cold War, the Moscow-dominated Warsaw Pact’s military expenditures were about 65-80% of NATO, and its technology and efficiency was way behind that of its Western brother. But to be sure, the OSCE – the Organisation of Security and Cooperation in Europe (set up in the early 1970s with...