As the Biden administration faces mounting public and internal criticism for supporting and arming Israel’s 96-day assault on Gaza, we speak with Tariq Habash, who last week became the first Biden appointee to publicly resign from the government to protest Biden’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza. “It was untenable to work for and represent an administration and president that put conditions on my…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
As many as 10,000 people a day are being arrested in the U.S.-Mexico border as the Biden administration adapts the GOP’s xenophobic anti-immigrant framework ahead of the 2024 election, says Laura Carlsen, director of the Mexico City-based think tank MIRA: Feminisms and Democracies. She joins us as the U.S. secretary of state and homeland security secretary met Wednesday with the Mexican president.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A group of House Democrats led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) is calling on President Joe Biden to demand a “robust bilateral ceasefire” in Gaza as reports say over 1 in 200 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed in just the last six weeks amid Israel’s siege and genocide. The letter, signed by 24 House Democrats in total, urges Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken to call for…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
From racist tweets to rising hate crimes, the media’s anti-China propaganda has created a climate of aggression. Two weeks ago, a man drove a car into the Chinese consulate in San Francisco, yelling “Where’s the CCP?” Arab Americans have been targeted during the Persian Gulf War, the War on Terror, and U.S.-backed atrocities in Palestine. It’s no surprise that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are in the crosshairs of white supremacy as the U.S. targets China. Back in April, a Columbia University found that three in four Chinese Americans said they’d suffered racial discrimination in the past 12 months.
When the Trump administration launched the China Initiative to prosecute spies, the Department of Justice racially profiled Chinese Americans and Chinese nationals. Between 2018 and 2022, the number of Chinese researchers who dropped their affiliation with U.S. institutions jumped 23 percent. The Biden administration has ended the initiative, but the Department of Justice and the congressional anti-China committee are still targeting political leaders in the Chinese community.
As Biden continues the crackdowns of his predecessor, his administration is also escalating in the Asia-Pacific region. From expanding military bases in the Philippines – including one potential base in the works intended to join contingencies in Taiwan – to building a fleet of AI drones to target China, militarists are creating conditions for a hot war in the Pacific. As the U.S. prepares for war, Forbes published an article on September 25 about an aircraft carrier “kill chain” and its potential use in a war with China. In February, CNN journalists accompanied a U.S. Navy jet approaching Chinese airspace. As a Chinese pilot warned the U.S. to keep a safe distance, an American soldier remarked: “It’s another Friday afternoon in the South China Sea.”
Not only are we normalizing U.S. aggression. We’re also relying on the military-industrial complex as an unbiased source. Pro-war propaganda is derailing China-U.S. ties, increasing anti-Asian hate, and hiding the realities of public opinion across the Pacific.
After launching the AUKUS military pact between Britain and Australia in 2021, as well as stiff export controls designed to limit China’s economy last year, the U.S. began 2023 with what appeared to be an olive branch. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was scheduled to visit China in February. Then came the “spy balloon.”
A Chinese balloon was blown off course and eventually shot down by the U.S. military. The Wall Street Journal and NBC uncritically printed and broadcasted statements from US Air Force Brigadier General Pat Ryder about the balloon’s surveillance capabilities. On February 8, citing three unnamed officials, the New York Times said, “American intelligence agencies have assessed that China’s spy balloon program is part of global surveillance.” The same story mentions the U.S. State Department’s briefings to foreign officials that were “designed to show that the balloons are equipped for intelligence gathering and that the Chinese military has been carrying out this collection for years, targeting, among other sites, the territories of Japan, Taiwan, India, and the Philippines.”
On April 3, the BBC and CNN published conflicting stories on the balloon that cited anonymous officials but contained inconsistencies about its ability to take pictures. It wasn’t until June 29 that Ryder admitted no data had been transmitted. In September, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told CBS the balloon wasn’t even spying. This matched China’s statements about the balloon, as well as that of American meteorologists. But the damage was done. Blinken had postponed his trip to China. He eventually went in June, after a trip to Papua New Guinea, where its student protesters rejected his plans to militarize their country under a security pact.
On May 26, Blinken made a speech, referring to China as a “long-term challenge.” Politico went further, publishing a piece on May 26, called “Blinken calls China ‘most serious long-term’ threat to world order” with a same-day USA Today article also taking the liberty of using challenge and threat interchangeably.
A Princeton University study found Americans who perceive China as a threat were more likely to stereotype Chinese people as untrustworthy and immoral. Intelligence leaks about a China threat combined with the age-old Yellow Peril syndrome have allowed for incessant Sinophobia to dominate our politics.
Misinformation, the other pandemic
In May 2020, Trump told a scared country with 1 million recorded COVID-19 cases and almost 100,000 dead that the pandemic was China’s fault. Again, our leaders cited undisclosed intelligence. For its part, CNN showed images of wet markets after the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Walter Russell Mead called “China Is The Real Sick Man of Asia.” A year later, Politico eventually acknowledged Trump cherry-picked intelligence to support his claims but the Biden administration ended up also seeking to investigate the lab leak theory. And the media went along with it.
For the Wall Street Journal, pro-Iraq War propagandist Michael Gordon co-authored an article claiming that “three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care.” An anonymous source said, “The information that we had coming from the various sources was of exquisite quality.” But the source admits it’s not known why researchers were sick.
The article relies on the conservative Hudson Institute’s Senior Fellow David Asher’s testimony and the fact China has not shared the medical records of citizens without potential COVID-19 symptoms. It is even admitted that several other unnamed U.S. officials find the Trump-era intelligence to be exactly what it is – circumstantial.
A year earlier, during the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries moderated by CNN, Dana Bash asked Bernie Sanders: “What consequences should China face for its role in its global crisis?” She asked the question referencing how Wuhan’s authorities silenced Dr. Wenliang but failed to mention China’s People’s Supreme Court condemned the city’s police for doing so. She also didn’t acknowledge how Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Shi Zhengli revealed in July 2020 that all of the staff and students in her lab tested negative for COVID-19. Shi even shared her research with American scientists. Georgetown University COVID-19 origin specialist Daniel Lucey welcomed Shi’s transparency: “There are a lot of new facts I wasn’t aware of. It’s very exciting to hear this directly from her.”
But from the Page Act of 1875, which stereotyped Chinese as disease carriers, to job discrimination during the pandemic, it is Asian Americans who ultimately pay the price for the media’s irresponsibility and participation in medical racism. They are already among the casualties of the new cold war. But that war not only threatens residents of the U.S. but the entire planet too.
Profit, not principle
This summer, the U.S. armed Taiwan under the Foreign Military Transfer program, reserved for sovereign states only. This violates the one-China policy which holds that both sides of the Taiwan Strait acknowledge that there is one China. Biden is also trying to include Taiwan weapons funding in a supplemental request to Congress. Weapons sales to Taiwan go back to the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, as well as Reagan administration’s assurances that the U.S. will keep sending weapons but not play any mediation role between Taipei and Beijing. In 1996, a military standoff between the U.S. and China erupted in the Taiwan Strait, followed by an increasing flow of lethal weaponry up to the present.
The New York Times published a story on September 18, mentioning Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, which it says was “a show of support for the island.” Never mind that the majority of Taiwan residents surveyed by the Brookings Institute felt her visit was detrimental to their security. The media also often ignores voices from Taiwan who don’t want war, favor reunification, or reject attempts to delete Chinese history in their textbooks.
Still, Fox News continues to give a platform to lawmakers like Representative Young Kim who wrote a piece on September 20 advocating for more military patrols in the South China Sea. On October 17, The Washington Post published a story about the Pentagon releasing footage of Chinese aircraft intercepting U.S. warplanes over the last two years. The story does not share the context of U.S. expansionism or how multiple secretaries of defense have threatened Beijing over its disputed maritime borders. Microsoft is even getting in on the action, with articles from CNN and Reuters last month uncritically sharing the software company’s claims that China is using AI to interfere in our elections, despite no evidence shared with the voting public.
It demonstrates how war profiteers are edging us closer to a conflict. From sending the Patriot weapons system to Taiwan to practicing attacks with F-22 Raptors in the occupied Northern Marianas Islands, Lockheed Martin is raking in lucrative contracts while residents of the region fear an outbreak of war. RTX supplies Israel’s Iron Dome and is now designing engineering systems for gunboats in the Pacific. When arms dealers make money, victims of imperialism die. With strong links to the military, it’s hard to imagine that Microsoft, News Corp, and Warner Bros. Discovery would care as long as their stocks go up too. Intelligence spooks and media moguls don’t know what’s best for people or the planet. And it’s time for a balanced and nuanced understanding of China. That begins with disarming the discourse and keeping the Pacific peaceful.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, speaking alongside U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, indicated on Monday that Israel’s relentless and indiscriminate military campaign against Palestinians in Gaza will last a long time. In a joint appearance, Gallant and Blinken reiterated the United States’ commitment to supporting Israel. “Mr. Secretary, thank you for coming to Israel.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, speaking alongside U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, indicated on Monday that Israel’s relentless and indiscriminate military campaign against Palestinians in Gaza will last a long time. In a joint appearance, Gallant and Blinken reiterated the United States’ commitment to supporting Israel. “Mr. Secretary, thank you for coming to Israel.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The president has a frosty history with Israel’s PM, and he has emphasised that US backing depends on the upholding of democratic values
President Biden’s response to the murderous attack by Hamas on Israeli towns, villages and kibbutzim that claimed more than 1,200 Israeli lives, the majority of them civilians, was one of the most heartfelt expressions of support for Israel by a US president for a very long time. His speech on 10 October emphasised that Washington would not confine its backing for the Jewish state to words, and would immediately translate those words into tangible assistance. But Biden’s pledge of “surging” support, including sending aircraft carriers “to deter hostile actions against Israel” – is not without caveats, to which Israel should pay careful heed. Over the weekend, Biden wisely warned Israel against occupying Gaza, and expressed his support for opening a humanitarian corridor to alleviate the humanitarian catastrophe that is already taking place.
It is no secret that US-Israel relations have been strained since Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power at the end of last year. The US administration has been openly critical of the crass attempt to weaken the country’s judiciary, and with it Israel’s democratic system, by the newly formed, most rightwing government coalition in its history. Indirectly supporting the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have been regularly taking to the streets in defence of their democracy, Biden linked US friendship with Israel to the preservation of that democracy, and asserted that: “The genius of American democracy and Israeli democracy is that they are both built on strong institutions, on checks and balances, on an independent judiciary.”
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
As officials in Washington scramble to address the rapid outbreak of war in Israel and Palestine, they are sidestepping the fact that they believed that such a dramatic outburst of violence was likely. Since May 2021, when Hamas and Israel clashed in a brief war that left more than 200 Palestinians dead and much of Gaza’s infrastructure destroyed, U.S. officials have repeatedly warned that living…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
As Israel on Friday bombarded civilians in Gaza and prepared for a ground invasion in response to Hamas’ recent attack, U.S. State Department leadership reportedly instructed officials not to publicly use some terms that would advocate for less violence. According to HuffPost, which reviewed official emails, “State Department staff wrote that high-level officials do not want press materials to…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s horrific counterattack on mostly Israeli civilians and Israel’s hourly genocidal bombing on Gaza’s more than 2 million people – nearly 40% of whom are children – it is unlikely that the Western or U.S. mass media will focus on what should be the U.S. government’s response.
Last Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken abruptly took down his earlier post which read: “Turkish Foreign Minister @HakanFidan and I spoke further on Hamas’ terrorist attacks on Israel. I encouraged Türkiye’s advocacy for a cease-fire and the release of all hostages held by Hamas immediately.”
That was the end of any ceasefire talk by Washington – Israel’s historic patron, protector and unlimited weapons provider. Instead, Biden, Blinken and Secretary of Defense Austin have made statements of unconditional support and further weapons shipments for expanding the bombing and destruction of Gaza, targeting homes, mosques, schools, clinics, hospitals, ambulances and critical infrastructure like water mains.
There was no mention of the far greater destruction of innocent Palestinians using F-16s and U.S.-made missiles that was underway. Are there no lawyers advising these politicians? When Israel ordered a complete siege of tiny, defenseless Gaza (an area much smaller than New York City) Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered his Southern Command to cut off essential services to Gaza, declaring “No electricity, no food, no fuel, no water. … We are fighting animals and will act accordingly.”
Reacting to this omnicidal military order, international law practitioner Bruce Fein noted, “The Genocide Convention defines genocide, among other things, as ‘Deliberately inflicting on [a national, ethnical, racial or religious group] conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’.”
No problem, said Biden, assuring Israel unlimited military support to do whatever it wants, thus greenlighting genocide by Israel’s extremist ministers with their long, open record of racist hatred against Palestinians. Having met the legal definition of Co-belligerency, Biden, knowing that the laws of war were being systemically violated, later expressed his hope that Israel would abide by them.
Biden/Blinken so far have no diplomatic policy, and no strategy counseling restraint to keep the conflict from escalating uncontrollably in that explosive region. They exercise veto power on the UN Security Council blocking anything like a ceasefire truce and negotiations toward a permanent two-state resolution as envisioned by the Oslo Accords and the Arab-Israeli Peace Process signed by all parties on September 13, 1993.
Our government still hasn’t learned from the history of this region. This is the fifth war on Gaza with the most modern weaponry against Hamas’s fortunately feeble rockets, now intercepted. Over the decades, innocent Palestinian casualties, fatalities, injuries, disease and loss of livelihoods are hundreds of times larger than those suffered by innocent Israelis.
Yet Washington, knowing that the oppressors, occupiers, and blockaders surrounding and infiltrating Gaza keep saying Israel has a right to defend itself without adding that the crushed Palestinians have a similar right to defend themselves under international law and the norms of equity.
The Hamas fighters moving into those border Israeli villages saw themselves on a homicide/suicide mission. Many had lost family members, and co-workers, to decades of Israeli bombs. They knew they were going to die inside Israel. Indeed, Israel counted 1,500 Hamas bodies in the area, larger than the number of Israeli civilians slain by these self-perceived martyrs.
Thus, the cycle of violence expands, and what human rights advocates call “the open-air prison” of Gaza faces total obliteration by Israel. Moral, rational voices for waging peace by Israeli human rights groups, together with their Palestinian counterparts, are lost in the vortex of the killing fields in Gaza – a victim of post-World War II history.
Driven by the Nazi Holocaust, the founders of the state of Israel were in no mood to tolerate the rights of the indigenous Arab peoples. It was their land and we took it, said the father of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, in an oft-quoted public remark to Nahum Goldmann, the head of the World Zionist Organization.
After the UN partitioned Palestine in 1948, many expelled Palestinian refugees ended up in the Gaza Strip. Since then, the Israeli military superpower has expanded its original territory several-fold, now holding 78% of the original Palestine plus the Syrian Golan Heights. After its victory over Arab nations in the 1967 war, Israel, in violation of international law, occupied the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, establishing large colonies in the West Bank.
The U.S. has not been an honest broker, to say the least. It has been meddling in the Middle East, invading countries, toppling regimes, arming dictators and factions, and fueling constant instability. Oil, of course, has also been a key factor driving U.S. foreign policy.
All along, Congress has become a growing chorus calling for unlimited money and weaponry for Israeli militarism, making that country an unchallengeable military superpower, bristling with nuclear weapons. The existential threat is against the right of the Palestinians to have their state. Before the colossal intelligence failure last week in Gaza, Israeli military leaders had been saying that Israel has never been more secure.
It is hard not to charge hawkish Congressional Republicans and Democrats with bigoted, legislated cruelties against Palestinian victims of Israeli war crimes. They have tied themselves at the hip to the most historically extreme Israeli politicians who’ve voiced their view of Palestinians as subhuman and use vicious racist language that nearly all members of Congress refuse to disavow.
The question for Americans of conscience, including American Jews and Arab-Americans – especially Jewish Voice for Peace and the Arab American Institute – is when will the U.S. government assert its influence in the area to say: “Enough.” Stop the slaughter of innocents, demand a ceasefire and commence critical medical and food aid to the suffering survivors. After years of unconscionable downgrading of the “Palestinian question,” it is time for Washington to launch serious diplomatic negotiations, backing the experienced role of the United Nations (UN) in such conflicts.
The UN also has a grieving stake there. Israeli “precision” bombing once again struck clearly marked, long-standing UN humanitarian sites in Gaza, so far killing 11 courageous United Nations workers.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
On August 29, 2023, Amnesty International USA, Human Rights Watch, Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED) and 16 additional civil society organizations delivered an open letter urging U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to encourage the United Arab Emirates (UAE) government to immediately and unconditionally release Emirati human rights defender Ahmed Mansoor ahead of the 28th Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28) that will take place from November 30 to December 12, 2023. [for more on UAE: see https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/tag/ahmed-mansoor/]
In the letter, the organizations urged Secretary Blinken to call on the UAE government to immediately and unconditionally release Ahmed Mansoor and other jailed human rights defenders and peaceful critics both privately and publicly at the highest levels. The organizations also called on the Secretary to signal deep concern about Mansoor’s well-being and request permission to visit him in prison as soon as possible.
“With the world’s attention on Dubai, the US government should deliver on this administration’s promise to center human rights in its foreign policy and press the Emirati authorities to finally release Ahmed Mansoor,” said Elizabeth Rghebi, Advocacy Director for the Middle East and North Africa, “As a participant in COP28, the US government can demand the UAE demonstrate through this high profile release its commitment to the human rights principles required for healthy civic space at this upcoming global gathering.”
Governments have an obligation to protect the civic space for protest, in particular guaranteeing the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of expression. Subjecting human rights defenders and critics to unlawful use of force, arbitrary detention, unfair trials, and abusive detention conditions violate these and other rights. The US government should work to uphold its obligations both at home and when engaging diplomatic partners.
Mansoor was arrested by Emirati authorities in March 2017 for “spreading false news” to “harm the reputation of the state.” All the charges on which he was convicted were based solely on his human rights advocacy, including using email and WhatsApp to communicate with human rights organizations. Following more than a year in isolation in pre-trial detention and a grossly unfair trial, an Emirati state security court sentenced Mansoor to 10 years in prison. Mansoor is a laureate of the MEA [see: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/laureates/074ACCD4-A327-4A21-B056-440C4C378A1A]
Throughout his imprisonment, Mansoor has been subjected to treatment that violates the prohibition against torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, including being held in solitary confinement without access to reading materials, television, or radio. Since December 2017, he has been denied eyeglasses, most personal hygiene items and, at least until recently, a bed or mattress in his cell.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/08/30/cop28-us-should-press-uae-activists-release
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
I first visited North Korea in 2009. I remember feeling nervous and anxious in the days and weeks leading up to the trip. I had grown up thinking of only the south as my homeland, and the north seemed remote and foreign. This was also the same year that United States journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee had been detained in North Korea, also known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)…
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken just wrapped up his visit to South Pacific island countries. During the visit, he tried to sow discord between China and these countries. In recent years, such practices have become the must-do and highlights of the visits by US officials such as Blinken and US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Nonetheless, Tongan Prime Minister Siaosi Sovaleni said he was not concerned about the large amount of money his country had borrowed from China; Foreign Affairs Minister of New Zealand Nanaia Mahuta shut the door on joining the AUKUS alliance; Prime Minister James Marape of Papua New Guinea said his country welcomes cooperation with China and that “USA does not need PNG’s ground to be a launching pad for any offensive anywhere in the world.” All these remarks have embarrassed the US. It can be said that Blinken and Austin have met “soft nails” in the South Pacific.
This is not accidental, because the US has encountered quite a lot of such “soft nails” in many other places across the world. For example, when the US went to Africa with a so-called aid plan to counter China, what it received was a vigilant response. When US Vice President Kamala Harris visited Africa earlier this year, President of Ghana Nana Akufo-Addo said, “There may be an obsession in America about Chinese activity on the continent, but there is no such obsession here.” In ASEAN, whether senior US officials go to ASEAN or Washington invites ASEAN to the US for a meeting, “not taking sides” is the basic principle repeatedly and publicly emphasized by ASEAN countries. In the Middle East and other places, the situation is the same. When the same situation occurs time and again, it is indeed necessary for the US to reflect on why this is the case.
In fact, the reason is very simple. It is difficult for a person who is unwilling to listen and respect others to be welcomed. The signal received by the US has been strong enough, that is, the world is unwilling to fall into division and confrontation, and hopes for more peace and cooperation. This has become a trend. Washington seems to have noticed these signals, but it still doesn’t pay attention. On the surface, it holds the bait of “cooperation,” but its heart is full of how to use these “cooperation” to undermine China’s influence. The similar scenes that appeared repeatedly during Blinken’s visit this time are enough to illustrate the deep-seated problems of the current US diplomacy. To put it simply, the goals of US diplomacy have formed a huge dislocation, or even contradiction and antagonism, with the vital interests of quite a number of countries.
Take the South Pacific countries as an example. These countries value a peaceful and stable environment and sustainable economic development. In addition, due to geographical factors, South Pacific countries also pay special attention to climate change and marine environmental issues, such as Japan’s reckless plan to dump nuclear-contaminated wastewater. In these respects, China has been their most reliable partner. Now the US came to tell these countries that the pair of shoes they are wearing does not fit, take that pair off off quickly, and put on the pair brought by the US. Whether the shoes fit or not, don’t the people who wear them know?
After all, people in any country want to live a peaceful life, and what meets this need is positive energy, otherwise it is negative energy. As some scholars have said, Washington today must adapt to a new reality: developing countries are becoming more mature and more capable of independent decision-making. When American officials make a visit, their pockets are often full of rhetoric to smear China that no one needs. Creating uneasiness and distrust between a country and its largest and most reliable partner is a despicable act, which is a scourge to the country and its people, and is life-threatening.
In recent years, in order to counter China, the US has launched various “grand” plans, but basically much is said but little is done. For example, the Build Back Better World in 2021 almost copied the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative, but even the Americans called it a “Waterloo.” What’s more, even when the US invests in certain projects, most of them are either not feasible, or feed the pockets of those in charge.
These practices make the US look like a malicious bidder in the international community. It disrupts the normal cooperation of others, but it takes no responsibility for cooperation at all, allowing those projects to remain unfinished. Ultimately, it’s a mixture of hegemony and rogue thinking. Perhaps the US feels that it has big fists and is not afraid of anyone coming to hold it accountable. But what is certain is that if the US does not change this behavior, it will encounter more and more “soft nails.”
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
It was there for all to see. Embarrassing, cloying, and bound make you cough up the remnants of your summit lunch, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III stopped by one of the vassal states to make sure that the meal and military service was orderly, the troops well behaved, and the weapons working as they should. On the occasion of 2023 AUSMIN meetings, the questions asked were mild and generally unprovocative; answers were naturally tailored.
Seeing that Australia is now rapidly moving into the US orbit of client status – its minerals will be designated a US domestic resource in due course – and given that its land, sea and air are to be more available than ever for the US armed forces, nuclear and conventional, nothing will interrupt this inexorable extinguishing of sovereignty.
One vestige of Australian sovereignty might have evinced itself, notably in how Canberra might push for the release, or at the very least better terms, for the Australian national and founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange. The publisher faces 18 counts, all but one of them pertaining to the Espionage Act of 1917, an archaic, wartime act with a dark record of punishing free speech and contrarians. The Albanese government, eschewing “the hailer” approach in favour of “quiet diplomacy” and not offending Washington, has conspicuously failed to make any impression.
In April, an open letter to the US Attorney General, Merrick Garland, featuring 48 Australian MPs and Senators, including 13 from the governing Labor Party, argued that the Assange prosecution “would set a dangerous precedent for all global citizens, journalists, publishers, media organizations and the freedom of the press. It would also be needlessly damaging for the US as a world leader on freedom of expression and the rule of law.”
Despite such concerns bubbling away in Parliament, Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong was in no danger of upsetting their guests. “[W]e have made clear our view that Mr Assange’s case has dragged for too long, and our desire it be brought to a conclusion, and we’ve said that publicly and you would anticipate that that reflects also the positive we articulate in private.” But, as ever, “there are limits until Mr. Assange’s legal processes have concluded.” The assumption, laid bare, is that Australia will only push for terms once the US secures its treasured quarry.
Blinken parroted staged, withered lines, politely dismissing Wong’s statements while pouring acid on the Assange plea. “I really do understand and certainly confirm what Penny said about the fact that this matter was raised with us, as it has been in the past, and I understand the sensitivities, I understand the concerns and view of Australians.” He thought it “important”, as if it mattered “that our friends here understand our concerns about this matter.”
Those friends were made to understand that matter in no uncertain terms. Assange had been “charged with very serious criminal conduct in the United States in connection with his alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of our country. The actions that he has alleged to have committed risked very serious harm to our national security, to the benefit of our adversaries, and put named sources at grave risk – grave risk – of physical harm, and grave risk of detention.”
Such excremental, false reasoning was galling, and went unchallenged by the all too pliant Senator Wong and the Australian Defence Minister, Richard Marles. This, despite the cool findings by Blinken’s own colleagues at the Pentagon that the WikiLeaks disclosures never posed a risk to any valued source in the service of the US imperium, and the fact that other outlets have also published these purportedly “named sources” without having their collars fingered by the US Department of Justice. The double standard is gold in Washington.
The same babbling nonsense was evident during the extradition trial proceedings of Assange that were held at London’s Central Criminal Court in 2020. There, the prosecution, representing a number of clumsy, clownish and impressively ignorant representatives from Freedom Land, proved unable to produce a single instance of actual compromise or harm to a single informant of the US imperium. They also showed, with idiotic facility, an ignorance of the court martial that the US military had subjected Chelsea Manning to when she faced charges for revealing classified national security information to WikiLeaks.
Wong, as part of her buttoned-up brief dictated by Washington’s suits, either did not know nor care to correct Blinken who, for all we know, is equally ignorant of his brief on the subject. If the prosecutors in London in 2020 had no idea, why should the US secretary of state, let alone the Australian foreign minister?
As a terrible omen for the Australians, four defence personnel seem to have perished in waters near Hamilton Island through an accident with their MRH-90 Taipan helicopter as part of the Talisman Sabre war games. The US overlords were paternal and benevolent; their Australian counterparts were grateful for the interest. Blinken soppily suggested how the sacrifice was appreciated. “They have been on our minds throughout today; they remain very much on our minds right now.” But the message was clear: Australia, you are now less a state than a protectorate, territory to exploit, a resource basket to appropriate. Why not just make it official?
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
By Christina Persico, RNZ Pacific
An international relations professor says that if New Zealand joins AUKUS it could impact on its relations with Pacific countries.
AUKUS is a security agreement between Australia, the UK and the US, which will see Australia supplied with nuclear-powered submarines.
That has raised concern in the Pacific, which is under the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty, also known as the Treaty of Rarotonga.
The topic has come up while US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited New Zealand.
The visit came after he visited Tonga.
Robert Patman, professor of international relations at the University of Otago, said New Zealand’s views on non-nuclear security are shared by the majority of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) members and also the Pacific Island states.
“Even if New Zealand joined AUKUS in a non-nuclear fashion, technically, it may be seen through the eyes of others as diluting our commitment to that norm,” Professor Patman said.
Sharing defence information
Professor Patman explained that “pillar 1” of AUKUS is about providing nuclear-powered submarines to Australia over two or three decades, and “pillar 2” is to do with sharing information on defence technologies.
“We haven’t closed the door on it, but it’s a considerable risk from New Zealand’s point of view, because a lot of our credibility is having an independent foreign policy.”
Asked about New Zealand’s potential membership in AUKUS, Blinken said work on pillar 2 was ongoing.
“The door is very much open for New Zealand and other partners to engage as they see appropriate,” he said.
“New Zealand is a deeply trusted partner, obviously a Five Eyes member.
“We’ve long worked together on the most important national security issues.”
New Zealand Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta said the government was exploring pillar 2 of the deal.
Not committed
But she said New Zealand had not committed to anything.
Mahuta said New Zealand had been clear it would not compromise its nuclear-free position, and that was acknowledged by AUKUS members.
Patman said that statement was reassurance for Pacific Island states.
“[New Zealand is] party to the Treaty of Rarotonga,” he said.
“We have to weigh up whether the benefits of being in pillar 2 outweigh possible external perception that we’re eroding our commitment, to being party to an arrangement which is facilitating the transfer of nuclear-powered submarines to Australia.”
He said New Zealand had also been in talks with NATO about getting access to cutting-edge technology, so it was not dependent on AUKUS for that.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
By Christina Persico, RNZ Pacific
An international relations professor says that if New Zealand joins AUKUS it could impact on its relations with Pacific countries.
AUKUS is a security agreement between Australia, the UK and the US, which will see Australia supplied with nuclear-powered submarines.
That has raised concern in the Pacific, which is under the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty, also known as the Treaty of Rarotonga.
The topic has come up while US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited New Zealand.
The visit came after he visited Tonga.
Robert Patman, professor of international relations at the University of Otago, said New Zealand’s views on non-nuclear security are shared by the majority of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) members and also the Pacific Island states.
“Even if New Zealand joined AUKUS in a non-nuclear fashion, technically, it may be seen through the eyes of others as diluting our commitment to that norm,” Professor Patman said.
Sharing defence information
Professor Patman explained that “pillar 1” of AUKUS is about providing nuclear-powered submarines to Australia over two or three decades, and “pillar 2” is to do with sharing information on defence technologies.
“We haven’t closed the door on it, but it’s a considerable risk from New Zealand’s point of view, because a lot of our credibility is having an independent foreign policy.”
Asked about New Zealand’s potential membership in AUKUS, Blinken said work on pillar 2 was ongoing.
“The door is very much open for New Zealand and other partners to engage as they see appropriate,” he said.
“New Zealand is a deeply trusted partner, obviously a Five Eyes member.
“We’ve long worked together on the most important national security issues.”
New Zealand Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta said the government was exploring pillar 2 of the deal.
Not committed
But she said New Zealand had not committed to anything.
Mahuta said New Zealand had been clear it would not compromise its nuclear-free position, and that was acknowledged by AUKUS members.
Patman said that statement was reassurance for Pacific Island states.
“[New Zealand is] party to the Treaty of Rarotonga,” he said.
“We have to weigh up whether the benefits of being in pillar 2 outweigh possible external perception that we’re eroding our commitment, to being party to an arrangement which is facilitating the transfer of nuclear-powered submarines to Australia.”
He said New Zealand had also been in talks with NATO about getting access to cutting-edge technology, so it was not dependent on AUKUS for that.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Last week, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the United Nations special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, released a scathing report on her visit to the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. The report, the first of its kind, once again brought the world’s attention to the profound, far-reaching impact that the use of torture and arbitrary detention by the United States has had not just on the minds…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
After instigating a series of diplomatic disputes and displaying “toughness” toward China, Seoul’s attitude seems to have suddenly changed in the past couple of days, with a high-profile emphasis on “China-South Korean friendship.” On June 25, South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin stated in a news program that the basic stance of the Yoon Suk-yeol government is to advance South Korea-China relations into that of a mature and healthy one based on mutual respect, reciprocity and common interest, and the Yoon government sees “no reason to antagonize China and has no will to do so.” He further expressed that Seoul will continue to strengthen strategic communication to promote friendship between South Korea and China.
This statement has sparked discussions in both China and South Korea. From the perspective of Chinese society, we certainly welcome and hope that the two countries meet each other halfway. However, to be frank, many Chinese people have doubts about Seoul’s sincerity: Is it a realization of the overall trend or a measure of expediency? These doubts are not unfounded. An important “coincidence” is that South Korea’s denial of “antagonizing China” happened to occur after the visit of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to China.
Actually, after the official announcement of Blinken’s visit to China, there has been a wave of voices in South Korean public opinion hoping to repair relations with China, because “China-US relations are entering a phase of easing tensions,” and South Korea should follow suit. Therefore, even though the stated intention is to enhance “China-South Korean friendship,” it still gives the impression of dancing to US’ tune. The effectiveness of such a “friendly gesture” is questionable.
A government that cannot maintain independence and autonomy in foreign affairs will find it hard to help pull the China-South Korea relations out of a dilemma. Currently, when Washington wants to ease tensions, Seoul immediately responds with a “warm breeze.” However, if Washington wants to tighten the situation in the future, wouldn’t Seoul follow suit with immediate snowfall? The key issue is not just a matter of attitude. South Korea has cooperated with the US in damaging China’s interests on issues such as THAAD and chips. The consequences of these actual actions are not something that can be resolved by simply blowing some “warm breeze.”
Frankly speaking, since the inauguration of the Yoon government, China-South Korea relations have been deteriorating, and it seems they have not yet hit the bottom. Many insightful individuals in South Korea are expressing deep concerns about the unnecessary difficulties that China-South Korea relations are experiencing due to external or emotional factors. They have also criticized the South Korean government for its actions.
It is worth noting that China has never concluded or made the judgment that there is a reason for China and South Korea to antagonize each other. The self-defense of South Korea appears to be more of an attempt to ease domestic dissatisfaction and resentment toward the immature and unbalanced diplomacy of the Yoon government.
Regardless of the reason, having the willingness to improve relations is always better than exchanging harsh words, but ultimately it depends on the actions of South Korea. For example, when it comes to the Taiwan question, can South Korea return to its original position as an “outsider?” In Washington’s strategy of “decoupling from” and containing China, does South Korea play the role of a communicator or an accomplice? In terms of security issues, does it want to maintain common peace or pave the way for an Asia-Pacific NATO? These will be important yardsticks for measuring whether the Yoon government truly wants to improve or stabilize China-South Korea relations.
Of course, South Korea has the right to develop friendly relations with other countries. Whether it wants to develop relations with the US and Japan based on equality and mutual benefit, sacrifice its own interests, or engage in “humiliating diplomacy,” the Chinese people do not really care. However, if South Korea regards its relations with the US as a “guidebook” for developing relations with China, follows the US’ lead, parrots Washington’s tone, deals with China from a position of strength that is no longer what it used to be, or learns the bad US habit of “saying one thing while doing another,” it will be inevitably difficult for the Chinese people to have a good impression of Seoul. If trust is lost, how can “China-South Korean friendship” be discussed?
In addition, South Koreans with a certain historical background will easily think of deeper issues. Some Korean media claimed that the US enjoys the logic of a great power, mobilizing the world to confront China while secretly seeking dialogue with China itself. Many South Koreans are worried that they may be “sold” by the US. As is well known, Japan has had a nightmare of “overhead diplomacy,” which is also true for South Korea. Under the “America First” doctrine and the US’ great power logic, the dilemma and nightmare of allies such as Japan and South Korea being abandoned have always existed. The more closely tied to the US, the more independence will be lost, and the heavier this nightmare will become.
China and South Korea share significant common interests, which even the most conservative political groups in South Korea cannot deny or ignore. We have observed that the Yoon government has recently tilted heavily in diplomacy, but there has also been a significant backlash within South Korea. Returning to rationality and pragmatism will be the only correct option that the Yoon government will eventually have to face. We hope that this shift will occur voluntarily rather than being forced upon South Korea.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
During the economic crisis in 2008, the United States sought China’s aid. US treasury secretary Hank Paulson conferred with Chinese officials, and China agreed to increase the value of the RMB and to stop selling US T-bills which it had been doing at that time.
Paulson said, “It is clear that China accepts its responsibility as a major world economy that will work with the United States and other partners to ensure global economic stability.” But the notion that China was acting in a selfless fashion was also dispelled by Paulson who stated China helps when it is in their own interest.
Paulson depicted the US position during the crisis as “dealing with Chinese from a position of strength…”
That same attitude was repeated by the US State Department in March 2021 during the first face-to-face meeting with president Joe Biden’s administration in Anchorage, Alaska: “America’s approach will be undergirded by confidence in our dealing with Beijing — which we are doing from a position of strength — even as we have the humility to know that we are a country eternally striving to become a more perfect union.” [emphasis added]
Given the baleful US shenanigans against China, Chinese high-ranking officials were ill-disposed to meet with their American counterparts. Chairman Xi Jinping was not interested in meeting with Biden after the US shot down a Chinese weather balloon. The Pentagon sought a meeting between defense secretary Lloyd Austin and China’s minister of national defense Li Shangfu, but the latter reportedly ghosted Austin in Singapore.
Finally, secretary of state Antony Blinken managed to secure a meeting with his Chinese counterpart Qin Gang in Beijing. The official readouts for each country, however, reveal a glaring gap between them.
The Chinese readout noted that “China-U.S. relations are at their lowest point since the establishment of diplomatic ties…” Other excerpts read:
China has always maintained continuity and stability in its policies towards the United States, fundamentally adhering to the principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation proposed by President Xi Jinping. These principles should also be the shared spirit, bottom line, and goal that both sides uphold together.
Qin Gang pointed out that the Taiwan question is at the core of China’s core interests, it is the most significant issue in China-U.S. relations, and it is also the most prominent risk. China urges the U.S. side to adhere to the one-China principle and the three China-U.S. Joint Communiqués, and truly implement its commitment not to support “Taiwan independence”.
That the US and China were not on the same page was clear from the oft-heard banality in the American readout:
The Secretary made clear that the United States will always stand up for the interests and values of the American people and work with its allies and partners to advance our vision for a world that is free, open, and upholds the international rules-based order.
That the US side made no comment on China’s core interest was a glaring brush off. Instead the US side pushed its “international rules-based order,” which is about rules defined by the US for others to follow. In other words, China does not decide what rules apply to its province of Taiwan.
The readouts made crystal clear that China and the US view the world through different lenses.
China is about peaceful development and win-win trade relations. The US is about waging war, sanctions, bans on trading, and an immodest belief in its indispensability. Because of this, China and Russia with the Global South are each forging their own way, a way that respects each country’s sovereignty. In future, it will be increasingly difficult for the US to use loans to impoverish other nations and plunder their wealth through the IMF’s financial strictures. Sanctions, freezing assets, and blocking financial transactions through the SWIFT system have pushed countries away and toward de-dollarization, joining BRICS, taking part in the Belt and Road Initiative, and using other financial institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank based in Beijing. Even companies in countries nominally aligned with the US are pulling back from the harms of adhering to US trading bans. The US pressure tactics have resulted in blowback, and there is sure to be growing apprehension within empire.
The US is a warmaker. It flattened Iraq, Libya, and would have done the same to Syria had not Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah intervened at the invitation of the Syrian government. Nevertheless, the US still illegally occupies an enormous chunk of Syria and plunders its oil, revealing its true nature to the world.
China is a peacemaker; for example, the Saudi-Iranian rapprochement, the Syrian-Arab League reunion, a ceasefire between Yemen and Saudi Arabia, a proposal for peace between Russia and Ukraine that was rejected by the US, and currently China is playing an honest broker to try and solve the Israeli-Palestinian impasse, something the US has failed miserably at solving (not that it was ever interested in solving this besides, perhaps, a brief interregnum under Jimmy Carter).
China has stood steadfastly with Russia during its special military operation in Donbass and Ukraine. China knows that if the US-NATO would succeed in their proxy war, the plan is “regime change” and a carve up of Russia to exploit its resource wealth. This would pave the way for further “regime change” in China.
The Blinken-Qin meeting has been an abysmal failure in diplomacy. Communist China is ascendant, and the capitalist US is in economic decline, but it still believes that it can bully and fight its way to the top by keeping the others down.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with leading Chinese officials, including President Xi Jinping, in Beijing on Monday in what was portrayed by both sides as an effort to ease increasingly dangerous tensions between the two nuclear-armed powers. Blinken met with Xi for roughly 35 minutes on Monday after speaking to Wang Yi, China’s top foreign policy official, for several hours earlier in…
The National, Port Moresby
Papua New Guinea yesterday intialled a defence cooperation agreement with the United States amid day-long protests against the signing by university students and opposition MPs.
The agreement was signed by PNG Defence Minister Win Daki and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
A statement by the US State Department said the signing, when it comes into force, “will serve as a foundational framework upon which our two countries can enhance security cooperation and further strengthen our bilateral relationship, improve the capacity of the PNG Defence Force and increase stability and security in the region”.
The US will publish the contents of the document when it enters into force as provided by US law, the statement declared.
Protests and demonstrations were held at four universities — the University of Papua New Guinea, University of Technology in Lae, Divine Word University in Madang and at the University of Goroka.
The UPNG protests spilled out on the streets last night stopping traffic.
Opposition Leader Joseph Lelang cautioned the government not to “sacrifice Papua New Guinea’s sovereignty” in the haste to sign international agreements with other nations, whatever the motivation.
In ‘crosshairs of China’
Former prime minister Peter O’Neill said the government was putting the country squarely in the “crosshairs of China and the United States” in their struggle for geopolitical supremacy in the region.
The US government will work with Congress to provide more than US$45 million (about K159 million, or NZ$72 million) in new programming as PNG and the US enter a new era as “partners for peace and prosperity in the region”.
The US will provide an additional US$10 million (about K35.3 million) to implement the strategy to “prevent conflict and promote stability” in PNG, bringing total planned funding to US$30 million (about K106 million) over three years.
Blinken and PNG Prime Minister Marape also signed a comprehensive bilateral agreement to counter illicit transnational maritime activity through joint at-sea operations, the US statement revealed.
“This agreement will enable the US Coast Guard’s ship-rider programme to partner with and enhance PNG’s maritime governance capacity.
Marape said before the signing that the agreement would not encroach on the country’s sovereignty.
“The US and PNG have a long history, with shared experiences and this will be a continuation of that same path.
Generic SOFA in 1989
“PNG signed a generic SOFA [status of forces] agreement with other countries in 1989 and today with the signing of the defence cooperation and the maritime cooperation (ship-rider agreement) it will only elevate the SOFA.
“And this cooperation will help build the country’s defence capacity and capabilities and also address issues such as illegal fishing, logging and drug smuggling in PNG waters.”
Blinken said the agreement would help PNG mitigate the effects of climate change, tackle transnational crime and improve public health.
“We are proud to partner with PNG, driving economic opportunities and are committed to all aspects of the defence and maritime cooperation,” he said.
Republished with permission.
Story: US and PNG strike new defence pact https://t.co/dfGDTCd52j
— Stephen Dziedzic (@stephendziedzic) May 22, 2023
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
By Lydia Lewis, RNZ Pacific journalist, and Scott Waide, RNZ Pacific PNG correspondent, in Port Moresby
Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape says the increased United States security involvement in Papua New Guinea is driven primarily by the need to build up the Papua New Guinea Defence Force and not US-China geopolitics.
Last night, despite calls for more public consultation, the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Papua New Guinea’s Minister for Defence, Win Bakri Daki, penned the Bilateral Defence Cooperation and Shiprider agreements at APEC house in Port Moresby.
Prime Minister Marape said the milestone agreements were “important for the continued partnership of Papua New Guinea and the United States.”
“It’s mutually beneficial, it secures our national interests,” he said.
He said the penning of the new defence pact elevated prior security arrangements with the US under the 1989 Status of Forces Agreement.
Despite public criticism, Marape maintains the agreements are constitutional and will benefit PNG.
He said it had taken “many, many months and weeks” and passed through legal experts to reach this point.
The Shiprider agreement will act as a vital mechanism to tackle illegal fishing and drug trafficking alongside the US, which is a big issue that PNG faces in its waters, Marape said.
“I have a lot of illegal shipping engagements in the waters of Papua New Guinea, unregulated, unmonitored transactions take place, including drug trafficking,” he said
“This new Shiprider agreement now gives Papua New Guinea’s shipping authority, the Defence Force and Navy ‘full knowledge’ of what is happening in waters, something PNG has not had since 1975 [at independence],” Marape said.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken echoed those sentiments and stressed that the US was committing to the growing of all aspects of the relationship.
“Papua New Guinea is playing a critical role in shaping our future,” Blinken told the media.
He said the defence pact was drafted by both nations as “equal and sovereign partners”.
It was set to enhance PNG’s Defence Force capabilities, making it easy for both forces to train together.
He too stressed the US would be transparent.
For all their reassurances, both leaders steered clear of any mention of US troop deployments in PNG despite Marape having alluded to it in the lead up to the signing.
Reactions to the security pact
Although celebrated by the governments of the US and PNG as milestone security agreements the lead up to the signings was marked by a day of university student protests across the country calling for greater transparency from the PNG government around the defence pact.
The students’ president at the University of Technology in Lae, Kenzie Walipi, had called for the government to explain exactly what was in the deal ahead of the signing.
“If such an agreement is going to affect us in any way, we have to be made aware,” Walipi said.
Just before the pen hit the paper last night, Marape again sought to reassure the public.
“This signing in no way, state or form terminates us from relating to other defence cooperations we have or other defence relationships or bilateral relationships that we have,” Marape said.
He added “this is a two-way highway”.
Students at the University of Papua New Guinea ended a forum late last night and blocked off the main entrance to the campus as Prime Minister Marape and State Secretary Blinken signed the Defence Cooperation agreement.
They are maintaining a call for transparency and for a proper debate on the decision.
Hours before the signing, they presented a petition to the Planning Minister, Renbo Paita, who received their demands on behalf of the Prime Minister.
Students at the University of Technology in Lae met late into the night. Students posted live videos on Facebook of the forum as the signing happened in Port Moresby.
The potential impact of the agreements signed in Port Moresby overnight on Papua New Guinea and the Pacific will become more apparent once the full texts are made available online as promised by both the United States and Papua New Guinea.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Extending my heartfelt thanks to Prime Minister Marape and the people of Papua New Guinea for hosting me. I am grateful to have met with Pacific Islands leaders and to demonstrate our commitment to working together with our Pacific neighbors to address our shared challenges. pic.twitter.com/mpVCnIGDAT
— Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) May 22, 2023
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
On the eve of Papua New Guinea’s hosted Pacific meetings, Free Papua Organisation-OPM leader Jeffrey Bomanak has called for an international embargo on Indonesian goods and services in protest over what he calls Jakarta’s “unlawful military occupation” of West Papua.
Bomanak has also challenged US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to meet with him while visiting Port Moresby today to review “six decades of prima facie photographic evidence of Indonesia’s crimes against humanity”.
“My people have been in a war of liberation from Indonesia’s illegal invasion and annexation for six decades,” he said in a statement.
“Six decades of barbarity and callous international abandonment.”
He said the “theft” of West Papua and its natural resources with the alleged complicity of the US and Australian governments had been “well documented in countless books and journals”.
He described the ongoing human rights violations in West Papua as a “travesty of justice”.
“Indonesia will never leave West Papua without being pushed. We are waiting for an act of deliverance,” Bomanak said.
“To all unions and every unionist — help us reach our day of liberation.”
Both agreements for signing
Meanwhile, the PNG Post-Courier reports that Prime Minister James Marape confirmed last night that the Ship Rider Agreement and the Defence Cooperation Agreement would both be signed with the United States this afternoon.
US State Secretary Blinken would sign the agreements during his visit to PNG.
Marape said he did not see geopolitics being involved in the defence agreement. He was signing this agreement to protect the territorial borders from “all kinds of emerging threats”.
He said the agreement was only a defence force cooperation pact like it had with Australia and Indonesia.
Marape hosted dinner last night for all the leaders of the Pacific who had arrived earlier yesterday and on Saturday.
He said Pacific leaders would present their challenges to the world leaders — Blinken and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi — who would be coming for separate meetings.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
By Lydia Lewis, RNZ Pacific journalist
Pacific leaders are starting to trickle into Papua New Guinea for two high level meetings and a number of side talks.
The leaders are set to meet with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and a high-level US delegation in Port Moresby tomorrow.
PNG Prime Minister James Marape told local media on Thursday that President Joe Biden had called to apologise for his absence due to the need to return to Washington for meetings with Congressional leaders to raise its debt ceiling issue and avoid a default.
“He conveyed his sincerest apologies that he cannot make it into our country,” Marape said.
“I did place the invitation to him [that] at the next earliest available time, please come and visit us here.”
Biden has confirmed that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will arrive on Monday to meet with PNG for a bilateral meeting and engage in a separate meeting with the Pacific Islands Forum leaders.
Biden also invited Marape and other Pacific leaders to Washington later this year for the second US summit with the Pacific Islands Forum.
“He did invite again the Pacific Island leaders to go back for a progressive continuation of the meeting that we have initially held last September in Washington,” Marape said.
Fiji’s Rabuka already in PNG
Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka has already arrived in Papua New Guinea.
He was greeted by acting Deputy Prime Minister John Rosso.
“After being welcomed by young traditional Motu Koitabu dancers, PM Rabuka made a courtesy visit to Government House and met with Governor-General Grand Chief Sir Bob Dadae,” Rosso said in a statement.
He has since been hosted by Marape for dinner at the State Function Room at Parliament House.
“PM Rabuka will be joined by other Pacific Island leaders, including New Zealand PM Chris Hipkins, who will travel into PNG this weekend,” Rosso said.
The traditional presentation of kamunaga or whale’s tooth was accorded to Governor-General Dadae to convey Fiji’s respect and appreciation for the historical and traditional ties shared between our two countries and moreso to further advance regional cooperation. pic.twitter.com/vbFOCrmTLk— Sitiveni Rabuka (@slrabuka) May 19, 2023
The leaders will be in Port Moresby for the third Forum for India-Pacific Islands Cooperation (FIPIC).
According to Marape, 14 of the 18 Pacific Islands Forum member leaders, including New Zealand’s Prime Minister Chris Hipkins, are expected to be in attendance.
Marape calls for calm
Marape said a Defence Cooperation Agreement that is being mulled over in anticipation of an upcoming bilateral meeting with the US was consistent with the country’s “constitutional provisions”.
The cabinet is aware of the agreement, “cabinet has not concluded on this. It is awaiting cabinet conclusion,” he said.
He has called for people to trust in the process as he believes it would have a positive impact on the country.
“Another agreement called a 505 agreement, separate agreement, allows for us to have a working partnership with the US, US Navy and the US Coast Guard.
“With the US Coast Guard, it now gives us an opportune time to access not just on maritime access, but satellite access to illegal fishing, drug traffickers, illegal loggers, all those illegal transportations and activities that happens on high sea,” Marape added.
Meanwhile, PNG’s National Executive Council has confirmed that the public holiday announced for Monday for the National Capital District still stands despite Biden cancelling his attendance.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
The following article was made possible by paid subscribers. Support independent journalism on whistleblowers and press freedom and become a subscriber with this special World Press Freedom Day offer.
For the United States government, World Press Freedom Day is an opportunity to further project an image of the U.S. as a supposed champion of journalism and human rights. But that projection is muddied greatly by the prosecution against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
An event was hosted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) at the UN headquarters in New York. It marked the 30th anniversary of World Press Freedom Day.
Dr. Agnès Callamard, the secretary general for Amnesty International, called attention to the double standard of so-called democratic countries while discussing challenges to protecting press freedom.
“It is not just what is happening in Iran or in Russia that should worry us, although it should worry us a lot. It is also what is happening here [in the U.S.],” Callamard said. “Who is imprisoning Julian Assange? Who is creating more laws to curtail the freedom to protest? All of those indicators and trends are occurring within the so-called democracies of the world.”
Callamard added, “Sadly, the playbook of autocracy, of control over conscience, of control over speech, has been well-learned by our so-called democratic leaders.”
President Joe Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have wielded the playbook of autocracy through deliberate acts of omission—by consistently dodging any attempts by reporters or civil society leaders to hold them accountable for pursuing the Assange case.
At the White House Correspondents Dinner on April 29, Biden highlighted Russia’s detention of Evan Gershkovich and the abduction of Austin Tice in Syria over a decade ago.
Then Biden proclaimed, “Tonight, our message is this: Journalism is not a crime.”
However, that message seems fraudulent as the U.S. government remains committed to prosecuting Assange and keeps him in jail.
Assange has been a target of surveillance and subject to some form of arbitrary detention for more than a decade. The journalism he oversaw as WikiLeaks editor-in-chief, which involved publishing classified documents from the U.S. government, effectively made him a target.
Last year, Blinken uttered the following on World Press Freedom Day:
When individual journalists are threatened, when they’re attacked, when they’re imprisoned, the chilling effects reach far beyond their targets. Some in the media start to self-censor. Others flee. Some stop reporting altogether. And when repressive governments come after journalists, human rights defenders, labor leaders, others in civil society are usually not far behind.
A similar statement about the climate of fear fueled by prosecuting Assange has been made by Rebecca Vincent, the director of operations and international campaigns for Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
“If the U.S. government is successful in securing Assange’s extradition and prosecuting him for his contributions to public interest reporting, the same precedent could be applied to any journalist anywhere,” Vincent contended. “The possible implications of this case simply cannot be understated; it is the very future of journalism and press freedom that is at stake.”
This year, Blinken will participate in a “moderated conversation on the state of press freedom worldwide” with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius.
After Assange’s arrest on April 11, 2019, Ignatius argued the U.S. Justice Department had “drawn its indictment carefully enough that the issue [was] theft of secrets, rather than their publication.” The Washington Post Editorial Board has maintained that WikiLeaks “differs from journalism.” So Blinken will likely be permitted to advance a litany of double standards without being called on it.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) marked World Press Freedom Day by promoting “Reporters Shield.” Under the new program, certain journalists and media organizations can apply to become “members” that are eligible to receive funds to help combat legal threats aimed at silencing them (Note: USAID has in the past been used by the CIA as a front for operations.)
According to USAID Director Samantha Power, who spoke at the UNESCO meeting, independent journalists around the world increasingly face lawfare from “corrupt leaders,” who are intent to drive them out of business.
“Repressive or corrupt elites have tried to silence opposition by killing journalists. Now they are trying to kill journalism,” Power stated.
Power was thinking of journalists countries like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, but the reality is that Assange and WikiLeaks might benefit from such a program.
The CIA mounted a disruption campaign against WikiLeaks to make it difficult for the media organization to function. Officials reportedly discussed kidnapping or poisoning Assange while he was living under political asylum in the Ecuador embassy, and Mike Pompeo, when he was secretary of state, pressured Ecuador to toss Assange out of the embassy so the US could get their hands on him.
Later in the meeting, Committee to Protect Journalists Jodie Ginsberg pointed out that if we really want to keep journalism safe then all governments must cease lawfare that involves targeting journalists with a “wide variety of spurious charges.”
“One thing that the United States could concretely do is drop the charges against Julian Assange,” Ginsberg declared. She noted if Assange was brought to trial it would “effectively criminalize journalists everywhere.”
Hitting Assange with Espionage Act charges and jailing him for the past four years has forced WikiLeaks to focus on freeing their founder. The organization has little to no funds to support the publication of new leaks, not to mention their reputation has been tarnished by smear campaigns engaged in by current and former U.S. intelligence officials. And it has also become harder to maintain the invaluable archive of documents on the WikiLeaks website.
U.S. officials could abandon this case on World Press Freedom Day, but they will not because officials have entrenched themselves in the spiteful position that Assange is not a journalist. They see no conflict between their calls to free imprisoned journalists and their own autocratic conduct.
The post US Double Standards On World Press Freedom Day appeared first on Shadowproof.
This post was originally published on Shadowproof.
Relations between the United States and China are spiraling dangerously downward, and neither side seems able to reverse the trend. Yet it is imperative that the world’s two biggest economies find a modus vivendi if the peace of the planet is to be preserved.
Consider the recent contretemps between the U.S. and China over a Chinese balloon that drifted over the United States. The rift caused acrimonious accusations by both sides and a cancellation of the Secretary of State’s visit to China, which had been designed to tamp down tensions.
China’s first reaction was a public regret, only later to be followed by more belligerent language. Wouldn’t it have been better if President Biden had taken China’s expression of regret and ignored the later, harsher responses? Wouldn’t it have been better if the secretary of state’s visits had gone forward?
That’s what President Kennedy did during the Cuban Missile Crisis six decades ago when the Soviet Union’s Nikita Khrushchev sent an emotional message suggesting that, rather than “doom the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war…let us not only relax the forces pulling on the ends of the rope, let’s take measures to untie the knot.” The very next day, Russia upped the ante with a much harsher message demanding that American missiles in Turkey be removed.
Kennedy ignored the second message and replied to the first. In due course, the Soviet missiles were removed from Cuba and the American missiles from Turkey, although the latter was not officially part of the deal.
How much better it would have been if the Secretary of State Blinken had gone ahead with his mission, met with his counterpart in China, and made an effort to reduce the tensions between China and the United States instead of accelerating them.
When I looked up the purpose of the new House of Representatives’ Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, I found the following:
The Select Committee “is committed to working on a bipartisan basis to build a consensus on the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party and develop a plan of action to defend the American people, our economy and our values.”
No one is denying that there is serious competition between the United States and China, but does it justify such a defensive crouch? Wouldn’t it have been better to form a committee that would also develop a plan of action so that the two major competing powers can avoid conflict?
Although the growing antagonism between the United States and China has not grown to the level of the Cuban Missile Crisis, nevertheless it presents the greatest danger to the world today. Much has been written about the “Thucydides Trap,” Graham Allison’s warning that all too often in history the tension between a rising power and an established power results in war, as it did between Sparta and Athens in 431 BC, and German and Great Britain in the early 21th Century.
It is imperative that cooler heads in China and the United States work to defuse tensions. The prospect of nuclear war that so terrified the world in the fifties and sixties has lost some of its emotional punch. The historian Christopher Clark writes that Europe’s leaders in 1914 knew that a general European war would be massively destructive, but did they really feel it? He posits that in the 1950s and 60s decision makers and the general public not only understood the dangers of nuclear war, but viscerally felt it. Today that visceral fear has fallen away among younger generations.
China is not without blame for the growing confrontation between the United States and China. Under President Xi Jinping, the Communist Party has reasserted its dominant role over the economy and returned China to a more Maoist centralized state with aggressive and at times bullying diplomacy and military actions in the South China Sea and in the Himalayas. But that said, a drumbeat of anti-Chinese rhetoric from the Western powers only enables China’s hardliners and handicaps those in China who would seek a less belligerent accommodation with the West.
After all, China does not seek to overthrow our system of government. The Chinese Communist Party does not seek to export revolution as did the old Soviet Union. It is hard to imagine Cambridge University students becoming traitors as did Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, and Donald Maclean in the 1930s for the sake of the Chinese Communist Party.
As Singapore’s Bilahari Kausikan has pointed out: “Competition within a system cannot by definition be existential because the survival of the system is not at stake. China is the principal beneficiary of the existing system and has no strong incentive to kick over the table and change it in any fundamental way because its own economy rests on the foundation of that system.”
Americans have always suffered under the delusion that China should become more like the United States. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, American missionaries fanned out across China in an effort to convert the Chinese to Christianity. President Woodrow Wilson was delighted when he discovered that Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern China, had become a Christian. More recently, when Deng Xiaoping abandoned Maoism for a market economy, Americans concluded that a political liberalization was sure to follow, that China would become more like the United States. It didn’t happen, but is China responsible for this miscalculation and disappointment, or are we?
It is one thing to deny China technology that could be used militarily, but the bipartisan inflammatory language emanating from the United States is counter- productive to America’s interests and the preservation of peace. China and the United States are drifting, like sleepwalkers, toward confrontation much as Europe did in 1914 which of course resulted in a devastating war nobody wanted.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 23: TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew prepares to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill on March 23, 2023 in Washington, DC. The hearing was a rare opportunity for lawmakers to question the leader of the short-form social media video app about the company’s relationship with its Chinese owner, ByteDance, and how they handle users’ sensitive personal data. Some local, state and federal government agencies have been banning use of TikTok by employees, citing concerns about national security (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
The US’ TikTok hearing is politically manipulated to cover its real purpose of robbing the profitable firm from China, which reflects the US’ mounting hegemony and bullying against firms with Chinese background, experts said on Friday, noting the US witch-hunting against TikTok portends US’ technological innovation is going downhill and the political farce against a tiny app has seriously shattered the US values of fair competition and its credibility.
The US House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing on Thursday (US time) titled, “TikTok: How Congress can safeguard American data privacy and protect children from online harms.”
While US lawmakers acted like they are pursuing a solution on how to ensure data security, the hearing turned out to be a political show that was designed to smear an international firm that has Chinese background and cover up its real purpose of stealing the firm from its Chinese parent, experts said.
Whether it ends up “killing” TikTok or forcibly taking the child out of its parent ByteDance’s arms, it is one of the ugliest scenes of the 21st century in high-tech competition, they said. “Your platform should be banned,” House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers said as she started the hearing, claiming that the app has ties with Chinese government.
During the roughly five-hour hearing, CEO Shou Zi Chew’s attempts to illustrate TikTok’s business operations were frequently interrupted. His requests to elaborate on concerns of members of US Congress were also blocked.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning denounced the US’ move on Friday, saying the US is adopting the presumption of guilt and engaging in an unreasonable crackdown against TikTok without any proof.
“We noted that some US lawmaker has said that to seek a TikTok ban is a ‘xenophobic witch hunt’,” she said, urging the US to respect the market economy and fair competition rules, stop the unreasonable crackdown on foreign firms and provide an open, fair and non-discriminatory environment for other countries’ firms in the US.
The Chinese government places high importance on protecting data privacy and security according to laws. China has never and will never ask firms or individuals to violate local laws to collect or provide data and information stored within other countries’ borders, Mao stressed.
The latest hearing followed reports that the Biden administration has threatened to ban TikTok if its China-based parent company ByteDance doesn’t divest its stakes in the popular video app.
It is another dark scene in Washington’s struggle for US supremacy, the US’ barbaric act only underscores that US values of fair competition, freedom of speech and inclusiveness are gradually disappearing and instead xenophobia is rising, experts said, noting that the US government lacks confidence in competing with China.
Even more ironic is that rather than finding a solution to problems brought about by the negative impact of US social problems on children such as suicide, self-harm and drug abuse, US lawmakers are instead faulting the company, Li Yong, deputy chairman of the Expert Committee of the China Association of International Trade, told the Global Times on Friday.
“The hearing was hegemonic and bullying against a private firm,” Li said, noting that it’s common for American politicians to put unwarranted labels on entities with Chinese background by fabricating excuses.
“While the US has always paraded itself as a rules-based market economy, they don’t really have any objective rules. All the rules are selected and serve American political elites’ interests and US hegemony,” Li said.
The US’ forced sale of TikTok is shameless robbery of a profitable firm from China, he said, noting that the US is increasingly politicizing an innovative app that has enriched the digital life of American people and benefited a lot of micro businesses in the US.
“TikTok itself is not available in the Chinese mainland, we’re headquartered in Los Angeles and Singapore, and we have 7,000 employees in the US today,” Chew said in his opening remarks.
Dismissing Chew’s testimony, US officials have stepped up their fight against TikTok. Speaking at a separate House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday TikTok should be “ended one way or another,” adding that he did not know if it would be sufficient for TikTok to be divested from its Chinese parent company, CNN reported.
The high-profile hearing also attracted wide attention from netizens who called US Congress members arrogant, ridiculous and ignorant.
“Not a single one of them has made an argument that makes a lick of sense,” an American net user posted on Twitter. “By his logic every other social media app should be banned,” posted another netizen.
The topic “TikTok CEO attending US hearing” became trending on China’s Twitter-like social media Sina Weibo, generating nearly 5 million views.
“I feel sorry for what Chew endured at the hearing. American politicians weren’t so arrogant and aggressive at Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook hearing. It seems all the lawmakers are bullying Chew,” a Chinese netizen posted on Sina Weibo.
While Chew was grilled in Washington, Apple CEO Tim Cook was met with cheers and applause at an Apple store in Beijing on Friday, prompting Chinese netizens to compare the “so-called free market” in the US and “real free market” in China.
The Biden administration’s so-called “national security” narrative has also caused widespread speculation among TikTok users, scholars and researchers.
A TikTok sale would be “completely irrelevant to any of the alleged ‘national security’ threats” and go against “every free market principle and norm” of the state department’s internet freedom principles, the Guardian reported, citing Karim Farhat, a researcher with the Internet Governance Project at Georgia Tech.
NBC News reported on Thursday that a 19-year-old Harvard freshman named Aidan Kohn-Murphy, who used TikTok to rally support for Biden in 2020, is now trying to use the app to stop Biden from killing the platform.
“If they went ahead with banning TikTok, it would feel like a slap in the face to a lot of young Americans,” he said. “Democrats don’t understand the political consequences this would have.”
Illustration: Liu Rui/GT
Sinister move doomed
By forcing the sale of TikTok, the Biden administration is aiming to repeat its takeover of French power company Alstom and its torment on Japanese chip firm Toshiba, but the US’ sinister move is doomed to meet challenges, given similar roadblocks faced by Trump three years ago, experts said.
“The Biden administration will find it hard to completely ban TikTok, as the app has a large user base of more than 150 million in the US,” Xiang Ligang, director-general of the Beijing-based Information Consumption Alliance, told the Global Times.
It’s an even more complicated issue for the US to take over TikTok, as a possible deal should also be in compliance with Chinese laws, he said. Experts said the Chinese government may step in to block the sale of TikTok.
“The Chinese side is firmly opposed to the forced sale or divestiture of TikTok,” Chinese Commerce Ministry spokesperson Shu Jueting said on Thursday.
Exports of Chinese technology must be subject to administrative licensing procedures in accordance with Chinese laws, and the Chinese government is legally bound to make a decision, she reiterated.
In August 2020, China’s Ministry of Commerce revised its restrictions on technology exports, including personalized content recommendations based on data analysis and a number of other technologies such as AI algorithms, which is widely considered as China’s countermeasures against US’ forced sale of TikTok then.
Back in 2020, then president Donald Trump and his administration sought to remove TikTok from app stores and force ByteDance to sell off its US assets. US courts blocked the order, concluding that banning the app would likely restrict the “personal communications” and sharing of “informational materials” by TikTok users.
In addition, the Washington Post reportedly worked with a privacy researcher to look under the hood at TikTok in 2020, concluding that the app does not appear to collect any more data than typical mainstream social network platforms in the US.
“From the US’ groundless crackdown on Huawei to targeting TikTok citing the so-called ‘national security,’ American politicians have not had a comprehensive ‘blueprint’ for their moves, it’s all politically motivated,” Xiang said, referring to reports saying Biden is seeking a second presidential term.
On Thursday, the US put an additional 14 Chinese companies to a red flag list, forcing US exporters to conduct greater due diligence before shipping goods to them, mainly technology and solar firms.
Xiang said the US’ unabated crackdowns on international firms including those from China violate international rules, disrupt global industrial and supply chains and harm both sides’ interests and the global economy as a whole.
Ghost of McCarthyism haunts TikTok Hearing. Cartoon: Carlos Latuff
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
U.S. soldiers breaking into a home in Baquba, Iraq, in 2008 Photo: Reuters
March 19 marks the 20th anniversary of the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq. This seminal event in the short history of the 21st century not only continues to plague Iraqi society to this day, but it also looms large over the current crisis in Ukraine, making it impossible for most of the Global South to see the war in Ukraine through the same prism as U.S. and Western politicians.
While the U.S. was able to strong-arm 49 countries, including many in the Global South, to join its “coalition of the willing” to support invading the sovereign nation of Iraq, only the U.K., Australia, Denmark and Poland actually contributed troops to the invasion force, and the past 20 years of disastrous interventions have taught many nations not to hitch their wagons to the faltering U.S. empire.
Today, nations in the Global South have overwhelmingly refused U.S. entreaties to send weapons to Ukraine and are reluctant to comply with Western sanctions on Russia. Instead, they are urgently calling for diplomacy to end the war before it escalates into a full-scale conflict between Russia and the United States, with the existential danger of a world-ending nuclear war.
The architects of the U.S. invasion of Iraq were the neoconservative founders of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), who believed that the United States could use the unchallenged military superiority that it achieved at the end of the Cold War to perpetuate American global power into the 21st century.
The invasion of Iraq would demonstrate U.S. “full spectrum dominance” to the world, based on what the late Senator Edward Kennedy condemned as “a call for 21st century American imperialism that no other country can or should accept.”
Kennedy was right, and the neocons were utterly wrong. U.S. military aggression succeeded in overthrowing Saddam Hussein, but it failed to impose a stable new order, leaving only chaos, death and violence in its wake. The same was true of U.S. interventions in Afghanistan, Libya and other countries.
For the rest of the world, the peaceful economic rise of China and the Global South has created an alternative path for economic development that is replacing the U.S. neocolonial model. While the United States has squandered its unipolar moment on trillion-dollar military spending, illegal wars and militarism, other countries are quietly building a more peaceful, multipolar world.
And yet, ironically, there is one country where the neocons’ “regime-change” strategy succeeded, and where they doggedly cling to power: the United States itself. Even as most of the world recoiled in horror at the results of U.S. aggression, the neocons consolidated their control over U.S. foreign policy, infecting and poisoning Democratic and Republican administrations alike with their exceptionalist snake oil.
Corporate politicians and media like to airbrush out the neocons’ takeover and continuing domination of U.S. foreign policy, but the neocons are hidden in plain sight in the upper echelons of the U.S. State Department, the National Security Council, the White House, Congress and influential corporate-funded think tanks.
PNAC co-founder Robert Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and was a key supporter of Hillary Clinton. President Biden appointed Kagan’s wife, Victoria Nuland, a former foreign policy adviser to Dick Cheney, as his Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the fourth most senior position in the State Department. That was after she played the lead U.S. role in the 2014 coup in Ukraine, which caused its national disintegration, the return of Crimea to Russia and a civil war in Donbas that killed at least 14,000 people.
Nuland’s nominal boss, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, was the staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, during its debates over the impending U.S. assault on Iraq. Blinken helped the committee chairman, Senator Joe Biden, choreograph hearings that guaranteed the committee’s support for the war, excluding any witnesses who did not fully support the neocons’ war plan.
It is not clear who is really calling the foreign policy shots in Biden’s administration as it barrels toward World War III with Russia and provokes conflict with China, riding roughshod over Biden’s campaign promise to “elevate diplomacy as the primary tool of our global engagement.” Nuland appears to have influence far beyond her rank in the shaping of U.S. (and thus Ukrainian) war policy.
What is clear is that most of the world has seen through the lies and hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy, and that the United States is finally reaping the result of its actions in the refusal of the Global South to keep dancing to the tune of the American pied piper.
At the UN General Assembly in September 2022, the leaders of 66 countries, representing a majority of the world’s population, pleaded for diplomacy and peace in Ukraine. And yet Western leaders still ignore their pleas, claiming a monopoly on moral leadership that they decisively lost on March 19, 2003, when the United States and the United Kingdom tore up the UN Charter and invaded Iraq.
In a panel discussion on “Defending the UN Charter and the Rules-Based International Order” at the recent Munich Security Conference, three of the panelists–from Brazil, Colombia and Namibia–explicitly rejected Western demands for their countries to break off relations with Russia, and instead spoke out for peace in Ukraine.
Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira called on all the warring parties to “build the possibility of a solution. We cannot keep on talking only of war.” Vice President Francia Márquez of Colombia elaborated, “We don’t want to go on discussing who will be the winner or the loser of a war. We are all losers and, in the end, it is humankind that loses everything.”
Prime Minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila of Namibia summed up the views of Global South leaders and their people: “Our focus is on solving the problem…not on shifting blame,” she said. “We are promoting a peaceful resolution of that conflict, so that the entire world and all the resources of the world can be focused on improving the conditions of people around the world instead of being spent on acquiring weapons, killing people, and actually creating hostilities.”
So how do the American neocons and their European vassals respond to these eminently sensible and very popular leaders from the Global South? In a frightening, warlike speech, European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told the Munich conference that the way for the West to “rebuild trust and cooperation with many in the so-called Global South” is to “debunk… this false narrative… of a double standard.”
But the double standard between the West’s responses to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and decades of Western aggression is not a false narrative. In previous articles, we have documented how the United States and its allies dropped more than 337,000 bombs and missiles on other countries between 2001 and 2020. That is an average of 46 per day, day in day out, for 20 years.
The U.S. record easily matches, or arguably far outstrips, the illegality and brutality of Russia’s crimes in Ukraine. Yet the U.S. never faces economic sanctions from the global community. It has never been forced to pay war reparations to its victims. It supplies weapons to the aggressors instead of to the victims of aggression in Palestine, Yemen and elsewhere. And U.S. leaders–including Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden—have never been prosecuted for the international crime of aggression, war crimes or crimes against humanity.
As we mark the 20th anniversary of the devastating Iraq invasion, let us join with Global South leaders and the majority of our neighbors around the world, not only in calling for immediate peace negotiations to end the brutal Ukraine war, but also in building a genuine rules-based international order, where the same rules—and the same consequences and punishments for breaking those rules—apply to all nations, including our own.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
On his recent visit to Israel, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken reaffirmed the U.S.’s “ironclad” support for the Israeli state, which recently voted in the most fascist, anti-Palestinian, far right government in its history. In a stunning display of doublespeak, Blinken said: It does seem true that the relationship between Israel and U.S. is rooted in “shared values,” as Blinken suggests…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
I was part of a small delegation of Arab Americans invited to meet with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken the day before his recent visit to Egypt, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority. Our meeting came on the heels of two tragic days in Israel/Palestine.
On January 26th, 10 Palestinians were killed during an Israeli undercover raid into Jenin. Nightly Israeli invasions of heavily populated Palestinian communities have taken almost three dozen lives so far this year. These raids and killings coupled with a new round of mass expulsions and intensified settler violence have left Palestinians both seething in anger and despairing of any improvement in their lives.
The next day a lone Palestinian gunman murdered eight Israelis as they walked home from their synagogue in a settlement to the east of Jerusalem.
Both mass killings were deplorable and yet tragically predictable.
While all of this left the region concerned that the violence would spin out of control, it appears that things may remain on a low boil. While extremist elements in the Israeli government may want to accelerate matters with more violence, Netanyahu himself intensified a series of repressive measures that included: sealing the homes of the Palestinian attackers and the arrests and/or expulsion of their family members and friends; sending more Israeli forces into the Occupied Territories; and issuing more weapons to settlers. For its part, the Palestinian Authority condemned the raids into Jenin and said it would cease security cooperation with Israel, but both the PA and Hamas appeared to have more interest in tamping things down than accelerating toward more violence.
We met with Secretary Blinken against this tense backdrop. We expressed our concerns including: admitting Israel into the US visa waiver program without Israel guaranteeing full reciprocity and respect for the rights of Arab Americans to enter and depart without harassment; plans to build the U.S. embassy on Palestinian-owned land in Jerusalem; and the State Department’s definition of antisemitism which includes legitimate criticism of Israel.
In my remarks, I attempted to place the recent events in the context of decades of failed US policies that have brought us to where we are today. The asymmetry of power that has existed between the Israelis and Palestinians has been amplified by the US’s asymmetrical approach to both. We have given full-throated support to Israel, while applying pressure mainly to the Palestinians.
When Palestinians have taken actions with which the US has disagreed, we’ve called them out or taken punitive measures to sanction them. But when Israel has acted contrary to international law or our own policies, we’ve responded, when at all, timidly with private communiques or public statements of concern. Knowing that there would be no consequences to their bad behavior, the Israelis would either simply proceed, or delay until the heat was off.
The result of having no consequences for Israel’s bad behaviors has been devastating on multiple levels. We have enabled Israel’s drift to the far right. Our enabling of hardliners and their policies has weakened Israel’s peace forces, who came to realize that they would have no backing for their opposition to human rights violations and the deepening of the occupation. At the same time, as prospects for a two-state solution became impossible to implement, we have discredited those Palestinian moderates who endorsed the Oslo Accords, while also emboldening Palestinian hardliners and advocates of violence as the only way forward. I made it clear that this was not the result of the last two years, but decades of US failed policies.
It’s not enough for the US to express concern about Netanyahu’s efforts to run roughshod over Israel’s democracy, while falling silent in the face of his proposed responses to the recent terror attack—all of which (including home demolitions and expulsions) are clear violations of international law. And it’s not enough to continue to express support for a two-state solution and speak about “the equal worth of Israelis and Palestinians.” The two-state solution is no longer possible and US silence in the face of Israeli actions makes it clear that we will not defend Palestinian rights or respect their humanity.
To dig our way out of this hole and begin to transform the downward spiraling dynamic, I recommended that the US reverse course. The Israeli side needs to hear that there will be consequences to policies that violate rights and international law and provoke violence. I suggested that we remove the sanctions that have been placed on the ICC, meet with and offer direct financial support to the Palestinian human rights organizations that Israel has banned, and make it clear that there will be direct consequences in aid and political support for any further movement on settlement expansion, home demolitions, and expulsions.
Such actions won’t make immediate change, but they will send a message to the Israeli right that their decades-long impunity is over. It will strengthen those forces in Israel who support ending the occupation, give hope to Palestinians that they have US support, and open the door to new possibilities. Change will not be overnight. It’s taken us decades to dig this hole that we, Israelis, and Palestinians are in. There’s no time like the present to stop digging and reverse course. If we don’t, the violence and repression will continue, and we will have only our inaction to blame.
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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Arab American Institute. The Arab American Institute is a non-profit, nonpartisan national leadership organization that does not endorse candidates.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
