US Empire/West Decline

Gordon Hahn November 10, 2023 The world split is quickly evolving into something less like a split – if by ‘split’ one means a more or less evenly balanced division between two parts – and more like the isolation of one smaller part of the international community from a larger, significant or supermajority. Moreover, this isolation resembles self-solation, and the self-isolated party is the West. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Even before the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War, Washington and Brussels were touting success in isolating first Russia and then China from ‘community of democracies’ (even as Washington was itself abandoning what should properly be called not democratic government but republican government). Instead, the reverse is occurring. By means of arrogance and obstinance, the West, led by Washington, is finding itself increasingly isolated. The West’s isolation is largely an accidental self-isolation brought about by a series of radical policy choices...

Gerhard Schroeder’s revelations about why negotiations broke down last spring are even more depressing than you might think. Why did the US/NATO world want the war to continue when it could have been stopped long ago? Tarik Cyril Amar* October 26, 2023 In a much-cited interview, ex-German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has stated that a compromise peace to end the war in Ukraine was well within reach when negotiators met in Istanbul last spring. This deal would have meant an end to NATO’s long march east, Ukrainian neutrality, international security guarantees, and domestic arrangements to reintegrate the separatist territories in the Donbass.   Ending the war so quickly would have made a great difference, as even a few basic figures will show. While key data remains secret and estimates are contested, it is certain that Europe’s largest conflict since World War II has led to several hundred thousand military casualties. Figures for...

Richard E. Rubenstein October 23, 2023 Everyone knows that the United States is the world’s leading military power, with an annual “defense” budget approaching one trillion dollars, considerably more than the arms budgets of the next 144 nations combined. The U.S. employs more than 3.5 million active military and civilian personnel and maintains more than 750 military bases located in some 80 nations around the world. The nation’s most profitable and fastest-growing manufacturing sector is the military-industrial complex, which employs more than 4 million workers and supplies approximately 40 percent of the total weaponry used by the world’s armed forces. In the production and deployment of nuclear weapons, of course, the U.S. is absolutely dominant. Originally published at Transcend on October 2, 2023 All this is common knowledge. Yet, in the heartland of arms production and preparation for war, there is virtually no debate about militarism. Only a handful of...

It’s about fighting against evil/Putin/Hitler and fighting for democracy… NATO’s Jens Stoltenberg admits that Russia was motivated by NATO to invade Ukraine. Video creator Matt Orfalea shows how often we were told that the war was absolutely “not about NATO”… October 3, 2023 There is no need for an intro or comments to this short documentation of lies by high-level people and mainstream media. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so tragic… Always help spreading this tag #NOTONATO, thanks!

Jan Oberg Originally published by Global Times, Beijing, on September 5, 2023 September 28, 2023 A couple of years ago, The Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, TFF, in Sweden, of which I am the director, published ”Behind The Smokescreen. An Analysis of the West’s Destructive China Cold War Agenda And Why It Must Stop” (130 pages). Among several perspectives of the U.S./Western accusation industry, we looked into the medialised stories about genocide in Xinjiang, forced labour, and Taiwan and nine mainstream media manipulation methods that aim to manufacture a systematically negative image of China in the Western mind. We found that the Cold War happens by attempts to influence the ’free’ press – also the Western state press – through three main mechanisms: a) Fake or fabricated stories, b) Omission – for instance, of every positive aspect of China’s developments, and c) Source Ignorance: using the same few...

US lawmakers say the alliance’s movement into Asia is “inevitable.” It’s actually a completely avoidable, completely bad idea. Branko Marcetic September 15, 2023 A little over a century ago, rising inter-imperial tensions coupled with a complicated, evidence board–like set of alliances pulled Europe into the most disastrous, pointless war the world had ever seen up to then, World War I. Today, a ’roided-up version of that scenario is looming, as US-China relations deteriorate and the NATO alliance begins to dip several toes in Asia, nearly six thousand miles away from its headquarters in Brussels. Originally published at Jacobin on July 29, 2023 This isn’t an exaggeration. Asked recently at a joint appearance on Meet the Press whether NATO’s expansion into Asia was “inevitable,” Senators Tammy Duckworth (an Illinois Democrat) and Dan Sullivan (an Alaska Republican) answered yes. “Oh, I think it is,” said Sullivan. “I agree with my friend,” said Duckworth. They had good...

Joint demonstration of the trade unions on May Day in Berlin under the slogan Unbroken Solidarity. Photography K.M.Krause via Reuters Anatol Lieven & George Beebe August 23, 2023 Demonizing Russian culture and people only makes peace in Ukraine harder to achieve and plays into Putin’s propaganda A deeply sinister and dangerous tendency has made its appearance in Western writing about the war in Ukraine. This is the extension of hatred for the Putin regime and its crimes to the entire Russian people, the Russian national tradition, and Russian culture. This tendency is of course bitterly familiar from the history of hostile propaganda, but precisely for that reason we should have learned to shun it. The banning of Russian cultural events and calls for the “decolonization” of Russian literature and Russian studies recall the propaganda of all sides during the First World War, which did so much to embitter that war and make its peaceful resolution...

Jan Oberg August 19, 2023 On August 19, 2023, it is 70 years ago that the US/CIA and others, with the assistance of their British peers, did one of its countless regime changes worldwide, namely in Iran: The U.S.- and UK-instigated, Iranian army-led overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in favour of strengthening the monarchical rule of the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Here is Wikipedia’s detailed account of this shameful act. And with the exception of the years under the Shah’s rule, relations between the West and Iran have been utterly conflictual ever since, and every potential for cooperation has been squandered. The US has felt its usual exceptionalist privilege to harass the country decade after decade, telling it that it will never acquire nuclear weapons, which the US itself and Israel have plenty of – and which it’s doubtful that Iran ever wanted to acquire –...

A video conversation with Chas Freeman August 10, 2023 Chas Freeman is a legend of US diplomacy – since he served as interpreter for Kissinger and Nixon during their visit to China in 1972. He is also an academic and prolific writer and commentator. An intellectual that offers so much more than anybody serving as an ambassador in today’s NATO countries. You will find his homepage here with much about him and his thoughts. Although a staunch American, he is not the type Western mainstream media would turn to since he has the ‘wrong’ views on several essentially important things. I’ve also come to appreciate Neutrality Studies’ YouTube Channel. Browse it when you are anyhow there, but – first – listen carefully to this conversation that starts out with Henry Kissinger’s visit to China and moves on to very important aspects of Taiwan and beyond. Jan Oberg, Editor

In the 17th century, Ming China represented roughly one-third of global output, and Mughal India a little less. Together the two countries accounted for more than half of the world’s output, with a corresponding size of populations (as a proportion of the total global population). By the 1950s, Mao China was a mere 5 per cent of global GDP. India only 1 per cent. Today, after several decades of exceptional economic progress, particularly in China, there is now a historic rise of the Global South. The two behemoths – China and India, and others in the South – are now reclaiming their historic economic weight in the world.  The 2013 UNDP Human Development Report documented this rise of the Global South presenting evidence that China, India, and Brazil were collectively in the process of exceeding western developed countries in terms of trade and global output. China is now the largest...

By Helmut Scheben* July 18, 2023 Mass media are often unreliable, but hardly anyone has time to check the news. If news reports later turn out to be false, they are usually already burned into the hard drive of collective memory as “historical truth”. Originally published at Zeit-Fragen After the Gulf War of 1991, it was forbidden for the media in the US to show pictures of the coffins of American soldiers killed in combat. This prohibition was lifted only in February 2009. Filming dead or wounded US soldiers were also banned, and the ban was enforced with extreme severity, especially during the Iraq war, as cameramen reported. Once, when I was looking for such footage in the vast archives of Swiss television, I found a single sequence that lasted about three seconds. An American soldier was trying to climb out of a burning tank. Three seconds out of thousands...

Edward Curtin July 19, 2023 Social psychosis is widespread. In the words of the British psychiatrist, RD Laing, “The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.” He was not referring to raving, drooling, hitting-your-head-against-the-wall lunacy but a taken-for-granted acceptance of a world long teetering on the edge of nuclear extinction, to take the most extreme example, but surely only one of many.  Originally published at Off Guardian on July 9, 2023 The insouciant acceptance and support of psychotic rulers who promote first-strike nuclear war is very common. First strike nuclear policy is United States policy. I recently wrote an article about the dangers of the fourteen US Trident submarines. These subs constantly cruise under the oceans carrying 3,360 nuclear warheads equivalent to 134,400 Hiroshima bombs. All are on first strike triggers. And of course these are supplemented by all the land...