Eucner Posted April 30, 2022 Share Posted April 30, 2022 4 hours ago, redsnapper said: Finland has maintained neutrality ( no nato ) and a sizeable border with Russia and prospered without nato. Is this impossible in UKR? Many seems to forget that Finland's special position was paid with blood. It is exactly what Ukraine is doing now. If they push Russians back, there won't be another war for a very long time. 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
redsnapper Posted April 30, 2022 Share Posted April 30, 2022 (edited) 5 hours ago, Eucner said: Many seems to forget that Finland's special position was paid with blood. It is exactly what Ukraine is doing now. If they push Russians back, there won't be another war for a very long time. Even with continuous western re-supply of weapons, UKR will likely suffer significant losses. Winter War in Finland was of a very different nature - not a proxy war at all - and still Finland later chose not to join NATO ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finlandization ). In this case hard to imagine that Putin will retreat without concessions on NATO expansion neutrality etc. That being said, Putin has already consolidated significant gains by having partners (China,India,etc) accept nonUSD energy transactions and have the entire southern hemisphere refuse to align with the west on sanctions. So in part Russian strategic objectives may already be partially met? No one really knows how this will play out but certainly seems that prolonged conflict and death is likely given US refusal to participate in diplomatic solution... Edited May 1, 2022 by redsnapper Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
redsnapper Posted May 1, 2022 Share Posted May 1, 2022 (edited) Quote The Chris Hedges Report: Ukraine and the ‘Worthy’ and ‘Unworthy’ Victims of War TRANSCRIPT Chris Hedges: Welcome to The Chris Hedges Report. Rulers divide the world into worthy and unworthy victims. Those we are allowed to pity, such as Ukrainians enduring the hell of modern warfare, and those whose suffering is minimized, dismissed, or ignored. The terror we and our allies carry out against Iraqi, Palestinian, Syrian, Libyan, Somali, and Yemeni civilians is part of the regrettable cost of war. We, echoing the empty promises from Moscow, claim we do not target civilians. Rulers always paint their militaries as humane, there to serve and protect. Collateral damage happens, but it is regrettable. This lie can only be sustained among those who are unfamiliar with the explosive ordinance and large kill zones of missiles, iron fragmentation bombs, mortar, artillery and tank shells, and belt-fed machine guns. This bifurcation of the world into worthy and unworthy victims, as Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky point out in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, is a key component of propaganda, especially in war. The Russian-speaking population in Ukraine, to Moscow, are worthy victims. Russia is their savior. The millions of refugees and the millions of Ukrainian families cowering in basements, car parks, and subway stations are unworthy Nazis. Worthy victims allow citizens to see themselves as empathetic, compassionate, and just. Worthy victims are an effective tool to demonize the aggressor. They are used to obliterate nuance and ambiguity. Mention the provocations carried out by the Western Alliance with the expansion of NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany, a violation of promises made to Moscow in 1990, the stationing of NATO troops and missile batteries in Eastern Europe, the US involvement in the ouster in 2014 of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, which led to the civil war in the East of Ukraine between Russian-backed separatists and Ukraine’s army, a conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives, and you are dismissed as a Putin apologist. It is to taint the sainthood of the worthy victims, and by extension ourselves. We are good. They are evil. Worthy victims are used not only to express sanctimonious outrage, but to stoke self-adulation and a poisonous nationalism. The cause becomes sacred, a religious crusade. Fact-based evidence is abandoned, as it was during the calls to invade Iraq. Charlatans, liars, con artists, fake defectors, and opportunists become experts used to fuel the conflict. Joining me to discuss this duplicity and mendacity is Peter Oborne, a former political commentator of The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph, and Daily Mail, who covered the war in Yemen. He currently writes about politics for Open Democracy and Middle East Eye, and is the author of The Triumph of the Political Class, as well as The Rise of Political Lying. Peter, I want to begin with Yemen, a country you know well. You’ve covered it as a reporter. It’s been defined by the United Nations as the greatest humanitarian calamity of the 21st century. I wondered if you could juxtapose the West’s response to this seven-year assault on Yemen, which has left about 240,000 dead, resulting in widespread famine, cholera epidemics, with a response to the Ukraine. And in that response, I wondered if you could speak about the visit to the Polish border by Samantha Power, the administrator of the US Agency for International Development? Peter Oborne: Indeed. Starting with Samantha Power, she was the US ambassador, I think, to the United Nations at the very start of the Yemen conflict, and she was in a great position to stop it or to deal with the problem, but she didn’t. She never addressed the Yemen, or for that matter, as far as I know, the impending genocide of the Rohingya or the terrible events in Gaza and so on. And yet there she is. Very shortly after the terrible tragedy of Ukraine starts, there she is at the Polish border, so this is a correct cause in her mind, whereas the other causes are less interesting. I do find this myself, as a British citizen, particularly troubling. I went, you’re right, but I’ve only been once. It’s very hard to get to Yemen as a reporter, and I went there towards the start of the war in 2016. It was very, very difficult to get in. What you saw was an attack on the Yemeni people, effectively, by Saudi Arabia, and in a coalition backed by Britain and the United States and other local parties also, such as the UAE. The legal situation is different because the internationally recognized government is actually based in Saudi Arabia. And I won’t get into the details, but the murderous nature of the assault on the Yemeni people is utterly unspeakable and horrible. As you just were saying, I mean, I think according to the latest figures I’ve seen something like 230,000 people out of a population of 20 million have died, partly through Saudi bombing and so forth, but also through starvation and cholera and the siege of the Yemen, which has been going on now for this awful time. Now, it really hits me, as a British citizen, that Britain is the penholder at the United Nations. We are responsible for managing the war, as it were. It is also the case that we supply many of the arms to the Saudi government, and we do more than that. I think we handle them, we advise the Saudis, we give them all kinds of advice on munitions, and we make a very healthy profit on the side of it. Now, we have a huge moral responsibility for a war which is far longer and responsible for the deaths of far more people than anything which… By the way, don’t get this wrong. I mean, Putin is guilty of a war of aggression in Ukraine, but it has claimed far more lives, Yemen, than has so far, inshallah, happened in Ukraine. Chris Hedges: Can you explore why? What do you think the disparity in terms of the response is due to? Peter Oborne: It’s a really deep question, and actually I think this is a really shaming thing. There’s a very fine British diplomat, a whistleblower, I’m ashamed to say I’ve forgotten her name. But she’s gone public and talked about sitting in a room with Boris Johnson, now the British prime minister, when they were both at the Foreign Office, and they were talking about what to do about the Yemen situation. Boris Johnson was just laughing about, joking about what, according to her account which is extremely credible, and nobody challenged it, he had been making jokes while these very grave issues affecting the lives of millions of people are being discussed. You have to reach the conclusion that the life of an Arab in Yemen is not anything like the same where it counts, and I think maybe doesn’t count at all in the eyes of the international community. Whereas there’s a much greater weight put on the lives of Ukrainian people. Which is excellent. I’m very happy about that. I salute the Ukrainian people fighting the aggression of Putin. But what upsets me and shames me, I think, and shames all of us, is that we don’t put the same weight or anything like the same weight on the lives of the Yemeni people. Chris Hedges: What is it due to? Why don’t we put the same weight on the lives of Palestinians or Yemenis or Iraqis? Peter Oborne: Well, I think if you look at the media coverage, and not just media coverage, of the remarks by politicians about the Ukrainian situation, they draw attention to the fact that Ukraine is in Europe. Some people [inaudible] they are civilized and they have blue eyes, I think, has been a phrase used occasionally. In other words, Chris, maybe that people are saying they are Christian Europeans. I went to Yemen. It’s an incredibly beautiful place. Fabulous architecture and deep, deep history. I spent so many fascinating evenings with really civilized, intelligent people, with a deep history stretching back thousands of years. They were civilized well before Europe, let alone America, supposing America ever has got civilized. Arguable point, I think. But certainly well before. [inaudible] Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, and these incredible mud skyscrapers, a lot of which have been destroyed by the Saudis. I mean, it’s like going to Venice in terms of the sheer beauty and architectural scope, or Florence. I mean, it’s an incredible civilization. And yet clearly in the Western mind, I’m ashamed to say, that doesn’t count. It isn’t something which matters. They are simply uncivilized people who do not deserve the same respect. Their rights do not count in the same way as the rights of Europeans in Ukraine count. Chris Hedges: There was a social media footage of a 16-year-old Palestinian girl who confronted an Israeli soldier. This was repackaged on TikTok and was sent out as a Ukrainian girl confronting a Russian soldier. What does that tell us about the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, and what does it tell us about the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land? Peter Oborne: A film went out during the early stages of the Ukrainian conflict. It was of a very young girl, maybe 11 or 12 years old, confronting a soldier. It was presented as a Ukrainian young girl confronting a Russian soldier and being very brave and standing up to him, and this one’s reportedly got 12 million views on social media. Now, actually, that was a repackaged picture or video of a young girl called Ahed Tamimi, who ended up being arrested by the Israelis, confronting an Israeli soldier in that way. But of course, and it did cause some stir at the time, but nothing like the impact which the fake package, this Palestinian girl repackaged as a Ukrainian young woman or girl, where that was a much bigger thing. So it is interesting to compare and contrast. Chris Hedges: I want to ask about what this means, when you bifurcate the world into worthy and unworthy victims, what this does for those who want to hold war criminals accountable. If worthy victims are deserving of justice and unworthy victims are not, what are the consequences in terms of dealing with war crimes? Peter Oborne: Well, it’s a very difficult question, and something which is very relevant. You and I both covered, in different ways, the British-American invasion of Iraq. There is no question that that was, under international law, a war of aggression. And therefore that makes the British prime minister Tony Blair and the American president George W. Bush war criminals. I mean, actually, before coming on the show, I was preparing for this conversation, and the Nuremberg tribunal… This is quoting from the tribunal, the judge. “To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime. It is a supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” Now, there is no question that Mr. Putin has done exactly that. He has initiated a war of aggression in the Ukraine, and there are voices saying that he should be held accountable, but on the other hand, there is no question either that Tony Blair and George W. Bush initiated a war of aggression in Iraq. It wasn’t a war of defense – Which you can fight under international law – It did not have United Nations Security Council justification or agreement, and of course, it was based on a fabrication of weapons of mass destruction. So if you are going to call for Mr. Putin to be charged with the ultimate war crime, you must be consistent, and you must call for Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair also to be called to account in exactly the same way. Chris Hedges: What are the consequences for, in essence, a world that doesn’t abide by the rule of law, that people who commit war crimes when they’re in power in Washington or in the UK are not held accountable and Putin is? Peter Oborne: Well, do you know, you’re very privileged and I’m very privileged. I’m a British citizen. You, I presume, are an American citizen. We both belong to great countries which have, over time, built up democracy, rule of law, parliament, a free press, all these things which we are taught about at school, and I certainly believed it when I was taught about them at school. We were taught at my school how amazing America was because it was the bastion of all of this against evildoers, in particular at that time when I was a young boy, the Soviet Empire. It breaks my heart, actually, that Britain and America no longer, or have chosen no longer to, abide by those values. Actually, there’s a British phrase: fair play. We prided ourselves, we were taught this very strongly. It was what we stood for. Free speech, fair play, decency, rule of law, parliamentary democracy, representative democracy. Now, if we’re going to say we stand for those things and assert that on the international stage, we must be consistent about it. We can’t say that whatever we do, when we commit a crime of aggression, that’s fine. That’s something which is perfectly reasonable because [inaudible], and when somebody we review as an enemy does it, that’s terrible. He needs to be held to account and put on trial. That doesn’t have any credibility. And it explains, by the way, something which has been heavily underreported in this conflict, is the amount of support which Russia is getting across the globe, particularly in the Middle East. Because if you’re in the Middle East, and you and I have both gone there a lot and talked to a lot of people from there, they see us as aggressors. They see NATO as an aggressive thing which has no respect for law and has destroyed countries. Now, in other words we have betrayed our own values, and it has diminished our ability to be taken seriously and with respect on the international stage. Chris Hedges: I want to talk about the media’s response to Ukraine and have you comment on what’s happened to our own trade as foreign correspondents. Peter Oborne: I mean, I don’t know… The history of reporting has had its ups and downs. And actually, there have always been foreign correspondents who have been spies, or they have simply been happy to amplify the propaganda message of whichever country they represent. On the other hand, there’s also been a tradition, which is the one which I think most reporters would claim to adhere to, which is that your purpose of being a foreign correspondent is to try and tell the truth. Now, this is a very difficult thing to do. In war it’s pretty well impossible, because – Not that I’ve ever been on a battlefield, I should say – You’re stuck. You have, I know, Chris. You’re stuck in a corner of the battlefield. There’s really nothing which you can know about what’s going on. Think of Tolstoy’s great description of Napoleon at Borodino, and even Napoleon, the general, doesn’t know what’s actually happening. But what we should aim at is a culture of some kind of detachment, in my view, for reporting from any country around the world. We should listen to all voices, including unpopular voices, ones which are people who are despised and even hated. They have a story to tell. Often it’s a very interesting story which enables you to understand things you never understood. Actually, I’d love to hear what you think about this. My observation is that we have moved to a form of reporting of engagement. You’re only allowed to report one side of the story in the West. This is what it feels like, looking not just at Ukraine, but other recent conflicts as well. There’s one set of good guys and one set of bad guys. In fact, there are no good guys. It’s much, much more complicated than that. Chris Hedges: Well, yes. I mean, what’s not reported, certainly in the United States, and I was in Eastern Europe covering the collapse of the Communist Bloc and the Soviet Union in 1989, what’s not reported is that there was universal understanding that expanding NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany was an unnecessary provocation that would have disastrous consequences. This was universally accepted across the board by Henry Kissinger, George Kennan, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Margaret Thatcher, everyone. Peter Oborne: Indeed. Yes, George. It was a famous piece of analysis by George Kennan, who really set out the strategy for the Cold War after 1945 against Soviet Russia, and then commented then and was still around at the fall of the Berlin Wall to make the very wise remark. Now, it doesn’t mean that’s right. It’s perfectly reasonable [inaudible]. Absolutely, Ukraine should be free. It shouldn’t be a part of a Russian sphere of influence. But even to start talking along those lines you get accused of somehow being a Putin ally or Putin propagandist. What that means is you can’t really have an intelligent discussion anymore about these immensely important matters. By the way, this isn’t just a problem with foreign affairs and wars. It’s a problem generally, I think, in the West. Something’s happened to public discourse, whereby it’s very hard to have an even-handed, well-informed discussion. That we have developed this very seriously bad habit of accusing our ideological enemies or just people who disagree with us of bad faith and having maligned motives and being apologists for terrible things. Now, I think we need to escape, to return to a much more… Oh, I can just give you a personal story, actually. I was a schoolboy in a boarding school in the West Country, England, called Sherborne, in the early 1970s, and there was a wonderful history teacher called Graham Stephenson, who was not at all liked by the school authorities. He was quite dangerous. He had a stick which he’d hurl at you in class, and that didn’t… But it was to keep us alert, and he did keep us alert. Before my time, but he wanted to take a school trip to the Les Événements in Paris in 1968 so that the boys could see history in motion. But what I remember, and I really learned from it, this was the height of the Cold War, just around the time of the Chilean coup d’état, created by the CIA. It was a very dangerous time in the world. He brought down, and he used to do this a lot, the political officer of the Soviet embassy to speak to us about dialectical material and give the general Soviet view of the world. Soviet Weekly would be there alongside The Times Literary Supplement and New Statesman in the school library so we could read it. Now, the situation vis-à-vis Russia, between Russia and the West, was marked by deeper hostility then than it is now. It was the existential enemy of the West. It was perfectly reasonable at this school for us to be introduced to people who were going to tell us about how the Soviet Union saw the world. Now, that’s a brilliant thing. By the way, Tim Garton Ash, who was another student there, just a year or two above me, who’s written a book about free speech, was another student of this great, great, truly great school teacher, history teacher. I’d like to know what he thinks. Because it really upsets me, for instance, that in Britain, Russia Today, RT, has been closed down. It’s not that I agree with RT particularly, but it’s just that it’s… We were allowed, as 16-year-old schoolboys, to read Pravda, Soviet Weekly. We were introduced to the officials from the regime, and we learned how the other side thought. We learned, we understood. And they had some decent points, by the way, I seem to remember. It didn’t mean that I ended up joining the Communist Party. Chris Hedges: Well, that’s key. I was a foreign correspondent for 20 years, and you develop a linguistic, a cultural, historical, religious literacy that allows you to look at your own country, in this case step into the shoes of someone from the Middle East, someone from Latin America. Of course, Russia, given its history, was invaded in the 20th century by the Nazis that laid waste to the Soviet Union, and the century before that, Napoleon did the same thing. It has historical reasons to fear encirclement. And of course, I think that is what has been lost, especially with the steep decline in foreign bureaus and foreign coverage. We worked very, very hard to do exactly what you said, which was to present the other perspective. And many times, that perspective had to be heard because it had many legitimate grievances and many legitimate points, I think especially coming out of the Middle East. That’s true. Peter Oborne: Also, there’s a second point here. I mean, we claim to represent [inaudible]. We claim that free speech is one of our great values. There, you have the First Amendment of your Constitution. We can point to John Stuart Mill and his classic On Liberty defense of free speech. And yet we seem terrified of allowing it. It’s not just that only one point of view can be safely projected on the mass media now in the West, but it’s also that they’re actually closing down channels which present another way of seeing the world. That suggests to me two things, actually. One is a deep insecurity about something, and I think we need to drill down to know what’s going wrong, but also a very emphatic, explicit repudiation of what we actually stand for. It’s not just free speech, of course, which we are now turning our back on, but it’s also the rule of law, and it’s also, in certain respects, democracy itself. It’s a real crisis for the West, a lack of confidence in what we are. Chris Hedges: Great. That was Peter Oborne. I want to thank The Real News Network and its production team, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, Dwayne Gladden, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com. Edited May 3, 2022 by redsnapper Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
redsnapper Posted May 1, 2022 Share Posted May 1, 2022 (edited) Hedges: The Pimps of War byMODERATORApril 11, 2022 77 Commentson Hedges: The Pimps of War The coterie of neocons and liberal interventionists who orchestrated two decades of military fiascos in the Middle East and who have never been held to account are now stoking a suicidal war with Russia. By Chris Hedges | Original to ScheerPost Quote The same cabal of warmongering pundits, foreign policy specialists and government officials, year after year, debacle after debacle, smugly dodge responsibility for the military fiascos they orchestrate. They are protean, shifting adroitly with the political winds, moving from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party and then back again, mutating from cold warriors to neocons to liberal interventionists. Pseudo intellectuals, they exude a cloying Ivy League snobbery as they sell perpetual fear, perpetual war, and a racist worldview, where the lesser breeds of the earth only understand violence. They are pimps of war, puppets of the Pentagon, a state within a state, and the defense contractors who lavishly fund their think tanks — Project for the New American Century, American Enterprise Institute, Foreign Policy Initiative, Institute for the Study of War, Atlantic Council and Brookings Institution. Like some mutant strain of an antibiotic-resistant bacteria, they cannot be vanquished. It does not matter how wrong they are, how absurd their theories, how many times they lie or denigrate other cultures and societies as uncivilized or how many murderous military interventions go bad. They are immovable props, the parasitic mandarins of power that are vomited up in the dying days of any empire, including ours, leaping from one self-defeating catastrophe to the next. I spent 20 years as a foreign correspondent reporting on the suffering, misery, and murderous rampages these shills for war engineered and funded. My first encounter with them was in Central America. Elliot Abrams — convicted of providing misleading testimony to Congress on the Iran-Contra Affair and later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush so he could return to government to sell us the Iraq War — and Robert Kagan, director of the State Department’s public diplomacy office for Latin America — were propagandists for the brutal military regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala, as well as the rapists and homicidal thugs that made up the rogue Contra forces fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, which they illegally funded. Their job was to discredit our reporting. They, and their coterie of fellow war lovers, went on to push for the expansion of NATO in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, violating an agreement not to extend NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany and recklessly antagonizing Russia. They were and are cheerleaders for the apartheid state of Israel, justifying its war crimes against Palestinians and myopically conflating Israel’s interests with our own. They advocated for air strikes in Serbia, calling for the US to “take out” Slobodan Milosevic. They were the authors of the policy to invade Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya. Robert Kagan and William Kristol, with their typical cluelessness, wrote in April 2002 that “the road that leads to real security and peace” is “the road that runs through Baghdad.” We saw how that worked out. That road led to the dissolution of Iraq, the destruction of its civilian infrastructure, including the obliteration of 18 of 20 electricity-generating plants and nearly all the water-pumping and sanitation systems during a 43-day period when 90,000 tons of bombs were rained down on the country, the rise of radical jihadist groups throughout the region, and failed states. The war in Iraq, along with the humiliating defeat in Afghanistan, shredded the illusion of US military and global hegemony. It also inflicted on Iraqis, who had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11, the widespread killing of civilians, the torture and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners, and the ascendancy of Iran as the preeminent power in the region. They continue to call for a war with Iran, with Fred Kagan stating that “there is nothing we can do short of attacking to force Iran to give up its nuclear weapons.” They pushed for the overthrow of President Nicholas Maduro, after trying to do the same to Hugo Chavez, in Venezuela. They have targeted Daniel Ortega, their old nemesis in Nicaragua. They embrace a purblind nationalism that prohibits them from seeing the world from any perspective other than their own. They know nothing about the machinery of war, its consequences, or its inevitable blowback. They know nothing about the peoples and cultures they target for violent regeneration. They believe in their divine right to impose their “values” on others by force. Fiasco after fiasco. Now they are stoking a war with Russia. “The nationalist is by definition an ignoramus,” Yugoslav writer Danilo Kiš observed. “Nationalism is the line of least resistance, the easy way. The nationalist is untroubled, he knows or thinks he knows what his values are, his, that’s to say national, that’s to say the values of the nation he belongs to, ethical and political; he is not interested in others, they are no concern of his, hell — it’s other people (other nations, another tribe). They don’t even need investigating. The nationalist sees other people in his own images — as nationalists.” The Biden administration is filled with these ignoramuses, including Joe Biden. Victoria Nuland, the wife of Robert Kagan, serves as Biden’s undersecretary of state for political affairs. Antony Blinken is secretary of state. Jake Sullivan is national security advisor. They come from this cabal of moral and intellectual trolls that includes Kimberly Kagan, the wife of Fred Kagan, who founded The Institute for the Study of War, William Kristol, Max Boot, John Podhoretz, Gary Schmitt, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Frum, and others. Many were once staunch Republicans or, like Nuland, served in Republican and Democratic administrations. Nuland was the principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney. They are united by the demand for larger and larger defense budgets and an ever expanding military. Julian Benda called these courtiers to power “the self-made barbarians of the intelligentsia.” They once railed against liberal weakness and appeasement. But they swiftly migrated to the Democratic Party rather than support Donald Trump, who showed no desire to start a conflict with Russia and who called the invasion of Iraq a “big, fat mistake.” Besides, as they correctly pointed out, Hillary Clinton was a fellow neocon. And liberals wonder why nearly half the electorate, who revile these arrogant unelected power brokers, as they should, voted for Trump. These ideologues did not see the corpses of their victims. I did. Including children. Every dead body I stood over in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Gaza, Iraq, Sudan, Yemen or Kosovo, month after month, year after year, exposed their moral bankruptcy, their intellectual dishonesty, and their sick bloodlust. They did not serve in the military. Their children do not serve in the military. But they eagerly ship young American men and women off to fight and die for their self-delusional dreams of empire and American hegemony. Or, as in Ukraine, they provide hundreds of millions of dollars in weaponry and logistical support to sustain long and bloody proxy wars. Historical time stopped for them with the end of World War II. The overthrow of democratically elected governments by the US during the Cold War in Indonesia, Guatemala, the Congo, Iran and Chile (where the CIA oversaw the assassination of the commander-in-chief of the army, General René Schneider, and President Salvador Allende), the Bay of Pigs, the atrocities and war crimes that defined the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, even the disasters they manufactured in the Middle East, have disappeared into the black hole of their collective historical amnesia. American global domination, they claim, is benign, a force for good, “benevolent hegemony.” The world, Charles Krauthammer insisted, welcomes “our power.” All enemies, from Saddam Hussein to Vladimir Putin, are the new Hitler. All US interventions are a fight for freedom that make the world a safer place. All refusals to bomb and occupy another country are a 1938 Munich moment, a pathetic retreat from confronting evil by the new Neville Chamberlain. We do have enemies abroad. But our most dangerous enemy is within. The warmongers build a campaign against a country such as Iraq or Russia and then wait for a crisis — they call it the next Pearl Harbor — to justify the unjustifiable. In 1998, William Kristol and Robert Kagan, along with a dozen other prominent neoconservatives, wrote an open letter to President Bill Clinton denouncing his policy of containment of Iraq as a failure and demanding that he go to war to overthrow Saddam Hussein. To continue the “course of weakness and drift,” they warned, was to “put our interests and our future at risk.” Huge majorities in Congress, Republican and Democrat, rushed to pass the Iraq Liberation Act. Few Democrats or Republicans dared be seen as soft on national security. The act stated that the United States government would work to “remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein” and authorized $99 million towards that goal, some of it being used to fund Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress that would become instrumental in disseminating the fabrications and lies used to justify the Iraq war during the administration of George W. Bush. The attacks of 9/11 gave the war party its opening, first with Afghanistan, then Iraq. Krauthammer, who knows nothing about the Muslim world, wrote that “the way to tame the Arab street is not with appeasement and sweet sensitivity but with raw power and victory…The elementary truth that seems to elude the experts again and again…is that power is its own reward. Victory changes everything, psychologically above all. The psychology in the [Middle East] is now one of fear and deep respect for American power. Now is the time to use it.” Removing Saddam Hussein from power, Kristol crowed, would “transform the political landscape of the Middle East.” It did, of course, but not in ways that benefited the US. They lust for apocalyptic global war. Fred Kagan, the brother of Robert, a military historian, wrote in 1999 that “America must be able to fight Iraq and North Korea, and also be able to fight genocide in the Balkans and elsewhere without compromising its ability to fight two major regional conflicts. And it must be able to contemplate war with China or Russia some considerable (but not infinite) time from now [author’s emphasis].” They believe violence magically solves all disputes, even the Israeli-Palestinian morass. In a bizarre interview immediately after 9/11, Donald Kagan, the Yale classicist and rightwing ideologue who was the father of Robert and Fred, called, along with his son Fred, for the deployment of US troops in Gaza so we could “take the war to these people.” They have long demanded the stationing of NATO troops in Ukraine, with Robert Kagan saying that “we need to not worry that the problem is our encirclement rather than Russian ambitions.” His wife, Victoria Nuland, was outed in a leaked phone conversation in 2014 with the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, disparaging the EU and plotting to remove the lawfully elected President Viktor Yanukovych and install compliant Ukrainian politicians in power, most of whom did eventually take power. They lobbied for US troops to be sent to Syria to assist “moderate” rebels seeking to overthrow Bashar al Assad. Instead, the intervention spawned the Caliphate. The US ended up bombing the very forces they had armed, becoming Assad’s de facto air force. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, like the attacks of 9/11, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Putin, like everyone else they target, only understands force. We can, they assure us, militarily bend Russia to our will. “It is true that acting firmly in 2008 or 2014 would have meant risking conflict,” Robert Kagan wrote in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, lamenting our refusal to militarily confront Russia earlier. “But Washington is risking conflict now; Russia’s ambitions have created an inherently dangerous situation. It is better for the United States to risk confrontation with belligerent powers when they are in the early stages of ambition and expansion, not after they have already consolidated substantial gains. Russia may possess a fearful nuclear arsenal, but the risk of Moscow using it is not higher now than it would have been in 2008 or 2014, if the West had intervened then. And it has always been extraordinarily small: Putin was never going to obtain his objectives by destroying himself and his country, along with much of the rest of the world.” In short, don’t worry about going to war with Russia, Putin won’t use the bomb. I do not know if these people are stupid or cynical or both. They are lavishly funded by the war industry. They are never dropped from the networks for their repeated idiocy. They rotate in and out of power, parked in places like The Council on Foreign Relations or The Brookings Institution, before being called back into government. They are as welcome in the Obama or Biden White House as the Bush White House. The Cold War, for them, never ended. The world remains binary, us and them, good and evil. They are never held accountable. When one military intervention goes up in flames, they are ready to promote the next. These Dr. Strangeloves, if we don’t stop them, will terminate life as we know it on the planet. Edited May 3, 2022 by redsnapper 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul A Posted May 1, 2022 Share Posted May 1, 2022 (edited) Perhaps the perspective of what Putin desires is a bit awry. Maybe it should be what the Russian people desire. Oppression of free and fair elections, eg: a popular opposition leader Alexei Navalny incarcerated, attempted assassination. State run media Tass expounding propaganda. Corruption of the political system with former state owned enterprises controlled by oligarchs. Orwell's 'Animal Farm'. If such oppression did not exist, it is possible that the Russian people would choose to be a democracy. Choose to join NATO. Choose to join the EU. Is Putin protecting Russia from US meddling? Or protecting himself and the elite? Edited May 1, 2022 by Paul A Typo 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
redsnapper Posted May 1, 2022 Share Posted May 1, 2022 (edited) Hedges: The Lie of American Innocence byMODERATORMarch 21, 2022 207 Commentson Hedges: The Lie of American Innocence Our hypocrisy on war crimes makes a rules-based world, one that abides by international law, impossible. By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost The branding of Vladimir Putin as a war criminal by Joe Biden, who lobbied for the Iraq war and staunchly supported the 20 years of carnage in the Middle East, is one more example of the hypocritical moral posturing sweeping across the United States. It is unclear how anyone would try Putin for war crimes since Russia, like the United States, does not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. But justice is not the point. Politicians like Biden, who do not accept responsibility for our well-documented war crimes, bolster their moral credentials by demonizing their adversaries. They know the chance of Putin facing justice is zero. And they know their chance of facing justice is the same. Quote We know who our most recent war criminals are, among others: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, General Ricardo Sanchez, former CIA Director George Tenet, former Asst. Atty. Gen. Jay Bybee, former Dep. Asst. Atty. Gen. John Yoo, who set up the legal framework to authorize torture; the helicopter pilots who gunned down civilians, including two Reuters journalists, in the “Collateral Murder” video released by WikiLeaks. We have evidence of the crimes they committed. But, like Putin’s Russia, those who expose these crimes are silenced and persecuted. Julian Assange, even though he is not a US citizen and his WikiLeaks site is not a US-based publication, is charged under the US Espionage Act for making public numerous US war crimes. Assange, currently housed in a high security prison in London, is fighting a losing battle in the British courts to block his extradition to the United States, where he faces 175 years in prison. One set of rules for Russia, another set of rules for the United States. Weeping crocodile tears for the Russian media, which is being heavily censored by Putin, while ignoring the plight of the most important publisher of our generation speaks volumes about how much the ruling class cares about press freedom and truth. If we demand justice for Ukrainians, as we should, we must also demand justice for the one million people killed — 400,000 of whom were noncombatants — by our invasions, occupations and aerial assaults in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan. We must demand justice for those who were wounded, became sick or died because we destroyed hospitals and infrastructure. We must demand justice for the thousands of soldiers and marines who were killed, and many more who were wounded and are living with lifelong disabilities, in wars launched and sustained on lies. We must demand justice for the 38 million people who have been displaced or become refugees in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya, and Syria, a number that exceeds the total of all those displaced in all wars since 1900, apart from World War II, according to the Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs at Brown University. Tens of millions of people, who had no connection with the attacks of 9/11, were killed, wounded, lost their homes, and saw their lives and their families destroyed because of our war crimes. Who will cry out for them? Every effort to hold our war criminals accountable has been rebuffed by Congress, by the courts, by the media and by the two ruling political parties. The Center for Constitutional Rights, blocked from bringing cases in US courts against the architects of these preemptive wars, which are defined by post-Nuremberg laws as “criminal wars of aggression,” filed motions in German courts to hold US leaders to account for gross violations of the Geneva Convention, including the sanctioning of torture in black sites such as Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Those who have the power to enforce the rule of law, to hold our war criminals to account, to atone for our war crimes, direct their moral outrage exclusively at Putin’s Russia. “Intentionally targeting civilians is a war crime,” Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said, condemning Russia for attacking civilian sites, including a hospital, three schools and a boarding school for visually impaired children in the Luhansk region of Ukraine. “These incidents join a long list of attacks on civilian, not military locations, across Ukraine,” he said. Beth Van Schaack, an ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice, will direct the effort at the State Department, Blinken said, to “help international efforts to investigate war crimes and hold those responsible accountable.” This collective hypocrisy, based on the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves, is accompanied by massive arms shipments to Ukraine. Fueling proxy wars was a specialty of the Cold War. We have returned to the script. If Ukrainians are heroic resistance fighters, what about Iraqis and Afghans, who fought as valiantly and as doggedly against a foreign power that was every bit as savage as Russia? Why weren’t they lionized? Why weren’t sanctions imposed on the United States? Why weren’t those who defended their countries from foreign invasion in the Middle East, including Palestinians under Israeli occupation, also provided with thousands of anti-tank weapons, anti-armor weapons, anti-aircraft weapons, helicopters, Switchblade or “Kamikaze” drones, hundreds of Stinger anti-aircraft systems, Javelin anti-tank missiles, machine guns and millions of rounds of ammunition? Why didn’t Congress rush through a $13.6 billion package to provide military and humanitarian assistance, on top of the $1.2 billion already provided to the Ukrainian military, for them? Well, we know why. Our war crimes don’t count, and neither do the victims of our war crimes. And this hypocrisy makes a rules-based world, one that abides by international law, impossible. This hypocrisy is not new. There is no moral difference between the saturation bombing the US carried out on civilian populations since World War II, including in Vietnam and Iraq, and the targeting of urban centers by Russia in Ukraine or the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Mass death and fireballs on a city skyline are the calling cards we have left across the globe for decades. Our adversaries do the same. The deliberate targeting of civilians, whether in Baghdad, Kyiv, Gaza, or New York City, are all war crimes. The killing of at least 112 Ukrainian children, as of March 19, is an atrocity, but so is the killing of 551 Palestinian children during Israel’s 2014 military assault on Gaza. So is the killing of 230,000 people over the past seven years in Yemen from Saudi bombing campaigns and blockades that have resulted in mass starvation and cholera epidemics. Where were the calls for a no-fly zone over Gaza and Yemen? Imagine how many lives could have been saved. War crimes demand the same moral judgment and accountability. But they don’t get them. And they don’t get them because we have one set of standards for white Europeans, and another for non-white people around the globe. The western media has turned European and American volunteers flocking to fight in Ukraine into heroes, while Muslims in the west who join resistance groups battling foreign occupiers in the Middle East are criminalized as terrorists. Putin has been ruthless with the press. But so has our ally the de facto Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman, who ordered the murder and dismemberment of my friend and colleague Jamal Khashoggi, and who this month oversaw a mass execution of 81 people convicted of criminal offenses. The coverage of Ukraine, especially after spending seven years reporting on Israel’s murderous assaults against the Palestinians, is another example of the racist divide that defines most of the western media. World War II began with an understanding, at least by the allies, that employing industrial weapons against civilian populations was a war crime. But within 18 months of the start of the war, the Germans, Americans and British were relentlessly bombing cities. By the end of the war, one-fifth of German homes had been destroyed. One million German civilians were killed or wounded in bombing raids. Seven-and-a-half million Germans were made homeless. The tactic of saturation bombing, or area bombing, which included the firebombing of Dresden, Hamburg and Tokyo, which killed more than 90,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo and left a million people homeless, and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which took the lives of between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians, had the sole purpose of breaking the morale of the population through mass death and terror. Cities such as Leningrad, Stalingrad, Warsaw, Coventry, Royan, Nanjing and Rotterdam were obliterated. It turned the architects of modern war, all of them, into war criminals. Civilians in every war since have been considered legitimate targets. In the summer of 1965, then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara called the bombing raids north of Saigon that left hundreds of thousands of dead an effective means of communication with the government in Hanoi. McNamara, six years before he died, unlike most war criminals, had the capacity for self-reflection. Interviewed in the documentary, “The Fog of War,” he was repentant, not only about targeting Vietnamese civilians but about the aerial targeting of civilians in Japan in World War II, overseen by Air Force General Curtis LeMay. “LeMay said if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals,” McNamara said in the film. “And I think he’s right…LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose, and not immoral if you win?” LeMay, later head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, would go on to drop tons of napalm and firebombs on civilian targets in Korea which, by his own estimate, killed 20 percent of the population over a three-year period. Industrial killing defines modern warfare. It is impersonal mass slaughter. It is administered by vast bureaucratic structures that perpetuate the killing over months and years. It is sustained by heavy industry that produces a steady flow of weapons, munitions, tanks, planes, helicopters, battleships, submarines, missiles, and mass-produced supplies, along with mechanized transports that ferry troops and armaments by rail, ship, cargo planes and trucks to the battlefield. It mobilizes industrial, governmental and organization structures for total war. It centralizes systems of information and internal control. It is rationalized for the public by specialists and experts, drawn from the military establishment, along with pliant academics and the media. Industrial war destroys existing value systems that protect and nurture life, replacing them with fear, hatred, and a dehumanization of those who we are made to believe deserve to be exterminated. It is driven by emotions, not truth or fact. It obliterates nuance, replacing it with an infantile binary universe of us and them. It drives competing narratives, ideas and values underground and vilifies all who do not speak in the national cant that replaces civil discourse and debate. It is touted as an example of the inevitable march of human progress, when in fact it brings us closer and closer to mass obliteration in a nuclear holocaust. It mocks the concept of individual heroism, despite the feverish efforts of the military and the mass media to sell this myth to naïve young recruits and a gullible public. It is the Frankenstein of industrialized societies. War, as Alfred Kazin warned, is “the ultimate purpose of technological society.” Our real enemy is within. Historically, those who are prosecuted for war crimes, whether the Nazi hierarchy at Nuremberg or the leaders of Liberia, Chad, Serbia, and Bosnia, are prosecuted because they lost the war and because they are adversaries of the United States. There will be no prosecution of Saudi Arabian rulers for the war crimes committed in Yemen or for the US military and political leadership for the war crimes they carried out in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, or a generation earlier in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The atrocities we commit, such as My Lai, where 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians were gunned down by US soldiers, which are made public, are dealt with by finding a scapegoat, usually a low-ranking officer who is given a symbolic sentence. Lt. William Calley served three years under house arrest for the killings at My Lai. Eleven US soldiers, none of whom were officers, were convicted of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. But the architects and overlords of our industrial slaughter, including Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Gen. Curtis LeMay, Harry S. Truman, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Lyndon Johnson, Gen. William Westmoreland, George W. Bush, Gen. David Petraeus, Barack Obama and Joe Biden are never held to account. They leave power to become venerated elder statesmen. The mass slaughter of industrial warfare, the failure to hold ourselves to account, to see our own face in the war criminals we condemn, will have ominous consequences. Author and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi understood that the annihilation of the humanity of others is prerequisite for their physical annihilation. We have become captives to our machines of industrial death. Politicians and generals wield their destructive fury as if they were toys. Those who decry the madness, who demand the rule of law, are attacked and condemned. These industrial weapons systems are our modern idols. We worship their deadly prowess. But all idols, the Bible tells us, begin by demanding the sacrifice of others and end in apocalyptic self-sacrifice. Edited May 3, 2022 by redsnapper 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
redsnapper Posted May 1, 2022 Share Posted May 1, 2022 (edited) On 4/30/2022 at 9:55 PM, Paul A said: Perhaps the perspective of what Putin desires is a bit awry. Maybe it should be what the Russian people desire. Oppression of free and fair elections, eg: a popular opposition leader Alexei Navalny incarcerated, attempted assassination. State run media Tass expounding propaganda. Corruption of the political system with former state owned enterprises controlled by oligarchs. Orwell's 'Animal Farm'. If such oppression did not exist, it is possible that the Russian people would choose to be a democracy. Choose to join NATO. Choose to join the EU. Is Putin protecting Russia from US meddling? Or protecting himself and the elite? The golden opportunity to create a new alliance that included Russia was rejected by the US after the breakup of USSR and the path of isolation & NATO encirclement was chosen instead (against the advice of many FP experts)... Russia was in total disarray after Yeltsin let the oligarchs rape Russian resources and industry and Putin (who had already established himself as a crook in Leningrad muni politics) rose in the ashes. Oppression and corruption were hallmarks of the Stalin and post Stalin USSR and under Putin continued (under the guise of democracy). When have the Russian people really been free to choose democracy? Perhaps only in the short period between the breakup of the USSR and the rise of Putin and they would have likely needed much western help to create the institutional foundations and frameworks for success - and even then! Democracy is a fragile thing - hard to implement and ez to lose... For a deep dive on Russia US relations from the breakup of USSR onward - https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/06/20/thirty-years-of-u.s.-policy-toward-russia-can-vicious-circle-be-broken-pub-79323 Putin no doubt is protecting himself and his crooked cronies (lessons learned from watching regime change at work - Sadam Hussein & Gaddafi getting dragged through the streets) while defending "perceived" Russian interests (which for 20 years have been centered around the menace of NATO encroachment). But the west historically maintained workable relationships with much worse super villains (Mao,Stalin,etc.) to safeguard the world from disaster as outlined in the comments by former diplomats (Brenner,Freeman,etc.). We will never know what could have been but what is clear is that right now the most pressing issue is to stop the killing and prevent further escalation! This can be done only via diplomacy (which the US refuses to consider). Barring that you have prolonged war and more death... and an increased risk of a cataclysmic nuclear exchange. The world is run by madmen who view the planet as a big game of Risk and for whom the horror of war - the human toll - is immaterial & irrelevant. Utter lunacy... Edited May 5, 2022 by redsnapper 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freeforester Posted May 1, 2022 Share Posted May 1, 2022 Seems that for Biden and those controlling him, the gloves are off: Diplomacy?? - Churchill famously quipped that ‘ To jaw-jaw was better than war-war’, but of course, times and ‘sensibilities’ change, and after all, he isn’t in charge now, Biden and co have a plan... Fighting to the last Ukrainian, eh?… 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul A Posted May 1, 2022 Share Posted May 1, 2022 https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-polytics/3471981-zelensky-pelosi-meet-in-kyiv.html Sunday, 01 May 2022 Zelensky, Pelosi meet in Kyiv President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday met in Kyiv with U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who arrived in Ukraine on a visit. This was reported on the website of the President's Office, Ukrinform reports. The head of state thanked the speaker for the visit. "I am grateful to you for this signal of strong support from the United States, the people, and Congress — bicameral and bipartisan support. I highly appreciate this signal as President, as do our team and the people of Ukraine. This shows that the United States today champions strong support for Ukraine in the war against Russian aggression," he said. The president thanked the United States and Nancy Pelosi personally for the efforts to protect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine. For her part, Pelosi conveyed greetings from U.S. Congress and the people of the United States to the president of Ukraine. Nancy Pelosi noted that today Ukraine is heroically fighting for freedom, and the United States is ready to help the country until this fight is over. According to her, Ukraine is the frontier of freedom. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul A Posted May 1, 2022 Share Posted May 1, 2022 https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-ato/3472132-ssu-neutralizes-enemy-group-planning-to-shoot-down-passenger-aircraft.html Sunday, 01 May 2022 SSU neutralizes enemy group planning to shoot down passenger aircraft The Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) has neutralized an enemy sabotage and reconnaissance group (SRG), which was plotting a terrorist attack to shoot down a passenger aircraft over Russia or Belarus in order to accuse the Ukrainian side. The relevant statement was made by the SSU on Telegram, an Ukrinform correspondent reports. Russian occupiers were planning to accuse Ukraine and its partners of the attack on the aircraft. In order to make a provocation, attackers wanted to open fire on a civilian aircraft with the Stinger man-portable air-defense system. Russia’s security officials instructed their agents to steal and smuggle a foreign-made Stinger system for this purpose. The SSU detained all members of the enemy SRG. Investigative and operational actions are underway to substantiate the facts of the crime and bring its heads to justice. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul A Posted May 1, 2022 Share Posted May 1, 2022 https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-polytics/3472091-us-congressional-delegation-america-stands-firmly-with-ukraine.html Sunday, 01 May 2022 US Congressional Delegation: America stands firmly with Ukraine The US Congressional Delegation headed by Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi has paid a visit to Kyiv to send a resounding message to the entire world: America stands firmly with Ukraine. The relevant statement was issued by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Members of a Congressional delegation, following their visit to Kyiv, Ukraine. According to the statement, this visit is the first official Congressional delegation to have visited Ukraine following Russia’s invasion. The full delegation, which includes Chairman Jim McGovern, Chairman Gregory Meeks, Chairman Adam Schiff, Congresswoman Barbara Lee, Congressman Bill Keating and Congressman Jason Crow, will continue travel in southeast Poland and Warsaw. The US Congressional Delegation proudly delivered the message that additional American support is on the way, and they work to transform President Biden’s strong funding request into a legislative package. The Delegation members also conveyed their respect and gratitude to President Zelensky for his leadership and their admiration of the Ukrainian people for their courage in the fight against Russia’s oppression. The US Congressional Delegation will now continue their travels in Poland to meet with Polish President Andrzej Duda and senior officials. “When we return to the United States, we will do so further informed, deeply inspired and ready to do what is needed to help the Ukrainian people as they defend democracy for their nation and for the world,” the US Congressional Delegation added. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freeforester Posted May 1, 2022 Share Posted May 1, 2022 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
redsnapper Posted May 1, 2022 Share Posted May 1, 2022 Washington Denies Reality of “Spheres of Influence”–a New Pinnacle of Hypocrisy February 7, 2022by Graham E. Fuller • Uncategorized • Tags: China, Russia, Sphere of Influence, Ukraine, US foreign policy • Graham E. Fuller (bozorgg@aol.com) 6 February 2022 The Biden administration recently issued an incredibly naive statement –rewriting history and the nature of international relations– when Blinken informed Moscow that “spheres of influence should be relegated to the dustbin of history.” So Ukraine can’t possibly lie within Russia’s security and influence sphere. Take that, Putin! This pronunciamento by the State Department sets new records for US chutzpah. The reality is, virtually the entire history of American foreign policy is nothing if not an exercise in exerting its own “spheres of influence.” Of course it all goes back to1823 when the young republic of the United States proclaimed its “Monroe Doctrine” which declared the entire Western Hemisphere off limits to European colonial projects; any outside intervention into the political affairs in the Western hemisphere would be treated as a direct threat to US interests. For most of the rest of the century Washington continued to expand its “Manifest Destiny” across the country, down into Mexico and invading Canada several times during the war of 1812. US spheres of influence were being clearly set that expanded to Cuba, Central America, later to the Phillipines and the rejection of any Japanese hegemony in the Pacific. But the real turning point came at the end of World War II when the US found itself the “last man standing” in the postwar global wreckage. Washington then went on to become the de facto hegemon of almost all the rest of the world. Overthrowing regimes the US did not like became a basic tool in the arsenal of US foreign policy. Only here and there in the Cold War did Washington fall into competition with the Soviet Union for spheres of influence around the developing world. In the Middle East we still see long-running US efforts to keep all major foreign powers out (except Israel). Indeed, the main source of American fury against Syria and Iran over long decades has been their open refusal to yield to US pressures and fall into line. So it is with some astonishment that today we see Washington–a supreme practitioners for over a century of exercising spheres of influence–now denouncing the practice–at least when such spheres are claimed by others. Indeed a key source of US confrontation with China today has been Beijng’s temerity to gradually take steps to develop East Asia as its own de facto sphere of influence, a growing reality–although China would reject the term. Would that the world was not that way. It would be nice if small countries had just as many rights as large ones. But the quest for hegemony by large and even medium powers is the way of the world. Indeed we must sympathize with smaller states that suffer from such exercise of hegemonic power by powerful neighbours. A former president of Mexico once remarked, ”Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States.” Canada still struggles to develop policies genuinely independent of Washington, economically and internationally. To be a small country like Nepal or Sri Lanka in the shadow of India is never easy. Nor is it for the many small states in the growing shadow of China. Or for those in the shadow of Russia like the Baltics and Ukraine. All these small countries feel perpetually vulnerable to outside great power pressure. And they are in permanent quest of any external power who might lessen the influence of their Great Power neighbours over them. One can sympathise, but Fate and history placed them where they are and physical geography cannot be changed.The world may not like to formally acknowledge spheres of great power influence, but everyone knows they are there. To declare they “no longer exist” is naive, hypocritical, disingenuous –and, if you really believe it, dangerous. The nature of Great Power spheres of influence can vary–including total domination to simply a minimal demand that small neighbours be ever mindful of the Great Power’s interests. International politics can occasionally contest economic spheres of influence. But when it moves into the realm of military contestation or challenge, as the US is doing in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, or the desire to militarily encircle Russia, the game becomes far more dangerous. American spheres of influence are by definition not negotiable, although everyone else’s are. That is today most of what NATO is all about–Europe must have an “Atlanticist” geopolitical vision focused primarily on Washington’s needs, never a European vision. Europeans are sternly lectured if there is any talk of an independent European foreign. American hegemony in Europe is called NATO. And its future in doubt. Can we imagine how the US would respond if Russia or China sought to establish zones of military power or influence near the US? Yet that was what the Cuban missile crisis was all about. A Chinese military presence in Canada or Mexico would evoke extreme reaction in Washington. Indeed there are hints now that China or Russia might seek to brush back America’s drive to push NATO up to Russia’s very borders. Responses could include exercising greater diplomatic or even armed military presence closer to US borders.Tit for tat. We would do well to drop the approach to Russia that “what’s mine is mine, but what’s yours is negotiable.” Here the example of Finnish neutrality has served everyone well since the end of World War II. Let Ukraine, that sits on Russia’s very border as the former cultural centre of the ancient Russian state, be hereby defined as neutral, a geopolitical pawn of neither East nor West. We cannot realistically deny a major sphere of influence to Russia there, only to then to seek to place Ukraine under Washington’s own armed sphere of influence. For Moscow of course all this is not just about theoretical geopolitical concepts of Western threats. Don’t forget Russia has suffered repeated devastating encounters with invading Western armies that laid waste to Russian lands–by Napoleon whose army burned Moscow in 1812. Hitler did much the same in invading Russia in 1943, ultimately leading to the deaths of over 30 million–30 million– Russians in World War II. History is easily forgotten, if ever even learned. Finally Washington would be well advised to abandon its own ideological crusade against Russia–its cold geopolitical power moves clothed in a ringing call for the “spread of democracy.” “Democratization” becomes a weapon against US enemies. Yet somehow Washington never really seeks to bring democracy to its authoritarian friends. =================== Graham Fuller is a former CIA operations officer and vice-chair of the National Intelligence Council for long term forecasting. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
redsnapper Posted May 1, 2022 Share Posted May 1, 2022 (edited) This is a great article on spheres of influence - a concept which no one in the mainstream press seems to be talking about and which the US seems to want to conveniently forget despite it being fundamental to US FP in the last 75 years! The article is quite deep and worth a good read but I will pull only relevant excerpts for this forum... The footnotes alone are a good history lesson. https://chasfreeman.net/about-spheres-of-influence/ Quote About Spheres of Influence Chas Freeman 2022-03-09 Africa, Arab, ASEAN, Asia, China, Diplomacy, Economics, Essay, Europe, Finance, Global, India, Iran, Iraq, Latin America, Law, Middle East and South Asia, Military, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Science, Speeches, Strategy, Syria, Taiwan, Turkey, U.S. Foreign Policy, U.S. Politics, War About Spheres of Influence Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.) Visiting Scholar, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University March 2022 Security is a prerequisite for the prosperity, welfare, and economy of any society. Throughout history, nations have sought security through the establishment of empires, no-go zones [cordons sanitaires], buffer states, as well as military, economic, political, or cultural spheres of declared strategic interest or dominant influence. There are alternatives to these safeguards, among them systems based on the shifting coalitions of balances of power. But it is natural for states to want to have friends rather than enemies on their borders and for great powers to expect deference rather than challenges to their security from the collusion of lesser states with great power rivals.[1] Both nations and empires wax and wane. As they do, they shape political, economic, and military interactions in the regions around them or dependent upon them. Some states seek the protection of greater powers. Others reject and resist others’ hegemony.[2] Spheres of influence are creations of statecraft intended to fend off potential competitors. Why Spheres of Influence are Established U.S. secretaries of state have recently taken to declaring that “the United States does not recognize spheres of influence.”[3] In light of Americans’ continued insistence on the validity of the Monroe Doctrine, this is more than ironic.[4] The United States may refuse to recognize or respect other nation’s spheres of influence or their right to establish them, but it insists on enforcing its own, which, though officially undeclared, is no longer limited to the Western Hemisphere but worldwide.[5] [...] In the absence of an international system based on shifting coalitions to balance hegemonic ambitions,[10] spheres of influence are inextricable from the rivalries between great powers like China, India,[11] Iran,[12] Russia, and the United States. This makes it timely as well as important to review them, their origins, their purposes, and their intensity, all of which vary from case to case. Understanding and coping with great power rivalry demands recognition of the interests that spheres of influence serve as well as the degrees of deference, subordination, or exclusiveness they seek to enforce. History suggests that great powers establish spheres of influence to limit the autonomy of lesser states and thereby: exclude competitors from markets they wish to dominate with mercantilist policies, deny other powers influence in a region while enhancing their own, deny the strategic use of territory or resources to potential adversaries, forestall the incorporation of potential buffer states into others’ spheres of influence, assure the ideological conformity or allegiance of client states and their elites, gain or maintain access to territory and facilities from which to project power, subordinate and exercise quasi-imperial control over lesser states. Spheres of interest are instruments of statecraft and diplomacy designed to deter and counter prospective adversaries by measures short of war. They presume a relatively stable distribution of power in the international state system as opposed to one in which relations are fluid. Spheres of influence demand deference and restrict the geopolitical or geoeconomic freedom of maneuver of the countries or regions within them. As such, they are inherently hegemonic. They fall into two broad categories: (1) passive, defensive efforts to deny influence to other potential other competitors, and (2) active, assertive efforts to dominate the strategic choices of the nations within them, usually to bar and counter the influence of a single rather than multiple adversaries.[13] Each has different implications for competing powers, and each requires a distinct response from them. Exemptions from Spheres of Influence Great powers trying to project their power or deflect that of potential adversaries seldom find it difficult to secure the deference of those they whose autonomy they seek to limit. Still, a few less powerful states or groupings of them have been able to preserve their national identities and autonomy through a combination of armed neutrality, studied inoffensiveness, and recognition or acknowledgment of their status by potentially predatory powers.[14] These stances both deter and mitigate threats by others to subordinate or subjugate them. [...] The Origins of Spheres of Influence Just as Rome and Carthage competed in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE to control peripheral areas of the western Mediterranean,[15] in the 18th and 19th centuries, Britain, France, and other European imperialist powers competed to divide areas far from home, like India,[16] China,[17] Southeast Asia,[18] and Africa,[19] between them. The initial impulse for these divisions was mercantilist[20] but they evolved into primarily military contests aimed at geopolitical dominance. They persisted as political demarcations until overwhelmed by World War II and the subsequent end of the colonial era. Formally declared primacy in a defined area, like the U.S. Monroe Doctrine’s assertion of a unique right to exclude the Western Hemisphere to expanded influence by extra-regional powers or the proactive partition of China, the Middle East, and Africa between European great powers, was a feature of the 19th century colonial world order. As the century ended, spheres of influence constituted proto-imperial impositions of exclusive politico-military and ideological control on the societies within them. Consistent with this, the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine amended it to proclaim a U.S. right to intervene militarily to correct “flagrant and chronic wrongdoing by a Latin American nation.” The new policy was implemented with vigor. [21] In the 1930s, when Germany and Japan attempted to erode American primacy in countries like Brazil and Peru, the United States tempered its unabashed interventionism by adopting what it called a “Good Neighbor Policy.” Still, during World War II, Washington felt free to kidnap and intern thousands of Latin Americans of German, Japanese, and Italian descent.[22] World War II, the Cold War, and Decolonization The defeat of Germany in World War II and the subsequent Communist victory in the civil war on the Chinese mainland enabled the Soviet Union to control central and eastern Europe[23] as well as Korea north of the 38th parallel. In the first decade after the 1949 proclamation of the People’s Republic of China, Moscow appeared to have gained paramount influence in China and north Vietnam.[24] The United States had previously restricted its aspirations to overlordship of the Western Hemisphere under the Monroe Doctrine. But, once engaged in a global struggle with the USSR for global strategic and ideological hegemony, it began to build new, extra-hemispheric spheres of influence based on treaties offering protection from the USSR to an expanding inventory of states in Europe and Asia. Within these spheres, America demanded varying degrees of allegiance from those it had offered to protect. In the context of the Cold War’s static bipolar world order, they were an important stabilizing factor. In Europe in 1949, the United States sponsored the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to hold the USSR and its ideology at bay, submerge the traditional antagonisms of western Europe’s great powers (France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom) in an American-led alliance structure, and facilitate the economic and political recovery of western Europe. As a purely defensive alliance of democratic states led by the United States, NATO very effectively served all three purposes throughout the Cold War. In maritime Asia and the Pacific, having defeated Japan, Washington fell heir to Tokyo’s wartime sphere of influence. To secure this sphere and thereby protect its new Asian client states, the United States began to build a series of bilateral alliances[25] to contain China, the USSR, North Korea, and North Vietnam. America called the areas of the world in which it exercised dominant influence “the free world.”[26] In the four-decade-long “Cold War” (1948 – 1991),[27] Soviet and American-led ideological and geopolitical blocs each sought to achieve dominant ideological and political influence everywhere they could and to prevent the other from doing so. The withering away of Euro-Atlantic nations’ empires in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, with which this struggle coincided, created both independent states and apparent power vacuums. The newly independent states of the so-called “Third World” were fertile ground for both overt and covert US-Soviet proxy wars, notably in Indochina, West Asia and North Africa, the Congo, Lusophone Africa,[28] the Horn of Africa, and Afghanistan. In 1961- 1962, The USSR took advantage of a recent (1959) regime change in Cuba to establish a strategic outpost ninety miles from the United States.[29] Cuba’s defection to the Soviet bloc triggered a violent U.S. reaction to the challenge this posed to Washington’s Monroe Doctrine assertion of hegemony in the Americas. The Soviets, in partnership with Cuba, looked for openings to entrench their ideological, if not their military influence in Nicaragua, Chile, and Grenada. In each case, the United States forcefully intervened to uphold its strategic paramountcy in the western hemisphere. [30] More recently, Washington has relied on economic warfare plus covert action to challenge and overthrow ideologically heterodox regimes in Latin American countries like Bolivia and Venezuela. In the 1960s, Britain’s need to reduce its overseas commitments “east of Suez” led it to concede its sphere of influence in the Persian Gulf[31] to the United States. By 1967, countries in this region were independent but drawn to the United States by their need for protection from each other as well as from Iran. In the early 1970s, the United States buttressed China’s exit from the Soviet bloc by offering it politico-military protection from the USSR. Later in the decade, Washington took advantage of Egypt’s desire to make peace with Israel to remove it from the Soviet sphere of influence in the Middle East.[32] Spheres of influence do not necessarily disappear as colonial empires contract or are abandoned, though allegiances sometimes change. Since granting independence to its African colonies in 1960, France has maintained an internationally acknowledged politico-military and monetary sphere of influence in them, sometimes called Françafrique.[33] In 1968, the USSR retroactively justified its invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia by formally claiming a right to reverse any effort to dislodge its version of “socialism” in central and eastern Europe. [34] When applied to the ‘Communist bloc,’ this Soviet parallel to the Monroe Doctrine produced a definitive rupture in Sino-Soviet relations and opened the way for the United States to court China as a partner in the containment of the USSR. Contemporary Spheres of Influence Today, with the notable continuing exception of the Monroe Doctrine, spheres of influence are usually neither formerly declared nor negotiated between great powers. India’s sphere of influence in sub-Himalayan Asia,[35] Iran’s in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen,[36] Australia’s in the south Pacific,[37] and South Africa’s in southern Africa[38] are informal. To formalize them would pose an obvious challenge to the Westphalian principles of state independence, immunity from military intervention, and sovereign equality on which the United Nations system and the post-colonial world order are grounded. But the fact that spheres of influence are undeclared should not obscure their continuing relevance. [39] They are assertions of military, economic, technological, and political dominance that are as likely to evoke challenge as acquiescence from others especially in periods of major shifts in balances of power and prestige. Spheres of influence both constrain and stimulate great power strategic interactions. As such they are a factor that statecraft and diplomacy cannot ignore. Post-Soviet Europe Beginning in 1989, the Soviet empire and then the Soviet Union itself imploded, disappearing as a security threat to the rest of Europe, China, the Middle East, and the world. NATO’s “Partnership for Peace”[40] briefly held out the promise of a Europe-wide cooperative security architecture in which the reconstituted Russian Federation as well as the United States would both participate and play a stabilizing role. But instead of dismantling the alliances and protective arrangements it had established to deal with now vanished Cold War threats, as the 1990s proceeded, Washington embraced the Russophobia of central and eastern European countries and their American diasporas by reemphasizing NATO as a defense against possible threats from a revived Russia. The United States undertook to expand NATO not just to the frontiers of the former USSR but beyond them.[41] This was an impulse born of America’s so-called “unipolar moment,” in which it sought universal deference to its values and interests and began to launch massive interventions to change regimes that refused to comply. In doing so, it set aside the UN Charter and other foundational elements of international law. Belying its original purely defensive raison d’être, NATO then vivisected Serbia (ripping Kosovo from it), joined the post-9/11 American effort to pacify and transform Afghanistan, and helped overthrow the government of Libya. Russia and other great powers came to see NATO as a threateningly offensive tool of American foreign policy. Meanwhile, the alliance, which was coterminous with an American sphere of politico-military influence in Europe and the Mediterranean, resumed justifying its continued existence by reference to the threats from Russia it had helped to resurrect.[42] Eventually, Russia resorted to shows of force followed by military intervention in Ukraine to block any further expansion of the American military sphere of influence in Europe.[43] In its long history, Europe has been at peace only when its major powers have all been included in a cooperative security system. The Concert of Europe kept the European peace for a century. The exclusion of Germany and the USSR from the councils of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s catalyzed World War II and the Cold War. The attempted exclusion of Russia from a role in the maintenance of peace and security in Europe in the 21st century has deprived it of diplomatic alternatives to a relapse into belligerent behavior. The Middle East In the Middle East, the collapse of the USSR orphaned Iraq and Syria, both of which had remained part of the shrunken Soviet sphere of influence that followed Egypt’s defection to America. No longer constrained by Moscow, Iraq gambled that it could alleviate the financial exhaustion of its eight-year war with Iran[44] by seizing Kuwait and its oil riches. In response, a UN-authorized coalition of forces led by the United States and Saudi Arabia liberated Kuwait.[45] Syria joined this coalition, signaling a willingness to explore relations with the United States as a partial substitute for the support of the vanished USSR, but was rebuffed due to its hostility to Israel. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq, ousted its government, and attempted to incorporate it into the American politico-military sphere of influence. The U.S. achieved military dominance in Iraq only to see Iran gain a paramount position in its politics. The concurrent U.S. effort to engineer regime change in Syria failed, entrenching Iranian influence there and providing an unexpected opportunity for a resurgence of Russian influence in the Asad government.[46] The destabilization of Iraq and Syria provoked a backlash by Islamist extremists, who briefly erased the border between the two and established an “Islamic state.” Turkey incorporated parts of northern Iraq and Syria into its military and economic spheres. The United States established a blatantly illegal military presence in Syria. After the withdrawal of all but a residual U.S. military training mission,[47] China became the preeminent foreign participant in the Iraqi economy.[48] Meanwhile, “fracking” enabled the United States to resume its historic status as a major energy exporter and made it the swing producer in global energy markets. This reduced the centrality of the Persian Gulf in U.S. global policy. The American commitment to Persian Gulf security diminished concomitantly. As the 21st century proceeded, U.S dominance of the affairs of the “Middle East” eroded. Despite the resurgence in Russian influence and intermittent French attempts to reassert a leading role in Lebanon, regional rather than external powers began to drive politico-military rivalries and dynamics there. China is displacing other great powers as the region’s largest economic partner, but the Middle East is no longer in the sphere of influence of any great power or divided between several, as in the past. [...] NATO, the EU, Turkey, and Russia By 2020, five post-Cold War enlargement rounds had extended NATO to all of Europe other than its officially neutral states[53] and expanded the alliance to thirty members. For most of these, especially the new members, NATO was still a purely defensive alliance. They had no significant ability to contribute to expeditionary military operations and sought dependence on the United States, NATO, and its larger member states for their defense. But the post-Cold War era saw NATO cease to emphasize its defensive character and to become a platform for offensive military operations in the Balkans and “out of area” interventions by “à la carte” coalitions led or backed by the United States.[54] Efforts to include Russia in consultations with the United States and NATO about European security issues foundered. Meanwhile, Turkey both distanced itself from the United States and, like Russia, set aside its centuries-old aspiration to be recognized as part of the European community of nations centered on Berlin, London, Paris, and Rome. And, as Sino-American relations turned adversarial, U.S. efforts to enlist NATO and its members in operations directed at countering Chinese naval power in the South China Sea helped convince China that it should share Russian opposition to further NATO enlargement. [...] The Global American Sphere of Influence Washington no longer frames its arguments for and against policies in terms of the provisions of the UN Charter or major international legal conventions. Instead, it promotes the idea of a monolithic “rules-based order” in which liberal internationalism serves as a thin cover for U.S. primacy.[73] The “rules-based order” amounts to the assertion of a global sphere of influence in which the United States, assisted by the Anglosphere and a few former colonial powers,[74] sets and enforces the rules. American primacy and overlordship are symbolized by the unique,[75] comprehensive set of U.S. regional military commands. These span the globe and are headed by quasi-viceregal four-star flag officers. The US-directed “rules-based order” is institutionalized and reinforced: Militarily, by a network of some eight hundred bases beyond U.S. borders,[76] the world’s widest ranging (if no longer the world’s largest) navy, counterterrorism operations in much of the world,[77] and the world’s greatest volume of arms sales. Economically, through use of dollar sovereignty and dominance of key multilateral institutions[78] to impose a bewilderingly complex set of financial and other sanctions on other countries.[79] Technologically, through the extraterritorial application of U.S. export and retransfer controls.[80] Informationally, by the dominant role of U.S. media and digital communication platforms. Politically, by regime-change operations, selective democracy promotion,[81] adjustments in levels of foreign assistance,[82] the enforcement of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine,[83] and the denial of technology and arms sales to countries that cooperate with designated U.S. adversaries.[84] In effect, Washington now claims and seeks to exercise a right to help determine the policies and international alignments of all the world’s countries other than China, Iran, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and the Russian Federation, all of which it regards and has designated for military planning purposes as implacable adversaries. In what some have called “a contest for the allegiance of humanity,” countries in the spheres of influence of other great powers or not yet incorporated into the U.S. sphere are either courted[85] or subjected to coercive diplomacy through sanctions[86] or thrown into anarchy by regime-change operations.[87] But in a period of major global power shifts, as formerly eclipsed civilization-states like China, India, and (in their own views) Russia and Turkey resurge to wealth and power, the static partitions established by spheres of influence deter less than they invite challenge. This defeats their purpose, which is to protect the security, political culture, and domestic tranquility of the states that establish them. The once-monolithic U.S. global sphere of influence is under attack as other nations seek to deny territories and activities to American dominance and to compete in domains other than the politico-military. What seems to be replacing the once-unified world order is a congeries of regional, overlapping, multidimensional, political, economic, informational, technological,[88] and military spheres of influence Conclusion In the beginning, there were military empires forged through conquest. Then there were trading empires that evolved into political control of areas like India and Indonesia. Some spheres of influence were devoted to denying other powers influence in areas of strategic interest to those proclaiming them. Now the norm is spheres of influence that seek a measure of exclusivity through demands for deference and the power to veto the decisions of the countries they incorporate about military, economic, technological, informational, or political matters. The global U.S. sphere of influence is comprehensive but of this kind. It is now being challenged in various regions of the world and globally, through the rise of other innovative economies and information systems. Rivalry between the world’s greatest powers directed at defending or expanding the arenas in which they exercise primacy may still drive their strategic decisions. But regional powers have their own ideas about this, and their views are gaining ground. As the world traverses the third decade of the 21st century, the worldwide ascendancy and global sphere of influence of the United States is under challenge from its designated adversaries, particularly Russia and China: Latin America is building new relationships with China, Russia, Iran, and Turkey in defiance of the Monroe Doctrine. In the Asia-Pacific, China proposes the negotiation of a “new type of great power relations” that would give it a significant role in the management of the region. In the absence of such an agreement, it is exploring the possible use of force to remove Taiwan from the U.S. sphere of influence and integrate it with the Chinese mainland.[89] In Europe, Russia insists, at a minimum, on strategic denial of Ukraine to the U.S. sphere of influence represented by NATO, demands the rollback of the U.S. sphere to limit potential threats to it from its immediate neighbors, and may, at a maximum, be seeking to incorporate Ukraine into a reestablished, broad Russian sphere of influence. In the Middle East, previous great power spheres of influence, including the six-decade-long primacy of the United States, are challenged by Islamism and nationalism, and are giving way to regional dynamics driven by local religious and geopolitical rivalries. In Africa, new regional alignments are emerging, as the French retreat from Islamist attacks in Françafrique, Nigeria establishes a regional order through the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), South Africa exercises dominant influence in its neighbors, and other local spheres of influence emerge. The global dominance of U.S. media has been greatly eroded by the emergence of foreign competitors,[90] unattractive parochialism, corporate censorship, and increasing domestic focus. S. information dominance is challenged by locally sponsored social media and the emergence of sequestered national media zones in places like China and Iran. These are strategic developments with enormous implications for global peace and development Denying the validity and role of spheres of influence neither erases them nor helps deal with them or the process of their demise. Understanding what is at stake is essential to dealing effectively with conflicts between great powers. Spheres of influence have been an integral part of great power competition. They differ in their purposes and consequences in the varying domains they affect. They are now generating more instability and conflict than they confine. Spheres of influence have been an abiding phenomenon of statecraft and diplomacy that deserves a great deal more study than it has so far received. It is time to consider the alternatives to them. {and some notable footnotes}: [5] The U.S. continues to attempt to bring Cuba and other countries in Latin America, like Venezuela, to heel. Yet it rejects any effort by Russia to incorporate Georgia or Ukraine into a Russian sphere of influence as illegitimate, while insisting on its right to include both countries in its own sphere admitting them to NATO. In Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America, the United States is currently engaged in coercive diplomacy and economic warfare to exclude Chinese companies from any role in telecommunications or infrastructure investment. U.S. policies in the Indo-Pacific seek to sustain American military primacy and the hub-and-spoke alliance system that implemented policies of “containment” in the Cold War. In the Middle East, where American influence is visibly in retreat, the U.S. focus is on rolling back the sphere of influence its and its security partners’ bungled military interventions in Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen enabled Iran to create. [8] The “Monroe Doctrine” was the first formal declaration of a sphere of influence by any country, though the term itself was not used in diplomacy until 1885. In its original form, it was an effort to deny extra-hemispheric powers spheres of influence that might threaten U.S. security. (The 1904 ‘Roosevelt Corollary’ transformed it from an instrument of strategic denial into an active assertion of U.S. dominance of the Hemisphere.) Proclaimed by U.S. President James Monroe December 2, 1823, on the advice of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, the Monroe Doctrine demanded the respect of European colonial powers for the independence of states in the Western Hemisphere and declared that any effort on their part to “extend their system to any portion of [the] hemisphere [would be seen] as dangerous to [U.S.] peace and safety.” In 1864, as the U.S. was preoccupied with its civil war, France installed Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph von Hapsburg-Lorraine as the emperor of Mexico. In 1865, with the civil war behind it, the U.S. massed 40,000 troops on the Mexican border and demanded that the French remove him. The French withdrew their forces from Mexico. Maximilian was then captured and executed by the forces of Benito Juárez. In 1895, the United States threatened to go to war with Britain if it intervened in Venezuela. In 1917, a German proposal of an alliance with Mexico helped persuade the United States to enter World War I. [14] For example, Switzerland has remained independent by virtue of the strategic convenience this offers the great powers that surround it, a tough citizen army trained to exploit its difficult topography for defense, and its scrupulous neutrality in times of peace as well as war. Its neutrality was recognized at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Austria was freed from great power occupation and exempted from their spheres of influence by the Austrian State Treaty of May 15, 1955. Finland severed its union with Russia in 1917. It lost ten percent of its territory in the Winter War of 1939–1940, the Continuation War of 1941–1944, and the War of Lapland of 1944–1945. It has since refused to compromise its independence and distinctive democratic social order while prudently maintaining cordial relations with Moscow and avoiding obvious challenges to core Russian interests. Finland’s conduct proves that there is nothing ideologically pernicious about prudent self-restraint that recognizes the potential perils of offending more powerful neighbors. [21] By 1904, the U.S. had already seized Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spain, threatened to go to war with Great Britain over Venezuela, and intervened to detach Panama from Colombia. It subsequently invaded Nicaragua, Honduras, Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Cuba, Panama, Costa Rica, and Grenada and engaged in covert regime change operations in many of these countries as well as in Chile, Venezuela, and Bolivia. The first version of the Monroe Doctrine had been passive and defensive. The second was active and domineering. [30] These U.S. reactions included the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and other efforts to produce regime change in Cuba, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the 1973 overthrow of the government of Chile, the 1981 – 1988 Contra war in Nicaragua, and the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada. [34] The USSR intervened in Hungary on November 4, 1956, and in Czechoslovakia on August 20, 1968. On November 13, 1968, in what became known as the Brezhnev Doctrine, Leonid Brezhnev, the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, declared that no member country could leave the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact or disturb a ruling communist party’s monopoly on power. [41] As early as the U.S. midterm elections of 1994, both the Republican Party and the Clinton administration were courting ethnic Slavic and Baltic voters by suggesting early membership in NATO for their ancestral homelands. By December 1994, Russia, which professed to have been seeking partnership with the United States, angrily declared that it felt threatened and betrayed. (See “NATO Expansion: What Yeltsin Heard” and referenced National Security Archive documents at https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2018-03-16/nato-expansion-what-yeltsin-heard. The Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland were admitted to NATO in 1999, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania (all formerly part of the USSR), Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004, Albania and Croatia in 2009, Montenegro in 2017, and North Macedonia in 2020. In 2008, when NATO declared it would be prepared to admit Georgia and Ukraine to membership, Russia warned that it would regard this as “a direct threat” to its security. Meanwhile, the United States briefly attempted to establish its influence in Central Asia before ceasing to contest the dominant politico-military influence of Russia and the economic influence of China there. [42] In 2020, when the United States and other NATO countries, citing election fraud, refused to recognize the Lukashenko government, Belarus placed itself under Russian protection, thus confirming its position as part of a residual Russian sphere of influence in eastern Europe. [43] By 2021 – 2022, Russia had built enough military strength to mount a diplomatic challenge to the continued expansion of NATO. Moscow demonstrated its ability to overwhelm Ukraine and to signal that admitting it to NATO membership might trigger a nuclear confrontation with the United States. It demanded that the United States and NATO end the menace such expansion posed to its peace of mind. Russia initially denied that it had any intention of invading Ukraine. But when it received no U.S or NATO answer to its demands, it attacked, changing its apparent objective from strategic denial of Ukraine to the U.S. sphere of influence to the incorporation of Ukraine into a reestablished sphere of influence of its own. [52] For example, Norway, the only founding member of NATO to border Russia, has long barred the peacetime stationing of troops and offensive weapons from other NATO countries on its territory. See also the discussion of the armed neutrality of Finland, above. [54] Fourteen of NATO’s then-nineteen members participated in the US-led 1999 air war with Serbia. NATO commanded the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan in which a total of fifty nations took part, many of them not NATO members, but most NATO members declined to join the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. 9 NATO member states spearheaded the 2011 intervention in Libya, which was joined by two non-NATO members. The majority of member states did not take part in the conflict. [64] U.S. forces occupied Japan after World War II and never left. The U.S. troop presence there and in South Korea has long been unpopular. Japanese and Koreans tolerated it because of the Soviet threat to their independence and the perceived military superiority of North Korea to South Korea. With the end of the Cold War and the remarkable ascendancy of the Republic of Korea (ROK) over its northern rival, this tolerance is increasingly fragile. Meanwhile, Washington’s stridently anti-Chinese posture has fed concern that Japan and the ROK could be dragged willy-nilly into a Sino-American war and erratic American foreign policy behavior has raised doubts about the reliability of U.S. security guarantees. [71] China is no longer the fastest growing market for U.S. exports, as it once was. The imposition of tariffs has exacerbated supply chain problems resulting from the COVID-19 epidemic and fed inflation in the U.S. economy. There has been no significant “reshoring” of industrial jobs from China to the United States. [72] The U.S. campaign against Chinese telecommunications companies like Huawei and ZTE and its efforts to choke off Chinese access to extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) technology and equipment exemplify this effort to divide the global technology market. The irony is that, in many instances, the United States cannot itself produce alternatives to Chinese products. [73] The new “rules-based order” omits references to the United Nations Charter and international law. Due to domestic political gridlock, the United States is no longer able to ratify international treaties and conventions, but it insists on its right to interpret them without regard to the views of others. The “rules-based order” presumes that the United States and its key allies (in the G-7) have the authority to make the rules, determine when and how to apply them, and exempt themselves from them while imposing and enforcing them on others. [74] The “G-7,” whose members are Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States. [77] According to the Cost of War project sponsored by the Watson Institute at Brown University, in 2021, the U.S. military was engaged in such operations in eighty-five countries. https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2021/US%20Counterterrorism%20Operations%202018-2020%2C%20Costs%20of%20War.pdf [79] Countries or regions subject to direct U.S. sanctions (either unilaterally or in part unilaterally) include (but are not limited to) the Balkans, Belarus, Burma, Burundi, Central African Republic, China, Cuba, Democratic Republic of Congo, Hong Kong, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Nicaragua, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, Ukraine/Russia, Venezuela, Yemen, and Zimbabwe. U.S. secondary sanctions target normal arms-length commercial activity that does not involve a U.S. nexus and may be legal in the jurisdictions of the transacting parties. While U.S. individuals and entities must adhere to primary sanctions as a matter of U.S. law or face potential criminal/civil penalties, secondary sanctions present non-U.S. targets with a choice: do business with the United States or with the sanctioned target, but not both. Targeted sanctions prohibit US persons from transacting with an individual or entity designated by the State or Treasury Departments under a specific sanctions regime. [80] The United States now gives export controls and economic boycotts extraterritorial application. As a result, persons and companies in other states are prevented from exporting to or investing in the states targeted by the U.S. The U.S. previously argued (e.g., in the case of the Arab boycott of Israel) that this was illegal under international law. [81] It is instructive to contrast the U.S. reaction to the 2013 military coup in Egypt and the 2021coup in Myanmar. Egypt is in the U.S. sphere of influence while Myanmar is outside it. [90] U.S. media are now grossly ill-equipped and staffed to cover events abroad. The vacuum is being filled by state-owned foreign news services like the BBC. Al Jazeera, Sputnik, Xinhua, and the like. The U.S, which once commanded the global information domain, is no longer able to dominate it. Domestic media designed to appeal to partisan audiences at home alienates, rather than engages audiences abroad. Great powers are being driven to recognize the need for information strategies. The United States, having euthanized the U.S. Information Agency after the end of the Cold War, is, however, a holdout. Edited May 3, 2022 by redsnapper Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul A Posted May 1, 2022 Share Posted May 1, 2022 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_Morris Clayton Morris Lawsuits In March 2019, investors filed more than two dozen lawsuits in Indiana and New Jersey, claiming that Morris was running a Ponzi scheme involving the sales of some houses in C- and D-class neighborhoods through his investment company, Morris Invest, in Indianapolis, Indiana. The investors claim they were sold rental properties which Morris Invest promised to rehabilitate and rent out, earning them rental income. Some claim they later discovered the properties they received rental income from for several months were boarded up and vacant and they began receiving city code and country health department violations. Others found they had purchased vacant lots, small shacks or buildings that were falling down.[5] By July 2019, Morris had moved the family to a resort town on the coast of Portugal. The Morrises say they and several members of their family also lost money because of the underhanded business practices of former business partner Bert Whalen of Oceanpointe Investments. Whalen is accused of taking money entrusted to him for purchases, rehabilitations, and property management costs and forging documents when asked for updates and receipts. The Morrises intend to fight the suits from overseas. Federal and state law enforcement officials would not comment on whether or not there was a criminal investigation.[6] In March 2020, Clayton Morris lost a $7.2 million copyright infringement lawsuit against HoltonWiseTV. The lawsuit, filed in Federal Court by Morris in October 2019, stemmed from HoltonWiseTV's production of a three-hour documentary investigating the alleged involvement of Morris in various real estate scams.[7][8] In May 2020, the state of Indiana filed a civil lawsuit against Clayton Morris, among others, for violating Indiana's deceptive sales and home loan acts in real estate deals involving more than 150 properties in Marion County.[9] 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
redsnapper Posted May 1, 2022 Share Posted May 1, 2022 1 hour ago, Freeforester said: Seems that for Biden and those controlling him, the gloves are off: Diplomacy?? - Churchill famously quipped that ‘ To jaw-jaw was better than war-war’, but of course, times and ‘sensibilities’ change, and after all, he isn’t in charge now, Biden and co have a plan... Fighting to the last Ukrainian, eh?… This is the actual US strategy (concocted by the same whackos that surrounded Obama in 2014) - no diplomacy, maximum pressure on Russia no matter the cost in UKR blood and no matter what the risk of nuclear exchange. UKR has no option other than to keep fighting to the last Ukrainian. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eucner Posted May 1, 2022 Share Posted May 1, 2022 1 hour ago, Freeforester said: Please choose more trustworthy sources. That video included picked facts and intentional understanding to make it a selling scandal. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
meepmeepmayer Posted May 1, 2022 Share Posted May 1, 2022 (edited) Even if one somehow subscribes to this "spheres of influence" thing: Russia clearly has not enough power for it. The US has. So if might makes right, as they so argue, where is the problem? The Russians conveniently ignore that point. Which is how you know they only bullshit: no consistent logic other than the typical "It's ok if we do it, and an outrage otherwise." of the selfish. Otherwise, they would just accept that they lost their stupid imagined "sphere of influence" (and why), and try to do better. But of course that assumes they are genuine, which they are not. Edited May 1, 2022 by meepmeepmayer 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul A Posted May 1, 2022 Share Posted May 1, 2022 https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-ato/3472351-un-confirms-evacuation-of-civilians-from-azovstal.html Sunday, 01 May 2022 UN confirms evacuation of civilians from Azovstal The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs confirmed on Sunday the evacuation of civilians from the Azovstal plant in Mariupol. The United Nations is conducting a "safe passage operation" for civilians from the Azovstal steel works in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, a spokesperson for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Saviano Abreu, told Reuters. The operation began on April 29 and is being coordinated with the International Committee of the Red Cross, Ukraine and Russia, he noted. Abreu said the operation arrived at the steel works on Saturday morning. He added that no further details could be released so as not to jeopardise the safety of evacuees and the convoy. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul A Posted May 1, 2022 Share Posted May 1, 2022 https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-ato/3472300-zelensky-about-100-civilians-evacuated-from-azovstal-plant.html Sunday, 01 May 2022 Zelensky: About 100 civilians evacuated from Azovstal plant The evacuation of civilians has begun from the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, destroyed by Russian shelling. The first group of people is already heading to the government-controlled territory. “Evacuation of civilians from Azovstal began. The 1st group of about 100 people is already heading to the controlled area. Tomorrow we’ll meet them in Zaporizhzhia. Grateful to our team! Now they, together with UN, are working on the evacuation of other civilians from the plant,” President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky posted on Twitter. As reported, about 1,000 civilians and Ukrainian servicemen, including about 600 wounded, still stay in the plant’s territory. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
redsnapper Posted May 1, 2022 Share Posted May 1, 2022 11 minutes ago, meepmeepmayer said: Even if one somehow subscribes to this "spheres of influence" thing: >> it is not a question of subscription - this is a reality of how the world has operated for quite some time and is exemplified by the Monroe Doctrine, the Brezhnev Doctrine, and 100+ years of geopolitical history. Whether it is good or bad can be debated no doubt but it is the way great powers operate... Russia's invasion is illegal and immoral without a doubt (as are all wars of aggression including the US)! But why did it happen? Russia clearly has not enough power for it. >> they seized Crimea and now they are in UKR proper The US has. So if might makes right, as they so argue, where is the problem? >> might does not make right - might makes possible The Russians conveniently ignore that point. Which is how you know they only bullshit: no consistent logic other than the typical "It's ok if we do it, and an outrage otherwise." of the selfish. >>Is this not exactly the posture of the US in all of its foreign wars (ok if we do it)? And the posture of the US on others wars (not ok)? Otherwise, they would just accept that they lost their stupid imagined "sphere of influence" (and why), and try to do better. But of course that assumes they are genuine, which they are not. >>The sphere of influence is such that neighbors of great powers are automatically part of their sphere (especially if strategically important). So nothing substantial Mexico or Canada wants can be done without considering how the US will react. NATO is US projection of power in Europe and moving that projection into UKR is a direct threat to the Russian sphere of influence ( Russia's perception going back to 1994 ). So Russia behaved predictably/ruthlessly the way great powers do - it annexed Crimea to start with little or no response from the west. It made amply clear it wanted NATO/US meddling out of UKR and a rollback on the menace of NATO weapons on its borders. No diplomatic response from the west - no dialog - no diplomacy to seek a non military solution. Only continued western rapprochement with UKR. So Russia attacks UKR - which it telegraphed for months in advance by obvious troop movements. Again during that long period ample time for US to get active diplomatically. BUt US calls Russia's bluff - they invade. So we have to think that surely the US considered that Russia might respond this way in response to the US wanting UKR to be within its sphere of influence (solely because it is of strategic importance to Russia). So US policy makers made the calculus that bringing UKR into US sphere of influence (via various means) might risk a Russian response but so what - no NATO/US troops are getting blown up in this conflict - only UKR people and infrastructure. So the US maintains its strategic objective (NATO expansion and encirclement of Russia) with only the UKR people to lose... If UKR gets blown to smithereens in a protracted war with Russia, it still weakens Russia. As Leonid Brezinski said about 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan which lead to a quagmire for USSR - (I paraphrase): They fell for the trap!!! Which of course implies - who gives a shit about the Afghans getting pummeled as long as USSR is weakened... If the US really cared about UKR, they would have immediately stepped in to de-escalate diplomatically once the invasion started (and Russia proved they were not kidding about a red line in UKR which they had already shown with Crimea). Or they would have considered how this lunatic game of super-power chess with Russia might end for UKR. But UKR blood appears to be of little concern to the US as they keep feeding the conflict. Other than the awful effects on UKR, the US probably did not consider some other unintended consequences of this proxy war with Russia: >India/China/Russia alliance >Russia transacting energy deals in Rubles (or yuan,etc) >Nuclear threat escalation And who knows what else will come from this? Fog of war is highly unpredictable with many unintended consequences guaranteed! All wars of aggression are illegal and immoral - so when you have US political class screaming moral outrage over UKR after US policy helped to create this mess and after 20 years of US illegal wars in the middle east leading to immense human suffering (and 240 thousand dead in Yemen under a US OKd Saudi bombing campaign and millions dead in Vietnam,Laos,etc), you gotta shake your head at the irony and hypocrisy! When Russia mentions spheres of influence, Blinken says these belong in the dustbin of history? While the US considers the entire world now within its sphere of influence (minus China, NK, Russia, Iran,etc)? Am I the only one who thinks this is batshit crazy? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mrelwood Posted May 1, 2022 Share Posted May 1, 2022 6 hours ago, redsnapper said: This is a great article on spheres of influence Maybe these very long articles would better fit to the forum as external links. They do infer with glancing through the topic, and the readers who have the interest to read them through will do so with just a link as well. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
redsnapper Posted May 1, 2022 Share Posted May 1, 2022 (edited) On 5/1/2022 at 7:42 PM, mrelwood said: Maybe these very long articles would better fit to the forum as external links. They do infer with glancing through the topic, and the readers who have the interest to read them through will do so with just a link as well. agreed! i hv gone a little batshit crazy myself apparently ... @RagingGrandpa suggested I use the quote function to contain these long suckers which I have done retroactively! A very good tip... Edited May 3, 2022 by redsnapper 2 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul A Posted May 2, 2022 Share Posted May 2, 2022 https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-ato/3472510-russian-mole-exposed-in-ukraine-armys-general-staff-adviser-to-presidents-office-chief.html Monday, 02 May 2022 Russian mole exposed in Ukraine Army’s General Staff - adviser to President’s Office chief Until recently, a Russian spy had been working at the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. However, the enemy aide was exposed and detained by the Ukrainian security service. That’s according to Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to the head of the President's Office, who spoke in an interview with Feygin Live, Ukrinform reports. According to the official, in addition to the enemy asset in the General Staff, several other persons were exposed, who had no connection to military headquarters. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul A Posted May 2, 2022 Share Posted May 2, 2022 https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-economy/3472492-over-4m-tonnes-of-grain-blocked-in-ukrainian-ports-due-to-war-un.html Monday, 02 May 2022 Over 4M tonnes of grain blocked in Ukrainian ports due to war - UN Almost 4.5 million tonnes of grain have been blocked in Ukrainian ports. Exports through the closed sea routes are halted amid an ongoing Russian military invasion. This was stated by the UN World Food Program official Martin Frick, Ukrinform reports with reference to RFE/RL. Before the war, Ukraine was one of the world's largest wheat exporters and corn producers. Many countries rely on Ukrainian wheat supplies, according to the UN. Western governments have repeatedly warned of a possible food crisis and famine in a number of countries due to Russia's war against Ukraine. In March, the United Nations saw food prices rise by more than 12 percent, a record since 1990. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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