On 15 July 2015 — the day after the United States agreed to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA; also called the Iran nuclear deal) along with China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, plus Germany — then US president Barack Obama said in an interview that Iran was “a great civilization.” Without listing any of the great attributes of Iran, Obama then proceeded to criticize Iran, saying, “but, it also has an authoritarian theocracy in charge that is anti-American, anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic, sponsors terrorism, and there are a whole host of real profound differences…”
That is American exceptionalism. The US is a country whose sense of diplomacy deems it appropriate to openly criticize other nations. And because of this self-bestowed exceptionalism, it need not substantiate any criticisms it makes, and, of course, no such accusations could be leveled against the US.
However, soon after Donald Trump won the electoral college vote to become the US president, the days of the US abiding by the JCPOA were numbered. The US State Department said that the JCPOA “is not a treaty or an executive agreement, and is not a signed document.”
Apparently, US and international definitions on what constitutes a treaty differ. Since the JCPOA had not received the consent of the US Senate, as per domestic US law, it was not considered a treaty. Another instance of US exceptionalism — how the US legally separates itself from the international sphere.
On 8 May 2018, the US pulled out from the Iran nuclear deal.
Even though the US had withdrawn, Iran made it known that it would continue to comply with its commitments to the JCPOA if Europe also complied with its commitments. One important condition was that Europe must maintain business relations with Iranian banks and purchase Iranian oil despite US sanctions. Europe, however, failed to uphold its commitments.
China stood steadfast with the JCPOA. Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, called upon the US to quickly and unconditionally return to the Iran nuclear deal. Wang also called on the US to remove sanctions on Iran and third-parties.
Wang also urged Iran to restore full compliance with the JCPOA. China, though, has made it clear that the US “holds the key to breaking the deadlock” by returning to the JCPOA and lifting sanctions on Iran.
*****
When the Trump administration slapped sanctions on Iran, a devastating result was expected.
The effects of sanctions are lethal. Americans professors John Mueller and Karl Mueller wrote in their Foreign Affairsarticle:
economic sanctions … may have contributed to more deaths during the post-Cold War era than all weapons of mass destruction throughout history.
The lethality has been borne out. A large-scale human suffering was part of the plan to topple the government in Iran, which secretary of state Mike Pompeo admitted to. Not even the serious outbreak of COVID-19 would stir mercy in the hearts of American politicians. Included in the sanctions were medicines and food.
*****
When targeted by a hegemonic military superpower, the importance of powerful friends cannot be underestimated. China seems like a natural ally for Iran.
Like Iran, China has historically been targeted by brutish American imperialism. China, like Iran finds itself ringed by American militarism. China also has US sanctions levied against it. Western governments and their mass media bombard readers and viewers with disinformation to demonize China. US warships ply the South China Sea as they ply the waters of the Persian Gulf. Both China and Iran deal with domestic terrorism (undoubtedly abetted by western foes).
Thus, the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), designated as a terrorist group by the US in 1997, would be dropped from the US terrorist list in 2012. Later, the “cult-like” MEK would be embraced by right-wing Americans such as Rudy Giuliani, John Bolton, and Mike Pompeo, in hopes of furthering US aims of “regime change.” In a similar move, the separatist East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) in Xinjiang, China was removed from the US terrorist list.
US machinations have only served to hasten closer relations between China and Iran.
On March 27, Iran and China signed the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, a $400 billion 25-year agreement that includes oil and mining, promoting industrial activity in Iran, and collaborating in transportation and agriculture.
It’s a win-win. Iran gets a market for its commodities and investment. China gets access to needed resources and a partner for its Belt and Road Initiative, a multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure scheme to encompass Eurasia and abroad.
Iran also has economic and technology agreements with another US-sanctioned country that is a close ally of China, Russia. In February 2021, there was the important symbolism of the Iran-China-Russia collaboration on naval maneuvers in the Indian Ocean.
Iran does not have nukes, but it has powerful friends.
On 15 July 2015 — the day after the United States agreed to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA; also called the Iran nuclear deal) along with China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, plus Germany — then US president Barack Obama said in an interview that Iran was “a great civilization.” Without listing any of the great attributes of Iran, Obama then proceeded to criticize Iran, saying, “but, it also has an authoritarian theocracy in charge that is anti-American, anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic, sponsors terrorism, and there are a whole host of real profound differences…”
That is American exceptionalism. The US is a country whose sense of diplomacy deems it appropriate to openly criticize other nations. And because of this self-bestowed exceptionalism, it need not substantiate any criticisms it makes, and, of course, no such accusations could be leveled against the US.
However, soon after Donald Trump won the electoral college vote to become the US president, the days of the US abiding by the JCPOA were numbered. The US State Department said that the JCPOA “is not a treaty or an executive agreement, and is not a signed document.”
Apparently, US and international definitions on what constitutes a treaty differ. Since the JCPOA had not received the consent of the US Senate, as per domestic US law, it was not considered a treaty. Another instance of US exceptionalism — how the US legally separates itself from the international sphere.
On 8 May 2018, the US pulled out from the Iran nuclear deal.
Even though the US had withdrawn, Iran made it known that it would continue to comply with its commitments to the JCPOA if Europe also complied with its commitments. One important condition was that Europe must maintain business relations with Iranian banks and purchase Iranian oil despite US sanctions. Europe, however, failed to uphold its commitments.
China stood steadfast with the JCPOA. Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, called upon the US to quickly and unconditionally return to the Iran nuclear deal. Wang also called on the US to remove sanctions on Iran and third-parties.
Wang also urged Iran to restore full compliance with the JCPOA. China, though, has made it clear that the US “holds the key to breaking the deadlock” by returning to the JCPOA and lifting sanctions on Iran.
*****
When the Trump administration slapped sanctions on Iran, a devastating result was expected.
The effects of sanctions are lethal. Americans professors John Mueller and Karl Mueller wrote in their Foreign Affairsarticle:
economic sanctions … may have contributed to more deaths during the post-Cold War era than all weapons of mass destruction throughout history.
The lethality has been borne out. A large-scale human suffering was part of the plan to topple the government in Iran, which secretary of state Mike Pompeo admitted to. Not even the serious outbreak of COVID-19 would stir mercy in the hearts of American politicians. Included in the sanctions were medicines and food.
*****
When targeted by a hegemonic military superpower, the importance of powerful friends cannot be underestimated. China seems like a natural ally for Iran.
Like Iran, China has historically been targeted by brutish American imperialism. China, like Iran finds itself ringed by American militarism. China also has US sanctions levied against it. Western governments and their mass media bombard readers and viewers with disinformation to demonize China. US warships ply the South China Sea as they ply the waters of the Persian Gulf. Both China and Iran deal with domestic terrorism (undoubtedly abetted by western foes).
Thus, the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), designated as a terrorist group by the US in 1997, would be dropped from the US terrorist list in 2012. Later, the “cult-like” MEK would be embraced by right-wing Americans such as Rudy Giuliani, John Bolton, and Mike Pompeo, in hopes of furthering US aims of “regime change.” In a similar move, the separatist East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) in Xinjiang, China was removed from the US terrorist list.
US machinations have only served to hasten closer relations between China and Iran.
On March 27, Iran and China signed the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, a $400 billion 25-year agreement that includes oil and mining, promoting industrial activity in Iran, and collaborating in transportation and agriculture.
It’s a win-win. Iran gets a market for its commodities and investment. China gets access to needed resources and a partner for its Belt and Road Initiative, a multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure scheme to encompass Eurasia and abroad.
Iran also has economic and technology agreements with another US-sanctioned country that is a close ally of China, Russia. In February 2021, there was the important symbolism of the Iran-China-Russia collaboration on naval maneuvers in the Indian Ocean.
Iran does not have nukes, but it has powerful friends.
The US-centralized empire is waging nonstop wars that have killed millions of human beings just since the turn of this century, and people will still say things like “We’ve really got to do something about Cuba.”
The US-centralized empire is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases, working to destroy any nation which disobeys its dictates and brandishing armageddon weapons at its enemies like a drunken hillbilly with a shotgun, and people are still like “Something must be done about China’s intellectual property theft!”
Among the violent and destructive governments in our world, one towers high above all the others in a league entirely of its own. Add in the malign behavior of its allies, who effectively function as arms of the same single empire on foreign policy, and the gap between it and the next-worst offender grows even greater.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has presented “some points” of a landmark cooperation deal that was recently concluded between Beijing and Tehran.
In a message posted on his Instagram account on Thursday, Zarif underscored that the Sino-Iranian Comprehensive Strategic Partnership focuses on a “practical promotion” of bilateral ties and provides “a roadmap and long-term horizon” toward such relations.
According to him, the accord paves the way for full-blown collaboration between the two sides in the fields of politics, economy, trade, culture, defence, and security.
The Iranian foreign minister added that the agreement envisages the principles of “mutual respect and the pursuit of common interests in a win-win manner regarding bilateral, regional, and international relations”.
During the March 23-24 meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) council, Anthony Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State, encouraged NATO members to join the U.S. in viewing China as an economic and security threat to the U.S. as well as to NATO countries, thereby expanding NATO’s areas of focus to include the Pacific. This is a dangerous move that must be challenged.
To gain insight into what transpired at the March NATO meeting, we can look to a roadmap for NATO’s future, which was released last fall. The report, entitled “NATO 2030: United for a New Era,” is intended to be a guide for the military alliance in meeting the challenges it will face in the next decade.
You know you’re in for a hard sell when the New York Times (3/29/21) publishes an article under the headline “An Alliance of Autocracies? China Wants to Lead a New World Order.”
And Times Beijing bureau chief Steven Lee Myers doesn’t disappoint. He asserts:
China hopes to position itself as the main challenger to an international order, led by the United States, that is generally guided by principles of democracy, respect for human rights and adherence to rule of law.
“Generally” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I don’t think I have to spend too much time reminding you that the United States is a massive supporter of coups and undemocratic governments; has an ongoing history of torture, detention without trial and extrajudicial killing; and asserts the right to invade and coerce countries in defiance of international law.
Over the past few weeks, the world has gotten a glimpse of just how ugly international relations could become if the COVID crisis doesn’t ease up in the coming months.
While a handful of countries — the U.S., the U.K. and Israel in particular — have vaccinated large percentages of their populations, for most of the world, getting vaccinations into arms on a scale capable of blunting the spread of the virus remains a distant aspiration.
In Brazil, as the virus rampaged and Jair Bolsonaro’s government hemmed and hawed in the face of calamity, by the weekend, close to 4,000 people a day were dying of the disease. In much of Eastern Europe, deaths were higher in late March than at any point to date in the pandemic. Although a frightening COVID spike is ongoing in the United States as well, hopes are still high as vaccinations continue apace, with 28 percent of Americans having received at least one dose of the vaccine.
As that divide grows between countries with robust vaccination programs and countries with less access, some governments may slide further into what might be called vaccine nationalism: blocking the export of vaccines, even if they have already been paid for by other countries; insisting that people hoping to enter the country have received a vaccine manufactured by that country; and using selective vaccine exports as ways to shore up overseas influence — in a similar way to, say, arms sales or development grants.
This past month, it was the European Union (EU), which has prided itself historically on its openness and its sense of international spirit, that wielded raw power in a particularly crude way to start blockading the export of vaccines.
France called it the end of “naivety”;Italy said it was an imperative to halt exports while its own population was under-vaccinated; and Germany — even while using more moderate language — cited the imperatives of protecting one’s own population first and foremost. However it was packaged, the result was the same: The EU, which has massively bungled the rollout and distribution of vaccines within its borders and is being overwhelmed by the spread of the U.K. variant, is now severely restricting exports of vaccines made on European soil to Canada, the U.K., Australia, and other countries whose governments have already paid for certain numbers of doses of Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines.
The European Commission rejected the language of a “blockade,” saying it was just protecting its own in the same way as the U.S. has done, but it’s hard to see how else to interpret the shifting EU priorities. It’s also hard to see how such a policy will be successful in speeding up the EU’s vaccination program, given that many of the bottlenecks have far more to do with an inadequate distribution infrastructure for vaccines than with actual shortages on the continent. In other words, the EU’s aggressive stance is political posturing to deflect attention from a stunning public health failure vis-a-vis vaccine distribution. Tragically, this posturing could cost many lives.
In the U.K.’s case, the situation could end up being particularly dangerous, as the government has embarked on a strategy of distributing as many first doses as possible, and stretching out the second doses to 12 weeks out — far longer than is permitted in the U.S. That strategy was premised on the assumption that doses contractually signed for would actually be delivered promptly, and the second doses would arrive when expected. Now, however, the steady supply of vaccines is at risk, since the Pfizer doses that the U.K. relies on are manufactured in Belgium, meaning those second doses might be postponed even further. This risks a breakdown in immunity for those who are only partially vaccinated, and could conceivably lead to a new wave of infections in the late spring and summer. Should that happen, the already frayed relations between Brexit Britain and the EU will likely worsen still more.
In addition to the U.S., other countries are also wielding vaccines as a form of power, a new tool in a peculiarly 21st-century Great Power game. China, which has some of the most restrictive requirements in the world for anyone hoping to enter the country, is only willing to relax those restrictions for those who have proof that they were inoculated with a Chinese vaccine. It is doing so despite the fact that at least Pfizer and Moderna have produced vaccines that seem to have a far higher efficacy rate than do the Chinese vaccines.
Meanwhile, Russia is surging exports of its Sputnik V vaccine to many poor countries around the world, particularly in Latin America and in Asia, possibly as a way to re-establish a global footprint in areas from which it was largely ousted in the post-Cold War decades.
In Israel, which has the highest per capita vaccination rate on Earth — and has begun implementing a vaccine passport system allowing inoculated individuals to go into public spaces barred to the non-vaccinated — the government has implemented what amounts to a vaccine blockade against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, distributing only a few thousand vaccines to local authorities in those regions. Doctors Without Borders has calculated that an Israeli is 60 times more likely to have vaccine access than is a Palestinian living in one of the occupied territories. Meanwhile, settlers in the West Bank have received vaccine access even while Palestinian residents have not. This amounts, in some ways, to a racial or religious litmus test for vaccine access.
The COVID crisis represents the biggest global public health challenge in more than a century. While the development of vaccines in under a year represents one of the greatest acts of scientific cooperation in human history, now much of that cooperative spirit is being lost in the swirl of nationalist politics and the language of exclusion that surround distribution of the vaccines.
In the long run, vaccine nationalism, and the protectionism of rich countries against poor countries, helps no one. If new, more contagious variants emerge over the coming months and years in poorer countries that can’t compete for vaccines with the U.S., the U.K., the EU and other powerhouses in the global marketplace, there’s a real risk that some of those variants will end up evading vaccines. Such a development could bring everyone, rich and poor alike, back to square one, and that’s a scenario that would be catastrophic in its global implications.
Roaming UAVs ease airborne border and coastal surveillance. Enduring territorial disputes, illegal immigration, transnational crime, and domestic and international terrorism in Asia-Pacific continue to drive regional interest in the protection of long and often porous land and maritime boundaries. While the imperative to monitor national borders is well understood, the reality on the ground for […]
Former Australian PM says world ‘radically underestimating’ how quickly junta violence could deteriorate to tens of thousands of deaths and a refugee crisis
The world is “radically underestimating” how badly the situation in Myanmar could deteriorate, with the prospect of thousands of deaths and an exodus of refugees, the former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd has warned.
Rudd raised the alarm as he called for an urgent meeting of the UN security council, arguing the international community had a “responsibility to protect” the people of Myanmar from “mass atrocities” by the country’s military.
The New York Times (3/29/21) produces a new installment in its ongoing project of demonizing China (FAIR.org, 1/29/21): “As President Biden predicts a struggle between democracies and their opponents, Beijing is eager to champion the other side.”
You know you’re in for a hard sell when the New York Times (3/29/21) publishes an article under the headline “An Alliance of Autocracies? China Wants to Lead a New World Order.”
And Times Beijing bureau chief Steven Lee Myers doesn’t disappoint. He asserts:
China hopes to position itself as the main challenger to an international order, led by the United States, that is generally guided by principles of democracy, respect for human rights and adherence to rule of law.
“Generally” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I don’t think I have to spend too much time reminding you that the United States is a massive supporter of coups and undemocratic governments; has an ongoing history of torture, detention without trial and extrajudicial killing; and asserts the right to invade and coerce countries in defiance of international law. But it’s what Myers does with this deceptive summary of US policy that I find most striking; he immediately follows with:
Such a system “does not represent the will of the international community,” China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, told Russia’s, Sergey V. Lavrov, when they met in the southern Chinese city of Guilin.
Wang, like the New York Times, defines the US-led international order as one based in democracy, human rights and the rule of law, and says that doesn’t represent “the will of the international community”? That doesn’t seem likely. When you search for the part of the quote that’s actually in quotation marks, you find this release (3/26/21) from the Chinese government:
Wang Yi said, the so-called “rules-based international order” by a few countries is not clear in its meaning, as it reflects the rules of a few countries and does not represent the will of the international community.
So what Wang actually said China was challenging is the “rules-based international order”—which he suggested doesn’t deserve its name, since only a handful of countries get to make the rules. He didn’t mention democracy or human rights in the statement; as for the rule of law, he said, “We should uphold the universally recognized international law.”
It’s an article of faith in US establishment media that they represent an independent watchdog press, whereas China’s news outlets propagandize the official positions of the state. Articles like this one make you wonder what they’re talking about.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com (Twitter: @NYTimes). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
There’s a new dawn evident: China is not putting up with what it sees as hypocritical Western interference in its sovereign affairs. Sanctions are being met with rapid counter-sanctions, and Chinese officials are vociferously pointing out Western double standards.
There was a time when the United States and its allies could browbeat others with condemnations. Not any more. China’s colossal global economic power and growing international influence has been a game-changer in the old Western practice of imperialist arrogance.
The shock came at the Alaska summit earlier this month between US top diplomat Antony Blinken and his Chinese counterparts. Blinken was expecting to lecture China over alleged human rights violations. Then Yang Jiechi, Beijing’s foreign policy chief, took Blinken to task over a range of past and current human rights issues afflicting the United States. Washington was left reeling from the lashes.
Western habits die hard, though. Following the fiasco in Alaska, the United States, Canada, Britain and the European Union coordinated sanctions on Chinese officials over provocative allegations of genocide against the Uyghur population in Xinjiang. Australia and New Zealand, which are part of the US-led Five Eyes intelligence network, also supported the raft of sanctions.
Again China caused shock when it quickly hit back with its own counter-sanctions against each of these Western states. The Americans and their allies were aghast that anyone would have the temerity to stand up to them.
Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau bemoaned: “China’s sanctions are an attack on transparency and freedom of expression – values at the heart of our democracy.”
Let’s unpack the contentions a bit. First of all, Western claims about genocide in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang are dubious and smack of political grandstanding in order to give Washington and its allies a pretext to interfere in China’s internal affairs.
The latest Western sanctions are based on a report by a shady Washington-based think-tank Newlines Institute of Strategic Policy. Its report claiming “genocide” against the Uyghur Muslim ethnic minority in Xinjiang has the hallmarks of a propaganda screed, not remotely the work of independent scholarly research. Both China and independent journalists at the respected US-based Grayzone have dismissed the claims as fabrication and distortion.
For the United States and other Western governments to level sanctions against China citing the above “report” is highly provocative. It also betrays the real objective, which is to undermine Beijing. This is a top geopolitical priority for Washington. Under the Biden administration, Washington has relearned the value of “diplomacy” – that is the advantage of corralling allies into a hostile front, rather than Trump’s America First go-it-alone policy.
Granted, China does have problems with its Xinjiang region. As Australia’s premier think-tank Lowy Institute noted: “Ethnic unrest and terrorism in Xinjiang has been an ongoing concern for Chinese authorities for decades.”
Due to the two-decade-old US-led war in Afghanistan there has been a serious problem for the Chinese authorities from radicalization of the Uyghur population. Thousands of fighters from Xinjiang have trained with the Taliban in Afghanistan and have taken their “global jihad” to Syria and other Central Asian countries. It is their stated objective to return to Xinjiang and liberate it as a caliphate of East Turkestan separate from China.
Indeed, the American government has acknowledged previously that several Uyghur militants were detained at its notorious Guantanamo detention center.
The United States and its NATO and other allies, Australia and New Zealand, have all created the disaster that is Afghanistan. The war has scarred generations of Afghans and radicalized terrorist networks across the Middle East and Central Asia, which are a major concern for China’s security.
Beijing’s counterinsurgency policies have succeeded in tamping down extremism among its Uyghur people. The population has grown to around 12 million, nearly half the region’s total. This and general economic advances are cited by Beijing as evidence refuting Western claims of “genocide”. China says it runs vocational training centers and not “concentration camps”, as Western governments maintain. Beijing has reportedly agreed to an open visit by United Nations officials to verify conditions.
Western hypocrisy towards China is astounding. Its claims about China committing genocide and forced labor are projections of its own past and current violations against indigenous people and ethnic minorities. The United States, Britain, Canada, Australia have vile histories stained from colonialist extermination and slavery.
But specifically with regard to the Uyghur, the Western duplicity is awesome. The mass killing, torture and destruction meted out in Afghanistan by Western troops have fueled the radicalization in China’s Xinjiang, which borders Afghanistan. The Americans, British and Australians in particular have huge blood on their hands.
An official report into unlawful killings by Australian special forces found that dozens of Afghan civilians, including children, were murdered in cold blood. When China’s foreign ministry highlighted the killings, the Australian premier Scott Morrison recoiled to decry Beijing’s remarks as “offensive” and “repugnant”. Morrison demanded China issue an apology for daring to point out the war crimes committed in Afghanistan by Australian troops.
It is absurd and ironic that Western states which destroyed Afghanistan with war crimes and crimes against humanity have the brass neck to censure China over non-existent crimes in its own region of Xinjiang. And especially regarding China’s internal affairs with its Uyghur people, some of whom have been radicalized by terrorism stemming from Western mass-murder in Afghanistan.
China is, however, not letting this Western hypocrisy pass. Beijing is hitting back to point out who the real culprits are. Its vast global economic power and increasing trade partnerships with over 100 nations through the Belt and Road Initiative all combine to give China’s words a tour de force that the Western states cannot handle. Hence, they are falling over in shock when China hits back.
The United States thinks it can line up a coalition of nations against China.
But Europe, Britain, Canada and Australia – all of whom depend on China’s growth and goodwill – can expect to pay a heavy price for being Uncle Sam’s lapdogs.
Finian Cunningham has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Read other articles by Finian.
There’s a new dawn evident: China is not putting up with what it sees as hypocritical Western interference in its sovereign affairs. Sanctions are being met with rapid counter-sanctions, and Chinese officials are vociferously pointing out Western double standards.
There was a time when the United States and its allies could browbeat others with condemnations. Not any more. China’s colossal global economic power and growing international influence has been a game-changer in the old Western practice of imperialist arrogance.
The shock came at the Alaska summit earlier this month between US top diplomat Antony Blinken and his Chinese counterparts. Blinken was expecting to lecture China over alleged human rights violations. Then Yang Jiechi, Beijing’s foreign policy chief, took Blinken to task over a range of past and current human rights issues afflicting the United States. Washington was left reeling from the lashes.
Western habits die hard, though. Following the fiasco in Alaska, the United States, Canada, Britain and the European Union coordinated sanctions on Chinese officials over provocative allegations of genocide against the Uyghur population in Xinjiang. Australia and New Zealand, which are part of the US-led Five Eyes intelligence network, also supported the raft of sanctions.
Again China caused shock when it quickly hit back with its own counter-sanctions against each of these Western states. The Americans and their allies were aghast that anyone would have the temerity to stand up to them.
Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau bemoaned: “China’s sanctions are an attack on transparency and freedom of expression – values at the heart of our democracy.”
Let’s unpack the contentions a bit. First of all, Western claims about genocide in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang are dubious and smack of political grandstanding in order to give Washington and its allies a pretext to interfere in China’s internal affairs.
The latest Western sanctions are based on a report by a shady Washington-based think-tank Newlines Institute of Strategic Policy. Its report claiming “genocide” against the Uyghur Muslim ethnic minority in Xinjiang has the hallmarks of a propaganda screed, not remotely the work of independent scholarly research. Both China and independent journalists at the respected US-based Grayzone have dismissed the claims as fabrication and distortion.
For the United States and other Western governments to level sanctions against China citing the above “report” is highly provocative. It also betrays the real objective, which is to undermine Beijing. This is a top geopolitical priority for Washington. Under the Biden administration, Washington has relearned the value of “diplomacy” – that is the advantage of corralling allies into a hostile front, rather than Trump’s America First go-it-alone policy.
Granted, China does have problems with its Xinjiang region. As Australia’s premier think-tank Lowy Institute noted: “Ethnic unrest and terrorism in Xinjiang has been an ongoing concern for Chinese authorities for decades.”
Due to the two-decade-old US-led war in Afghanistan there has been a serious problem for the Chinese authorities from radicalization of the Uyghur population. Thousands of fighters from Xinjiang have trained with the Taliban in Afghanistan and have taken their “global jihad” to Syria and other Central Asian countries. It is their stated objective to return to Xinjiang and liberate it as a caliphate of East Turkestan separate from China.
Indeed, the American government has acknowledged previously that several Uyghur militants were detained at its notorious Guantanamo detention center.
The United States and its NATO and other allies, Australia and New Zealand, have all created the disaster that is Afghanistan. The war has scarred generations of Afghans and radicalized terrorist networks across the Middle East and Central Asia, which are a major concern for China’s security.
Beijing’s counterinsurgency policies have succeeded in tamping down extremism among its Uyghur people. The population has grown to around 12 million, nearly half the region’s total. This and general economic advances are cited by Beijing as evidence refuting Western claims of “genocide”. China says it runs vocational training centers and not “concentration camps”, as Western governments maintain. Beijing has reportedly agreed to an open visit by United Nations officials to verify conditions.
Western hypocrisy towards China is astounding. Its claims about China committing genocide and forced labor are projections of its own past and current violations against indigenous people and ethnic minorities. The United States, Britain, Canada, Australia have vile histories stained from colonialist extermination and slavery.
But specifically with regard to the Uyghur, the Western duplicity is awesome. The mass killing, torture and destruction meted out in Afghanistan by Western troops have fueled the radicalization in China’s Xinjiang, which borders Afghanistan. The Americans, British and Australians in particular have huge blood on their hands.
An official report into unlawful killings by Australian special forces found that dozens of Afghan civilians, including children, were murdered in cold blood. When China’s foreign ministry highlighted the killings, the Australian premier Scott Morrison recoiled to decry Beijing’s remarks as “offensive” and “repugnant”. Morrison demanded China issue an apology for daring to point out the war crimes committed in Afghanistan by Australian troops.
It is absurd and ironic that Western states which destroyed Afghanistan with war crimes and crimes against humanity have the brass neck to censure China over non-existent crimes in its own region of Xinjiang. And especially regarding China’s internal affairs with its Uyghur people, some of whom have been radicalized by terrorism stemming from Western mass-murder in Afghanistan.
China is, however, not letting this Western hypocrisy pass. Beijing is hitting back to point out who the real culprits are. Its vast global economic power and increasing trade partnerships with over 100 nations through the Belt and Road Initiative all combine to give China’s words a tour de force that the Western states cannot handle. Hence, they are falling over in shock when China hits back.
The United States thinks it can line up a coalition of nations against China.
But Europe, Britain, Canada and Australia – all of whom depend on China’s growth and goodwill – can expect to pay a heavy price for being Uncle Sam’s lapdogs.
The Pentagon recently asked Congress for an astronomical $27 billion budget increase to support a massive military buildup in Asia as part of its new Indo-Pacific plan, which calls for a substantially more aggressive military stance against China.
With the US already ranking first in military spending worldwide and holding more than 290 military bases in the Asia-Pacific region alone, this aggressive buildup is being proposed at the most financially precarious moment in US history. According to the Congressional Budget Office report released this month, federal debt is projected to reach 102% of GDP by the end of 2021 before surpassing its historical high of 107% in 2031 and going on to nearly double to 202% by 2051. According to Doug Bandow, “Uncle Sam is headed toward insolvency.”
Boris Johnson’s March 16 speech before the British Parliament was reminiscent, at least in tone, to that of Chinese President Xi Jinping in October 2019, on the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Republic of China.
The comparison is quite apt if we remember the long-anticipated shift in Britain’s foreign policy and Johnson’s conservative government’s pressing need to chart a new global course in search for new allies – and new enemies.
Xi’s words in 2019 signaled a new era in Chinese foreign policy, where Beijing hoped to send a message to its allies and enemies that the rules of the game were finally changing in its favor, and that China’s economic miracle – launched under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping in 1992 – would no longer be confined to the realm of wealth accumulation, but would exceed this to politics and military strength, as well.
In China’s case, Xi’s declarations were not a shift per se, but rather a rational progression. However, in the case of Britain, the process, though ultimately rational, is hardly straightforward. After officially leaving the European Union in January 2020, Britain was expected to articulate a new national agenda. This articulation, however, was derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the multiple crises it generated.
Several scenarios, regarding the nature of Britain’s new agenda, were plausible:
One, that Britain maintains a degree of political proximity to the EU, thus avoiding more negative repercussions of Brexit;
Two, for Britain to return to its former alliance with the US, begun in earnest in the post-World War II era and the formation of NATO and reaching its zenith in the run up to the Iraq invasion in 2003;
Finally, for Britain to play the role of the mediator, standing at an equal distance among all parties, so that it may reap the benefits of its unique position as a strong country with a massive global network.
A government’s report, “Global Britain in a Competitive Age”, released on March 16, and Johnson’s subsequent speech, indicate that Britain has chosen the second option.
The report clearly prioritizes the British-American alliance above all others, stating that “The United States will remain the UK’s most important strategic ally and partner”, and underscoring Britain’s need to place greater focus on the ‘Indo-Pacific’ region, calling it “the centre of intensifying geopolitical competition”.
Therefore, unsurprisingly, Britain is now set to dispatch a military carrier to the South China Sea, and is preparing to expand its nuclear arsenal from 180 to 260 warheads, in obvious violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The latter move can be directly attributed to Britain’s new political realignment which roughly follows the maxim of ‘the enemy of my friend is my enemy’.
The government’s report places particular emphasis on China, warning against its increased “international assertiveness” and “growing importance in the Indo-Pacific”. Furthermore, it calls for greater investment in enhancing “China-facing capabilities” and responding to “the systematic challenge” that China “poses to our security”.
How additional nuclear warheads will allow Britain to achieve its above objectives remains uncertain. Compared with Russia and the US, Britain’s nuclear arsenal, although duly destructive, is negligible in terms of its overall size. However, as history has taught us, nuclear weapons are rarely manufactured to be used in war – with the single exception of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The number of nuclear warheads and the precise position of their operational deployment are usually meant to send a message, not merely that of strength or resolve, but also to delineate where a specific country stands in terms of its alliances.
The US-Soviet Cold War, for example, was expressed largely through a relentless arms race, with nuclear weapons playing a central role in that polarizing conflict, which divided the world into two major ideological-political camps.
Now that China is likely to claim the superpower status enjoyed by the Soviets until the early 1990s, a new Great Game and Cold War can be felt, not only in the Asia Pacific region, but as far away as Africa and South America. While Europe continues to hedge its bets in this new global conflict – reassured by the size of its members’ collective economies – Britain, thanks to Brexit, no longer has that leverage. No longer an EU member, Britain is now keen to protect its global interests through a direct commitment to US interests. Now that China has been designated as America’s new enemy, Britain must play along.
While much media coverage has been dedicated to the expansion of Britain’s nuclear arsenal, little attention has been paid to the fact that the British move is a mere step in a larger political scheme, which ultimately aims at executing a British tilt to Asia, similar to the US ‘pivot to Asia’, declared by the Barack Obama Administration nearly a decade ago.
The British foreign policy shift is an unprecedented gamble for London, as the nature of the new Cold War is fundamentally different from the previous one; this time around, the ‘West’ is divided, torn by politics and crises, while NATO is no longer the superpower it once was.
Now that Britain has made its position clear, the ball is in the Chinese court, and the new Great Game is, indeed, afoot.
Boris Johnson’s March 16 speech before the British Parliament was reminiscent, at least in tone, to that of Chinese President Xi Jinping in October 2019, on the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Republic of China.
The comparison is quite apt if we remember the long-anticipated shift in Britain’s foreign policy and Johnson’s conservative government’s pressing need to chart a new global course in search for new allies – and new enemies.
Xi’s words in 2019 signaled a new era in Chinese foreign policy, where Beijing hoped to send a message to its allies and enemies that the rules of the game were finally changing in its favor, and that China’s economic miracle – launched under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping in 1992 – would no longer be confined to the realm of wealth accumulation, but would exceed this to politics and military strength, as well.
In China’s case, Xi’s declarations were not a shift per se, but rather a rational progression. However, in the case of Britain, the process, though ultimately rational, is hardly straightforward. After officially leaving the European Union in January 2020, Britain was expected to articulate a new national agenda. This articulation, however, was derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the multiple crises it generated.
Several scenarios, regarding the nature of Britain’s new agenda, were plausible:
One, that Britain maintains a degree of political proximity to the EU, thus avoiding more negative repercussions of Brexit;
Two, for Britain to return to its former alliance with the US, begun in earnest in the post-World War II era and the formation of NATO and reaching its zenith in the run up to the Iraq invasion in 2003;
Finally, for Britain to play the role of the mediator, standing at an equal distance among all parties, so that it may reap the benefits of its unique position as a strong country with a massive global network.
A government’s report, “Global Britain in a Competitive Age”, released on March 16, and Johnson’s subsequent speech, indicate that Britain has chosen the second option.
The report clearly prioritizes the British-American alliance above all others, stating that “The United States will remain the UK’s most important strategic ally and partner”, and underscoring Britain’s need to place greater focus on the ‘Indo-Pacific’ region, calling it “the centre of intensifying geopolitical competition”.
Therefore, unsurprisingly, Britain is now set to dispatch a military carrier to the South China Sea, and is preparing to expand its nuclear arsenal from 180 to 260 warheads, in obvious violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The latter move can be directly attributed to Britain’s new political realignment which roughly follows the maxim of ‘the enemy of my friend is my enemy’.
The government’s report places particular emphasis on China, warning against its increased “international assertiveness” and “growing importance in the Indo-Pacific”. Furthermore, it calls for greater investment in enhancing “China-facing capabilities” and responding to “the systematic challenge” that China “poses to our security”.
How additional nuclear warheads will allow Britain to achieve its above objectives remains uncertain. Compared with Russia and the US, Britain’s nuclear arsenal, although duly destructive, is negligible in terms of its overall size. However, as history has taught us, nuclear weapons are rarely manufactured to be used in war – with the single exception of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The number of nuclear warheads and the precise position of their operational deployment are usually meant to send a message, not merely that of strength or resolve, but also to delineate where a specific country stands in terms of its alliances.
The US-Soviet Cold War, for example, was expressed largely through a relentless arms race, with nuclear weapons playing a central role in that polarizing conflict, which divided the world into two major ideological-political camps.
Now that China is likely to claim the superpower status enjoyed by the Soviets until the early 1990s, a new Great Game and Cold War can be felt, not only in the Asia Pacific region, but as far away as Africa and South America. While Europe continues to hedge its bets in this new global conflict – reassured by the size of its members’ collective economies – Britain, thanks to Brexit, no longer has that leverage. No longer an EU member, Britain is now keen to protect its global interests through a direct commitment to US interests. Now that China has been designated as America’s new enemy, Britain must play along.
While much media coverage has been dedicated to the expansion of Britain’s nuclear arsenal, little attention has been paid to the fact that the British move is a mere step in a larger political scheme, which ultimately aims at executing a British tilt to Asia, similar to the US ‘pivot to Asia’, declared by the Barack Obama Administration nearly a decade ago.
The British foreign policy shift is an unprecedented gamble for London, as the nature of the new Cold War is fundamentally different from the previous one; this time around, the ‘West’ is divided, torn by politics and crises, while NATO is no longer the superpower it once was.
Now that Britain has made its position clear, the ball is in the Chinese court, and the new Great Game is, indeed, afoot.
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During the March 23-24 meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) council, Anthony Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State, encouraged NATO members to join the U.S. in viewing China as an economic and security threat to the U.S. as well as to NATO countries, thereby expanding NATO’s areas of focus to include the Pacific. This is a dangerous move that must be challenged.
To gain insight into what transpired at the March NATO meeting, we can look to a roadmap for NATO’s future, which was released last fall. The report, entitled “NATO 2030: United for a New Era,” is intended to be a guide for the military alliance in meeting the challenges it will face in the next decade. In the report, released in November, the “independent group” of five advisers from 10 NATO countries identified 13 challenges and threats to NATO in the next decade.
This new proposed roadmap for NATO reflects an alarming expansion: It is as much about China and the Asia/Pacific region as it is about NATO’s traditional area of operations and concern, Europe and Russia.
Although the group identified the number one threat to NATO as Russia, China was named as threat number 2.
The document brings the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into the Pacific and attempts to provide a justification to expand and strengthen “partnerships” in the Asia/Pacific region. NATO already has four “partners” in the Pacific through bilateral agreements with Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. As NATO partners, Australia and New Zealand have deployed many troops under the NATO banner in Afghanistan, while Japan and South Korea have had reconstruction and development projects in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the United States, NATO’s mega-member, has military bases all over the Pacific, including in Japan, Okinawa, South Korea, Guam, Singapore and Hawaii that are used by NATO “partners” during regional war drills.
U.S. Secretary of State Blinken, in his address on March 24 to NATO members, strongly rebuked China and urged NATO allies to join with the U.S. in this adversarial position.
Blinken said the U.S. wouldn’t force its European allies into an “us-or-them choice,” but he then implied the opposite, emphasizing that Washington views China as an economic and security threat, particularly in technology, to NATO allies in Europe.
“When one of us is coerced we should respond as allies and work together to reduce our vulnerability by insuring our economies are more integrated with each other,” Blinken said.
Blinken cited China’s militarization of the South China Sea, use of predatory economics, intellectual property theft and human rights abuses.
In his March 24 press conference after the meetings of the North Atlantic Council and after U.S. Secretary of State Blinken’s statement, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg focused on primarily on Russia but echoed Blinken’s oppositional rhetoric regarding China. While saying “We don’t regard China as an adversary,” Stoltenberg nevertheless continued to spell out specific reasons NATO agrees with the U.S.: “The rise of China has direct consequences to our security…. So, one of the challenges we face as we now have this forward looking process with NATO 2030 is how to strengthen and how to work more closely together as allies, responding to the rise of China.”
NATO’s concerns about Chinese military expansion include the construction of nine naval bases on atolls in the South China Sea and an increasing number of ships: China now has the largest navy in the world, with 350 ships and submarines, including over 130 ships. In comparison, the U.S. Navy has 293 ships as of early 2020, but U.S. naval ships have substantially more firepower than Chinese Navy ships.
While China’s military budget has increased dramatically in the past decade, it still amounts to only one-third of the military budget of the U.S. and is very small compared to the combined military budgets of NATO members and partners.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s 2019 estimates show the U.S. military budget of $732 billion is 38 percent of global military expenditures, while China’s $ 261 billion is 14 percent and Russia’s military budget of $61 billion is 3.4 percent. Six of the 15 highest military global spenders are members of NATO: the U.S., France, Germany, the U.K., Italy and Canada. Together, these six accounted for 48 percent ($929 billion) of global military expenditure. Total spending by all 29 NATO members was $1035 billion in 2019.
At the March meeting, NATO members spoke frequently about China’s increasingly global military footprint, including the development of an overseas base in Djibouti, which now “hosts” military bases of the United States, France, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Japan and China. China also has several smaller bases around the world, including in the province of Neuquén, Patagonia, Argentina, on land loaned to the Chinese government during Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s presidency. China claims the land is for space exploration and intelligence services. The Chinese government also has a naval electronic intelligence facility on the Great Coco Island of Myanmar in the Bay of Bengal and a small military post in south-eastern Tajikistan.
China has a total of 13 military bases worldwide, including the 9 on atolls in the South China Sea. For perspective, the United States has over 800 military bases around the world.
Meanwhile, NATO is also raising alarm about China’s economic Belt and Road Initiative, which includes a “belt” of overland road and rail corridors and a maritime “road” of shipping lanes and ports.
NATO Members Increase Military Presence to Counter “Threat” From China
The groundwork has already been laid for NATO’s expansion into Asia: The dominant and continued presence of the United States in the Pacific has given NATO a permanent foothold in the region. The Obama administration’s “Pivot to Asia” was a NATO stepping-stone for increased military actions in the region.
For many years, NATO countries have participated in Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC), the world’s largest naval exercise held every two years in Hawaii. In 2020, the COVID-modified RIMPAC had ships from 25 countries: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Colombia, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Peru, South Korea, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tonga, United Kingdom, United States and Vietnam. China participated in the 2014 RIMPAC with four ships and in 2016, but was disinvited in 2018 due to its military activities in the South China Sea.
The United Kingdom and France have increased their presence in the Indo-Pacific. At the Shangri-La Dialogue in 2018, French and British defense ministers announced they would sail warships through the South China Sea to challenge China’s military expansion. The Shangri-La Dialogue is a security forum attended by defense ministers and military chiefs of 28 Asia-Pacific states and is named for the Shangri-La Hotel in Singapore where it has been held since 2002.
Subsequently, the United Kingdom deployed the HMS Albion to conduct freedom of navigation exercises near the Paracel Islands in August 2018 and conducted its first joint exercise with the United States in the South China Sea in 2019. NATO member France has exclusive economic zones in the Pacific around its overseas territories and in February 2021, France conducted a patrol through the South China Sea with a nuclear attack submarine and two other navy ships as a part of its freedom of navigation exercises.
Additionally, the U.S. military is already reorienting much of its military equipment and war maneuvers to the Pacific. The U.S. Army’s longstanding massive land maneuvers “Defender” exercises in Europe will be in the Pacific in 2021. Meanwhile, the U.S. Marine Corps is reorganizing its forces in the Pacific to be “fast moving counterweights to China’s growing navy fleet.”
NATO’s new strategy in the Pacific is for Marines, as well as small Army units, to operate in “littoral operations or operations around shorelines from the islands around the Western Pacific in small units with ship-killing missiles.” The Corps is testing missiles fired from these smaller vehicles, which according to the Marine Corps, will “make it incredibly hard for the enemy to find us. … We will have dozens and dozens and dozens of these platoons and vehicles placed strategically throughout the region.”
In 2021, Hawaii will become the home of the Marine Corps’s first Marine Littoral Regiment, with initial operating capability in 2023. The Hawaii-based 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment will be composed of 1,800- 2,000 Marines from the 3rd Marine Regiment at Kaneohe Bay, Oahu, which has about 3,400 Marines.
Currently, the Marines have two regiments on Okinawa and one in Hawaii. In the next two years, the new strategy calls for one littoral regiment each on Okinawa, Hawaii and Guam.
The new strategy not only redesigns units but is also redesigning the sea transportation to move the forces around the Pacific. According to the Congressional Research Service, the Light Amphibious Warship, a proposed new class of Navy vessel, will be between 200 and 400 feet long and cost $100 million. The Navy wants to have 28 to 30 of these amphibious ships, which will have the capability to pull up onto beaches. How many ships would be based in Hawaii, Guam and Okinawa remains unclear, as is where they would practice beach landings in the islands, which will be watched closely by local environmental activists.
The U.S. Marines are also adding weaponized drones to their war-fighting equipment. Beginning in 2023, 18 Predator drones will come into the Pacific region, 6 in Hawaii and the others going to Guam and Okinawa.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military is building new bases in the Pacific. In 2020, the president of Palau, a small Pacific island nation of a population of only 17,000, offered his country as a new base of operations for the U.S. military in the Pacific. The U.S. has already constructed a runway and has increased the number of U.S. Navy ships using Palau’s ports. The Trump administration quickly sent the secretary of defense and secretary of the navy to consolidate the agreement. Palau already receives extensive funding from the U.S. through an economic and defense agreement called the Compact of Free Association.
U.S. military operations from other Pacific islands have increased in recent years. U.S. nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers and their accompanying escorts of 10 ships and B-2 nuclear-equipped bombers operate daily from the U.S. territory of Guam on “freedom of navigation” sea drills and overflights of Taiwan, Okinawa, Japan and South Korea.
The Chinese military has responded with its own naval drills in the South China Sea and air armadas of 18 aircraft flying to the edge of Taiwan’s air defense zone during the Trump administration’s increased diplomatic engagement and military sales to Taiwan, an island the People’s Republic of China (PRC) considers as a renegade province of the PRC.
The level of air and sea confrontation in the Western Pacific between the U.S. and NATO forces and China has increased dangerously over the past two years, and it’s only a matter of time until an accident or purposeful incident presents a potential war incident that can lead to horrific consequences.
As NATO advisors name China as the number two threat to the organization after Russia, the U.S. top diplomat echoes their rallying call as the U.S. military ramps up its forces in the Pacific region. These worrisome developments suggest the U.S. will continue to play a leading role in pushing NATO to train its sights on China, which will heighten the dangerous confrontation in the Western Pacific.
President Joe Biden’s domestic policies, especially on the economic front, are quite encouraging, offering plenty of hope for a better future. The same, however, cannot be said about the administration’s foreign policy agenda, as Noam Chomsky’s penetrating insights and astute analysis reveal in this exclusive interview for Truthout. Chomsky is a world-famous public intellectual, Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT and Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona.
C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, two months after being in the White House, Biden’s foreign policy agenda is beginning to take shape. What are the signs so far of how the Biden administration intends to address the challenges to U.S. hegemony posed by its primary geopolitical rivals, namely Russia and China?
Noam Chomsky: The challenge to U.S. hegemony posed by Russia and particularly China has been a major theme of foreign policy discourse for some time, with persistent agreement on the severity of the threat.
The matter is plainly complex. It’s a good rule of thumb to cast a skeptical eye when there is general agreement on some complex issue. This is no exception.
What we generally find, I think, is that Russia and China sometimes deter U.S. actions to enforce its global hegemony in regions on their periphery that are of particular concern to them. One can ask whether they are justified in seeking to limit overwhelming U.S. power in this way, but that is a long distance from the way the challenge is commonly understood: as an effort to displace the U.S. global role in sustaining a liberal rule-based international order by new centers of hegemonic power.
Do Russia and China actually challenge U.S. hegemony in the ways commonly understood?
Russia is not a major actor in the world scene, apart from the military force that is a (very dangerous) residue of its earlier status as a second superpower. It does not begin to compare with the U.S. in outreach and influence.
China has undergone spectacular economic growth, but it is still far from approaching U.S. power in just about any dimension. It remains a relatively poor country, ranked 85th in the UN Human Development Index, between Brazil and Ecuador. The U.S., while not ranked near the top because of its poor social welfare record, is far above China. In military strength and global outreach (bases, forces in active combat), there is no comparison. U.S.-based multinationals have about half of world wealth and are first (sometimes second) in just about every category. China is far behind. China also faces serious internal problems (ecological, demographic, political). The U.S., in contrast, has internal and security advantages unmatched anywhere.
Take sanctions, a major instrument of world power for one country on Earth: the U.S. They are, furthermore, third-party sanctions. Disobey them, and you’re out of luck. You can be tossed out of the world financial system, or worse. It’s pretty much the same wherever we look.
If we look at history, we find regular echoes of Sen. Arthur Vandenberg’s 1947 advice to the president that he should “scare hell out of the American people” if he wanted to whip them up to a frenzy of fear over the Russian threat to take over the world. It would be necessary to be “clearer than truth,” as explained by Dean Acheson, one of the creators of the postwar order. He was referring to NSC-68 of 1950, a founding document of the Cold War, declassified decades later. Its rhetoric continues to resound in one or another form, again today about China.
NSC-68 called for a huge military build-up and imposition of discipline on our dangerously free society so that we can defend ourselves from the “slave state” with its “implacable purpose… to eliminate the challenge of freedom” everywhere, establishing “total power over all men [and] absolute authority over the rest of the world.” And so on, in an impressive flow.
China does confront U.S. power — in the South China Sea, not the Atlantic or Pacific. There is an economic challenge as well. In some areas, China is a world leader, notably renewable energy, where it is far ahead of other countries in both scale and quality. It is also the world’s manufacturing base, though profits go mostly elsewhere, to managers like Taiwan’s Foxconn or investors in Apple, which is increasingly reliant on intellectual property rights — the exorbitant patent rights that are a core part of the highly protectionist “free trade” agreements.
China’s global influence is surely expanding in investment, commerce, takeover of facilities (such as management of Israel’s major port). That influence is likely to expand if it moves forward with provision of vaccines virtually at cost in comparison with the West’s hoarding of vaccines and its impeding of distribution of a “People’s Vaccine” so as to protect corporate patents and profits. China is also advancing substantially in high technology, much to the consternation of the U.S., which is seeking to impede its development.
It is rather odd to regard all of this as a challenge to U.S. hegemony.
U.S. policy might help create a more serious challenge by confrontational and hostile acts that drive Russia and China closer together in reaction. That has, in fact, been happening, under Trump and in Biden’s first days — though Biden did respond to Russia’s call for renewing the New START Treaty on limiting nuclear weapons at the last minute, salvaging the one major element of the arms control regime that had escaped Trump’s wrecking ball.
Clearly what is needed is diplomacy and negotiations on contested matters, and real cooperation on such crucial issues as global warming, arms control, future pandemics — all very severe crises that know no borders. Whether Biden’s hawkish foreign policy team will have the wisdom to move in these directions is, for now, at best unclear — at worst, frightening. Absent significant popular pressures, prospects do not look good.
Another issue that calls for popular attention and activism is the policy of protecting hegemony by seeking to harm potential rivals, very publicly in the case of China, but elsewhere too, sometimes in ways that are sometimes hard to believe.
A remarkable example is buried in the Annual Report for 2020 of the Department of Health and Human Services, proudly presented by Secretary Alex Azar. Under the subheading “Combatting malign influences in the Americas,” the report discusses the efforts of the Department’s Office of Global Affairs (OGA)
to mitigate efforts by states, including Cuba, Venezuela and Russia, who are working to increase their influence in the region to the detriment of U.S. safety and security. OGA coordinated with other U.S. government agencies to strengthen diplomatic ties and offer technical and humanitarian assistance to dissuade countries in the region from accepting aid from these ill-intentioned states. Examples include using OGA’s Health Attaché office to persuade Brazil to reject the Russian COVID-19 vaccine, and offering CDC technical assistance in lieu of Panama accepting an offer of Cuban doctors. [Emphasis mine].
In the midst of a raging pandemic, according to this report, we must block malignant initiatives to help miserable victims.
Under President Jair Bolsonaro’s grotesque mismanagement, Brazil has become the global horror story of failure to deal with the pandemic, despite its outstanding health institutes and fine past record in vaccination and treatment. It is suffering from a severe shortage of vaccines, so the U.S. takes pride in its efforts to prevent it from using the Russian vaccine, which Western authorities recognize to be comparable to the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines used here.
Even more astonishing, as the author of this article in the EU-based Brasil Wire comments, is “that the US dissuaded Panama from accepting Cuban doctors, who have been on the global front line against the pandemic, working in over 40 countries.” We must protect Panama from the “malign influence” of the one country in the world to exhibit the kind of internationalism that is needed to save the world from disaster, a crime that must be stopped by the global hegemon.
Washington’s hysterical dedication to crush Cuba from almost the first days of its independence in 1959 is one of the most extraordinary phenomena of modern history, but still, the level of petty sadism is a constant surprise
With regards to Iran, also there do not seem to be signs of hope as the Biden administration has named Richard Nephew, an architect of sadistic sanctions against Iran under Barack Obama, as its deputy Iran envoy. Right or wrong?
Biden adopted Trump’s Iran program with virtually no change, even in rhetoric. It is worthwhile to recall the facts.
Trump withdrew U.S. participation in the JCPOA (the nuclear agreement), in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 2331, which obligates all states to abide by the JCPOA, and in violation to the wishes of all other signers. In an impressive display of hegemonic power, when the UN Security Council members insisted on abiding by 2331 and not extending UN sanctions, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told them to get lost: You are renewing the sanctions. Trump imposed extremely harsh new sanctions to which others are obliged to conform, with the goal of causing maximum pain to Iranians so that perhaps the government might relent and accept his demand that the JCPOA be replaced by a new agreement that imposes much harsher restrictions on Iran. The pandemic offered new opportunities to torture Iranians by depriving them of desperately needed relief.
Furthermore, it is Iran’s responsibility to take the first steps towards negotiations to capitulate to the demands, by terminating actions it took in reaction to Trump’s criminality.
As we’ve discussed before, there is merit in Trump’s demand that the JCPOA can be improved. A far better solution is to establish a nuclear weapons-free zone (or WMD-free zone) in the Middle East. There is only one barrier: the U.S. will not permit it, and vetoes the proposal when it arises in international forums, most recently seen by President Obama. The reason is well-understood: It’s necessary to protect Israel’s major nuclear arsenal from inspection. The U.S. does not even formally acknowledge its existence. To do so would prejudice the vast flood of U.S. aid to Israel, arguably in violation of U.S. law, a door that neither political party wants to open. It’s another topic that will not even be discussed unless popular pressure makes suppression impossible.
In U.S. discourse, Trump is criticized because his policy of torturing Iranians didn’t succeed in bringing the government to capitulate. The stance is reminiscent of Obama’s highly praised moves towards limited relations with Cuba, because, as he explained, we need new tactics after our efforts to bring democracy to Cuba had failed — namely, a vicious terrorist war that led almost to extinction in the 1962 missile crisis and sanctions of unparalleled cruelty that are unanimously condemned by the UN General Assembly (Israel excepted). Similarly, our wars in Indochina, the worst crimes since World War II, are criticized as a “failure,” as is the invasion of Iraq, a textbook example of the “supreme international crime” for which Nazi war criminals were hanged.
These are among the prerogatives of a true hegemon, immune to the cackles of foreigners and confident in the support of those whom an acerbic critic once called “the herd of independent minds,” the bulk of the educated classes and the political class.
Biden took over the entire Trump program, without any change. And to twist the knife further, he appointed Richard Nephew as deputy Iran envoy. Nephew has explained his views in his book Art of Sanctions, where he outlines the proper “strategy to carefully, methodically, and efficiently increase pain on areas that are vulnerabilities while avoiding those that are not.” Just the right choice for the policy of torturing Iranians because the government that most of them despise will not bend to Washington’s demands.
U.S. government policy towards Cuba and Iran provides very valuable insight into how the world works under the domination of imperial power.
Cuba since independence in 1959 has been the target of unremitting U.S. violence and torture, reaching truly sadistic levels — with scarcely a word of protest in elite sectors. The U.S., fortunately, is an unusually free country, so we have access to declassified records explaining the ferocity of the efforts to punish Cubans. Fidel Castro’s crime, the State Department explained in the early years, is its “successful defiance” of U.S. policy since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which declared Washington’s right to control the hemisphere. Plainly harsh measures are required to stifle such efforts, as any Mafia Don would understand — and the analogy of world order to the Mafia has considerable merit.
Much the same is true of Iran since 1979, when a popular uprising overthrew the tyrant installed by the U.S. in a military coup that rid the country of its parliamentary regime. Israel had enjoyed very close relations with Iran during the years of the Shah’s tyranny and extreme human rights violations, and like the U.S., was appalled by his overthrow. Israel’s de facto Ambassador to Iran, Uri Lubrani, expressed his “strong” belief that the uprising could be suppressed, and the Shah restored “by a very relatively small force, determined, ruthless, cruel. I mean the men who would lead that force will have to be emotionally geared to the possibility that they would have to kill ten thousand people.”
U.S. authorities pretty much agreed. President Carter sent NATO Gen. Robert E. Huyser to Iran to try to convince the Iranian military to undertake the task — a surmise confirmed by recently released internal documents. They refused, considering it hopeless. Shortly after, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran — an attack that killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians, with full support from the Reagan administration, even when Saddam resorted to chemical weapons, first against Iranians, then against Iraqi Kurds in the Halabja atrocities. Reagan protected his friend Hussein by attributing the crimes to Iran and blocking congressional censure. He then turned to direct military support for Hussein with naval forces in the Gulf. One vessel, the USS Vincennes, shot down an Iranian civilian airliner in a clearly marked commercial airspace, killing 290 people, returning to a royal welcome at its home base where the commander and flight officer who had directed the destruction of the airliner were rewarded with Medals of Honor.
Recognizing that it could not fight the U.S., Iran effectively capitulated. Washington then to turned harsh sanctions against Iran, while rewarding Hussein in ways that sharply increased threats to Iran, which was then just emerging from a devastating war. President Bush I invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to the U.S. for advanced training in nuclear weapons production, no small matter for Iran. He pushed through agricultural aid that Hussein badly needed after having destroyed rich agricultural areas with his chemical weapons attack against Iraqi Kurds. He sent a high-level mission to Iraq headed by the Republican Senate leader Bob Dole, later presidential candidate, to deliver his respects to Hussein, to assure him that critical comment about him would be curbed on Voice of America, and to advise Hussein that he should ignore critical comment in the press, which the U.S. government can’t prevent.
This was April 1990. A few months later, Hussein disobeyed (or misunderstood) orders and invaded Kuwait. Then everything changed.
Almost everything. Punishment of Iraq for its “successful defiance” continued, with harsh sanctions, and new initiatives by President Bill Clinton, who issued executive orders and signed congressional legislation sanctioning investment in Iran’s oil sector, the basis of its economy. Europe objected, but had no way to avoid U.S. extraterritorial sanctions.
U.S. firms suffered too. Princeton University Middle East specialist Seyed Hossein Mousavian, former spokesman for Iran nuclear negotiators, reports that Iran had offered a billion-dollar contract to the U.S. energy firm Conoco. Clinton’s intervention, blocking the deal, closed off an opportunity for reconciliation, one of many cases that Mousavian reviews.
Clinton’s action was part of a general pattern, an unusual one. Ordinarily, particularly on energy-related issues, policy conforms to Adam Smith’s comments on 18th-century England, where the “masters of mankind” who own the private economy are the “principal architects” of government policy, and act to ensure that their own interests are foremost, however “grievous” the effect on others, including the people of England. Exceptions are rare, and instructive.
Two striking exceptions are Cuba and Iran. Major business interests (pharmaceuticals, energy, agribusiness, aircraft, and others) have been eager to break into Cuban and Iranian markets and to establish relations with domestic enterprises. State power bars any such moves, overruling parochial interests of the “masters of mankind” in favor of the transcendent goal of punishing successful defiance.
There’s a good deal to say about these exceptions to the rule, but it would take us too far afield.
The release of the Jamal Khashoggi murder report disappointed almost everyone, save Saudi Arabia. Why is the Biden administration taking such a soft approach towards Saudi Arabia, and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in particular, which prompted New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof to write that, “Biden … let the murderer walk”?
Not hard to guess. Who wants to offend the close ally and regional power that the State Department described during World War II as “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history … probably the richest economic prize in the world in the field of foreign investment.” The world has changed in many ways since, but the basic reasoning remains.
Biden had promised that, if elected, he would scale back Trump’s nuclear weapons spending, and that the U.S. would not rely on nuclear weapons for defense. Are we likely to see a dramatic shift in U.S. nuclear strategy under the Biden administration whereby the use of these weapons will be far less likely?
For reasons of cost alone, it is a goal that should be high on the agenda of anyone who wants to see the kinds of domestic programs the country badly needs. But the reasons go far beyond. Current nuclear strategy calls for preparation for war — meaning terminal nuclear war — with China and Russia.
We should also remember an observation of Daniel Ellsberg’s: Nuclear weapons are constantly used, much in the way a gun is used by a robber who aims his gun at a storekeeper and says, “Your money or your life.” The principle in fact is enshrined in policy, in the important 1995 document “Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence” issued by Clinton’s Strategic Command (STRATCOM). The study concludes that nuclear weapons are indispensable because of their incomparable destructive power, but even if not used, “nuclear weapons always cast a shadow over any crisis or conflict,” enabling us to gain our ends through intimidation; Ellsberg’s point. The study goes on to authorize “preemptive” use of nuclear weapons and provides advice for planners, who should not “portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed.” Rather, the “national persona we project” should be “that the US may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked and that “some elements may appear to be potentially ‘out of control.’”
Richard Nixon’s “madman theory,” but this time not from reports by associates but from the designers of nuclear strategy.
Two months ago, the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons went into effect. The nuclear powers refused to sign, and still violate their legal responsibility under the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons to undertake “effective measures” to eliminate nuclear weapons. That stance is not carved in stone, and popular activism could induce significant moves in that direction, a necessity for survival.
Regrettably, that level of civilization still seems beyond the range of the most powerful states, which are careening in the opposite direction, upgrading and enhancing the means to terminate organized human life on Earth.
Even junior partners are joining in the race to destruction. Just a few days ago, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson “announced a 40 per cent increase in UK’s stockpile of nuclear warheads. His review… recognised ‘the evolving security environment’, identifying Russia as Britain’s `most acute threat’.”
Lots of work to do.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Responding to the spike in anti-Asian violence, Philadelphia joined scores of communities across the country Saturday in a National Day of Action Against Asian Hate launched by the Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) Coalition.
“We have a lot of community support, and we’re expecting hundreds of participants … at Franklin Square,” said Echo Alford, a volunteer with the Philadelphia Liberation Center and member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which coordinated the afternoon event with the support of about a dozen other local organizations. That estimate proved to be accurate.
UN Photo/Jean-Marc FerréA general view of the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council in session. 24 March 2021
The UN’s top rights forum passed resolutions condemning abuses of fundamental freedoms in Belarus and Myanmar on Wednesday, in response to ongoing concerns over the human rights situation in both countries.
The ISHR and another 15 organisations (see below) produced as usual their reflections on the key outcomes of the 46th session of the UN Human Rights Council, as well as the missed opportunities to address key issues and situations including pushbacks and other human rights violations faced by migrants and refugees, and the human rights situations in Algeria, Cameroon, China, India, Kashmir and the Philippines.
They welcome some important procedural advances such as the possibility for NGOs to make video statements, which should be maintained and expanded after the pandemic for all discussions, including in general debates. …They are concerned by the renewal for another year of the ‘efficiency’ measures piloted in 2020, despite their negative impact on civil society participation in a year also impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. We urge States to reinstate general debates in the June sessions, to preserve their open-ended nature, and maintain the option of video intervention also in general debates.
Environmental justice:
They welcome the joint statement calling for the recognition of the right of all to a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment that was delivered by the Maldives, on behalf of Costa Rica, Morocco, Slovenia and Switzerland and supported by 55 States. We call on all States to seize this historic opportunity to support the core-group as they continue to work towards UN recognition so that everyone in the world, wherever they live, and without discrimination, has the right to live in a safe, clean and sustainable environment.
We welcome the joint statement that was delivered by Bangladesh, on behalf of 55 States, calling the Council to create a new Special Rapporteur on human rights and climate change. We believe this new mandate would be essential to supporting a stronger human rights-based approach to climate change, engaging in country visits, normative work and capacity-building, and further addressing the human rights impacts of climate responses, in order to support the most vulnerable. This mandate should be established without further delay.
Racial Justice: Over 150 States jointly welcomed that the implementation of HRC Resolution43/1 will center victims and their families. They urge the Council to respond to the High Commissioner’s call to address root causes of racism including the “legacies of enslavement, the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans, and its context of colonialism”. The Council must answer to the demands of victims’ families and civil society’s, and establish – at its next session – an independent inquiry to investigate systemic racism in law enforcement in the United States and a thematic commission of inquiry to investigate systemic racism in law enforcement globally, especially where it is related to legacies of colonialism and transatlantic slavery.
Right to health: The resolution on ensuring equitable, affordable, timely, and universal access by all countries to vaccines in response to the COVID-19 pandemic is a welcome move in highlighting the need for States not to have export and other restrictions on access to safe diagnostics, therapeutics, medicines, and vaccines, and essential health technologies, and their components, as well as equipment and encouraged States to use all flexibilities within TRIPs. However, a revised version of the resolution tabled was further weakened by the deletion of one paragraph on stockpiling of vaccines and the reference to ‘unequal allocation and distribution among countries”. The specific deletion highlights the collusion between rich States and big pharmaceuticals, their investment in furthering monopolistic intellectual property regimes resulting in grave human rights violations. The reluctance of States, predominantly WEOG States who continue to defend intellectual property regimes and States’ refusal to hold business enterprises accountable to human rights standards is very concerning during this Global crisis.
Attempts to undermine HRC mandate: They regret that once again this Council has adopted a resolution, purportedly advancing ‘mutual beneficial cooperation’ which seeks to undermine and reinterpret both the principle of universality and its mandate. Technical assistance, dialogue and cooperation must be pursued with the goal of promoting and protecting human rights, not as an end in itself or as a means of facilitating inter-State relations. We reiterate our call on all States, and especially Council members, to consider country situations in an independent manner, based on objective human rights criteria supported by credible UN and civil society information. This is an essential part of the Council’s work; reliance on cooperation alone hobbles the Council’s ability to act to support the defenders and communities that look to it for justice.
Country-specific resolutions: They welcome the new mandate for the High Commissioner focused on the human rights situation in Belarus in the context of the 2020 Presidential election. It is now essential for States to support the High Commissioner’s office, ensuring the resources and expertise are made available so that the mandate can be operationalised as quickly as possible. Immediately afterwards, on 24 March, 2021 the Human Rights House Foundation published a call by 64 Belarusian and international human rights organisations, welcoming the resolution passed by the UN Human Rights Council mandating the High Commissioner to create a new robust monitoring and reporting mandate focused on accountability for human rights violations in Belarus that have taken place since 1 May 2020. In so doing, the Council demonstrated its determination to hold Belarusian authorities to account. This mandate needs immediate action. We urge the international community to support this critical next step. The mandate should provide a complementary and expert international mechanism to regional accountability processes already under way. Furthermore, it should assist in the identification of those responsible for the most serious violations for future prosecution. [https://humanrightshouse.org/statements/civil-society-organisations-call-for-the-immediate-operationalisation-of-hrcs-new-mandate-on-belarus/]
They welcome the renewal of the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on Iran, and urge Council to consider further action to hold Iranian authorities accountable, in view of the systematic impunity and lack of transparency surrounding violations of human rights in the country.
They welcome the call for additional resources for the Special Rapporteur on Myanmar, increased reporting by OHCHR as well as the work of the IIMM. Lack of international monitoring on, the imposition of martial law in Myanmar to prosecute civilians, including protesters, before military courts, the dangerous escalation of violence by the Tatmadaw and the widespread human rights violations amounting to crimes against humanity demand more efforts to ensure accountability.
They welcome the renewal and strengthening of the OHCHR’s monitoring and reporting mandate on Nicaragua, in a context of steady human rights deterioration marked by the Government’s refusal to cooperate constructively with the Office, over two years after its expulsion from the country. The adopted resolution lays out steps that Nicaragua should take to resume good faith cooperation and improve the situation ahead of this year’s national elections. It is also vital that this Council and its members continue to closely follow the situation in Nicaragua, and live up to the resolution’s commitments, by considering all available measures should the situation deteriorate by next year.
They welcome the increased monitoring and reporting on the situation of human rights in Sri Lanka. However, in light of the High Commissioner’s report on the rapidly deteriorating human rights situation and Sri Lanka’s incapacity and unwillingness to pursue accountability for crimes under international law, the Council should have urged States to seek other avenues to advance accountability, including through extraterritorial or universal jurisdiction.
While they welcome the extension of the mandate of the Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan (CHRSS), they regret the adoption of a competing resolution under the inadequate agenda item 10. This resolution sends a wrong signal as myriads of local-level conflicts and ongoing SGBV and other violations of fundamental rights continue to threaten the country’s stability. We urge South Sudan to continue cooperating with the CHRSS and to demonstrate concrete progress on key benchmarks and indicators.
They welcome the report by the Commission of Inquiry on Syria on arbitrary imprisonment and detention and reiterate the recommendation to establish an independent mechanism “to locate the missing or their remains”, and call on States to ensure the meaningful participation of victims and adopt a victim-centered approach, including by taking into consideration the Truth and Justice Charter of Syrian associations of survivors and families of disappeared when addressing arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance.
Country-specific State statements: They welcome States’ leadership and statements on human rights situations that merit the HRC’s attention.
They welcome the joint statement on the situation in Ethiopia’s Tigray region and urge all actors, including the Ethiopian Federal Government, to protect civilians and ensure unhindered humanitarian access. Those responsible for crimes under international law, including Ethiopian soldiers, members of armed militias and non-State groups, and Eritrean soldiers involved in Tigray, must be held criminally accountable. The HRC should mandate an independent investigation and reporting by the High Commissioner.
For the first time in seven years, States at the HRC have united to condemn the widespread human rights violations by Egypt and its misuse of counter-terrorism measures to imprison human rights defenders, LGBTI persons, journalists, politicians and lawyers and peaceful critics. They welcome the cross-regional joint statement by 32 States and we reiterate our call supported by over 100 NGOs from across the world on the HRC to establish a monitoring and reporting mechanism on the situation.
They welcome the joint statement by 45 States focused on the human rights situation in Russia, including the imprisonment of Alexi Navalny and the large number of arbitrary arrests of protestors across Russia. The statement rightly expresses concern for shrinking civil society space in Russia through recent legislative amendments and Russia using its “tools of State” to attack independent media and civil society.
The next session will receive a report on pushbacks from the Special Rapporteur on human rights of migrants. The Council must respond to the severity and scale of pushbacks and other human rights violations faced by migrants and refugees in transit and at borders and the ongoing suppression of solidarity, including by answering the High Commissioner’s call for independent monitoring. The Council’s silence feeds impunity, it must build on the momentum of the joint statement of over 90 States reaffirming their commitment to protection of the human rights of all migrants regardless of status.
While the OHCHR expressed deep concern about the deteriorating human rights situation and the ongoing crackdown on civil society in Algeria, and called for the immediate and unconditional release of arbitrarily detained individuals, the Council has remained largely silent. As authorities are increasingly arbitrarily and violently arresting protesters – at least 1,500 since the resumption of the Hirak pro-democracy movement on 13 February, they call on the Council to address the criminalisation of public freedoms, to protect peaceful protesters, activists and the media.
Cameroon is one of the human rights crises the Council has failed to address for too long. They condemn the acts of intimidation and reprisal exercised by the Cameroonian government in response to NGOs raising concerns, including DefendDefenders. This is unacceptable behavior by a Council member. The Council should consider collective action to address the gross human rights violations and abuses occurring in the country.
They echo the calls of many governments for the Council to step up its meaningful action to ensure that concerns raised by civil society, the UN Special Procedures and the OHCHR about the human rights situation in China be properly addressed, including through an independent international investigation. We also regret that a number of States have taken an unprincipled approach of voicing support to actions, such as those by the Chinese government, including in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, through their national and other joint statements.
They call for the Council’s attention on the rapid deterioration of human rights in India. Violent crackdowns on recent farmers’ protests, internet shutdowns in protest areas, sedition and criminal charges against journalists reporting on these protests, and criminalisation of human rights defenders signal an ongoing dangerous trend in restrictions of fundamental freedoms in India. We call on India to ensure fundamental freedoms and allow journalists, HRDs and civil society to continue their legitimate work without intimidation and fear of reprisals. [see also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2020/10/29/also-un-calls-on-india-to-protect-human-rights-defenders/]
We once again regret the lack of Council’s attention on the human rights crisis in Kashmir. Fundamental freedoms in the Indian-administered Kashmir remains severely curtailed since the revocation of the constitutional autonomy in August 2019. Raids in October and November 2020 on residences and offices of human rights defenders and civil society organisations by India’s anti-terrorism authorities in a clear attempt at intimidation have further exacerbated the ongoing crisis. We call on the OHCHR to continue to monitor and regularly report to the Council on the situation in both Indian and Pakistani administered Kashmir, and on Indian and Pakistani authorities to give the OHCHR and independent observers unfettered access to the region. [See also; https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2020/02/09/forgotten-kashmir-something-has-to-be-done/]
Nearly six months since its adoption, the Council Resolution 45/33 on technical assistance to the Philippines has proven utterly insufficient to address the widespread human rights violations and persistent impunity. Killings in the war on drugs continue, and attacks on human rights defenders and activists have escalated. The killing of nine unarmed activists on 7 March 2021 clearly demonstrates that no amount of technical assistance will end the killings as long as the President and senior officials continue to incite violence and killings as official State policy. It is imperative that the Council sets up an international accountability mechanism to end the cycle of violence and impunity in the Philippines. [see also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/03/09/philippines-killings-continue-and-de-lima-stays-in-jail/]
Watch the statement:
*The statement was also endorsed by: Franciscans International; Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR); International Commission of Jurists (ICJ); International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism (IMADR); Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA); African Centre For Democracy And Human Rights Studies; International Federation for Human Rights Leagues (FIDH); MENA Rights Group; International Lesbian and Gay Association; Impact Iran; Ensemble contre la Peine de Mort (ECPM); Siamak Pourzand Foundation; Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS); ARTICLE 19; CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation.
NOTE: The 47th regular session of the Human Rights Council is scheduled from 21 June 2021 to 9 July 2021.
During his confirmation hearing to head the command that covers 51 percent of the globe, U.S. Pacific Fleet commander Admiral John Aquilino told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “the most dangerous concern is that of a military force against Taiwan.” Aquilino told the committee that the “annexation of Taiwan is the number one priority of China” and asked the Senate committee to fund the $27.3 billion Pacific Deterrence Initiative.
Aquilino’s comment echoed the March 2, 2021 assessment of retired Lt. General H.R. McMaster, one of the Trump administration’s national security advisers.
The controversial sale of elephants from Zimbabwe to other countries, mostly China, is again in the spotlight. The renewed scrutiny comes due to author and filmmakerKarl Ammann highlighting related trading documents. They suggest there’s vast amounts of unaccounted for cash connected to the trades.
The attention comes at a bad time for China. The country is due to host a high profile biodiversity conference in May. These revelations will also do little to lessen criticism of Zimbabwe’s decision to capture wild elephants and sell them off to foreign zoos. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) is unlikely to take pleasure in the scrutiny either. The global wildlife trading body oversees the system through which these elephant trades happen. Moreover, it’s already facing legal complaints over alleged violations of its rules.
Most of all, however, the fresh controversy is a further indictment of the wildlife trade. It’s an industry that has already proved to be devastating for humans and other animals. So the last thing it needs is further marks against its name.
In response to the furore, the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority (ZimParks) released a list of elephant sales since 2016. On the list, ZimParks declared the income it earned from the elephants and what it spent the money on. It also named individuals in connection to the trades. ZimParks named Liang Zhao as being involved in the 2016 and 2019 trades. It named Qin Wei and Elske Burger in the 2017 and 2018 trades, respectively. Most of the sales were to venues in China, with one additionally to the UAE.
ZimParks declared an income per elephant of between $31k and $41.5k. But Ammann, who’s been investigating the international trade in elephants for years, has now brought attention to trading documents connected to the sales. They appear to show that some of the Chinese recipient venues declared a cost per elephant of around $125k.
That seems to be the case, for example, for both Longemont Animal World and Xiongsen Animal World. These venues received the elephants controversially sold in 2019, but ZimParks said the payment it received for the elephants going to those venues was $31k each. This means a discrepancy of $94k per elephant in those cases.
Duty-free imports
Ammann has further highlighted a document that shows China set “duty free import quotas for elephant, rhinos and pretty much everything else” in 2019. As such, he said, there would be “no need for a buyer to under or over declare the purchase price”.
Meanwhile, the filmmaker says a “well-informed animal dealer” in South Africa told him that there was a “$100,000 price tag” on the elephants Zimbabwe sold to Dubai Safari Park in 2018. But Zimbabwe said the payment for each elephant going there was $41.5k. So there’s a $58.5k discrepancy per elephant in that transaction.
What’s the problem?
A major concern in relation to these unaccounted for funds is that allegations of bribery and kickbacks abound within the CITES wildlife trading system. One current legal complaint against CITES, for example, involves allegations of corruption in Asian elephant trading between Laos and China. The UK law firm Advocates for Animals has raised this complaint with CITES on behalf of Ammann.
As The Canary previously reported, the legal complaint asserts that trafficking of elephants between the two countries “involved bribes with officials” in some cases. These bribes were allegedly sometimes connected with preparing the ‘paperwork’ for CITES permits. Within CITES, countries authorise trade through a permitting system.
In the case of the unaccounted for funds in Zimbabwe’s exports, Ammann says that “a range of players”, including brokers, could have cashed in via “kickbacks, bribes and commissions”. He alleges that “several sources” in China have told him that there are costs in the region “of US $160,000 per permit and per shipment” involved in international wildlife trading there.
The UK government lists the basic cost for a single CITES import and export permit as being less than £70.
Ammann’s investigations into elephant trading between Laos and China have shown similar price discrepancies to those apparent in the Zimbabwe to China trading. Although Chinese dealers may purchase a Laotian elephant for around $25k, the price Chinese zoos pay for them can be up to $500k.
So where’s the missing money?
The Canary contacted CITES about the price discrepancies in the Zimbabwe elephant trades. Among other things, we asked if the body had any knowledge of where the opaque money from these transactions could have gone. We also asked if the unaccounted for funds could have paid for associated costs of the trade. And, if so, who should have declared them – and where – under the CITES system. Of course, trading often involves associated costs. In this situation, for example, transporting the elephants from Zimbabwe to China would have cost money. CITES, however, declined to comment.
The Canary further contacted the Chinese CITES authorities and the country’s Endangered Species Scientific Commission. We asked about the unaccounted for funds and where associated costs should be recorded if they fall on the Chinese side of the transaction. We also asked about the country’s tax-free import quota. Specifically, we inquired whether the country takes steps to ensure such an incentive to import species doesn’t negatively impact those species’ conservation status in potential exporting countries. But they did not respond to The Canary either.
ZimParks’ response
The Canary contacted ZimParks too. We asked what role the named individuals had in the trades, such as animal traders or brokers. And we also asked whether the authority could explain the price discrepancy. Moreover, we raised an error in its list of elephant sales in 2017. It said ZimParks sold 30 elephants that year, whereas records show it in fact sold 38. The Canary further noted that four of the elephants sold in 2017 appear to have been subject to onward trading, as the documents Ammann highlighted showed. A tender announcement appears to show Ordos City Longsheng Wildlife Park purchased the four elephants from Tianjin Junheng International, in the same year that Tianjin Junheng International bought elephants from ZimParks. We asked the authority if it had assessed this onward trading venue’s suitability for the elephants.
ZimParks didn’t provide a response to our questions by the time of publication. However, when the authority released its list of elephant sales in 2019, it provided comments to the media. It said at the time that any claims money from the sales are misappropriated by officials were “false and unfounded”. ZimParks insisted that its finances were “audited by both internal and external auditors”.
On the destination venues, ZimParks said that receiving sites are “subjected to suitability assessment by a Zimbabwe team”. CITES secretary-general Ivonne Higuero has also previously said that a ZimParks veterinarian is sent with the elephants to China and stays with them for a month.
Zimbabwe’s record
Zimbabwe had a score of 24/100 on Transparency International’s 2020 Corruption Perceptions Index. ZimParks, for its part, has faced its fair share of corruption allegations. As a recent AllAfrica article noted, for example, some have accused its officials “of succumbing to coercion and bribery from powerful politicians and mining cartels” in relation to illegal gold digging in the country.
In 2015, environmental activists raised concerns over non-transparency and exploitation in the government’s elephant trading. Those concerns centred on the suspected involvement of a Chinese woman with Zimbabwean citizenship named Song Li. Having founded the Sino-Zim Wildlife Foundation, she appears to be heavily involved in wildlife initiatives in Zimbabwe. The foundation has reportedly donated to conservation efforts in the country, as has the Chinese government. China’s foreign affairs ministry has also provided assistance to a Chinese NGO called Blue Sky Rescue to conduct an anti-poaching programme in Zimbabwe. In short, the two countries have strong ties in relation to Zimbabwe’s wildlife sector.
In a 2015 article, Li admitted she had facilitated elephant trades between Zimbabwe and China. But she said she had earned nothing from it. A 2019 media report, meanwhile, claimed that a document named her as a facilitator in the 2016 trade. The Standard wrote:
Li reportedly facilitated the deal according to the first leaked ZimParks document whereas in the second document Liang Zhao was named as the facilitator.
Neither appropriate nor acceptable
The fact that these elephant sales are seemingly up to their neck in opaque cash isn’t the only issue though. There are numerous problems with the trades.
In a 2020 report, CITES members Niger and Burkina Faso accused Zimbabwe of contravening the Convention’s rules with the 2019 exports. Under the rules, Zimbabwe can only export elephants to ‘appropriate and acceptable destinations’ that are “suitably equipped to house and care” for them. In the report, the CITES members asserted that:
there is no publicly available evidence suggesting that the safari park in Shanghai [Longemont Animal World] which received the 32 young elephants from Zimbabwe in October 2019 –or any of the likely further destinations –can be considered as “suitably equipped to house and care for” live elephants
The report also noted that ZimParks officials and the chief inspector of the Zimbabwe National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ZNSPCA) had previously assessed eight Chinese venues in 2016, as ZimParks indicated in its 2019 comments. It explained that the inspectors “expressed concerns over the poor treatment and unacceptable facilities for elephants”. But the minister of environment authorised the exports nonetheless, the report said.
South African journalist Adam Cruise also pointed out to The Canary that none of these Chinese venues were “members of global zoo organisations like WAZA [World Association of Zoos and Aquariums]”. He said “that in itself is telling”.
Suffering “throughout their most likely significantly shortened lives”
Ammann has secured footage of 11 of the elephants in the 2019 export at their further destination, namely Xiongsen Animal World. In November 2020, The Canary sought an assessment of the footage from a number of wildlife experts. They included an elephant specialist with 37 years of experience. The experts concluded that the situation these elephants are in has caused a “dramatic negative change in their welfare”. That negative change is evident in heartbreaking signs of stress that they’re exhibiting. The experts said these elephants will suffer “throughout their most likely significantly shortened lives”. The overwhelming reaction of the experts was that Xiongsen isn’t an ‘appropriate or acceptable’ destination.
The trades have also faced hefty criticism for the brutality involved in abducting young elephants from their families. The young age of the elephants is also an area of controversy. Meanwhile, the scale of mortality in the trades is disturbing. Of eight young elephants exported in 2012, the 2020 report says seven are now dead or presumed dead. As of 2019, the remaining elephant was enduring a lonely existence in Taiyuan Zoo. He was in extremely inadequate conditions and had a history of poor health both mentally and physically. Meanwhile, the 2020 report said that of the 27 elephants Zimbabwe exported in 2015, 12 are now dead or presumed dead. The exact reasons for export-related deaths are often unclear. But injuries and illnesses sustained during capture, transport, and quarantine could have contributed to them.
The highest price
As The Canary has previously reported, the CITES system is full of holes that appear to be ripe for exploitation. The fact that huge sums of money may have disappeared through its cracks in relation to these trades is very concerning. It raises serious questions about the legality of these sales. Because an infraction of the domestic wildlife protection laws in the involved countries, such as those pertaining to corruption, could render the trades illegal under CITES’ rules. Right now, however, it appears few of those involved in the trades are willing to answer those questions. Clearly, though, the money isn’t just disappearing into thin air. There are apparently some winners in these less than transparent trades.
Exactly who those winners are may not be known yet, but we do know who isn’t coming out on top. The families of the abducted elephants aren’t, as they’re left bereft and traumatised by the loss of their young. Neither, of course, are the young elephants themselves. Ripped from their homes and loved ones, they’re now enduring an unnatural life in captivity. One that’s potentially filled with all the horrors – such as brutal training and demeaning performances – that such an existence can hold.
The evidence is clear: a genocide against the Uighurs is in progress. Britain must not put trade before human rights
It came as no surprise to me that I have been included on the list of those sanctioned by the Chinese government for vocal criticisms of the human rights abuses towards Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang province. China is not big on freedom of speech.
In the “tit-for-tat game that is part of foreign relations, this action is of little consequence. On a personal level, I will be sad not to visit China again, as I have great admiration for many Chinese academics and human rights advocates with whom I have had contact. However, I have no assets to freeze, no investments and no secret property, and my legal work seeking to protect human rights will go on as before.
Ever since a white Georgia man killed six Asian women and two others in Atlanta, the corporate media have jumped onto the “stop Asian hate” bandwagon as if they are innocent bystanders. It is easy to point fingers at a murdering local redneck and leave unexamined the media role in spreading hatred based on race and nationality.
Sinophobia in particular has been quite overt, with the corporate media following the dictates of U.S. foreign policy. When Donald Trump was president they repeated his every lie and insult, and supported every decision intended to thwart China.
China published its annual US human rights situation report on Wednesday at a time when the US-led ideological battle against China has intensified, mainly over Xinjiang and other domestic issues.
By highlighting the COVID-19 turning into a human tragedy, disorder in American democracy vividly reflected in the Capitol riots, and recent growing discrimination against ethnic minorities including Asian-Americans, China slammed the US’ terrible human rights record, which makes its remarks on other countries’ human rights situation pure “hypocrisy and double standards.”
The current representative of the US empire finally held his first full press conference yesterday, an embarrassing and undignified affair which saw a gaggle of obsequious imperial stenographers gather round to make believe that important policy decisions about the operation of the most powerful government in the world are actually being made by this dried up empty husk of a man who can barely think or talk.
Once again we heard the US empire babbling about the plight of Muslims in China, with the words tumbling out of Biden’s dementia-addled brain that he “made it clear that no American president, at least one did, but no American president had ever backed down from speaking out of what’s happening in the Uyghurs.”
By “what’s happening in the Uyghurs” Biden was attempting to articulate a concern for the human rights of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province, a talking point the US empire has been fallaciously and dishonestly pushing with more and more aggression as attempts to halt the rise of China escalate in urgency. And literally seconds later, Biden made it clear that that is exactly what this feigned concern for Muslim lives was indeed really about.
“So I see stiff competition with China,” Biden said. “China has an overall goal, and I don’t criticize them for the goal, but they have an overall goal to become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world and the most powerful country in the world. That’s not going to happen on my watch because United States is going to continue to grow and expand.”
President Biden on China: "They have an overall goal to become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world and the most powerful country in the world. That's not going to happen on my watch." pic.twitter.com/GAZUqnpY9G
As we discussed recently, it is a known fact that the US government has a standing policy of dishonestly weaponizing “human rights” concerns against nations like China in order to strategically undermine them while knowingly ignoring the brazen human rights violations that are being perpetrated by its allies on a regular basis. The US government does not care about the plight of the Uyghurs in China. It doesn’t care that the allegations regarding the abuse of their rights are riddled with glaring plot holes. All it cares about is undermining its chief geostrategic rival on the world stage, truth be damned.
And I just can’t get over the fact that the path the US empire has taken in order to attack that leading geostrategic rival is in pretending to care about the human rights of Muslims. We really don’t laugh at these clowns hard enough for that.
I mean, just think about that for a second. The US government, the government of the United States of America, has been melodramatically rending its garments over the wellbeing of Muslims. Muslims! Of all the populations they could possibly have chosen to cynically spearhead their campaign against China, they went with the one where they have the least possible number of legs to stand on.
This would after all be the same religious population which the US has been cheerfully slaughtering by the millions in its campaigns of military mass murder, just since the turn of this century. The same religious population the US has displaced by the tens of millions in its campaign of terrorism called the “war on terror”, also just since the turn of this century. The same religious population the US has sadistically tortured in facilities like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. The same religious population who was terrorized by an escalation in hate crimes in the United States itself due to propaganda campaigns for George W Bush’s wars, wars which were enthusiastically supported and facilitated by the current invalid-in-chief.
In almost the same breath as humanitarian interventionist bromides about Uyghurs and Hong Kong, Biden says his goal with China is preventing it from supplanting the US as the world’s leading economic power. A candid explanation of why Washington exploits human rights.
The only sane response to the US empire feigning concern for the wellbeing of a foreign Muslim population is laughter, derision, and ridicule. The whole world should be rolling on the floor laughing at these people. The fact that these butchers are saying “Oh won’t somebody please think of the Muslims!” after waging a psychopathic campaign of murder and theft upon an entire swath of Muslim-majority countries means we should all be mocking them, pointing at them, and laughing them out of the room.
Can you honestly think of anything more ridiculous? Off the top of my head I cannot.
The fact that a vast globe-spanning empire has placed so many chips on its ability to halt the rise of China by claiming to care about the rights and wellbeing of Muslims is one of the most cartoonishly absurd things that has ever happened in the history of civilization. We should be reacting to this accordingly.
It’s silly how many of us are still sitting around taking this clown show seriously. Let’s start making fun of these freaks. The entire US empire deserves to be laughed at, discredited, and dismissed forever.
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Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old bookWoke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.
Burberry and H&M among brands targeted over stance on region at centre of Uighur abuses allegations
Chinese celebrities and politicians are racing to distance themselves from western brands as Beijing steps up a campaign to penalise those making accusations of abuses in Xinjiang, including fashion companies that boycott the region’s cotton.
This is an excerpt from the “American/Canadian Propaganda – a Xinjiang ‘Genocide’ Panel” video. I encourage you to watch the whole thing, including Max Blumenthal’s part. The video can be found here: https://youtu.be/xdw1Nc6MJRg I’ve decided to subtitle this portion in both English and Chinese, as I know many overseas Chinese (and Asians in general) are suffering from the consequences of anti-China propaganda, and may even begin to believe it themselves. I’d like as many people as possible to understand this message encouraging people to think critically, dig deeper and do your own research. Don’t accept the anti-China propaganda for face value and equip yourself with facts.
3Mins Read China’s Community Youth League, a division of the Chinese Communist Party has called out the clothing giant H&M over its recent pledge to avoid sourcing cotton from Xinjiang, where ethnic minorities are allegedly forced to work in detention camps. In August of last year, a coalition of human rights organizations called out the world’s’ largest […]
