On the evening of September 20, 2001, then-President George W. Bush addressed the American public and laid the political, military and ideological groundwork for the “war on terror,” a global campaign of allied security forces to end domestic and international terrorism, a term so loosely defined that it soon became a container for anyone from al-Qaeda militants to teenage school shooters to January 6 rioters to leftists and human rights activists. In the same way that the world eventually realized the catastrophic failure of the “war on drugs,” more and more people are realizing that the war on terror is also an unwinnable war against a constantly shifting enemy.
In this address, Bush promised what followed would not be an age of terror, but “an age of liberty, here and across the world.” Twenty-one years after September 11, this “age of liberty” has ushered in an expanded surveillance apparatus, bloated defense budgets, military invasions and occupations, and the death and displacement of millions of people from Iraq to Somalia. While the Middle East is seen as the locus of the war on terror, one of the most ruthlessly pummeled frontiers of this war is the African continent.
In 2007, in a post-9/11 political and psychological landscape, President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, then secretary of defense, launched U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), which oversees all Department of Defense military operations on the continent in order to “monitor and disrupt violent extremist organizations and protect U.S. interests” because of the continent’s growing strategic importance. Initially based in Stuttgart, Germany, AFRICOM was formed without the input or support of any African leaders, many of whom decried its formation and described it as an attempt to establish more U.S. military bases on the continent. In response, U.S. officials said AFRICOM was meant to provide humanitarian assistance and support peace and stability because “a safe, stable, and prosperous Africa is an enduring American interest.” But critics pointed out that Iraq and Afghanistan, twin targets of the war on terror, serve as clear examples of the disastrous consequences of the U.S.’s militarized “humanitarian” efforts.
AFRICOM has not created the “safety and stability” invoked by U.S. leaders, but it has expanded the U.S. military’s footprint. During the Obama administration, AFRICOM quickly expanded its reach and influence on the continent through military-to-military trainings, joint counterterrorism operations, foreign aid, and other surreptitious methods that created dependence on AFRICOM for the defense needs of African states. Despite the fact that the U.S. is not at war with any African country, there are 46 U.S. military bases and outposts spanning the continent, with the greatest concentration in the Horn of Africa. Camp Lemonnier, the U.S. base in Djibouti, a small East African nation with a poverty rate of 79 percent, serves as the current home to AFRICOM in the Horn. In 2014 the U.S. government secured a 20-year lease for $63,000,000 a year.
As AFRICOM’s presence across the continent grows, so does the terrorism it is meant to curb. The 2006 U.S.-backed overthrow of the Union of Islamic Courts in Somalia paved the way for a more militant group, al-Shabab, to grow in rank and reach. This is just one example of how power vacuums caused by U.S. military intervention fortify the political will and strength of terrorist groups.
In October 2017, in the one of the deadliest terror attacks in Somalia’s history, a truck bombing in Mogadishu killed over 500 civilians, injuring several hundred more. In August 2022, a deadly siege and 30-hour standoff between al-Shabab militants and the Somali security forces at Hotel Hayat in the city center left dozens dead. These attacks point to the country’s fragile security apparatus despite persistent counterterrorism offensives and $243,309,000 in security assistance from the United States in 2022 alone. The U.S.’s decades-long presence has not led to a decrease in terrorist activity but has only caused increased instability in the region and enabled such violence to flourish.
A 2019 report released by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies found terrorist activity doubled from 2012 to 2018, and the number of countries experiencing attacks increased by 960 percent during that time period. Moreover, there was a ten-fold increase in violent events, jumping from 288 incidents in 2009 to 3,050 in 2018. From Boko Haram’s growth in Nigeria, to al-Shabab’s territorial advancements across Somalia, to Daesh’s reappearance in Libya, by all metrics, the war on terror has been an abysmal failure in Africa. The African people, caught in the nexus of the catastrophic violence of terrorism and ensuing counterterrorism efforts, bear the weight of this failed war.
While AFRICOM training has not helped African security forces curb terrorism, it has enabled them to repress civilian protests against reactionary African leaders who align with U.S. interests, as evidenced by the crackdown on #EndSARS protesters in Nigeria in 2020. SARS, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, a notorious western-trained unit of the Nigerian Police, has a documented history of human rights abuses. The war on terror not only created the conditions that enabled the U.S. and its allies unfettered collaboration on security and surveillance through shared counterinsurgency tactics, but the development of a shared language and logic. From Lagos to Minneapolis, the designation of terrorist is frequently deployed against individuals or group that challenge the U.S. imperial project or any of its puppet regimes. President Joe Biden’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism is a domestic example of how the state has used the war on terror to criminalize and prosecute protesters and activists.
The one thing AFRICOM has dramatically succeeded at is boosting corporate profits associated with the lucrative counterterrorism industry that the war on terror has made possible. A 2021 report from Brown University’s Cost of War Project revealed that one-third to one-half of all Pentagon contracts since 9/11 have gone to five transnational weapons corporations: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. From 2001 to 2020, these five companies earned $2.1 trillion from Pentagon contracts. Terrorism is a manufactured political crisis. Unsurprisingly, it is global weapons manufacturers that are tasked with selling the solution.
On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, George W. Bush lauded the courage and resilience of the American people and said if they ever needed hope or inspiration in the aftermath of the attack, they should “look to the skies” for a reminder of all they have overcome. Meanwhile, a year before Bush delivered this speech at the Flight 93 memorial service, thousands of miles away in southern Somalia, on a clear and sunny day, the air hummed with the sound of U.S. drones flying overhead. A man named Kusow Omar Abukar was eating dinner with his family when they were attacked from the sky. His daughter, Nurto, died. His family’s life was changed forever. The U.S. military claimed there were no civilian causalities and called the strike a success. But even as the U.S. public is encouraged to find comfort and salvation in the heavens, the children of the world live in fear of what the U.S. might unleash from up above. “I no longer love blue skies,” 13-year-old Zubair of North Waziristan told Congress in 2012. “In fact, I now prefer grey skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are grey.”
In his first address to the nation on the evening of 9/11, a solemn Bush asked the American people to pray “for all those who grieve, for those children whose worlds have been shattered, for all whose sense of safety and security have been threatened.”
Many people were surprised and outraged when US President Biden recently fist bumped Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. After all, as a candidate, Biden pledged to make the Saudi kingdom a pariah since the Crown Prince had been directly linked to the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
In contrast, consider the relative lack of outrage to Biden’s statement after the latest criminal Israeli attack on Gaza that began on August 5th. This air bombardment by Israel, a nuclear power with one of the world’s strongest militaries and the occupier of Palestinian land, was against a mostly defenseless people. During this attack, 49 Palestinians, including 17 children, were killed and 360 Palestinians including 151 children were wounded. In contrast, reports suggest that 13 Israelis had minor injuries. Biden said: “My support for Israel’s security is long-standing and unwavering – including its right to defend itself against attacks. … I commend Prime Minister Yair Lapid and his government’s steady leadership throughout the crisis.”
Biden’s comment ignores reality. Israel wasn’t attacked, but it had attacked Gaza. Palestinians responded to the attack by Israel. In addition, note the large number of Palestinian children who were killed or wounded. This Israeli war crime clearly did not spare Palestinian civilians. This is the leadership that Biden and many other politicians commended. Wow — this says a lot! Even worse, Biden doesn’t seem to think Palestinians have a right to defend themselves against Israel’s state terrorism.
Besides the immeasurable human cost of the Israeli attack, the damage Israel did to Palestinian infrastructure and housing makes life in Gaza ever more difficult. Just as in numerous previous horrific and devastating Israeli attacks, there is no talk of Israel paying reparations for the widespread devastation it inflicted on Gaza. Rebuilding is difficult given that Israel has maintained, with US and Egyptian support, an illegal siege on Gaza since 2007.
The US corporate dominated media plays a role in enabling these Israeli crimes by its biased coverage. For example, it downplays the fact that Israel is an apartheid state. The US media also fails to consistently point out that Israel is occupying Palestinian land in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. There are well over 600,000 Israeli settlers living illegally on Palestinian land in the West Bank. The media doesn’t stress that Israel routinely violates international law, particularly the 1949 Geneva Conventions on occupation, with impunity. The media also seldom mentions that the US has cast over 40 vetoes of UN Security Council resolutions regarding problematic Israeli behavior. These vetoes or threats of vetoes by the US enable Israel to escape accountability.
In addition, given how the US praises Ukrainians who resist the Russian military in Ukraine, it is appalling to see the US commending Israel even though it has been occupying Palestinian land for decades. Ukrainians who resist Russian forces are touted as heroes in the US corporate media whereas Palestinians who legitimately resist cruel and illegal Israeli policies are called terrorists. As this latest attack shows, Palestinians who are simply trying to live their lives are killed with impunity for the killers due to the US preventing any sanctions against Israel.
Unfortunately, this US hypocrisy regarding Israel is of long standing. For example, before the Partition Plan for Palestine was approved by the UN General Assembly in 1947, Loy Henderson, director of the State Department’s Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs, warned: “The UNSCOP [U.N. Special Committee on Palestine] Majority Plan is not only unworkable; if adopted, it would guarantee that the Palestine problem would be permanent and still more complicated in the future.”
Henderson added: “The proposals contained in the UNSCOP plan … are in definite contravention to various principles laid down in the [U.N.] Charter as well as to principles on which American concepts of Government are based.
“These proposals, for instance, ignore such principles as self-determination and majority rule. They recognize the principle of a theocratic racial state and even go so far in several instances as to discriminate on grounds of religion and race against persons outside of Palestine.”
This US hypocrisy strongly undercuts the idea that the US cares about the rule of law. For example, the courageous South African Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Naledi Pandor, recently made this point in a press conference with the US Secretary of State. She said: “With respect to the role that multilateral bodies such as the United Nations should play, we believe that all principles that are germane to the United Nations Charter and international humanitarian law must be upheld for all countries, not just some Just as much as the people of Ukraine deserve their territory and freedom, the people of Palestine deserve their territory and freedom. And we should be equally concerned at what is happening to the people of Palestine as we are with what is happening to the people of Ukraine.”
Blatant US hypocrisy regarding its own war crimes as well as its hypocrisy regarding Israel are complicating its relations with non-aligned nations. The US desire to remain a leader is running into problems as more non-aligned nations don’t see the militaristic, economically predatory and hypocritical US as worthy of being their leader.
On 9 July 2022, remarkable images floated across social media from Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital. Thousands of people rushed into the presidential palace and chased out former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, forcing him to flee to Singapore. In early May, Gotabaya’s brother Mahinda, also a former president, resigned from his post as prime minister and fled with his family to the Trincomalee naval base. The public’s raw anger toward the Rajapaksa family could no longer be contained, and the tentacles of Rajapaksas, which had ensnared the state for years, were withdrawn.
Now, almost a month later, residual feelings from the protests remain but have not made any significant impact. Sri Lanka’s new caretaker, President Ranil Wickremesinghe, extended the state of emergency and ordered security forces to dismantle the Galle Face Green Park protest site (known as Gotagogama). Wickremesinghe’s ascension to the presidency reveals a great deal about both the weakness of the protest movement in this nation of 22 million people and the strength of the Sri Lankan ruling class. In parliament, Wickremesinghe’s United National Party has only one seat – his own – which he lost in 2020. Yet, he has been the prime minister of six governments on and off from 1993 to the present day, never completing a full term in office but successfully holding the reins on behalf of the ruling class nonetheless. This time around, Wickremesinghe came to power through the Rajapaksas’ Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (Sri Lanka People’s Front), which used its 114 parliamentarians (in a 225-person parliament) to back his installation in the country’s highest office. In other words, while the Rajapaksa family has formally resigned, their power – on behalf of the country’s owners – is intact.
Sujeewa Kumari (Sri Lanka), Landscape, 2018.
The people who gathered at Galle Face Green Park and other areas in Sri Lanka rioted because the economic situation on the island had become intolerable. The situation was so bad that, in March 2022, the government had to cancel school examinations owing to the lack of paper. Prices surged, with rice, a major staple, skyrocketing from 80 Sri Lankan rupees (LKR) to 500 LKR, a result of production difficulties due to electricity, fuel, and fertiliser shortages. Most of the country (except the free trade zones) experienced blackouts for at least half of each day.
Since Sri Lanka won its independence from Britain in 1948, its ruling class has faced crisis upon crisis defined by economic reliance on agricultural exports, mainly of rubber, tea, and, to a lesser extent, garments. These crises – particularly in 1953 and 1971 – led to the fall of governments. In 1977, elites liberalised the economy by curtailing price controls and food subsidies and letting in foreign banks and foreign direct investment to operate largely without regulations. They set up the Greater Colombo Economic Commission in 1978 to effectively take over the economic management of the country outside of democratic control. A consequence of these neoliberal arrangements was ballooning national debt, which has oscillated but never entered safe territory. A low growth rate alongside a habit of issuing international sovereign bonds to repay old loans has undermined any possibility of economic stabilisation. In December 2020, S&P Global Ratings downgraded Sri Lanka’s long-term sovereign credit rating from B-/B to CCC+/C, the lowest grade prior to D or ‘in default’ status.
Sri Lanka’s ruling class has been unable, or perhaps unwilling, to reduce its dependency on foreign buyers of its low-value products as well as the foreign lenders that subsidise its debt. In addition, over the past few decades – at least since the ugly 1983 Colombo riot – Sri Lanka’s elite class has expanded military expenditure, using these forces to enact a terrible slaughter of the Tamil minority. The country’s 2022 budget allocates a substantial 12.3% to the military. If you look at the number of military personnel relative to the population, Sri Lanka (1.46%) follows Israel, the world’s highest (2%), and there is one soldier for every six civilians in the island’s northern and eastern provinces, where a sizeable Tamil community resides. This kind of spending, an enormous drag on public expenditure and social life, enables the militarisation of Sri Lankan society.
Authors of the sizeable national debt are many, but the bulk of responsibility must surely lie with the ruling class and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Since 1965, Sri Lanka has sought assistance from the IMF sixteen times. During the depth of the current crisis, in March 2022, the IMF’s executive board proposed that Sri Lanka raise the income tax, sell off public enterprises, and cut energy subsidies. Three months later, after the resulting economic convulsions had created a serious political crisis, the IMF staff visit to Colombo concluded with calls for more ‘reforms’, mainly along the same grain of privatisation. US Ambassador Julie Chang met with both President Wickremesinghe and Prime Minister Dinesh Gunawardena to assist with ‘negotiations with the IMF’. There was not even a whiff of concern for the state of emergency and political crackdown.
These meetings show the extent to which Sri Lanka has been dragged into the US-imposed hybrid war against China, whose investments have been exaggerated to shift the blame for the country’s debt crisis away from Sri Lanka’s leaders and the IMF. Official data indicates that only 10% of Sri Lanka’s external debt is owed to Chinese entities, whereas 47% is held by Western banks and investment companies such as BlackRock, JP Morgan Chase, and Prudential (United States), as well as Ashmore Group and HSBC (Britain) and UBS (Switzerland). Despite this, the IMF and USAID, using similar language, continually insist that renegotiating Sri Lanka’s debt with China is key. However, malicious allegations that China is carrying out ‘debt trap diplomacy’ do not stand up to scrutiny, as shown by an investigation published in The Atlantic.
Wickremasinghe sits in the President’s House with a failing agenda. He is a fervent believer in Washington’s project, eager to sign a Status of Forces Agreement with the US to build a military, and was ready for Sri Lanka to join Washington’s Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) with a $480 million grant. However, one reason that Wickremasinghe’s party was wiped out in the last election was the electorate’s deep resistance to both policies. They are designed to draw Sri Lanka into an anti-China alliance which would dry up necessary Chinese investment. Many Sri Lankans understand that they should not be drawn into the escalating conflict between the US and China, just as the old – but raw – vicious ethnic wounds in their country must be healed.
Jagath Weerasinghe (Sri Lanka), Untitled I, 2016.
A decade ago, my friend Malathi De Alwis (1963–2021), a professor at the University of Colombo, collected poetry written by Sri Lankan women. While reading the collection, I was struck by the words of Seetha Ranjani in 1987. In memory of Malathi, and in joining Ranjani’s hopes, here is an excerpt of the poem ‘The Dream of Peace’:
Perhaps our fields ravaged by fire are still valuable
Perhaps our houses now in ruins can be rebuilt
As good as new or better
Perhaps peace too can be imported – as a package deal
But can anything erase the pain wrought by war?
Look amidst the ruins: brick by brick
Human hands toiled to build that home
Sift the rubble with your curious eyes
Our children’s future went up in flames there
Can one place a value on labour lost?
Can one breathe life into lives destroyed?
Can mangled limbs be rebuilt?
Can born and unborn children’s minds be reshaped?
We died –
and dying,
We were born again
We cried
and crying,
We learned to smile again
And now –
We no longer seek the company of friends
who weep when we do.
Instead, we seek a world
in which we may find laughter together.
British professor Orlando Figes, who specializes in Russian history, wrote that the 2008 Russian intervention in Georgia on the side of the breakaway enclaves of Abkhazia and South Ossetia had exposed American timidity and scuppered NATO membership hopes for Georgia. (Figes, The Story of Russia, (Metropolitan Books, 2022): 285-286.) Was there a lesson learned by the West?
In 2021-2022, Ukraine joining NATO was identified as a red line by Russia. US, Ukraine, and NATO paid scant heed to Russian security concerns and the outcome is the current fighting in Ukraine.
Putin had issued a warning in April 2021: “But if someone mistakes our good intentions for indifference or weakness and intends to burn or even blow up these bridges, they must know that Russia’s response will be asymmetrical, swift and tough.”
Vladimir #Putin: We really do not want to burn bridges.
But if someone mistakes our good intentions for indifference or weakness and intends to burn or even blow up these bridges, they must know that Russia's response will be asymmetrical, swift and tough. pic.twitter.com/6W8vkpGL0P
Across the Eurasian continent, China finds itself being provoked by the US’s oleaginous adherence to the One China policy to which it is a signatory. Beijing has in recent days warned of severe consequences to be borne by the US and separatists in Taiwan (there are vociferous protests in Taiwan against Pelosi’s visit) if US House speaker Nancy Pelosi were to land in Taiwan.
Nonetheless, Pelosi is now in Taiwan, saying her visit “honors America’s unwavering commitment to supporting Taiwan’s vibrant democracy.” Even NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman said that Pelosi was being “utterly reckless, dangerous and irresponsible.”
If the government in China ever still had any doubts (of course, they didn’t) about malicious American intentions, they have all evaporated now.
Chinese media has described the trip to Taiwan as American hypocrisy at its best.
Despite the trip being “utterly reckless, dangerous and irresponsible,” one has to hand it to the US that it was gutsy. The US didn’t back down. Pelosi did show up. But it required keeping her date, time, and place of arrival under wraps, and she was emboldened by the presence of accompanying US aircraft carriers. Hung Hsiu-chu, former chairwoman of the Taiwanese political opposition Kuomintang, sees some in the US tolerating Pelosi’s risky move to test Beijing’s red lines.
Among the speculated actions that China might undertake are sending fighter planes into what Taiwan contends is its airspace and sending naval ships into waters that Taiwan lays claim to; and that “the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] will strike Taiwan military targets … and the mainland could also consider speeding up legislation for a national reunification law and even publish a timetable for reunification which will impose real pressure on the US and Taiwan authorities.”
As to when Beijing will respond, the Global Timesnoted, “The Chinese mainland really knows the importance of ‘strategic patience.’”
Joint maritime and air exercises by the PLA were announced by senior colonel Shi Yi, a spokesperson at the PLA Eastern Theater Command, that will surround Taiwan in five directions.
It is well known that Putin does not bluff. Now the question is whether the administration of Xi Jinping bluffs. The world is about to find out what China means when it warns of “serious consequences.”
A graphic representation of a story transcribed via parts of a revelatory interview, “How the Banker Run Foundations are Shaping the World,” with Norman Todd, chief investigator in 1953 for the Special Committee on Tax Exempt Foundations.
[Source: Justin Trudeau photo – people.com; Dr. Jekyll & Hyde poster – amazon.com; collage courtesy of Steve Brown]
On July 8, the Canadian government led by Justin Trudeau announced that it would send 38 General Dynamics-made armored vehicles to Ukraine as part of $500 million in military aid allotted to Ukraine that had been attached to Canada’s budget in April.
That budget saw a $6 billion increase in military spending from the $26.4 billion total in 2021, which was to be used to boost cyber security and strengthen the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), a joint U.S.-Canadian defense organization.
Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said that “Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has reminded us that our own peaceful democracy—like all the democracies of the world—depends ultimately on the defense of hard power….The world’s dictators should never mistake our civility for pacifism. We know that freedom does not come for free, and that peace is guaranteed only by our readiness to fight for it.”
These comments display the priorities of Canada’s current leadership, which is committed to boosting defense spending by $18 billion over the next five years—when it was already ranked 12th in military spending—and to alliance with the United States against Russia and almost all of its other enemies.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gestures while inspecting NATO troops at Adazi military base in Kadaga, Latvia, in 2018. [Source: cbc.ca]
Trudeau has also signed a $15-billion agreement to export light armored vehicles (LAVs) produced by General Dynamics Land Systems Canada in London, Ontario, to Saudi Arabia, which sustains the U.S. Empire by trading its oil in U.S. dollars.
A Montreal-based journalist, Engler has written 11 books that are mostly critical of Canadian foreign policy. In this one, he shows that the Canadian military has a long and bloody record going back to its subjugation of Canada’s native population and support for British imperial interventions in sub-Saharan Africa.
After World War II, the Canadian military became more tightly integrated with that of the United States, supplying troops for imperial interventions like in the Korean War, while developing its own military-industrial complex that served as an adjunct of the U.S.
The Canadian Army originated from the British army which conquered North America from the Indians and French with tremendous brutality. Halifax became Britain’s primary naval base in North America after the violent displacement of Mi’kmaq First Nation people who had their heads placed on stakes when they tried to resist.
The father of the Canadian army, William D. Otter, was known for his merciless suppression of Cree and Assiniboine warriors in Saskatchewan.
Otter went on to command Canadian forces in South Africa in the Boer war, which became intimately involved in some of the nastier aspects including search, expel and burn missions.
Canadian infantrymen fighting the Boers in South Africa in 1902. [Source: warmuseum.ca]
William Heneker, a native of Sherbrooke, Quebec, and a Royal Military College (RMC) of Canada trained officer who led expeditions to conquer West Africa for the British, published an influential British training manual which noted how “the great thing is to impress savages with the fact that they are the weaker, and…enforce the will of the white man.”
Nationalist mythology presents Canada as a uniquely pacifist and benevolent country; however, in World War I, which Canada joined out of its loyalty to the British Empire, Canadian troops developed a terrible reputation for violence against prisoners.
After Canadian troops invaded Russia in 1918 with five other countries including the U.S. in an attempt to quell the Bolshevik Revolution, they were rebuked by locals for the “calm skills with which they used shrapnel as a short-range weapon against [Bolshevik] foot soldiers.”
Canada’s Siberian expeditionary force in Vladivostok in winter 1919. [Source: thecanadianencyclopedia.ca]
When Canadian troops were found guilty of murdering or raping Korean civilians during the Korean War, they were usually released from prison within a year or two at most.
Fifty years later in Afghanistan—where Canadian troops fired an astounding 4.7 million bullets and deployed white phosphorus—Captain Ray Wiss praised Canadian troops as “the best at killing people…we are killing a lot more of them [Afghans] than they are of us, and we have been extraordinarily successful recently…we have managed to kill between 10 and 20 Taliban each day.”
In 1910, the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) was established with the aim of reinforcing the British Empire. It was repeatedly deployed in the British Caribbean and in 1932 lent support to a military-coup government in El Salvador that brutally suppressed peasant and Indigenous rebellions.
First recruiting poster for Royal Canadian Navy. [Source: rcinet.ca]
Thirty years later, in 1962, the Canadian Navy participated in the U.S. blockade of Cuba, while assuming responsibility for surveillance of Soviet submarines. When 23,000 U.S. troops invaded the Dominican Republic in April 1965, a Canadian warship was sent to Santo Domingo, in the words of Defense Minister Paul Hellyer, “to stand by in case it is required.”
Subsequently, the RCN planned and exercised an invasion of Jamaica that was designed to secure the Alcan bauxite facilities from rioters.
In the 1990s, the RCN sent warships to the Middle East to enforce brutal sanctions on Iraq.
RCN vessels also enforced a naval blockade of Libya and kept the Port of Misrata open during the 2011 Operation Odyssey Dawn, a U.S.-NATO operation that resulted in the overthrow and lynching of Libya’s nationalist leader, Muammar Qaddafi.
During the Korean War in the 1950s, RCN destroyers transported Canadian troops and hurled 130,000 rounds at Korean targets, while destroying trains and tunnels on Korea’s coastal railway.
Royal Canadian Navy in Korean waters, 1952-1954. [Source: legionmagazine.com]
A year before the outbreak of the war, the RCN sent a naval vessel to China as Maoist forces were on the verge of victory in China’s civil war. Part of the objective was to show the U.S. and UK that Canada was a “willing partner in the emerging North Atlantic alliance.”
Canada has been a faithful member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) since its inception in 1949, currently providing it with about $165 million annually. Canada’s ambassador to the North Atlantic Council, Kerry Buck, boasted in 2018 that “Canada has participated and contributed to every NATO mission, operation and activity since NATO’s founding.”
Many of these missions were highly dubious, including a) NATO’s creation of underground anti-communist armies in Western Europe that carried out black-flag terrorist attacks that were blamed on communists in order to discredit them; b) NATO’s bombing of Kosovo in 1999; c) its 20-year war on Afghanistan; and d) its attack on Libya in which seven Canadian Air Force jets carried out bombing missions.
Canadian fighter pilots and ground crew in Libya during Operation Odyssey Dawn. [Source: rabble.ca]
In the 1990s, Canada strongly supported NATO enalrgement to the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary and has sent troops to Latvia and Ukraine as part of a belligerent policy toward Russia that has provoked a new Cold War and might yet cause a world war.
Canada and the CIA
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Canada’s Defence Research Board (DRB) had a formal relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which paid for classified research that was carried out by Canadian academics.
This research included CIA-funded psychological studies that were framed as a response to Communist Chinese brainwashing during the Korean War.
Canadian, British and U.S. officials met to coordinate this research at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Montreal on June 1, 1951, where the chairman of the DRB, Donald O. Hebb, suggested that the research focus on confessions, menticide and intervention in the individual mind, which was endorsed by other attendees.
Hebb subsequently received a secret $10,000 ($50,000 in today’s money) grant from the DRB to study sensory deprivation—or isolation of human beings—which was used as an interrogation technique.
The U.S. government and CIA subsequently put up half a million dollars ($2 million today) for McGill psychologist Ewen Cameron to build on Hebb’s psychological isolation research in ghastly ways—including forced isolation and administration of electroshocks on individuals and large doses of LSD and other hallucinogens.
The expressed objective of the research, carried out at Montreal’s Allen Memorial Institute from the early 1950s until 1965, was to erase existing memories and re-program individuals’ psyches. Hebb’s and Cameron’s research ultimately influenced the CIA’s 1963 KUBARAK Counterintelligence Interrogation handbook, laying the foundation for the CIA’s two-stage psychological torture methods.
Canada has assisted the U.S. allowing its landmass and many facilities to be used to test various weapons in the deadly U.S. arsenal, including chemical and biological weapons.
According to John Clearwater, author of the 2006 book Just Dummies: Cruise Missile Testing in Canada, “no matter how bizarre the weapon, no matter how dangerous the test, no matter how contrary the weapon to stated foreign policy objectives, Canada has never refused a single testing request from the United States.”
Starting in World War II, a super-secret germ warfare research facility run jointly by the U.S. and Canada operated at Grosse Îsle, 50 kilometers from Quebec City, which produced rinderpest (a cattle virus) and anthrax spores.
During the Korean War, the Guilford Reed-led Defence Research Board laboratory at Queens studied mosquito vectors and how to produce mosquito colonies, and helped turn shellfish toxins into weapons that were subsequently used by the CIA to try to assassinate foreign leaders like Fidel Castro.
Dr. Guilford Reed in front of Queens University laboratory which helped develop weapons for the CIA that was used to try to assassinate Fidel Castro. [Source: queensu.ca]
Other biological weapons that the U.S. deployed against Cuba were also tested in Canada and, in July 1953, U.S. army planes secretly sprayed 6 kg of zinc cadmium sulfide, a carcinogen, on Winnipeg, and eleven years later did the same on Medicine Hat, Alberta.
When uproar developed in the U.S. over the testing and development of chemical and biological weapons, much of the research was transferred to a secret military research facility north of Suffield, Alberta, where the U.S. Army tested 25-pound shells filled with highly toxic sarin.
Between 1956 and 1984, more than one billion germs of Agent Orange, Purple and White were sprayed on or near a Canadian military base in Gagetown, New Brunswick.
Canadian scientists generally played a key role in helping to develop defoliants and herbicides sprayed by the U.S. in Vietnam and the British in Malaya. Among them was Otto Maass, Chemical Biological Weapons (CBW) director at Canada’s Defence Research Board and the Chairman of McGill University’s Chemistry Department from 1937 to 1955.[1]
During the Vietnam War, Canadian manufacturers sold the U.S. military significant amounts of polystyrene, a major component in napalm—a flammable liquid agent that burns the flesh.
The latter was produced during the Korean War at Canada’s Defence Research Chemical laboratories. Canadian scientists working at the time at Suffield discovered a thickening agent for flamethrower fuels (napalm), and worked on development of a flamethrower to deliver this new and improved fuel from tanks.
Napalm strikes in Trang Bang, Vietnam, in June 1972—made possible by Canadian scientists. [Source: apjjf.org]
More Complicity in War
Overall, Canadian industry sold some $12.5 billion in ammunition, aircraft parts, napalm and other war materials to South Vietnam and the U.S. for use during the Vietnam War.
American planes that dropped bombs and napalm were often guided by Canadian-made Marconi-Doppler navigation systems and used bombing computers built in Rexdale, Ontario.
The bombs could have been armed with dynamite shipped from Valleyfield, Quebec. Defoliants came from Naugatuck Chemicals in Elmira, Ontario, and air-to-ground rockets were furnished by the Ingersoll Machine and Tool Company of Ingersoll, Ontario. On the ground, American infantry and artillery units were supplied with de Havilland (DHC-4) Caribous built at Milton, Ontario.
Canadian products also included Beta boots for the troops and the famous green berets of the Special Forces which came from Dorothea Knitting Mills in Toronto.
1972 Green Beret hat manufactured at Dorothea Knitting Mills in Toronto. [Source: worthpoint.com]
Supporting the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Program
Even though Canada is not officially one of the nine countries possessing nuclear weapons, for years it has supported the U.S.’s nuclear weapons program.
Uranium from Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories and which was refined in Port Hope, Ontario, was used in the nuclear bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Subsequently, Saskatchewan and Ontario mines supplied a considerable proportion of the uranium used for the U.S. nuclear weapons program.
A miner hauls a car of uranium-bearing ore at Eldorado Mine of Great Bear Lake, Northwest Territories, in 1930. [Source: cbc.ca]
In 1952, Canadian officials permitted the U.S. Strategic Air Command to use Canadian air space for training flights of nuclear-armed aircraft. Since 1965, nuclear-armed U.S. submarines have also fired torpedoes at Canadian army maritime bases and test ranges.
Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau (1968-1979; 1980-1984) claimed to be suffocating the arms race but allowed the U.S. to test cruise missiles designed for first-strike nuclear attacks at a Canadian army base in Cold Lake—a policy continued by Brian Mulroney (1984-1993).
In September 1950, the U.S. began storing nuclear weapons at Goose Bay, Newfoundland, while in 1963, Lester Pearson’s government (1963-1968) brought Bomarc missiles to Canada and gave Washington effective control over them.
Pearson had taken power after his Tory predecessor John Diefenbaker (1957-1963) had refused to station the Bomarcs in Canada, and was then threatened by Washington and fell from power in turn.
Canada received significant U.S. backing in establishing its signals intelligence (SIGNIT) capacities. A National Security Agency (NSA) history of the U.S.-Canada SIGNIT relationship released by Edward Snowden labeled Canada a “highly valued second party partner,” which offers “resources for advanced collection, processing and analysis, and has opened covert sites at the request of NSA, CSE [Communication Security Establishment] shares with NSA their unique geographic access to areas unavailable to the U.S.”
Canada is a member of the Five Eyes surveillance network. [Source: canadiandimension.com]
America First Foreign Policy
Canada has hundreds of military accords with the U.S. The most important, NORAD, has deepened the U.S. military footprint in Canada and committed Canada to acquiring U.S. nuclear weapons for air defense.
In 1965, NORAD’s mandate was expanded to include surveillance and assessment for U.S. commands worldwide, and in the 1980s and 1990s, it assisted in the War on Drugs.
Canadians posted to NORAD have helped research space weaponry while NORAD has also cooperated in missile defense work.
Many leading Canadian generals have trained in U.S. Army war colleges as the Canadian armed forces increasingly strives for what it calls “interoperability” with the Americans.
A March 2017 dispatch from the U.S. embassy in Ottawa to the State Department was tellingly titled “Canada Adopts ‘America First’ Foreign Policy.”
Chrystia Freeland earned her appointment as foreign minister, according to a memo uncovered through a Freedom of Information request, in large part because “of her strong U.S. contacts”; her number one priority was “working closely” with Washington.
Chrystia Freeland, center, and Justin Trudeau, right, with Donald Trump. [Source: thegrayzone.com]
The depth of the Canada-U.S. military alliance is such that, if the U.S. attacked Canada as in the War of 1812, it would be extremely difficult for the Canadian Armed Forces to defend Canadian soil.
According to Engler, Canada’s defense sector ignores the threat from the U.S. because it is not oriented toward protecting Canada from aggression; rather Canada’s “defense community” is aligned with the U.S. Empire’s quest for global dominance.
U.S. invades Canada in futuristic sci-fi series We Stand on Guard. Canada has no protection if this scenario comes true. [Source: usatoday.com]
U.S. Pushes for Higher Military Spending
After former Massachusetts governor Paul Cellucci was appointed U.S. ambassador to Canada in 2001, he revealed that his only instruction was to press for increased military spending.
During a 2016 speech to the Canadian parliament, then-U.S. President Barack Obama further called on the Canadian government to increase its military spending while, in 2018, Donald Trump sent Justin Trudeau a letter calling on Canada to improve its military preparedness.
A Rogue State
Canada’s status as a rogue state alongside the U.S. is evident in its non-compliance with a UN treaty outlawing mercenaries and the UN’s prohibition of nuclear weapons, which is supported by two-thirds of UN member states. Since 2007, Canada has also abstained on a series of UN resolutions concerning depleted uranium munitions.
Protesters ask why Canada has not signed onto UN treaty banning nuclear weapons. [Source: thecanadafiles.com]
Canadian companies meanwhile have followed their American counterparts in selling weapons to countries that have carried out significant human rights atrocities including Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Colombia and Israel.
Canada has also participated in illegal U.S. coups like in February 2004 when Canadian Special Forces “secured” the airport from which U.S. Marines forced Haiti’s elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide—a populist who tried to enact laws to benefit Haiti’s poor—onto a flight to the Central African Republic.
Canadian Special Forces guarding Port-au-Prince airport during Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s kidnapping in February 2004. [Source: reddit.com]
Canada’s Military-Industrial Complex
Dwight Eisenhower’s warning about a military-industrial complex in his 1961 farewell address applies all too well in Canada.
Canadian companies produce cutting-edge weapon systems and technologies that the U.S. military requires, construct and manage U.S. overseas military installations,[2] and even train the operators of Predator and Reaper drones.
The primary arms-industry lobbying group in Canada is the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries (CADSI), which has 20 staff in Ottawa. It has adopted an intense engagement plan that includes hundreds of meetings with members of parliament, key ministers and the Prime Minister’s office.
Protest outside arms trade show in Ottawa in 2019. [Source: worldbeyondwar.org]
Top U.S. arms makers Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, BAE, General Dynamics, L-3 Communications and Raytheon all have Canadian subsidiaries and offices in Ottawa a few blocks from parliament.
Exemplifying Canada’s version of the revolving door, Lockheed contracted with retired Air Force Commander André Deschamps—who had helped direct the Canadian Armed Forces in Afghanistan—to lobby for military contracts in 2017, while Irving Shipbuilding hired former Vice Admiral James King to push for Arctic and offshore patrol ship contracts.
Canada’s economy is dependent on shipbuilding, aerospace, high-tech and mining industries, which all benefit from higher military budgets and tighter integration with the U.S.
The only solution at this time is for American and Canadian peace activists to link up to challenge the military-industrial complex in both countries.
Detailed plans are needed to convert the U.S. and Canadian economies away from militarism and retrain workers and engineers who currently work in the defense sectors.
Restrictions on lobbying and foreign military sales should also be an urgent policy demand along with abolishing NORAD and NATO.
Peace mural in Nova Scotia. [Source: vowpeace.org]
Additionally, the peace movement should work to try to end the glorification of all things military and boycott Hollywood films, government propaganda initiatives and educational institutions that do so, and which dehumanize racial minorities and enemy countries like Russia and their leaders.
Yves Engler writes at the end of his book that “a peaceful world is possible if we want and work for it.” This is indeed true but it will require nothing less than a social revolution to achieve.
Mainstream media and politics routinely assume that the United States is a well-meaning global giant, striving to keep dangerous adversaries at bay. So, it was just another day at the imperial office on July 19 when FBI Director Christopher Wray declared: “The Russians are trying to get us to tear ourselves apart. The Chinese are trying to manage our decline, and the Iranians are trying to get us to go away.”
Such statements harmonize with the prevailing soundscape. The standard script asserts that the United States is powerful and besieged — mighty but always menaced — the world’s leading light yet beset by hostile nations and other sinister forces aiming to undermine the USA’s rightful dominance of the globe.
A fortress mindset feeds the U.S. government’s huge “defense” budget — which is higher than the military budgets of the next 10 countries combined — while the Pentagon maintains about 750 military bases overseas. But victimology is among Washington’s official poses, in sync with a core belief that the United States is at the center of the world’s importance and must therefore police the world to the best of its capacity.
In recent decades, U.S. military power has faced new challenges to retain unipolar leverage over the planet in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. (Heavy is Uncle Sam’s head that wears the crown.) Along with the fresh challenges came incentives to update the political lexicon for rationalizing red-white-and-blue militarism.
Ever since Secretary of State Madeleine Albright gave the motto its bigtime national debut in February 1998 on NBC’s “Today Show”, efforts to portray the U.S. as an “indispensable nation” became familiar rhetoric — or at least a renewed conceptual frame — for U.S. interventionism. “If we have to use force,” she said, “it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us.”
In 2022, such verbiage would easily fit onto teleprompters at the highest levels of the U.S. government. The appeal of such words has never waned among mass media and officials in Washington, as the United States simultaneously touts itself as the main virtuous star on the world stage and a country simply trying to protect itself from malevolence.
Consider FBI Director Wray’s rhetoric about official enemies:
“The Russians are trying to get us to tear ourselves apart.”
This theme remains an establishment favorite. It dodges the grim realities of U.S. society — completely unrelated to Russia — such as longstanding and ongoing conflicts due to racism, misogyny, income inequality, corporate power, oligarchy, and other structural injustices. The right-wing menace to human decency and democracy in the United States is homegrown, as the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol made chillingly clear.
This month, while the horrific and unjustified Russian war in Ukraine has continued, the United States has persisted with massive shipments of weapons to the Ukrainian government. Meanwhile, official interest in genuine diplomacy has been somewhere between scant and nonexistent. One of the few stirrings toward rationality from Capitol Hill came early this month when Rep. Ro Khanna toldThe Washington Post: “People don’t want to see a resigned attitude that this is just going to go on as long as it’s going to go on. What is the plan on the diplomatic front?” Several weeks later, the Biden administration is still indicating no interest in any such plan.
“The Chinese are trying to manage our decline.”
Leaders in Washington don’t want the sun to set on the U.S. empire, but China and many other nations have other ideas. This week, news of Nancy Pelosi’s intention to visit Taiwan in August was greeted with cheers from the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, which wrote that she deserved “kudos” for planning “what would be the first trip to the island democracy by a House Speaker in 25 years.”
At midweek, President Biden expressed concern about the planned trip, saying: “I think that the military thinks it’s not a good idea right now. But I don’t know what the status of it is.” However, his team’s overall approach is confrontational, risking a potentially catastrophic war with nuclear-armed China. Despite direwarnings from many analysts, the U.S. geopolitical stance toward China is reflexively and dangerously zero-sum.
“The Iranians are trying to get us to go away.”
Iran’s government adhered to the nuclear deal enacted in 2015, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). But the Trump administration pulled out of the pact. Rather than swiftly move to rejoin it, the Biden administration has dithered and thrown roadblocks.
Two weeks ago, Secretary of State Antony Blinken disingenuously announced: “We are imposing sanctions on Iranian petroleum and petrochemical producers, transporters, and front companies. Absent a commitment from Iran to return to the JCPOA, an outcome we continue to pursue, we will keep using our authorities to target Iran’s exports of energy products.”
In response, Quincy Institute Executive Vice President Trita Parsi tweeted: “Biden is continuing and embracing Trump’s max pressure policy, while expecting a different result. All of this could have been avoided if Biden just returned to the JCPOA via Exe order” — with an executive order, as he did to reverse President Trump’s withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris climate accord and the World Health Organization.
What continues — with countless instances of repetition compulsion — is the proclaimed vision of the United States of America leading the charge against the world’s badness. Beneath the veneer of goodness, however, systematic hypocrisy and opportunistic cruelty persist on a massive scale.
A case in point is Biden’s recent journey to the Middle East: The presidential trip’s prominent features included fist-bumping with a Saudi monarch whose government has caused a quarter-million deaths and vast misery with its war on Yemen, and voicing fervent support for the Israeli government as it continues to impose apartheid on the Palestinian people.
Leaders of the U.S. government never tire of reasserting their commitment to human rights and democracy. At the same time, they insist that an inexhaustible supply of adversaries is bent on harming the United States, which must not run away from forceful engagement with the world. But the actual U.S. agenda is to run the world.
Last week the Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Management released a report titled “The reach of Russian propaganda and disinformation in Canada”. According to lead author Anatoliy Gruzd, “the research provides evidence that the Kremlin’s disinformation is reaching more Canadians than one would expect. Left unchallenged, state-sponsored information operations can stoke societal tensions and could even undermine democracy itself.”
But the report calls statements of fact “pro-Kremlin claims”. One flagrant example cited prominently is the idea that “since the end of the Cold War, NATO has surrounded Russia with military bases and broken their promise to not offer NATO membership to former USSR republics, like Ukraine.”
“The reach of Russian propaganda and disinformation in Canada” follows on the heels of the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy releasing “Disinformation and Russia-Ukrainian war on Canadian social media”. The June report listed prominent Twitter accounts engaged in what it called “disinformation”, which includes “portraying NATO as an aggressive alliance using Ukraine as a proxy against Russia” and “promoting a specific mistrust of Canada’s Liberal government, and especially of Prime Minister Trudeau.” The widely mediatized report’s lead author, JC Boucher, has received millions of dollars in research funding from the military and is a product of the Canadian military’s vast ideological apparatus.
Recently the Canadian Forces tweeted, “we’re working with international partners to detect, correct, and call out the Kremlin’s state-sponsored disinformation about Ukraine.” They linked to a webpage titled “Canada’s efforts to counter disinformation — Russian invasion of Ukraine”.
Overseen by the Department of National Defense, the 2,700 employee Communications Security Establishment (CSE) also claims to combat “disinformation”. Its Twitter account regularly posts updates on Russian “disinformation” and the top item in its recently released annual report is “exposing Russian-backed disinformation campaigns and malicious cyber activity.”
Ten days ago, the Trudeau government announced sanctions on 15 Russian entities engaged in “disinformation”. In March, Ottawa put up $3 million to counter Russian “disinformation.”
At the legislative level Bill C11 is expected to require companies to remove content flagged as “disinformation.” A panel of experts appointed by the heritage minister to help shape the “online harms” legislation called for it to address “harmful content online, which includes disinformation, by conducting risk assessments of content that can cause significant physical or psychological harm to individuals.” The legislation is expected to further empower CSIS and establish a “digital safety commissioner”.
One member of the expert panel advising the minister, Bernie Farber, has repeatedly sought to suppress challenges to Israeli apartheid. As head of the Canadian Jewish Congress, Farber pressured the York University administration against holding an academic conference entitled Israel/Palestine: Mapping Models of Statehood and Paths to Peace, applauded the Stephen Harper government’s 2009 move to block former British MP George Galloway from speaking in Canada, spurred Shoppers Drug Mart to withdraw Adbuster from its stores, campaigned to suppress A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth and called on Toronto Pride to ban Queers Against Israeli Apartheid. Today Farber is an advocate of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism, which has repeatedly been used to suppress Palestine solidarity activism.
After I interrupted justice minister David Lametti’s press conference to question him about Israel murdering al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh and illegal recruitment for the Israeli military, Honest Reporting Canada released an action alert titled “CBC and CPAC Broadcast Anti-Israel Radical Crashing Press Conference and Spewing Hatred”. The May 27 statement noted, “instead of cutting away from this radical interrupting the press conference, CBC News gave the anti-Israel activist a national platform to spew disinformation, falsehoods, and anti-Israel hatred for over 2 minutes.” They called on the two TV channels to suppress my “disinformation.”
The Daily Dot, a US-based technology publication, published a similar response when I interrupted a speech by foreign affairs minister Melanie Joly to challenge Canada’s escalation of violence in Ukraine. In “Tech giants built digital dragnets to stop Russian propaganda—here’s how it still seeps through” Claire Goforth suggested Twitter and other social media outlets should have suppressed my 45 second video challenging Canada’s promotion of NATO and weapons deliveries. Bemoaning how “Russian propaganda and disinformation commingle across the web”, Goforth effectively argued that if Russian media promoted a video of a Canadian challenging their country’s foreign minister about Canada’s role in an important international issue it should be suppressed.
Proponents of “disinformation” are overwhelmingly focused on information that displeases Western power. “Disinformation” campaigners don’t cry foul when articles suggest Canada seeks to help Haiti or uphold the international rules-based order. Even obviously false numbers are okay so long as they align with power. When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau attended a memorial to the Rwandan genocide at last month’s Commonwealth Summit in Kigali CBC reported, “more than 800,000 Tutsis lost their lives across the country in the organized campaign that stretched over 100 days.” But it’s improbable there were 800,000 Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994 and no one believes every single Tutsi was killed, as I detailed in the 2017 article “Statistics, damn lies and the truth about Rwanda genocide”. (Rwanda’s 1991 census calculated 596,387 Tutsi and a Tutsi survivors’ group concluded close to 400,000 survived.)
In challenging his disinformation, I tagged the author of the CBC story, Murray Brewster, but he didn’t bother correcting the story. Canadian commentators claim more Tutsi were killed in the genocide than lived in Rwanda since it aligns with Washington, London and Kigali’s interests, as well as liberal nationalist Canadian ideology.
As someone who spends hours daily countering “disinformation” about Canadian foreign policy, I find it odd objecting to efforts to combat the scourge. But current official talk about “disinformation” has largely become a euphemism for protecting empire and a rebranding of age-old government-run censorship.
As the climate crisis deepens, rich states refuse to seriously fund climate adaptation and have reneged on agreements such as the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, while spending trillions on militarisation and war, writes Murad Qureshi.
The collapse of the short-lived Israeli government of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid validates the argument that the political crisis in Israel was not entirely instigated and sustained by former Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Bennett’s coalition government consisted of eight parties, welding together arguably one of the oddest coalitions in the tumultuous history of Israeli politics. The mishmash cabinet included far right and right groups like Yamina, Yisrael Beiteinu and New Hope, along with centrist Yesh Atid and Blue and White, leftist Meretz and even an Arab party, the United Arab List (Ra’am). The coalition also had representatives from the Labor Party, once the dominant Israeli political camp, now almost completely irrelevant.
When the coalition was formed in June 2021, Bennett was celebrated as some kind of a political messiah, who was ready to deliver Israel from the grip of the obstinate, self-serving and corrupt Netanyahu.
Confidence in Bennett’s government, however, was misplaced. The millionaire politician was a protégé of Netanyahu and, on many occasions, appeared to stand to the right of the Likud party leader on various issues. In 2013, Bennett proudly declared “I have killed lots of Arabs in my life – and there is no problem with that.” In 2014, he was very critical of Netanyahu for failing to achieve Israel’s objectives in one of the deadliest wars on besieged Gaza. Moreover, Bennett’s core support comes from Israel’s most extreme and far-right constituency.
Many wished to ignore all of this, in the hope that Bennett would succeed in ousting his former boss. That possibility became very real when Netanyahu was officially indicted in November 2019 on various serious corruption charges.
When Bennett and Lapid’s government was officially sworn in, on June 13, 2021, it seemed as if a new era of Israeli politics had begun. It was understood that Israel’s political camps had finally found their common denominator. Netanyahu, meanwhile, was exiled to the ranks of the opposition. His news began to peter out, especially as he sank deeper into his ongoing corruption trial.
Though some analysts continue to blame Netanyahu for the various crises suffered by Bennett’s coalition – for example, when Idit Silman resigned her post on April 6, leaving the coalition government with only 60 seats in the Knesset. But there is little proof of that. The short-lived Israeli government has collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions.
Would the actions of the government that ruled over Israel between June 2021 and June 2022 have been any different if Netanyahu was still the Israeli prime minister? Not in the least. Illegal Jewish settlements continue to grow unhindered; home demolitions, the dispossession of Palestinian communities in the West Bank and occupied Jerusalem and various routine acts of Israeli aggressions against its Arab state neighbors remained unchanged.
According to United Nations data, 79 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank by the Israeli army between June 2021 and May 2022. The region of Masafer Yatta, a 36-square km area located in the Southern Hebron Hills, has been designated for total annexation by the Israeli army. The expulsion of the area’s 1,200 Palestinian residents has already begun.
Regarding occupied Jerusalem, specifically in the case of the so-called Flag March, Bennett has proved to be even more extreme than Netanyahu. Bernard Avishai writes in The New Yorker that, in 2021, “Netanyahu’s government changed the march’s route away from the Damascus Gate to minimize the chance of violence”, while the ‘change government’ – a reference to Bennett’s coalition – “had reinstated the route, and even permitted more than two thousand national-Orthodox activists, including the extremist national-camp Knesset member Itamar Ben-Gvir,” to conduct their provocative ‘visits’ to Haram Al-Sharif, one of Islam’s holiest sites.
This is not to suggest that a return of Netanyahu, following the now scheduled November elections – Israel’s fifth general elections in less than four years – would be a welcome change. Instead, experience has shown that, regardless of who rules Israel, the political attitude of the country, especially towards Palestinians, would most likely remain unchanged.
True, Israeli politics are known to be unstable. This instability, however, worsened in recent decades. Since 1996, the average Israeli government has not served more than 2.6 years. But since April 2019, the average dramatically shrank to less than a year per government. The long-standing argument was that Netanyahu’s domineering and polarizing attitude was to blame. The last year, however, has demonstrated that Netanyahu was a mere symptom of Israel’s pre-existing political malaise.
Some Israeli analysts suggest that Israel’s political crisis can only end when the country institutes electoral and constitutional reforms. That, however, would be a superficial fix; after all, much of Israel’s parliamentary and electoral laws have been in effect for many years, when governments were relatively stable.
For Israel to change, a language of peace and reconciliation would have to replace the current atmosphere of incitement and war. Israeli politicians, who are currently fanning the flames, jockeying for positions and feeding on the violent chants of their supporters, would have to be transformed into something else entirely, a near impossibility in the current hate-filled atmosphere throughout the country.
Chances are Israel’s political crises will continue to loom large; coalitions will be assembled, only to collapse soon after; politicians will continue to move to the right even if they allege to be members of other ideological camps. Israel’s political instability is now the norm, not the exception.
In an interview with the CNN, Yohanan Plesner, a former Member of Knesset (MK), said that the problem is Israel’s need for “electoral and constitutional reforms, such as making any attempt to initiate early elections dependent on a two-thirds majority in parliament and amending the current law that demands new elections when a budget fails to pass.”
What Israelis refuse to face is the fact that governments which are predicated on right-wing, far-right, extremist constituencies are inherently unstable. Even if a purportedly centrist or even leftist prime minister finds himself at the helm of the government, outcomes will not change when the Knesset – in fact, most of the country – is governed by a militaristic, chauvinistic and colonial mindset.
NATO’s hawkish Madrid meeting booked the political benefits from Putin’s Ukraine invasion to the account of the imperialist power that stood to gain most from it — the US, reports Dick Nichols.
On June 28-30, 2022, NATO leaders gathered in Madrid, Spain, to discuss the major issues and challenges facing the alliance. The summit ended with far-reaching decisions that will have a dire impact on global peace and security. Hailed as “historic,” the summit was indeed transformative: NATO produced a new Strategic Concept and identified what it says are the key threats to western security, interests, and values — none other than Russia and China.
“The empire doesn’t rest,” quips Noam Chomsky, a public intellectual regarded by millions of people as a national and international treasure, in his assessment of NATO’s “historic” summit in the exclusive interview for Truthout that follows. Chomsky is one of the most widely cited scholars in modern history. He is institute professor emeritus at MIT and currently laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona, and has published more than 150 books in linguistics, political and social thought, political economy, media studies, U.S. foreign policy and world affairs.
C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, as was expected, the war in Ukraine dominated the recent NATO summit in Madrid and produced some extraordinary decisions which will lead to the “NATO-ization of Europe,” as Russia was declared “the most significant and direct threat” to its members’ peace and security. Turkey dropped its objections to Finland and Sweden joining the alliance after it managed to extract major concessions, NATO’s eastern flank will receive massive reinforcement, additional defense systems will be stationed in Germany, Italy, and elsewhere, and the U.S. will boost its military presence all across European soil. Given all of this, is it Russia that represents a threat to Europe, or NATO to Russia? And what does the “NATO-ization” of Europe mean for global peace and security? Is it a prelude to World War III?
We can dismiss the obligatory boilerplate about high principles and noble goals, and the rank hypocrisy: for example, the lament about the fate of the arms control regime because of Russian-Chinese disruption, with no mention of the fact it is the U.S. that has torn it to shreds under W. Bush and particularly Trump. All of that is to be expected in “historic” pronouncements of a new Strategic Concept for NATO.
The Ukraine war did indeed provide the backdrop for the meeting of NATO powers — with bitter irony, just after the conclusion of the first meeting of the states that signed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which passed unnoticed.
The NATO summit was expanded for the first time to include the Asian “sentinel states” that the U.S. has established and provided with advanced high-precision weapons to “encircle” China. Accordingly, the North Atlantic was officially expanded to include the newly created Indo-Pacific region, a vast area where security concerns for the Atlanticist powers of NATO are held to arise. The imperial implications should be clear enough. There’s a good deal more to say about this. I will return to it.
U.S. policy toward Ukraine and Russia was strongly affirmed in the Strategic Concept: no negotiations, only war to “weaken Russia.”
This has been steady policy since George W. Bush’s 2008 invitation to Ukraine to join NATO, vetoed by France and Germany, who agreed with high-level U.S. diplomats for the past 30 years that no Russian government could tolerate that, for reasons too obvious to review. The offer remained on the agenda in deference to U.S. power.
After the Maidan uprising in 2014, the U.S. began openly to move to integrate Ukraine into the NATO military command, policies extended under Biden, accompanied by official acknowledgment after the invasion that Russian security concerns, meaning NATO membership, had not been taken into consideration. The plans have not been concealed. The goals are to ensure full compatibility of the Ukrainian military with NATO forces in order to “integrate Ukraine into NATO de facto.”
Zelensky’s efforts to implement a diplomatic settlement were ignored, including his proposals last March to accept Austrian-style neutralization for the indefinite future. The proposals, which had indications of Russian support, were termed a “real breakthrough” by UN Secretary-GeneralAntónio Guterres, but never pursued.
The official Russian stance at the time (March 2022) was that its military operations would end if Ukraine too were to “cease military action, change its constitution to enshrine neutrality, acknowledge Crimea as Russian territory, and recognize the separatist republics of Donetsk and Lugansk as independent states.”
There was a considerable gap between the Ukrainian and Russian positions on a diplomatic settlement, but they might have been narrowed in negotiations. Even after the invasion, it appears that there may have remained some space for a way to end the horrors.
France and Germany continued to make overtures toward diplomatic settlement. These are completely dropped in the recent Strategic Concept, which simply “reaffirms” all plans to move toward incorporating Ukraine (and Georgia) into NATO, formally dismissing Russian concerns.
The shifts in the European stance reflect Europe’s increasing subordination to the U.S. The shift was accelerated by Putin’s choice of aggression after refusing to consider European initiatives that might have averted the crime and possibly even opened a path toward Europe-Russia accommodation that would be highly beneficial to all — and highly beneficial to the world, which may not survive great power confrontation.
That is not a throw-away line. It is reality. The great powers will either find a way to cooperate, to work together in confronting imminent global threats, or the future will be too grim to contemplate. These elementary facts should be kept firmly in mind while discussing particular issues.
We should also be clear about the import of the new Strategic Concept. Reaffirming the U.S. program of de facto incorporation of Ukraine within NATO is also reaffirming, unambiguously, the refusal to contemplate a diplomatic settlement. It is reaffirming the Ramstein declarations a few weeks ago that the war in Ukraine must be fought to weaken Russia, in fact to weaken it more severely than the Versailles treaty weakened Germany, if we assume that U.S. officials mean what they say — and we can expect that adversaries take them at their words.
The Ramstein declarations were accompanied by assurances that Ukraine would drive Russia out of all Ukrainian territory. In assessing the credibility of these assurances, we may recall that they come from the sources that confidently predicted that the U.S.-created Iraqi and Afghan armies would resist ISIS [also known as Daesh] and the Taliban, instead of collapsing immediately, as they did; and that the Russian invasion would conquer Kyiv and occupy Ukraine in three days.
The message to Russia is: You have no escape. Either surrender, or continue your slow and brutal advance, or, in the event that defeat threatens, go for broke and destroy Ukraine, as of course you can.
The logic is quite clear. So is the import beyond Ukraine itself. Millions will face starvation, the world will continue to march toward environmental destruction, the likelihood of nuclear war will increase.
But we must pursue this course to punish Russia severely enough so that it cannot undertake further aggression.
We might pause for a moment to look at the crucial underlying premise: Russia is bent on further aggression, and must be stopped now, or else. Munich 1938. By now this has become a Fundamental Truth, beyond challenge or inquiry. With so much at stake, perhaps we may be forgiven for breaking the rules and raising a few questions.
Inquiry at once faces a difficulty. There has been little effort to establish the Fundamental Truth. As good a version as any is presented by Peter Dickinson, editor of the prestigious Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert Service.The heart of Dickinson’s argument is this:
Putin has never made any secret of the fact that he views the territory of modern Ukraine as historically Russian land. For years, he has denied Ukraine’s right to exist while claiming that all Ukrainians are in fact Russians (“one people”). The real question is which other sovereign nations might also fit Putin’s definition. He recently set off alarm bells by commenting thatthe entire former Soviet Unionwas historically Russian territory.
Nor is it clear if Putin’s appetite for reclaiming Russian lands is limited to the 14 non-Russian post-Soviet states. Imperial Russia once also ruled Finland and Poland, while the Soviet Empire after WWII stretched deep into Central Europe and included East Germany. One thing is clear: unless he is stopped in Ukraine, Putin’s imperial ambitions are certain to expand.
That is clear, requiring no further argument.
The totality of evidence is given in the linked article. But now another problem arises. In it, Putin says nothing remotely like what set off the dramatic alarm bells. More like the opposite.
Putin says that the old Soviet Union “ceased to exist,” and he wants “to emphasise that in recent history we have always treated the processes of sovereignisation that have occurred in the post-Soviet area with respect.” As for Ukraine, “If we had had good allied relations, or at least a partnership between us, it would never have occurred to anybody [to resort to force]. And, by the way, there would have been no Crimea problem. Because if the rights of the people who live there, the Russian-speaking population, had been respected, if the Russian language and culture had been treated with respect, it would never have occurred to anybody to start all this.”
Nothing more is quoted. That’s the totality of evidence Dickinson presents, apart from what has become the last resort of proponents of the thesis that unless “stopped in Ukraine, Putin’s imperial ambitions are certain to expand”: musings of no clear import about Peter the Great.
This is no minor matter. On this basis, so our leaders instruct us, we must ensure that the war continues in order to weaken Russia; and beyond Ukraine itself, to drive millions to starvation while we march on triumphantly toward an unlivable earth and face increasing risk of terminal nuclear war.
Perhaps there is some better evidence for what is so “clear” that we must assume these incredible risks. If so, it would be good to hear it.
Putin’s cited remarks, as distinct from the fevered constructions, are consistent with the historical and diplomatic record, including the post-invasion Russian official stance just quoted, but much farther back.
The core issue for 30 years has been Ukraine’s entry into NATO. That has always been understood by high U.S. officials, who have warned Washington against the reckless and provocative acts it has been taking. It has also been understood by Washington’s most favored Russian diplomats. Clinton’s friend Boris Yeltsin objected strenuously when Clinton began the process of NATO expansion in violation of firm promises to Gorbachev when the Soviet Union collapsed. The same is true of Gorbachev himself, who accused the West and NATO of destroying the structure of European security by expanding its alliance. “No head of the Kremlin can ignore such a thing,” he said, adding that the U.S. was unfortunately starting to establish a “mega empire,” words echoed by Putin and other Russian officials.
I am unaware of a word in the record about plans to invade anyone outside the long-familiar red lines: Ukraine and Georgia. The only Russian threats that have been cited are that if NATO advances to its borders, Russia will strengthen its defenses in response.
With specific regard to Ukraine, until recently Putin was calling publicly for implementation of the Minsk II agreement: neutralization of Ukraine and a federal arrangement with a degree of autonomy for the Donbass region. It is always reasonable to suspect dark motives in great power posturing, but it is the official positions that offer a basis for diplomacy if there is any interest in that course.
On Crimea, Russia had made no moves until it was about to lose its sole warm water naval base, in the Crimean Peninsula. The background is reviewed by John Quigley, the U.S. State department representative in the OSCE [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe] delegation that considered the problem of Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Crimea, he reports, was a particular focus of attention. His intensive efforts to find a solution for the problem of Crimea faced a “dilemma.” Crimea’s population “was majority Russian and saw no reason to be part of Ukraine.” Crimea had been Russian until 1954, when, for unknown reasons, Soviet Communist Party Chair Nikita Khrushchev decided to switch Crimea from the Soviet Russian republic to the Soviet Ukrainian republic. As Quigley notes,
Even after 1954, Crimea was effectively governed more from Moscow than from Kyiv. When the Soviet Union was dissolved, Crimea’s population suddenly found itself a minority in a foreign country. Ukraine accepted a need for a certain degree of self-rule, but Crimea declared independence as what it called the Crimean Republic. Over Ukraine’s objection, an election for president was called in the declared Crimean Republic, and a candidate was elected on a platform of merger with Russia. At the time, however, the Russian government was not prepared to back the Crimeans.
Quigley sought a compromise that would provide autonomy for Crimea under a Ukraine-Crimea treaty, with international guarantees to protect Crimea from Ukrainian infringement. The “treaty went nowhere, however…. Ukraine cracked down on the Crimean Republic, and the conflict remained unresolved. Tension simmered until 2014, by which time Russia was prepared to act to take Crimea back. Crimea was then formally merged into the Russian Federation.”
It’s not a simple matter of unprovoked Russian aggression, as in the received U.S. version.
Like many others familiar with the region, Quigley now calls for a diplomatic settlement and wonders whether the current U.S. goal “is less to force Russia out of Ukraine than to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian.”
Is there still an option for diplomacy? No one can know unless the possibility is explored. That will not happen if it is an established Fundamental Truth that Putin’s ambitions are insatiable.
Apart from the question of Putin’s ambitions, there is a small matter of capability. While trembling in fear of the new Peter the Great, western powers are also gloating over the demonstration that their firm convictions about Russia’s enormous military power were quickly dispelled with the Russian debacle in its attack on Kyiv. U.S. intelligence had predicted victory in a few days. Instead, tenacious Ukrainian resistance revealed that Russia could not conquer cities a few miles from its border defended by a mostly citizens’ army.
But no matter: The new Peter the Great is on the march. Lack of evidence of intention and official proposals to the contrary are as irrelevant to Fundamental Truth as lack of military capacity.
What we are observing is nothing new. Russian devils of incomparable might aiming to conquer the world and destroy civilization have been a staple of official rhetoric, and obedient commentary, for 75 years. The rhetoric of the critical internal document NSC-68 (1950) is a striking illustration, almost unbelievable in its infantile crudity.
At times, the method has been acknowledged. From his position as “present at the creation” of the Cold War, the distinguished statesman Dean Acheson recognized that it was necessary to be “clearer than truth” in exercises (like NSC-68) to “bludgeon the mass mind” of government into obedience with elite plans. That was in fact “NSC-68’s purpose.”
Scholarship has also occasionally recorded the fact. Harvard Professor of Government and long-time government adviser Samuel Huntington observed that “you may have to sell [intervention or other military action] in such a way as to create the misimpression that it is the Soviet Union that you are fighting. That is what the United States has been doing ever since the Truman Doctrine,”
Today’s formula is no innovation.
We often tend to forget that the U.S. is a global power. Planning is global: What is happening in one part of the world is often replicated elsewhere. By focusing on one particular manifestation, we often miss the global tapestry in which it is one strand.
When the U.S. took over global hegemony from Britain after World War II, it kept the same guiding geopolitical concepts, now greatly expanded by a far more powerful hegemon.
Britain is an island off the coast of Europe. A primary goal of British imperial rule was to prevent a unified hostile Europe.
The U.S.-run western hemisphere is an “island” off the coast of the Eurasian land mass, with far grander imperial objectives (or “responsibilities,” as they are politely termed). It must therefore make sure to control it from all directions, North being a new arena of conflict as global warming opens it up to exploitation and commerce. The NATO-based Atlanticist system is the Western bulwark. The Strategic Concept and its ongoing implementation places this bulwark more firmly in Washington’s hands, thanks to Putin.
With virtually no notice, there are similar developments on the Eastern flank of the Eurasian land mass as NATO extends its reach to the Indo-Pacific region under the new Concept. NATO is deepening its relations with its island partners off the coast of China — Japan, Australia, South Korea, New Zealand — even inviting them to the NATO summit, but much more significant, enlisting them in the “encirclement” of China that is a key element of current bipartisan U.S. strategy.
While the U.S. is firming up its control of the western flank of the Eurasian landmass at the NATO Summit, it is carrying out related exercises at the eastern flank: the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) programs now underway. Under the direction of the U.S. Navy, these are “the grandest of all war games,” Australian political scientist Gavan McCormack writes, “the largest air, land, and sea war manoeuvres in the world. They would assemble a staggering 238 ships, 170 aircraft, 4 submarines and 25,000 military personnel from 26 countries.… To China, scarcely surprisingly these exercises are seen as expression of an anti-China ‘Asian NATO design.’ They are war games, and they are to include various simulations engaging ‘enemy forces,’ attacking targets and conducting amphibious landings on Hawaii Island and in Hawaiian waters.”
RIMPAC is supplemented by regular U.S. naval missions in China’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). These are merely “innocent passage” in accord with the principle of “freedom of navigation;” the U.S. protests when China objects, as does India, Indonesia, and many others. The U.S. appeals to the Law of the Sea – which bars threat or use of force in these zones. Quietly, the U.S. client state Australia, of course, in coordination with Washington, is engaged in “military espionage” in the EEZ, installing highly sophisticated sensing devices “so that the U.S. can more effectively destroy Chinese vessels as quickly as possible at the start of any conflict.”
These exercises on the Eastern Flank are accompanied by others in the Pacific Northeast region and, in part, in the Baltic region, with participation of new NATO members Finland and Sweden. Over the years, they have been slowly integrated into the NATO military system and have now taken the final step, pleading “security concerns” that are scarcely even laughable but do benefit their substantial military industries and help drive the societies to the right.
The empire doesn’t rest. The stakes are too high.
In official rhetoric, as always, these programs are undertaken for benign purposes: to enforce “the rules-based international order.” The term appears repeatedly in the Strategic Concept of the NATO Summit. Missing from the document is a different phrase: “UN-based international order.” That is no accidental omission: The two concepts are crucially different.
The UN-based international order is enshrined in the UN Charter, the foundation of modern international law. Under the U.S. Constitution (Article VI), the UN Charter is also “the supreme law of the land.” But it is unacceptable to U.S. elite opinion and is violated freely, with no notice, by U.S. presidents.
The Charter has two primary flaws. One is that it bans “the threat or use of force” in international affairs, apart from designated circumstances that almost never arise. That means that it bans U.S. foreign policy, obviously an unacceptable outcome. Consequently, the revered Constitution can be put aside. If, unimaginably, the question of observing the Constitution ever reached the Supreme Court, it would be dismissed as a “political question.”
The rules-based international order overcomes this flaw. It permits the threat and use of force freely by the Master, and those he authorizes. Illustrations are so dramatically obvious that one might think that they would be difficult to ignore. That would be a mistake: they are routinely ignored. Take one of the major international crimes: annexation of conquered territory in violation of international law. There are two examples: Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara in violation of the ruling of the International Court of Justice, and Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights in Syria and Greater Jerusalem in violation of unanimous Security Council orders. All have been supported by the U.S. for many years, and were formally authorized by the Trump administration, now by Biden. One will have to search hard for expressions of concern, even notice.
The second flaw is that the UN Security Council and other international institutions, like the World Court, set the rules. That flaw is also overcome in the rules-based international order, in which the U.S. sets the rules and others obey.
It is, then, easy to understand Washington’s preference for the rules-based international order, now forcefully affirmed in the NATO Strategic Concept, and adopted in U.S. commentary and scholarship.
Turning elsewhere, we do find serious commentary and analysis. Australian strategic analyst Clinton Fernandes discusses the matter in some depth in his book Sub-Imperial Power (Melbourne 2022).
Tracing the concept to its western origins in British imperial rule, Fernandes shows that
the rules-based order differs sharply from the United Nations–centred international system and the international order underpinned by international law. The United States sits at the apex of the system, exercising control over the sovereignty of many countries. The United Kingdom, a lieutenant with nuclear weapons and far-flung territories, supports the United States. So do subimperial powers like Australia and Israel. The rules-based international order involves control of the effective political sovereignty of other countries, a belief in imperial benevolence and the economics of comparative advantage. Since policy planners and media commentators cannot bring themselves to say ‘empire’, the ‘rules-based international order’ serves as the euphemism.
“The economics of comparative advantage,” as Fernandes discusses, is another euphemism. Its meaning is “stay in your place,” for the benefit of all. It is often advised with the best of intentions. Surely that was the case when Adam Smith advised the American colonies to keep to their comparative advantage in agriculture and import British manufactured goods, thus “promoting the progress of their country toward real wealth and greatness.”
Having overthrown British rule, the colonies were free to reject this kind advice and to resort to the same kinds of radical violation of orthodox free trade principles that Britain used in becoming the world’s great center of manufacturing and global power. That pattern has been replicated with impressive consistency. Those that adopted the favored principle, usually under force, became the third world. Those that violated it became the wealthy first world, including the one country of the South that resisted colonization, Japan, and thus was able to violate the rules and develop, with its former colonies in tow.
The consistency of the record is close to axiomatic. After all, development means changing comparative advantage.
In short, the rules-based order confers many advantages on the powerful. One can easily understand why it is viewed so favorably in their domains, while the UN-based order is dismissed except when it can be invoked to punish enemies.
Turkey continues to resist joining sanctions against Russia and acts, in fact, as a sanctions “safe haven” for Russian oligarchs. Yet it is treated by the U.S. and the NATO alliance in general as a reliable strategic ally, and everyone ignores the fact that Erdoğan’s regime is as blatantly authoritarian and oppressive as that of Putin. In fact, following his somersault vis-a-vis Saudi Arabia, the Biden administration is now warming up to Erdoğan and wants to upgrade Turkey’s fleet of American-made F-16 fighter jets. How should we interpret this anomalous situation within the NATO alliance? Yet another instance of western hypocrisy or the dictates of Realpolitik?
What is anomalous is that Erdoğan is playing his own game instead of just obeying orders. There’s nothing anomalous about his being “blatantly authoritarian and oppressive.” That’s not a concern [for the U.S.], as in numerous other cases. What is a concern is that he’s not entirely a “reliable strategic ally.” Turkey was actually sanctioned by the U.S. for purchasing Russian missile defense system. And even after the invasion of Ukraine, Erdoğan left open whether he would purchase Russian arms or depart from his “friendship” with Mr. Putin. In this particular regard, Turkey is acting more like the Global South than like NATO.
Turkey has departed from strict obedience in other ways. It delayed the accession of Sweden and Finland into NATO. The reason, it seems, is Turkey’s commitment to intensify its murderous repression of its Kurdish population. Sweden had been granting asylum to Kurds fleeing Turkish state violence — “terrorists” in Turkish official lingo. There are legitimate concerns that an ugly underground bargain may have been struck when Turkey dropped its opposition to full Swedish entry into NATO.
The background should not be overlooked. Brutal repression of the Kurds in Turkey has a long history. It reached a crescendo in the 1990s, with a state terror campaign that killed tens of thousands of Kurds, destroyed thousands of towns and villages, and drove hundreds of thousands from their homes, many to hideous slums in barely survivable corners of Istanbul. Some were offered the opportunity to return to what was left of their homes, but only if they publicly blamed Kurdish PKK guerrillas. With the amazing courage that has been the hallmark of the Kurdish struggles for justice, they refused.
These terrible crimes, some of the worst of the decade, were strongly supported by the U.S., which poured arms into Turkey to expedite the atrocities. The flow increased under Clinton as the crimes escalated. Turkey became the leading recipient of U.S. arms (apart from Israel-Egypt, a separate category), replacing Colombia, the leading violator of human rights in the Western hemisphere. That extends a long and well-established pattern. As usual, the media cooperated by ignoring the Turkish horrors and crucial U.S. support for them.
By 2000, the crimes were abating, and an astonishing period began in Turkey. There was remarkable progress in opening up the society, condemning state crimes, advancing freedom and justice. For me personally, it was a great privilege to be able to witness it first-hand, even to participate in limited ways. Prominent in this democratic revolution were Turkish intellectuals, who put their western counterparts to shame. They not only protested state crimes but carried out regular civil disobedience, risking and often enduring harsh punishment, and returning to the fray. One striking example was Ismail Beşikçi, who as a young historian was the first non-Kurdish academic to document the horrific repression of the Kurds. Repeatedly imprisoned, tortured, abused, he refused to stop his work, continuing to document the escalating crimes. There were many others.
By the early 2000s it seemed that a new era was dawning. There were some thrilling moments. One unforgettable experience was at the editorial offices of Hrant Dink, the courageous journalist who was assassinated with state complicity for his defense of human rights, particularly the rights of the Armenian community that had been subjected to genocidal slaughter, still officially denied. With his widow, I was standing on the balcony of the office, observing an enormous demonstration honoring Hrant Dink and his work, and calling for an end to ongoing crimes of state, no small act of courage and dedication in the harshly repressive Turkish state.
The hopes were soon to wane as Erdoğan instituted his increasingly brutal rule, moving to restore the nightmare from which Turkey had begun to emerge. All similar to what happened a few years later in the Arab Spring.
Turkey is also extending its aggression in Syria, aimed at the Kurdish population who, in the midst of the horrendous chaos of the Syrian conflicts, had managed to carve out an island of flourishing democracy and rights (Rojava). The Kurds had also provided the ground troops for Washington’s war against ISIS in Syria, suffering over 10,000 casualties. In thanks for their service in this successful war, President Trump withdrew the small U.S. force that served as a deterrent to the Turkish onslaught, leaving them at its mercy.
There is an old Kurdish proverb that the Kurds have no friends but the mountains. There is just concern that Turkish-Swedish NATO maneuverings might confirm it.
The NATO summit reached the interesting conclusion that China represents a “security challenge” to the interests and security of its member states, but it is not to be treated as an adversary. Semantics aside, can the West really stop China from exercising an ever-increasing role in global affairs? Indeed, is a unipolar power system a safer alternative to world peace than a bipolar or multipolar system?
The U.S. is quite openly seeking to restrict China’s role in global affairs and to impede its development. These are what constitute the “security challenge.” The challenge thus has two dimensions, roughly what is called “soft power” and “hard power.”
The former is internal development of industry, education, science and technology. This provides the basis for the expansion of China’s arena of influence through such projects as the Belt-and-Road (BRI) initiative, a massive multidimensional project that integrates much of Eurasia within a Chinese-based economic and technological system, reaching to the Middle East and Africa, and even to U.S. Latin American domains.
The U.S. complains, correctly, that Chinese internal development violates the rules-based international order. It does, radically. China is following the practices that the U.S. did, as did England before it and all other developed societies since. China is rejecting the policy of “kicking away the ladder”: First climb the ladder of development by any means available, including robbery of higher technology and ample violence and deceit, then impose a “rules-based order” that bars others from doing the same. That is a staple of modern economic history, now formalized in the highly protectionist investor-rights agreements that are masked under the cynical pretense of “free trade.”
The “security challenge” also has a military dimension. This is countered by the program of “encircling” China by heavily-armed “sentinel states,” and by such projects as the massive RIMPAC exercises now underway, defending the U.S. off the coasts of China. No infringement on U.S. domination of the “Indo-Pacific” region can be tolerated, even a threat that China might set up its second overseas military base in the Pacific Solomon Islands (the first is in Djibouti).
Digressing briefly to criminal “whataboutism,” we might mention that the U.S. has 800 bases worldwide, which, along with their very prominent role in “defense” (aka imperial domination), enable hundreds of “low-profile proxy wars” in Africa, the greater Middle East, and Asia.
Washington, along with concurring commentary in the media and journals of opinion, are quite correct in charging China with violation of the rules-based order that the U.S. upholds, now with even more firm European support than before. They are also correct in deploring severe human rights violations in China, but that is not a concern of the rules-based order, which easily accommodates and commonly vigorously supports such violations.
The question of how best to enhance world peace does not arise in this connection. Everyone is in favor of “peace,” even Hitler: on their own terms. For the U.S., the terms are the rules-based international order. Others have their own ideas. Most of the world is the proverbial grass on which the elephants trample.
The climate crisis was also on the agenda at the three-day summit in Madrid. In fact, it was recognized as “a defining challenge of our time” and NATO General-Secretary Jens Stoltenberg informed the world that the organization will “set the gold standard on addressing the security implications of climate change.” Personally, I sure feel better now knowing that militarism can be added to the methods of tackling the climate crisis. How about you?
How encouraging that NATO will address “the security implications of climate change,” where “security” has the usual meaning that excludes the security of people.
The issues raised here are the most important of all and are the most easily summarized. The human species is advancing toward a precipice. Soon irreversible tipping points will be reached, and we will be falling over the precipice to a “hothouse earth” in which life will be intolerable for those remnants that survive.
Military expenses make a double contribution to this impending disaster: first, in their enormous contribution to destroying the conditions for tolerable existence, and second, in the opportunity costs — what isn’t being done with the huge resources devoted to undermining any hope for the future.
Putin’s aggression in Ukraine made the same double contribution: destruction and robbery of the resources that must be used to avert environmental destruction. All of this couldn’t have happened at a worse time. The window for constructive action is closing while humanity persists on this mad course.
All else pales into insignificance. We will find ways to cooperate to avert disaster and create a better world, as we still can. Or we will bring the human experiment to an inglorious end.
The United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) announced on April 26 that they had set up an office in the US embassy in Lusaka, Zambia, reports Vijay Prashad. There are fears that it is only a matter of time until this is transformed into a full-scale US military base.
America loves its military. It should because it’s the most expensive defense force of all time. $778B was allocated for defense spending in 2022. China comes in a distant second at $229B.
All of which prompts a provocative question: What if the Marine Corps publishes a landmark study that claims recipients of the US government defense budget are collectively responsible for accelerating the danger of climate change to very dangerous levels, in fact, to unlivable levels?
As of June 2022, that’s precisely what’s happened.
The world’s militaries, intelligence agencies, foreign affairs strategies, and think tanks are unwittingly advancing the hyperthreat, which is an acceleration of climate and environmental change leading to Hothouse Earth. This startling information is explained in detail in an eye-opening analysis in which hyperthreat is the primary subject, to wit:1
The analysis is published in two parts in the Journal of Advanced Military Studies and by the US Marine Corps University Press, which is a professional university of the US Marine Corps located in Quantico, Virginia, listing the analysis as: “An Introduction to PLAN E.”
The publications contain the following clause: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Marine Corps University, the U.S. Marine Corps, the Department of the Navy, or the U.S. government.
Publishing an article is ordinarily consistent with some level of tacit approval of its general tenor, especially when the article points an accusing finger at the publishing entities’ main source of existence. That’s tacit approval, in spades. Further to the point, by all appearances, the military seems to want Boulton’s thesis in the public domain as a wake up call and more likely as a brilliant strategy going forward.
The analyst/author Elizabeth G. Boulton, PhD (Australian National University) and MA of Climate Policy (University of Melbourne) is a former army major in the Australian Defence Force, serving in East Timor (1999) and Iraq (2004) and undertaking logistics work in Ghana, Nigeria, and Sudan, and a lead research officer at army headquarters.
All quotations within this article come from Boulton’s article or from the following synopsis of the article:2
A key finding in the landmark study, which applies war theory and military strategy to the dynamics of the climate and ecological crises, states that activities of military and intelligent agencies are: “Accelerating the likelihood of triggering a worst-case ‘Hothouse Earth’ scenario that would make the planet ‘unlivable for most species.”
That’s a very powerful statement that’s seldom found outside of spirited scientific analyses. Yet, it is lodged within the heartbeat of the US Marine Corps, a tacit endorsement that’s desperately needed for the political establishment to get the hint, hello out there, all is not well. For decades now Congress has handled climate change like a hot potato. That’s an amateurish way to approach an existential threat.
Moreover, and even more damning, the study argues that various agencies of government “have become the biggest danger to planetary security, in effect, working to accelerate the ‘hyperthreat’ of climate and environmental change.”
According to the study: “The hyperthreat impact is an unprecedented combination of rapid global warming and the unraveling of Earth’s ecological systems.” Of heightened concern, the study warns that the hyperthreat’s most dangerous course of action is provoking cascading tipping elements thereby accelerating a transition to: “Hothouse Earth state uninhabitable for most species.”
That statement has strong endorsements throughout the world of science, to wit: “In 2019, Ripple and colleagues (2020) warned of untold suffering and declared a climate emergency together with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from 153 countries. They presented graphs of planetary vital signs indicating very troubling trends, along with little progress by humanity to address climate change. On the basis of these data and scientists’ moral obligation to ‘clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat,’ they called for transformative change.”3
Timeline for Action
The Boulton study places a timeline on taking action in order to prevent a worst case scenario: “Without concerted global action between 2022 and 2025, the most dangerous course of action is also the most likely course of action.”
Failure to address the danger within the 2022-25 timeline with proactive real time actual policies is explained in war terms: “The hyperthreat has ‘war-like destructive capabilities’ that make it hard to recognize the enormity of its destructive impacts or ‘who is responsible for its hostile actions.’ This is a phenomenon that humanity has never encountered before.”
The study identifies the difficult-to-grasp and stealthy nature of the hyperthreat by focusing on the main centre of gravity, which is its freedom of movement via invisibility and unknowability and human hesitancy to respond: “Human activity that fuels the hyperthreat is (1) often legal (2) has social license or (3) is understood as legitimate business or security activity; its contribution to slow violence is often obscured.”
For example, legitimate activity includes plans to exploit fossil fuel and natural ecological resources at rates and scales that exceed safe planetary boundaries: “Indeed, while declaring all manner of ‘net zero’ commitments, oil and gas firms continue to plan vast fossil fuel production projects. If executed, these would drive climate change beyond internationally-agreed temperature limits, leading to potentially catastrophic impacts.”
The world’s biggest oil and gas companies are projected to spend $932 billion by the end of 2030 developing new oil and gas fields, according to a new analysis of Rystad Energy, data by Global Witness and Oil Change International… And by the end of 2040, this figure grows to an even more staggering $1.5 trillion.”4
But, what if that same $1.5T was spent on renewables and mitigation measures, e.g., retrofitting buildings to maximum energy efficiency or sustainable public transportation or enhancing carbon sinks?
As for coal, China is now building or planning to build in China and elsewhere in the world new coal plants amounting to 176 gigawatts of coal capacity, enough to power 123 million homes. 5
“By seeking to protect the existing fossil fuel system, humanity’s security agencies are in effect working for the enemy.” Yet, this is not intentional behavior, rather, it’s the effect of national security institutions entangled within the status quo. It’s normal operational behavior.
Further clarification by Boulton: “After the Second World War, military strategy traditionally involved securing resources and protecting supply chains – all considered crucial to post-war rebuilding and prosperity narratives. But it is now clear that this very system, which military and security strategies are designed to support, is the primary driver of global insecurity.”
In a twisted manner, the very resources regarded as good and critical for functioning of the global system now threaten all forms of planetary life. “By applying economic, diplomatic, military, and other tools of force and power to participate in the ‘race for what’s left’ of Earth’s resources, humanity is unwittingly aiding the hyperthreat.”
Plan E
Dr. Boulton has elaborate plans to head off the biggest threat of all time, including a radical transformation of security paradigms. The next 8 years are pivotal. Defense resources need to develop a “whole of society approach, bringing into the fold numerous civilian capabilities to leverage Earth’s entire human population as an asset.”
The list of recommendations is beyond the scope of this article, but a couple of ideas follow herein:
For a full explanation, the link to Dr. Boulton’s article in the Journal of Advanced Military Studies, Marine Corps University Press go to: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/857233
One idea is establishment of a Global Climate Emergency Peace Treaty from 2022 to 2030 to allow nations to focus on the emergency hyper-response.
Another idea is to use international diplomacy to create a new, neutral, rules-based governing architecture for the world based on “ecological survival and safe Earth requirements… For this, we need to reimagine the role of great powers in the world, realigning geopolitical security with the overarching aim of containing the hyperthreat.”
Dr Boulton explores how ecological thinking can be used to reinvent traditional political institutions. Multilateralism should become ecomultilateralism to facilitate cooperation on caring for ecosystems and disaster response. “Earth citizenship’ could allow nations to mobilise the world’s 18 million work-ready forcibly displaced people in hyper-response work.”
In essence, “Plan E or a Grand Strategy for the Twenty-first Century Era of Entangled Security and Hyperthreats” utilizes a transdisciplinary approach to the idea of framing climate and environmental change as a new type of threat, a hyperthreat and when properly framed: “This approach contrasts to prior literature and longstanding geopolitical discourse that identify the risks of taking a securitization approach.” Instead, the author argues that it is now riskier not to consider climate and environmental change within a mainstream geopolitical and nation-state security strategy.
Dr. Boulton’s detailed analysis, combined with a generous layout of how to tackle the issue, is perhaps one of the finest approaches extant, bringing together a well-reasoned all-in all-together approach of forces to defeat a monster by the same forces that bred and fed the monster at its inception.
The Boulton thesis is an extraordinarily important statement of facts about the invisibility and difficultly of identifying risks that, in point of fact, are normal operating behavior inbred into the socio-economic fabric of late stage capitalism which, according to the Boulton thesis, can be detoured and maybe even defeated but only by well-directed powerful universal action commencing this decade.
But, the window for achievement is narrow.
Postscript: The US Supreme Court has declared war against the EPA by hampering, effectively eliminating, public policy to control polluting fossil fuels. This dangerous ruling effectively pokes a stick in the eye of military security concerns about Hothouse Earth by its own military and tens of thousands of scientists throughout the world, as the US takes one more gigantic step backwards into an era known as the Wild West when rugged individualism ruled the domain with guns blazing.
“Plan E: A Grand Strategy for the Twenty-first Century Era of Entangled Security and Hyperthreats” by Elizabeth G. Boulton, PhD, Publisher – Journal of Advanced Military Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1, 2022.
“Defence Agencies ‘Accelerating’ Risk of ‘Hothouse Earth’, US Military Study Warns”, David Spratt, Climate Code Red, June 27, 2022.
“World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency 2021”, BioScience, Oxford Academic, September 9, 2021.
“World’s Biggest Fossil Fuel Firms Projected to Spend Almost a Trillion Dollars on New Oil and Gas Fields by 2030”, Global Witness and Oil Change International, April 12, 2022.
New Scientist, April 26, 2022
“India Expected to Commission 10 Thermal Coal Power Plants in 2022-23, add 7,010 MW.” S&P Global Commodity Insights, June 3, 2022.
From the New York Times “The ruined industrial city in eastern Ukraine fell after months of Russian bombardment and weeks of urban combat. Like Mariupol, it became emblematic of the savagery of the war.”
Read similar articles and learn the content rarely follows the headline. Search Google and try to find images of a ruined and severely shelled Severodonetsk. Well, here is one. Take this headline from WION – World Is One News with global headquarters in New Delhi.
“High-resolution images collected by Maxar Technologies over a period of 24 hours on Monday show damaged buildings from artillery shelling in downtown Severodonetsk and around a hospital. From a hole in the roof, to charred buildings, the images showcase how the area has been laid waste by constant shelling.”
Note: Several online media published the exact same display of images and commentary.
Well, let’s see. Here is the first image.
Satellite image shows destroyed buildings in Rubizhne, Ukraine, near Sievierodonetsk.
Oh, not Sievierodonetsk, but a village near Sievierodonetsk.
“Severodonetsk, an industrial hub, is key to Russia’s plan as its fall would open up the route to Kramatorsk, the main city of Donetsk. At least 70 per cent of Severodonetsk is reported to be under Russian control, though the Ukrainian forces are fighting back. Ukraine repelling Russian attacks. The regional governor, Serhiy Haidai said tough street battles were continuing with varying degrees of success. ‘The situation constantly changes, but the Ukrainians are repelling attacks,’ he said.”
Next image.
A 40-meter crater can be seen next to destroyed buildings.
Evidently, this is not the industrial city of Sievierodonetsk.
“Sievierodonetsk important for Putin. Russia seeks victory in Sievierodonetsk, which would give it full control of Luhansk province. When Vladimir Putin began his invasion on 24 February, he pledged to “liberate” the parts of Donetsk and Luhansk where were in separatist hands.”
Next image.
This image shows a field peppered with craters caused by artillery, northwest of Slovyansk
“Russian forces have been focused for weeks on seizing Sievierodonetsk, which was home to some 106,000 people before Moscow invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, but the Luhansk region’s governor said Ukrainian forces would not surrender the city.:
Next image.
This image shows active artillery shelling in the town of Bogorodichne, Ukraine, northwest of Slovyansk
Where are photos of Sievierodonetsk?
“Widespread destruction (of Sievierodonetsk?)”
O.K.
This satellite image shows damaged buildings around a hospital in Sievierodonetsk, Ukraine
Wait a second!
(1) Where is the widespread destruction? I only see one possible bomb hit. Other dark spots are shadows.
(2) Is that really a hospital? The Red Cross is on top of vegetation. Has it been photoshopped? Note there is no parking lot nor cars parked by the “hospital.” Don’t people work there or visit?
CNN published the same image under the headline, “At least 2 hospitals hit by military strikes in Severodonetsk and Rubizhne, new satellite images show.” Does the image show a bombed hospital?
There must be some images of this heavily shelled Severodonetsk. Googled “heavily shelled Severodonetsk.”
Came up with the same previous image provided by Maxar Technologies, which showed destroyed buildings in Rubizhne, Ukraine near Severodonetsk. All other images were those of smoke rising over Severodonetsk. None of the images showed damage to the city.
Smoke rises during shelling of the city of Severodonetsk in eastern Ukraine on May 21
The YouTube video showed only some noise and smoke, no extensive damages
Washington Post
“Ukrainian soldiers in Severodonetsk, the eastern city under continuous Russian bombardment, are holding their positions despite relentless shelling, and troops are “doing their utmost to defend the city,” its mayor, Oleksandr Stryuk, said Tuesday. The satellite images show fields full of artillery craters, city blocks reduced to rubble and a 130-foot bomb scar.
The Ukrainian government has said that about 90 percent of the buildings are destroyed.”
Press on the link The satellite images show and it will return to the articles – no images, that’s right, no images, and no “about 90 percent of the buildings are destroyed. ”
Conclusion
Western media, which tends to always degrade its adversaries, as long as they continue to be adversaries — Russia, China, Iran. Gaddafi Libya and not the post-Gaddafi Libya — report a one-sided view of the war. Other media, attempting to capture audience, sensationalize catastrophes. Obtaining credible reports of the war in Ukraine requires shuffling through several accounts and piecing them together to make a logical analysis. Undoubtedly, Severodonetsk suffered from shelling and had some serious, but not extensive damage. The Russians encircled the city, destroyed the bridges, and then entered the city, which the Ukraine army was not equipped to defend. After two weeks of retreating within the city, the remnants of the Ukrainian army left.
When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th, I was easing my way into a new job and in the throes of the teaching year. But that war quickly hijacked my life. I spend most of my day poring over multiple newspapers, magazines, blogs, and theTwitter feedsof various military mavens, a few of whom have been catapulted by the war from obscurity to a modicum of fame. Then there are all those websites to check out, their color-coded maps and daily summaries catching that conflict’s rapid twists and turns.
Don’t think I’m writing this as a lament, however. I’m lucky. I have a good, safe life and follow events there from the comfort of my New York apartment. For Ukrainians, the war is anything but a topic of study. It’s a daily, deadly presence. The lives of millions of people who live in or fled the war zone have been shattered. As all of us know too well, many of that country’s cities have been badly damaged or lie in ruins, including people’s homes and apartment buildings, the hospitals they once relied on when ill, the schools they sent their children to, and the stores where they bought food and other basic necessities. Evenchurcheshave been hit. In addition, nearly13 millionUkrainians (including nearlytwo-thirdsof all its children) are either displaced in their own country or refugees in various parts of Europe, mainly Poland. Millions of lives, in other words, have been turned inside out, while a return to anything resembling normalcy now seems beyond reach.
No one knows how many noncombatants have been slaughtered by bullets, bombs, missiles, or artillery. And all this has been made so much worse by thewar crimesthe Russians have committed. How does a traumatized society like Ukraine ever become whole again? And in such a disastrous situation, what could the future possibly hold? Who knows?
To break my daily routine of following that ongoing nightmare from such a distance, I decided to look beyond the moment and try to imagine how it might indeed end.
Current Battlelines
It’s easy to forget just how daring (or rash) Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine was. After all, Russia aside, Ukraine is Europe’s biggest country in land area and its sixth-largest in population. True, Putin had acted aggressively before, but on a far more modest and careful scale, annexing Crimea and fostering the rise of two breakaway enclaves in parts of Donbas, the eastern Ukrainian provinces of Lugansk and Donetsk, which are industrial and resource-rich areas adjoining Russia. Neither was his 2015 intervention in Syria to save the government of Bashar al-Assad a wild-eyed gamble. He deployed no ground troops there, relying solely on airstrikes and missile attacks to avoid an Afghanistan-style quagmire.
Ukraine, though, was a genuinely rash act. Russia began the war with what seemed to be a massive advantage by any imaginable measure — from gross domestic product (GDP) to numbers of warplanes, tanks, artillery, warships, and missiles. Little wonder, perhaps, that Putin assumed his troops would take the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, within weeks, at most. And he wasn’t alone. Western military experts were convinced that his army would make quick work of its Ukrainian counterpart, even if the latter’s military had, since 2015, been trained and armed by theUnited States,Britain, and Canada.
Yet the campaign to conquer key cities — Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, and Kharkiv — failed disastrously. The morale of the Ukrainians remained high and their military tactics adept. By the end of March, Russia had lost tanks and aircraft worth an estimated$5 billion, not to speak of up toa quarterof the troops it had sent into battle. Its military supply system proved shockingly inept, whether for repairing equipment or delivering food, water, and medical supplies to the front.
Subsequently, however, Russian forces have made significant gains in the south and southeast, occupying part of the Black Sea coast, Kherson province (which lies north of Crimea), most of Donbas in the east, and Zaporozhizhia province in the southeast. They have also created a patchy land corridor connecting Crimea to Russia for the first time since that area was taken in 2014.
Still, the botched northern campaign and the serial failures of a military that had been infused with vast sums of money and supposedly subjected to widespreadmodernization and reformwas stunning. In the United States, the intrepid Ukrainian resistance and its battlefield successes soon produced a distinctly upbeat narrative of that country as the righteous David defending the rules and norms of the international order against Putin’s Russian Goliath.
In May, however, things began to change. The Russians were by then focused on taking the Donbas region. And bit by bit, Russia’s advantages — shorter supply lines, terrain better suited to armored warfare, and an overwhelming advantage in armaments, especially artillery — started paying off. Most ominously, its troops began encircling a large portion of Ukraine’s battle-tested, best-trained forces in Donbas where besieged towns like Sievierodonetsk, Lysychansk, Lyman, and Popasna suddenly hit the headlines.
Now, at the edge of… well, who knows what, here are three possible scenarios for the ending of this ever more devastating war.
1. De Facto Partition
If — and, of course, I have to stress the conditional here, given repeatedly unforeseen developments in this war — Putin’s army takes the entire Donbas region plus the whole Black Sea coast, rendering Ukraine smaller and landlocked, he might declare his “special military operation” a success, proclaim a ceasefire, order his commanders to fortify and defend the new areas they occupy, and saddle the Ukrainians with the challenge of expelling the Russian troops or settling for a de facto partition of the country.
Putin could respond to any Ukrainian efforts to claw back lost lands with air and missile strikes. These would only exacerbate thecolossal economic hitUkraine has already taken, including not just damaged or destroyed infrastructure and industries, a monthly budget shortfall of$5 billion, and an anticipated45% declinein GDP this year, but billions of dollars in revenue lost because it can’t ship its main exports via the Russian-dominated Black Sea. An April estimate of the cost of rebuilding Ukraine ranged from$500 billion to $1 trillion, far beyond Kyiv’s means.
Assuming, on the other hand, that Ukraine accepted a partition, it would forfeit substantial territory and President Volodymyr Zelensky could face a staggering backlash at home. Still, he may have little choice as his country could find the economic and military strain of endless fighting unbearable.
Ukraine’s Western backers may become war weary, too. They’ve just begun to feel the economic blowback from the war and the sanctions imposed on Russia, pain that will only increase. While those sanctions have indeed hurt Russia, they’ve also contributed to skyrocketing energy and food prices in the West (even as Putin profits by selling his oil, gas, and coal at higher prices). The U.S. inflation rate, at8.6%last month, is the highest in 40 years, while the Congressional Budget Office has revised estimates of economic growth — 3.1% this year —downto 2.2% for 2023 and 1.5% for 2024. All this as mid-term elections loom and President Biden’s approval ratings, now at39.7%, continue to sink.
Europe is also in economic trouble.Inflationin the Eurozone was 8.1% in May, the highest since 1997, and energy prices exploded. Within days of the Russian invasion, European natural gas prices had jumped nearly70%, while oil hit$105a barrel, an eight-year high. And the crunch onlycontinues. Inflation in Britain, at 8.2%, is the worst since 1982. On June 8th, gasoline prices there reached a17-year high. The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Developmentanticipatesthat the French, German, and Italian economies (the three largest in Europe) will contract for the rest of this year, with only France’s registering an anemic 0.2% growth in the fourth quarter. No one can know for sure whetherEuropeand theU.S. are headed for a recession, but many economists and business leaders consider it likely.
Such economic headwinds, along with the diminution of the early euphoria created by Ukraine’s impressive battlefield successes, could produce “Ukraine fatigue” in the West. The war has already lost prominence in news headlines. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s biggest supporters, including the Biden administration, could soon find themselves preoccupied with economic and political challenges at home and ever less eager to keep billions of dollars in economic aid and weaponry flowing.
The combination of Ukraine fatigue and Russian military successes, however painfully and brutally gained, may be precisely what Vladimir Putin is betting on. The Western coalition of more than three dozen states is certainly formidable, but he’s savvy enough to know that Russia’s battlefield advantages could make it ever harder for the U.S. and its allies to maintain their unity. The possibility of negotiations with Putin has beenraisedin France, Italy, and Germany. Ukraine won’t be cut off economically or militarily by the West, but it could find Western support ever harder to count on as time passes, despiteverbal assurancesof solidarity.
All of this could, in turn, set the stage for a de facto partition scenario.
2. Neutrality With Sweeteners
Before the war, Putin pushed for a neutral Ukraine that would foreswear all military alliances. No dice, said bothUkraineandNATO. That alliance’s decision, at its 2008 Bucharest summit, to open the door to that country (and Georgia) was irrevocable. A month after the Russian invasion began,Zelenskyput neutrality on the table, but it was too late. Putin had already opted to achieve his aims on the battlefield and was confident he could.
Still, Russia and Ukraine have now been fighting for more than three months. Both have suffered heavy losses and each knows that the war could drag on for years at a staggering cost without either achieving its aims. The Russian president does control additional chunks of Ukrainian territory, but he may hope to find some way of easing Western sanctions and also avoiding being wholly dependent on China.
These circumstances might revive theneutrality option. Russia would retain its land corridor to Crimea, even if with some concessions to Ukraine. It would receive a guarantee that thewater canalsflowing southward to that peninsula from the city of Kherson, which would revert to Ukrainian control, would never again be blocked. Russia would not annex the “republics” it created in the Donbas in 2014 and would withdraw from some of the additional land it’s seized there. Ukraine would be free to receive arms and military training from any country, but foreign troops and bases would be banned from its territory.
Such a settlement would require significant Ukrainian sacrifices, which is why candidate membership in the European Union (EU) and, more importantly, a fast track to full membership — one of that country’s key aspirations — as well as substantial long-term Western aid for economic reconstruction would be a necessary part of any deal. Expediting its membership would be a heavy lift for the EU and such an aid package would be costly to the Europeans and Americans, so they’d have to decide how much they were willing to offer to end Europe’s biggest conflict since World War II.
3. A New Russia
Ever since the war began, commentators and Western leaders, including President Biden, have intimated that it should produce, if not “regime change” in Russia, then Putin’s departure. And there have been no shortage ofpredictionsthat the invasion will indeed prove Putin’s death knell. There’s no evidence, however, that the war has turned his country’s political and military elite against him or any sign of mass disaffection that could threaten the state.
Still, assume for a moment that Putin does depart, voluntarily or otherwise. One possibility is that he would be replaced by someone from his inner circle who then would make big concessions to end the war, perhaps even a return to the pre-invasion status quo with tweaks. But why would he (and it will certainly be a male) do that if Russia controls large swathes of Ukrainian land? A new Russian leader might eventually cut a deal, providing sanctions are lifted, but assuming that Putin’s exit would be a magic bullet is unrealistic.
Another possibility: Russia unexpectedly becomes a democracy following prolonged public demonstrations. We’d better hope that happens without turmoil and bloodshed because it has nearly6,000nuclear warheads, shares landborderswith 14 states, and maritime borders with three more. It is also the world’s largest country, with more than 17 million square kilometers (44% larger than runner-up Canada).
So, if you’re betting on a democratic Russia anytime soon, you’d better hope that the transformation happens peacefully. Upheaval in a vast nuclear-armed country would be a disaster. Even if the passage to democracy isn’t chaotic and violent, such a government’s first order of business wouldn’t be to evacuate all occupied territories. Yet it would be so much more likely than the present one to renounce its post-invasion territorial gains, though perhaps not Russian-majority Crimea, which, in the era of the Soviet Union, was part of the Russian republic until, in 1954, it was transferred to the Ukrainian republic by fiat.
This Needs to End
The suffering and destruction in Ukraine and the economic turmoil the war has produced in the West should be compelling enough reasons to end it. Ditto the devastation it continues to create in some of the world’s poorest countries likeKenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, andYemen. Along with devastating droughts and local conflicts, it has led to staggering increases in the price of basic foods (with both Ukrainian and Russian grains, to one degree or another, blocked from the market). More than27 millionpeople are already facing acute food shortages or outright starvation in those four nations alone, thanks at least in part to the conflict in Ukraine.
Yes, that war is Europe’s biggest in a generation, but it’s not Europe’s alone. The pain it’s producing extends to people in faraway lands already barely surviving and with no way to end it. And sadly enough, no one who matters seems to be thinking about them. The simple fact is that, in 2022, with so much headed in the wrong direction, a major war is the last thing this planet needs.
Canada is at war with Russia. But the government doesn’t want to talk about it.
On Saturday the New York Timesreported that Canadian special forces are part of a NATO network providing weapons and training to Ukrainian forces. The elite troops are also in the country gathering intelligence on Russian operations.
The Department of National Defence refusedOttawa Citizen military reporter David Pugliese’s request for comment on the US paper’s revelations. But in late January Global News and CTV reported that the usually highly secretive special forces were sent to Ukraine. (Canadian special forces have been dispatched secretly to many war zones.)
Alongside special forces, an unknown number of former Canadian troops have been fighting in Ukraine. There have been a bevy of stories about Canadians traveling to Ukraine to join the fight and organizers initially claimed over 500 individuals joined while the Russian government recently estimated that 600 Canadians were fighting there (Both the Canadian organizers and Moscow would have reasons to inflate the numbers). Early on, Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly and Defence Minister Anita Anand both encouraged Canadians to join the fight, which may have violated Canada’s Foreign Enlistment Act.
Top commanders have also joined the war. After more than 30 years in the Canadian Forces lieutenant-general Trevor Cadieu retired on April 5 (amidst a rape investigation) and was in Ukraine days later. At one-point Cadieu was favoured to lead the Canadian Forces.
On Saturday a number of media outlets reported that former Chief of the Defence Staff Rick Hillier is heading a strategic advisory group supporting and advising Ukraine’s Territorial Defence Force. The mandate of the Hillier led council is to equip Ukraine’s 100,000-member volunteer reserve force.
Over the past four months Ottawa has delivered or allocated over $600 million in weapons to Ukraine. They’ve sent 20,000 artillery shells, 4,500 M72 rocket launchers, 7,500 hand grenades, a hundred Carl-Gustaf M2 anti-tank weapons, thousands of rounds of ammunition, light armoured vehicles and other arms to fight Russia.
Canada has also adopted an unprecedented sanctions regime on Russia. According to Politico, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland led the international charge to freeze over $300 billion in Russian Central Bank assets. Ottawa is also leading the international campaign to seize Russian assets and give them to Ukraine.
Ottawa has offered more than two billion dollars in direct assistance to the Ukrainian government since the start of the year. Under the auspices of the International Monetary Fund Canada instigated the multi-donor Administered Account for Ukraine. A sizable share of Canada’s assistance has gone to prosecuting the war.
Ottawa has also put up millions of dollars for the International Criminal Court to investigate Russian officials and has labeled Russia’s war a “genocide”. Canadian officials have repeatedly described the conflict as a fight for freedom while openly spurning peace negotiations.
The past four months of fighting should be viewed — at least in part — as an escalation in a eight years US/UK/Canada proxy war with Russia. Canadians greatly assisted Ukrainian forces fighting in a conflict that saw 14,000 killed in the Donbas before Russia’s illegal invasion.
Canada played a significant role in arming and training the Ukrainian military long before Russia’s brutal February 24 invasion. The federal government spent $900 million to train Ukrainian forces following the Canadian-backed overthrow of elected President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Between April 2015 and February 2022 Canadian troops — rotated every six months — trained 33,346 Ukrainian soldiers as part of Operation UNIFIER. Canadian military trainers helped restore Ukraine’s “decrepit” army prompting former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to dub former Canadian defence minister Jason Kenney “the godfather of the modern Ukrainian army” due to his role in instigating Operation Unifier.
UNIFIER reinforced Ukrainian forces fighting in the east and enabled Kyiv to avoid its commitments under the Minsk II peace accord, which was overseen by France and Germany in February 2015. When UNIFIER was launched the Russian Embassy in Ottawa released a statement labeling the mission a “deplorable” move “to assist the military buildup playing into the hands of ‘party of war in Kiev’”, which was their pejorative description for Poroshenko’s government.
Prior to the February 24 Russian invasion, the US and UK had also spent billions of dollars training and arming the Ukrainian military. The CIA ran a secret training program in Ukraine and over the past four months the agency has helped direct Ukrainian war efforts. Over the past few months, the US, UK and other NATO states have plowed tens of billions of dollars of weaponry into the country.
While more details on the scope of Western involvement will likely emerge in the coming months and years, there is enough information in the public record to conclude that Canada’s indeed at war in Ukraine. Further escalation is likely, particularly with Lithuania’s recent blockade of the Russian territory of Kalingrad. The 700 Canadian troops leading a NATO mission in Latvia will be on the frontline if fighting spreads to the Baltic states.
Despite facts on the ground, there’s been no vote in Parliament about whether it’s a good idea for Canada to go to war with a nuclear armed state.
The shifting baseline syndrome requires today’s people disavowing things written 10 years ago, even five years ago, but those books, articles, whitepapers and radio broadcasts are actually ahead of their time . . .
And what is that expiration date for good, sound, righteous news and writing and broadcasting?
I see more and more young people, and older ones, relying on up-to-the-minute news and up-to-the-minute authors to set the stage of their own personal collapse. Who do you need to hear, watch and rarely debate to help frame collapse?
Analysis paralysis, climate change fatigue, and, alas, the insanity of echo chambers and the constant high pitched whine of the mainstream news, the mainstream thinkers and all the handlers of us, including the gatekeepers, those are today’s diseases, much more than mental malaise.
This is the groundhog day show, when people today think they are in the know because of some piece of ProPublica, investigative new or news feature, because of another hundredth documentary consumed in a year, and all the noise coming from these script readers and yellers and scammers we call the mainstream media.
For instance, how do we feed out kids, get our roads fixed, live healthy, and pull down the system, end the system, with stories like this?
Susquehanna founder and TikTok investor Jeff Yass has avoided $1 billion in taxes while largely escaping public scrutiny. He’s now pouring his money into campaigns to cut taxes and support election deniers.
by Justin Elliott, Jesse Eisinger, Paul Kiel, Jeff Ernsthausen and Doris Burke
There is no difference between Tucker or Rachel. They are in it for the money, the accumulation of power, and the attention. Narcissim, and neglecting context and history and mutliple points of view, definitely defining characteristics of this day and age.
And so many wagons are circling, so many lobbies running the America citizen into the ground. So much is broken and wrong about the way the USA operates, that we are at the point of living in a world of thirty five adult, full-grown clowns coming out of the VW Bug or compact car.
I have these conversations daily about how much the average person has abandoned sanity or any faith or confidence in systems meant for The People, meant as entitlements for WE The People. That the pigs of commerce are gouging Americans on every leveL, that the housing crisis is more crises, that all those bombs and bullets and balistics are shipping to the Zionist Zelensky, that all of that is happening, but, oh, my, what to do about it?
We have insane people in positions of power, positions of middling influence, and then, of course, policy makers are in the pockets of the millionaires and billionaires, and then, we are at a point where, say, the community where I reside, Waldport and Newport, the dam holding our water source is crumbling and any action on it has to wait until the lottery numbers come in. Casino capitalism. Money for infrastructure gained through gaming the system, through gambling addiction.
Newport City Council approved $600,000 from federal relief funds for design tasks to replace the Big Creek dams, keeping the project moving while the city awaits state lottery bond funds and hopes for a much larger contribution from the federal government.
Last year, the Oregon Legislature approved a budget with $14 million appropriated for design and replacement of the earthen Big Creek dams, which are vulnerable to failure from relatively minor seismic event and showing signs of internal seepage. Those funds would bring the city through the design process and might contribute some to initial construction. (Source)
The incredible darkness of their lies, all of them, until here we are, stuck in a loop with Pig Trump and Pig Biden and all the Pigs of Politics.
How much money is funneled into the so-called Pentagon?
Really, how dependent is this country, USA, on the military machines? Military is everything — logistics, air, water, land, space, burgers and buttons, and trillions of dollars spent to prop up the welfare queens and kings of profiteering. War mercenaries, and profit players.
And what is this new green economy? What is this divestment from hydrocarbons? Americans and many in the Woke UK and EU, they live in a make-believe world, fully Disneyfied. Absolutely stupid greenies in terms of how things are made — think steel and aluminum and concrete and, well, embedded energy and life-cycles of products all embedded in oil!
Oh the headlines:
Tryzub: The National Revolution Fantasized by Ukranian Nationalists
‘Ukraine Fatigue’ Intensifies as Sanctions Boomerang Ravages Western Economies
So here we are: young people have no idea how the old days were the days of now, where solutions to the many problems were in the hands of communities, with farming, arts, communitarian spirit, sharing economy, mutual aid, rebuffing all those powers, all those instruments of suppression and oppression. The good old days were never put into play to the point of mass movements to oust the purveyors of pain, from militaries, to the government, to the corporation.
The good old ways, that is, those that embodied a spirit of honor and sharing, what the the Iroquois Great Law of Peace was about: a constitution that established a democracy between five Iroquois-speaking tribes—the Seneca, Cayuga, Oneida, Onondaga, and Mohawk. This group of five nations, called the Iroquois Confederacy, was established around 1450.
Making decisions now that will affect seven generations out originated with the Iroquois – Great Law of the Iroquois – which holds appropriate to think seven generations ahead (about 525 years into the future, which is counted by multiplying the 75 years of an average human lifespan by 7) and decide whether the decisions they make today would benefit those unborn generations.
In 1744, the Onondaga leader Canassatego gave a speech urging the contentious 13 colonies to unite, as the Iroquois had at the signing of the Treaty of Lancaster. This cultural exchange inspired the English colonist Benjamin Franklin to print Canassatego’s speech.
“We heartily recommend Union and a good Agreement between you our Brethren,” Canassatego had said. “Never disagree, but preserve a strict Friendship for one another, and thereby you, as well as we, will become the stronger. Our wise Forefathers established Union and Amity between the Five Nations; this has made us formidable; this has given us great Weight and Authority with our neighboring Nations. We are a powerful Confederacy; and, by your observing the same Methods our wise Forefathers have taken, you will acquire fresh Strength and Power; therefore whatever befalls you, never fall out one with another.”
He used a metaphor that many arrows cannot be broken as easily as one. This inspired the bundle of 13 arrows held by an eagle in the Great Seal of the United States. (source)
Their constitution, recorded and kept alive on a two row wampum belt, held many concepts familiar to United States citizens today.
Iroquois Confederacy and the Great Law of Peace
United States Constitution
Restricts members from holding more than one office in the Confederacy.
Article I, Section 6, Clause 2, also known as the Ineligibility Clause or the Emoluments Clause bars members of serving members of Congress from holding offices established by the federal government, while also baring members of the executive branch or judicial branch from serving in the U.S. House or Senate.
Outlines processes to remove leaders within the Confederacy
Article II, Section 4 reads “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and the conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
Designates two branches of legislature with procedures for passing laws
Article I, Section 1, or the Vesting Clauses, read “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.” It goes on to outline their legislative powers.
Delineates who has the power to declare war
Article I, Section 8, Clause 11, also known as the War Powers Clause, gives Congress the power, “To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;”
Creates a balance of power between the Iroquois Confederacy and individual tribes
The differing duties assigned to the three branches of the U.S. Government: Legislative (Congress), Executive (President), and Judicial (Supreme Court) act to balance and separate power in government.
Oh, those old ways, no? Ignored: Native American democratic principles focus on the creation of strong kinship bonds that promote leadership in which honor is not earned by material gain but by service to others. Read again — honor not earned by material gain but service to others.
Imagine that tattoo on the foreheads of these evil politicians.
Check out my old stuff, long form interviews, over the radio. Here, on my Word Press site:
Yes, old stuff I uploaded, and, who the hell listens to old radio shows in this day and age? Who would care about my own education during these 56 minute episodes? People like authors, scientists, food experts, activists, etc.?
Check it out — Tipping Points: Voices from the Edge, Spokane, low power community radio! Here, my preamble. Note that I am not a greenie weenie, and I have always doubted the sustainability arena, the New Urbanism crap, all of that, really, since all of what I have learned in courses and certifications and degrees is that CAPITALISM is the bulldozer and the media manipulator of any possible bottom up way to solve myriad of problems, not just tied to resource piracy, biopiray, land grabs, resource thefts, pollution-pollution-pollution, toxicity-toxicity-toxicity.
Podcast list— Paul’s radio show from the mid-2000s. Ironically, poets, thinkers, scientists, community engagement experts, and book authors talked to me with an open mind. I engaged in exchanges of ideas. I was not a stenographer, and yes, I do jump in and have my own spin or take on things. I, of course, have changed my way toward enlightenment compared to the period of 2001 – 2011 I was in Spokane, writing, creating columns, teaching, and involved in activism. I am more grounded in my socialism and my communism. Working anywhere in the USA, Amerikkka, means covering up or masking one’s true self. Capitalism is a form of totalitarianism, and fascism in its own way. I have witnessed colonization of formerly independent thinkers, then a hive mentality take over and then just Plain Jane Stockholm Syndrome seeping into the collective, at large, especially within Democratic Party supporters. Academics. Woke folk. Et al. Enjoy these people, these historic and cutting edge long-form radio conversations!
Note: Realize that the greenie weenies, the Green New Deal (not for nature and people) proponents, the end of fossil fuel folk, all those liberals in the liberal managerial class, please, realize, that I was up against them. For this radio station, this low power community radio station, I had back-stabbers and retrogrades. If you realize the value of this body of work, in a span of two years (and I did work for a living, since this was a gratis gig), then you might understand where I am now, listening to and observing the rot, smelling the putridity, and all the monetizing of some really bad show. Good ones, too, thank goodness, supported me, but I was already deeply victimized by cancel culture. Some of the worse are the compliant ones, the herd, those that call themselves green and organic. However, many of those types hated my show, hated my work, and, well, many loved the work, but those are not the pied piper types. It’s the haters who come out from their dirty sheets at night like an army of bedbugs.
This past week, as part of its policy to dominate the American hemisphere, the United States government organised the 9th Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles. US President Joe Biden made it clear early on that three countries in the hemisphere (Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela) would not be invited to the event, claiming that they are not democracies. At the same time, Biden was reportedly planning an upcoming visit to Saudi Arabia – a self-described theocracy. Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador questioned the legitimacy of Biden’s exclusionary stance, and so Mexico, Bolivia, and Honduras refused to come to the event. As it turned out, the summit was a fiasco.
Down the road, over a hundred organisations hosted a People’s Summit for Democracy, where thousands of people from across the hemisphere gathered to celebrate the actual democratic spirit which emerges from the struggles of peasants and workers, students and feminists, and all the people who are excluded from the gaze of the powerful. At this gathering, the presidents of Cuba and Venezuela joined in online to celebrate this festival of democracy and to condemn the weaponisation of democratic ideals by the United States and its allies.
Next year, 2023, will be the bicentennial of the Monroe Doctrine, when the US asserted its hegemony over the American hemisphere. The malign spirit of the Monroe Doctrine not only continues but has now been extended by the US government into a kind of Global Monroe Doctrine. In order to assert this preposterous claim on the entire planet, the United States has pursued a policy to ‘weaken’ what it sees as ‘near peer rivals’, namely China and Russia.
Philip Guston (Canada), Blackboard, 1969.
In July, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research – along with Monthly Review and No Cold War – will produce a booklet on the reckless military escalation by the US government against those whom it sees as its adversaries – mainly China and Russia. This booklet will include essays by John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review, Deborah Veneziale, a journalist based in Italy, and John Ross, a member of the No Cold War collective. In the vein of that booklet, which will be announced in this newsletter, No Cold War has also produced briefing no. 3, Is the United States Preparing for War with Russia and China?, on Washington’s sabre-rattling and alarming march toward nuclear primacy.
The war in Ukraine demonstrates a qualitative escalation of the United States’ willingness to use military force. In recent decades, the US launched wars on developing countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Serbia. In these campaigns, the US knew it enjoyed overwhelming military superiority and that there was no risk of a nuclear retaliation. However, in threatening to bring Ukraine into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the US was prepared to risk crossing what it knew to be the ‘red lines’ of the nuclear armed state of Russia. This raises two questions: why has the US undertaken this escalation, and how far is the US now prepared to go in the use of military force against not only the Global South but major powers such as China or Russia?
Using Military Force to Compensate for Economic Decline
The answer to ‘why’ is clear: the US has lost in peaceful economic competition to developing countries in general and China in particular. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in 2016 China overtook the US as the world’s largest economy. As of 2021, China accounted for 19% of the global economy, compared to the US at 16%. This gap is only growing wider, and, by 2027, the IMF projects that China’s economy will outsize the US by nearly 30%. However, the US has maintained unrivalled global military supremacy – its military expenditure is larger than the next nine highest spending countries combined. Seeking to maintain unipolar global dominance, the US is increasingly substituting peaceful economic competition with military force.
Ikeda Manabu (Japan), Meltdown, 2013.
A good starting point to understand this strategic shift in US policy is the speech given by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on 26 May 2022. In it, Blinken openly admitted that the US does not seek military equality with other states, but military supremacy, particularly with respect to China: ‘President Biden has instructed the Department of Defense to hold China as its pacing challenge, to ensure that our military stays ahead’. However, with nuclear armed states such as China or Russia, military supremacy necessitates achieving nuclear supremacy – an escalation above and beyond the current war in Ukraine.
The Pursuit of Nuclear Primacy
Since the beginning of the 21st century, the US has systematically withdrawn from key treaties limiting the threat of use of nuclear weapons: in 2002, the US unilaterally exited from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; in 2019, the US abandoned the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty; and, in 2020, the US withdrew from the Open Skies Treaty. Abandoning these treaties strengthened the US’ ability to seek nuclear supremacy.
Natalia Goncharova (Russia), Angels Throwing Stones on the City, 1911.
The ultimate aim of this US policy is to acquire ‘first strike’ capacity against Russia and China – the ability to inflict damage with a first use of nuclear weapons against Russia or China to the extent that it effectively prevents retaliation. As John Bellamy Foster has noted in a comprehensive study of this US nuclear build up, even in the case of Russia – which possesses the world’s most advanced non-US nuclear arsenal – this would ‘deny Moscow a viable second-strike option, effectively eliminating its nuclear deterrent altogether, through “decapitation”’. In reality, the fallout and threat of nuclear winter from such a strike would threaten the entire world.
This policy of nuclear primacy has long been pursued by certain circles within Washington. In 2006, it was argued in the leading US foreign policy journal Foreign Affairs that ‘It will probably soon be possible for the United States to destroy the long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia or China with a first strike’. Contrary to these hopes, the US has not yet been able to achieve a first strike capacity, but this is due to development of hypersonic missiles and other weapons by Russia and China – not a change in US policy.
From its attacks on Global South countries to its increased willingness to go to war with a great power such as Russia to attempting to gain first strike nuclear capacity, the logic behind the escalation of US militarism is clear: the United States is increasingly employing military force to compensate for its economic decline. In this extremely dangerous period, it is vital for humanity that all progressive forces unite to meet this great threat.
Shefa Salem (Libya), KASKA,Dance of War, 2020.
In 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Global South remained gripped by a never-ending debt crisis, the United States bombed Iraq despite entreaties from the Iraqi government for a negotiated agreement. During that bombing, the Libyan writer Ahmad Ibrahim al-Faqih penned a lyrical poem, ‘Nafaq Tudiuhu Imra Wahida’ (‘A Tunnel Lit by a Woman’), in which he sang, ‘A time has passed, and another time has not come and will never come’. Gloom defined the moment.
Today, we are in very dangerous times. And yet, the despondency of al-Faqih does not define our sensibility. The mood has altered. There is a belief in a world beyond imperialism, a mood that is not only evident in countries such as Cuba and China, but equally in India and Japan, as well as amongst the hard-working people who would like our collective attention to be focused on the actual dilemmas of humanity and not on the ugliness of war and domination.
This March, Malian forces attacked Moura, a small sunbaked town in the middle of the country. The operation began on a market day, as locals streamed into the area with their livestock. Residents recall hearing helicopters slash the air and soldiers disembark with grim resolve. Malian forces and Russian-speaking combatants laid siege to the village for multiple days, reportedly slaughtering civilians and wreathing corpses in flames. In a clinically worded communiqué, the government announced that the army completed a “systematic cleaning of the zone” with “very precise intelligence,” killing 203 jihadists.
Immediately, investigators contested its account, Human Rights Watch labeling the operation “the worst atrocity in Mali’s decade-long armed conflict.” Estimates of civilian deaths range as high as 500. Another episode in a litany of atrocities, the United Nations has urged investigation of the latest scandal in Mali’s war against jihadism.
Yet the massacre also signifies the failure of United States policy, as Mali occupies the center of U.S. strategy in the Sahel region. Since 2007, U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) has vigorously partnered with states to combat jihadism, bolster influence, and check Russian and Chinese competition. Rather than secure peace, U.S. intervention has internationalized local conflicts, deepened social divisions and fostered militarism.
Its failure has profound roots. The Malian crisis and other conflicts are inseparable from a cascading history of U.S. interventionism in Africa.
Post-Colonial Militarism
AFRICOM policy directly builds on the Cold War. After World War II, the U.S. discreetly promoted Western retrenchment in Africa. Officials helped Europeans reassert colonial mastery in order to forge a unified capitalist bloc and support for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. They notably armed France during its bitter war in Algeria, which became the emblematic struggle over colonialism.
But as the conflict drained Western legitimacy, U.S. policy makers encouraged Europeans to substitute informal hegemony for territorial occupation. Paradoxically, a new imperial order emerged with decolonization. Western capitals maintained effective sovereignty through a balance of “soft” and “hard” power: the haze of ideology, capital markets, political pressure, military bases, and other tools that could plunge a former colony into chaos.
Lacking comparable tools in Africa, the U.S. initially outsourced imperialism to European allies. Yet gradually, the U.S. cast a searing shadow, backing coups to smother radicalism, open markets and combat Soviet influence.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo first felt its weight in 1960. U.S. officials regarded the country as a subterranean treasure trove brimming with strategic minerals. Yet they viewed its first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, with acute anxiety. Lumumba refused to accept Western hegemony, while celebrating Congolese independence as “a decisive step towards the liberation of the entire African continent.”
President Dwight D. Eisenhower wished he would fall into a river full of crocodiles. That summer, he schemed to assassinate Lumumba and install a pliant substitute. The CIA deemed “his removal” an “urgent and prime objective.”
Eventually, secessionists compelled Lumumba to request UN intervention. Yet as the historian Elizabeth Schmidt observes, the operation was “largely an American affair.” The U.S. ferried UN troops to the Congo, while snatching power from Lumumba. After he thwarted their grasp, the CIA helped local officials apprehend him. They handed Lumumba over to secessionists, who brutally murdered him before an approving audience of Western observers.
Lumumba’s assassination was a cruel premonition. In following years, U.S. leaders ruthlessly eliminated exponents of African liberation. They especially targeted Kwame Nkrumah, the elegant colossus of pan-Africanism. After Lumumba fell, Nkrumah warned that “neo-colonialism” threatened to subvert African independence, reducing states to shells “directed from outside.”
Nkrumah turned Ghana into a bastion of revolution, offering safe haven to anti-colonial movements and inspiring U.S. civil rights activists. In response, the State Department froze loans and depressed global cocoa prices, throttling Ghana’s economy. Officers finally struck in February 1966. U.S. officials gloated that the new military government was “almost pathetically pro-Western.”
In 1957, Ghana’s liberation was the symbolic catalyst of African independence, lending decolonization an irresistible air of inevitability. By contrast, Nkrumah’s downfall solidified an ominous trend toward military rule. Before 1965, coups were relatively rare. Within less than two decades, military leaders governed 40 percent of Africa.
Ultimately, U.S. strategy curbed the promise of independence and accelerated the drift toward militarism, while carving the continent into invisible yet enduring spheres of influence. Repeatedly, U.S. partners waged catastrophic proxy wars across the region. Nkrumah’s critique of neocolonialism proved prophetic: “For those who practise it, it means power without responsibility and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress.”
The Third Scramble
After the Cold War, official interest in the continent waned. But eventually, a new scramble for Africa ignited. Over the past two decades, the U.S. has rallied to contain Russian and Chinese influence, while securing access to strategic resources.
Above all, the 9/11 attacks put Africa back on the U.S.’s radar. Policy makers worried about the ability of African governments with limited penetrative powers and resources to confront jihadism. In particular, they regarded the Sahara as a blistering power vacuum of sand and stone, a scabrous waste where extremists operated beyond the reach of fragile Sahelian states.
Evincing racist overtones, U.S. officials evoked a continent full of “terrorist breeding grounds.” Gen. Charles Wald insisted, “We need to drain the swamp,” adding that, “The United States learned a lesson in Afghanistan — you don’t let things go.”
In 2007, the U.S. established AFRICOM, the first unified military command for Africa. Officials located its headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany, while amassing an extensive archipelago of bases. Tellingly, the central node was Camp Lemonnier, a former outpost of the French empire in Djibouti. Strategically perched on the Gulf of Aden, the sun-drenched fort sprawls across 500 acres. It became the busiest drone base outside Afghanistan, blowing its cover when a Predator drone crashed into a neighborhood with a live Hellfire missile.
By 2013, AFRICOM pursued programs in at least 49 countries. Once more, the U.S. discreetly trained local forces, collected intelligence and waged war.
That year, Capt. Robert Smith addressed Special Operations Command Africa at a formal ceremony. “Forces are deploying as we speak…. [Our] mission does not stop,” he stressed. “Some people like to think that Africa is our next ridgeline,” he said, pausing for effect. “Africa is our current ridgeline.”
Captain Smith then cited his commander, Gen. James Linder: “Africa is the battlefield of tomorrow, today.” The bellicose quote became a self-fulling prophecy. By 2019, the U.S. military pursued more operations in Africa than the Middle East.
Air Pirates
AFRICOM’s first major battlefield was Somalia, then reeling from the legacy of past interventions. U.S. policy makers had turned the country into one of the largest recipients of military aid after its disastrous 1977 invasion of Ethiopia. Once assistance dried up, the government collapsed in 1991, plunging the country into chaos. Warlords carved Somalia into rival fiefdoms, while a devastating famine swept the region. In 2006, an alliance of Muslim leaders, the Islamic Courts Union, finally reestablished order. Ethiopia then invaded with U.S. backing, shattering the tentative peace and allowing the extremist group, al-Shabab, to gain ascendance.
Privately, regional leaders expressed little faith in the Somali government and warned that the military would collapse without U.S. aid, “increasing the ranks of the fundamentalists.” In 2013, President Barack Obama deployed troops to bolster the army and African Union Mission in Somalia. He also waged drone warfare, displacing thousands of civilians.
In 2017, policy makers relaxed rules for airstrikes, enabling the military to assess targets using only four criteria: age, gender, location and proximity to al-Shabab. Testifying before Congress, AFRICOM Commander Gen. Thomas Waldhauser soothed concerns, emphasizing, “I’m very comfortable with how this is being done.” Operations skyrocketed, entailing at least 196 airstrikes in four years. AFRICOM invariably labeled the dead as “combatants” until Amnesty International exposed numerous civilian casualties, suggesting that officials spread “a smokescreen for impunity.”
But the U.S. did more than prowl the skies. In August 2017, U.S. troops oversaw operations in the Lower Shabelle, a lush region known for its profusion of banana and mango trees. They massacred 10 civilians, including at least one child. One resident recalled listening to his friend bleed to death from a gunshot wound as a U.S. soldier held his head to the ground with a boot. Apparently, local officials enlisted the unit to attack a rival clan. U.S. Special Forces placed arms around the corpses, photographed them and demanded Somalia whitewash the massacre. Months later, General Waldhauser appeared before Congress. “I wouldn’t characterize that we’re at war,” he reassured legislators. “It’s specifically designed for us to not own that.”
Desert Illusions
As operations in Somalia escalated, AFRICOM promoted an interlocking defense network for the Sahel. In turn, Sahelian leaders exploited the global “war on terror,” milking the new master discourse to deflect criticism, render local conflicts legible to Western bureaucrats and exact “terrorism rents” — tapping the awesome financial and military largesse of the U.S. for their own aggrandizement.
Perhaps nowhere was this truer than Mali. U.S. leaders touted the country as a model, lauding its “strong and valuable … democratic tradition.” In reality, its transition from military rule in 1991 spawned a repressive democracy: a state with hollow institutions, rampant graft and an indistinguishable elite that rotated through ritual elections. The World Bank concluded that corruption in the country was a “generalised sociological phenomenon.”
Corruption thoroughly corroded the military. As an extravagant form of coup-proofing, Malian President Amadou Toumani Touré promoted 104 officers to the rank of general, reducing the defense budget to political patronage. A senior U.S. official recalled that “corruption was present” — “officers would withhold pay or steer contracts to family members.” Meanwhile, AFRICOM found bases wracked by power outages and supply shortages.
In 2012, U.S. policy shattered this status quo. That year, the U.S. exploited the Arab Spring to topple Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi, which officials previously embraced as “a top partner” against terrorism. Airstrikes pushed expatriate Tuareg fighters back into northern Mali, who then rallied to overthrow the government. As Tuareg rebels and jihadists seized control of the country, U.S.-trained forces defected to the enemy. While order collapsed, Capt. Amadou Haya Sanogo ousted Malian President Touré, lambasting his inept management of the crisis. Ironically, AFRICOM had trained Captain Sanogo, yet he too proved incapable.
Ultimately, French intervention in “Operation Serval” repelled the rebels, yet incited charges of colonialism. Tellingly, France helped Mali draft the letter requesting assistance. French officials then pushed post-coup elections through to legitimate the invasion retroactively. Rapid elections checked the shift to military rule but papered over long-festering problems that sparked the crisis.
Over the next decade, the military aid pipeline gushed, as U.S. and French leaders embraced Mali as a wavering domino against jihadism. They diagnosed the root issue as weak governance, propounding “the return of the state” and beefing up the military. AFRICOM regarded jihadists as roving internationalists, rootless ideologues operating beyond the withered arm of the law. But the state was the problem: the unmistakable corruption, violence and discrimination that ignited the uprising. Although jihadists spoke in universals, their grievances were startlingly parochial. Religion offered rhetorical artillery for addressing local issues such as grazing rights, ethnic tensions and crooked bureaucrats.
At times, the state and jihadism themselves blurred. Regional elites colluded with both camps to maximize their influence. The Tuareg powerbroker, Iyad ag Ghaly, was particularly shameless. As the war on terror escalated, he encouraged the U.S. to launch “targeted special operations” against al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). “Ag Ghali estimated that the AQIM had little to no support amongst the native populations,” the embassy elaborated. After failing to gain control of secular Tuareg organizations, he formed the jihadist group, Ansar al-Din, and swiftly affiliated with al-Qaeda.
Spreading Crises
AFRICOM’s strategy progressively backfired. As the U.S. supported Sahelian forces, they pushed jihadists into surrounding states and heightened social tensions. The brisk infusion of military aid and rising defense budgets only exacerbated corruption and militarism. Senior Nigerian officials overcharged the government for defense contracts, igniting a scandal that one diplomat called “the greatest predatory act in the history of Niger.” Militarism also worsened in Burkina Faso, where the constitution already allowed soldiers to wield extraordinary influence in politics. U.S.-led officers including Gen. Gilbert Diendéré, who previously appeared in glossy AFRICOM advertisements, executed coups in 2014 and 2015.
As states failed to identify jihadists, they punished entire communities and operations devolved into ethnic warfare. In Burkina Faso, Malian and Burkinabé forces waged bloody campaigns against the predominately Muslim Fulani. “It’s not that all Fulani are terrorists, it’s that most terrorists are Fulani,” an officer explained. Human Rights Watch found mass graves in Djibo, where authorities slaughtered 180 people, leaving the bodies to rot under the scorching sun. Ironically, violence against the Fulani compounded communal grievances, while driving civilians to jihadism for protection.
Secrecy also incentivized financial manipulation. In Mali, members of SEAL Team 6, the fabled unit that killed Osama bin Laden, murdered Army Staff Sgt. Logan Melgar in 2017 after he threatened to report embezzled funds. “The system is ripe for abuse,” admitted a former officer. “We knew this money wasn’t being tracked, and guys were stuffing their pockets.” Even at the senior level, Pentagon auditors discovered inexcusable accounting practices.
All Fall Down
In 2020, the elaborate defense system imploded. That August, another U.S.-trained officer, Col. Assimi Goïta, seized office in the Malian capital of Bamako, again citing the security crisis. His power grab initiated a wave of six coups in five countries within two years, immersing Mali, Chad, Guinea, Sudan and Burkina Faso in chaos. AFRICOM had trained many of the plotters. In Guinea, local forces paused an exercise with U.S. Army Green Berets to storm the capital. Most coup leaders cited the threat of jihadism and poor governance — crises that AFRICOM had not solved but aggravated. Before 2001, U.S. officials registered no terrorist organizations in sub-Saharan Africa. By 2019, they tallied nearly 50.
For years, AFRICOM had inflamed long-standing local conflicts, wrenching societies apart and lending jihadism meaning. And now, in a reverse domino effect, the very forces it enlisted to fight were rebelling.
Tensions with Mali have compelled Western forces to scale back operations. This February, France announced troop withdrawals, while waning confidence in the West prompted local authorities to hire Russian mercenaries. AFRICOM Commander Gen. Stephen Townsend warned that the decision would conclude in “horrific violence against Africans.”
UN forces remain in Mali, sustaining heavy losses, investigating an exponential increase in human rights violations and defending an abrasive government that lacks control over the majority of its territory. Meanwhile, the UN warns that 18 million residents in the Sahel face severe hunger, as war and famine sweep through the region.
Yet the mounting crisis also implicates the U.S. AFRICOM regards itself as enviably sleek and deadly effective, an elite force that fights “tomorrow’s wars today.” But in practice, operations resemble previous neocolonial interventions, fostering military rule and human rights violations. In truth, AFRICOM fights yesterday’s wars tomorrow: As U.S. forces intensify local conflicts and militarism, they sow the seeds of future crises.
The author would like to thank Sarah Priscilla Lee of the Learning Sciences Program at Northwestern University for reviewing this article.
Have you ever wondered who’s pulling the strings? … Anything we touch is a weapon. We can deceive, persuade, change, influence, inspire. We come in many forms. We are everywhere.
— U.S. Army Psychological Operations recruitment video
Psychological warfare, according to the Rand Corporation, “involves the planned use of propaganda and other psychological operations to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of opposition groups.”
For years now, the government has been bombarding the citizenry with propaganda campaigns and psychological operations aimed at keeping us compliant, easily controlled and supportive of the police state’s various efforts abroad and domestically.
Of the many weapons in the government’s vast arsenal, psychological warfare may be the most devastating in terms of the long-term consequences.
As the military journal Task and Purpose explains, “Psychological warfare is all about influencing governments, people of power, and everyday citizens… PSYOP soldiers’ key missions are to influence ‘emotions, notices, reasoning, and behavior of foreign governments and citizens,’ ‘deliberately deceive’ enemy forces, advise governments, and provide communications for disaster relief and rescue efforts.”
Yet don’t be fooled into thinking these psyops (psychological operations) campaigns are only aimed at foreign enemies. The government has made clear in word and deed that “we the people” are domestic enemies to be targeted, tracked, manipulated, micromanaged, surveilled, viewed as suspects, and treated as if our fundamental rights are mere privileges that can be easily discarded.
Aided and abetted by technological advances and scientific experimentation, the government has been subjecting the American people to “apple-pie propaganda” for the better part of the last century.
Consider some of the ways in which the government continues to wage psychological warfare on a largely unsuspecting citizenry.
Weaponizing violence. With alarming regularity, the nation continues to be subjected to spates of violence that terrorizes the public, destabilizes the country’s ecosystem, and gives the government greater justifications to crack down, lock down, and institute even more authoritarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.
Weaponizing surveillance, pre-crime and pre-thought campaigns. Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence. When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies. Add pre-crime programs into the mix with government agencies and corporations working in tandem to determine who is a potential danger and spin a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies, and you having the makings for a perfect dystopian nightmare. The government’s war on crime has now veered into the realm of social media and technological entrapment, with government agents adopting fake social media identities and AI-created profile pictures in order to surveil, target and capture potential suspects.
Weaponizing digital currencies, social media scores and censorship. Tech giants, working with the government, have been meting out their own version of social justice by way of digital tyranny and corporate censorship, muzzling whomever they want, whenever they want, on whatever pretext they want in the absence of any real due process, review or appeal. Unfortunately, digital censorship is just the beginning. Digital currencies (which can be used as “a tool for government surveillance of citizens and control over their financial transactions”), combined with social media scores and surveillance capitalism create a litmus test to determine who is worthy enough to be part of society and punish individuals for moral lapses and social transgressions (and reward them for adhering to government-sanctioned behavior). In China, millions of individuals and businesses, blacklisted as “unworthy” based on social media credit scores that grade them based on whether they are “good” citizens, have been banned from accessing financial markets, buying real estate or travelling by air or train.
Weaponizing compliance. Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation. The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on COVID-19, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.
Weaponizing entertainment. For the past century, the Department of Defense’s Entertainment Media Office has provided Hollywood with equipment, personnel and technical expertise at taxpayer expense. In exchange, the military industrial complex has gotten a starring role in such blockbusters as Top Gun and its rebooted sequel Top Gun: Maverick, which translates to free advertising for the war hawks, recruitment of foot soldiers for the military empire, patriotic fervor by the taxpayers who have to foot the bill for the nation’s endless wars, and Hollywood visionaries working to churn out dystopian thrillers that make the war machine appear relevant, heroic and necessary. As Elmer Davis, a CBS broadcaster who was appointed the head of the Office of War Information, observed, “The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize that they are being propagandized.”
Weaponizing behavioral science and nudging. Apart from the overt dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, there’s also the covert dangers associated with a government empowered to use these same technologies to influence behaviors en masse and control the populace. In fact, it was President Obama who issued an executive order directing federal agencies to use “behavioral science” methods to minimize bureaucracy and influence the way people respond to government programs. It’s a short hop, skip and a jump from a behavioral program that tries to influence how people respond to paperwork to a government program that tries to shape the public’s views about other, more consequential matters. Thus, increasingly, governments around the world—including in the United States—are relying on “nudge units” to steer citizens in the direction the powers-that-be want them to go, while preserving the appearance of free will.
Weaponizing desensitization campaigns aimed at lulling us into a false sense of security. The events of recent years—the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the lockdowns, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers—have conspired to acclimate the populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.
Weaponizing fear and paranoia. The language of fear is spoken effectively by politicians on both sides of the aisle, shouted by media pundits from their cable TV pulpits, marketed by corporations, and codified into bureaucratic laws that do little to make our lives safer or more secure. Fear, as history shows, is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government and control a populace, dividing the people into factions, and persuading them to see each other as the enemy. This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being manipulated into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. Instead, fueled with fear and loathing for phantom opponents, they agree to pour millions of dollars and resources into political elections, militarized police, spy technology and endless wars, hoping for a guarantee of safety that never comes. All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward, and “we the suckers” get saddled with the tax bills and subjected to pat downs, police raids and round-the-clock surveillance.
Weaponizing genetics. Not only does fear grease the wheels of the transition to fascism by cultivating fearful, controlled, pacified, cowed citizens, but it also embeds itself in our very DNA so that we pass on our fear and compliance to our offspring. It’s called epigenetic inheritance, the transmission through DNA of traumatic experiences. For example, neuroscientists observed that fear can travel through generations of mice DNA. As the Washington Postreports, “Studies on humans suggest that children and grandchildren may have felt the epigenetic impact of such traumatic events such as famine, the Holocaust and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.”
Weaponizing the future. With greater frequency, the government has been issuing warnings about the dire need to prepare for the dystopian future that awaits us. For instance, the Pentagon training video, “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” predicts that by 2030 (coincidentally, the same year that society begins to achieve singularity with the metaverse) the military would be called on to use armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems. What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security. The chilling five-minute training video paints an ominous picture of the future bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots. “We the people” are the have-nots.
The end goal of these mind control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in re-shaping the country in the image of a totalitarian police state.
The facts speak for themselves.
Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly not looking out for our best interests, nor is it in any way a friend to freedom.
When the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution, then you no longer have a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”
“We the people”—who think, who reason, who take a stand, who resist, who demand to be treated with dignity and care, who believe in freedom and justice for all—have become undervalued citizens of a totalitarian state that views people as expendable once they have outgrown their usefulness to the State.
Let our bleeding proxy negotiate a settlement, NOW.
Since early January, the corporate media have been proving their loyalty and their usefulness to the US foreign policy establishment. With faultless show-business efficiency, they manufactured an international political superstar, at least in Europe and the English speaking world. Vladimir Zelensky appeared on media screens, seemingly everywhere, including a turn on the 2022 Grammy Awards extravaganza.
Sad but resolute Ukrainian refugees became fodder for a blend of news and entertainment that firmly established, in our hearts and minds, who were the Good Guys and who were the Evil Monsters.
And we were encouraged to see that, sooner or later, the Ukrainian Good Guys were going to prevail over the brutal Russian fiends.
But lately there have been some tiny cracks in the wall of totalitarian perception management. And now ….
It’s time. It’s time to recognize the reality. It’s time for our bleeding proxy-warrior Ukraine to negotiate with Russia, in good faith, before it loses everything.
Right off the bat, many readers will exclaim, “You can’t negotiate with Russia! The Russians are guilty of unprovoked and unjustified aggression.”
Unprovoked and unjustified. Like an ancient Greek theatrical chorus, the corporate media have repeated that line until, now, it’s stuck permanently in our synapses. An ear worm, like a catchy melody.
I’d ask those media-addled opponents of diplomacy to imagine, just for a moment, a hypothetical situation: First, make sure you have a complete grasp of the drama’s exposition, the entire, contrived, set of circumstances which the President of Russia was facing on February 24, 2022.
Remember that the clever script writers of the US foreign policy elite had employed their best calculated, cold-blooded cunning to devise the perfect diplomatic double-bind for the drama’s Russian villain. (And, of course, they had choreographed their NATO dance line, to give their “diplomacy” the illusion of legitimacy.)
Now, ask yourself whether any American President, facing a comparable dramatic conflict, would have acted differently?
Or pretend, for a moment, that Winston Churchill, hero of numerous epic films, is, through the magic of your imagination, the President of the Russian Federation. Do you have any doubt that Churchill would have stoutly refused to bow down and appease the US/NATO leadership arrayed against him?
Azov Battalion fighters with Nazi flag (WikiCommons)
A second consideration, on the subject of Russia’s trustworthiness as a negotiating partner: The Western powers and their media mouthpieces have contemptuously dismissed Russia’s stated goal of de-Nazifying Ukraine. Western propaganda would have us believe that there is no serious neo-Nazi, ultra-nationalist threat whatsoever in Ukraine.
To the contrary, a little research reveals that the threat is very real. I’m talking about ferocious, far-right fanatics, who are heavily armed, highly trained, strongly motivated and fiercely disciplined. Their electoral base is small, but that doesn’t matter. In the media-fiction of Ukrainian democracy, with oligarchs pulling many of the strings, the ability to mobilize real-life violence is a powerful tool.
And we should remember that the US and NATO have been deeply involved in arming and training these forces, since 2014, making them an even more formidable part of Ukraine’s governing power structure. This arming and training took place off-stage, to be played out for an audience only when the time was right — when Russian tanks crossed the Belarus-Ukraine border, and the well-rehearsed Ukrainian military was unleashed, causing awesome, real-world damage and death.
Not every Ukrainian soldier is a neo-Nazi or a hard-right ethnic cleanser. But I believe it’s fair to say that those elements are the spine of the Ukrainian military. Without them, I doubt that the media-touted under-dog’s esprit de corps would be nearly as robust.
Let’s do an exercise in make-believe. Take the insurgents who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. As a theatrical event, the staging was a mess. It barely deserved to be called a riot. But that mob of actors was not lacking in motivation. Or raw talent. They clearly believed that their dramatic enactment was real. We in the audience were mesmerized and then relieved, when the play came to a sputtering end.
Now, picture the actors in that mob again. The Justice Department estimates their number to have been between 2,000 and 2,500. In your mind’s eye, multiply them by twenty-five (40,000 to 50,000).
Now, arm them. Train them hard. Organize them into squads, platoons, companies, battalions and brigades. Enforce strict discipline. Motivate them with a continued sense of ethnic superiority.
This little exercise of the dramatist’s imagination, “based upon” our home-grown January 6, should give you some idea of the ultra-right’s strength and influence within the Ukraine power structure.1
The Russians are very serious about confronting Nazis and ethnic supremacists in that country which sits right on their border. In Vladimir Putin’s February 21st speech to the Russian people, he was not using Ukrainian neo-Nazis as a flimsy pretext in a cheap melodrama.
The people of Ukraine don’t need any more media spot-lighting. Their plight doesn’t need more daily dramatizing presented as “news.” Ukrainian civilians need a permanent cease-fire. So let the talks begin. And please, remember: We are in no position to judge the sincerity of Russian negotiators, in potential talks, aimed at a peaceful settlement of this bloody conflict. In the fog of war, you never know what might happen until the diplomatic actors take the stage and begin their dialogue. The old cliche applies: You never know until you try.
The real blockage to peace talks is a triumphalist and misguided NATO and its Godfather in Washington. The US and NATO are going for broke. They are demanding that Ukraine fight on, bleeding and dying, until the US, NATO and their proxy achieve a decisive victory over Russian forces.
Furthermore, if Zelensky and his foreign policy team decide to negotiate, before they lose even more territory, they risk the wrath of the neo-Nazi, ultra-nationalists who permeate their military and police forces. They will not survive without the Godfather’s protection.
(See this article in the Kyiv Post, about veteran Ukrainian Donbas fighters confronting Zelensky, warning him, in 2019, NOT to seek peace in the Donbas. This dramatic verbal clash occurred just after his landslide election victory, playing the rôle of “peace candidate.”)
It’s time. It’s time for President Biden to assume the rôle of statesman. His NATO minions cannot object if Biden tells the government and the people of Ukraine that more billions of dollars worth of weapons will not secure a final battlefield victory over the Russians. Ukraine’s railroads, which are the means of delivering those weapons to frontline fighters, have been severely damaged by Russian air and missile strikes. And the less effective means of transport, heavy trucks, face the obstacle of damaged roads and many destroyed bridges. And finally, as the war grinds on in the Donbas theatre, Ukraine will have fewer and fewer seasoned soldiers to operate the new, more complicated weapons.
Unless Biden steps in, Ukrainians face, at best, a long, bloody stalemate, which Russia is better prepared to endure. (So far, Russia’s leaders have not called for a nation-wide, general mobilization.) Total victory for Ukraine is a cruel pipe-dream.
Biden must come clean with Americans and Ukrainians. The two real geopolitical combatants in this war are Russia and the United States. Ukraine is the USA’s tragic, foolish proxy — our poorly prepared understudy. That’s not stage blood we’re seeing on MSNB-CNN. Ukrainians are bleeding and dying while Biden & Co. prolong the agony in a vicious quest to punish and weaken Russia.
That is no way to ensure future peace. Talk. Now.
From a report on hard right activity in Ukraine since 2014, from FreedomHouse.org:
… [C]urrent polling data indicates that the far right has no real chance of being elected in the upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections in 2019. Similarly, despite the fact that several of these groups have real life combat experience, paramilitary structures, and even access to arms, they are not ready or able to challenge the state.
Extremist groups are, however, aggressively trying to impose their agenda on Ukrainian society, including by using force against those with opposite political and cultural views. They are a real physical threat to left-wing, feminist, liberal, and LGBT activists, human rights defenders, as well as ethnic and religious minorities.
In the last few months, extremist groups have become increasingly active. The most disturbing element of their recent show of force is that so far it has gone fully unpunished by the authorities. Their activities challenge the legitimacy of the state, undermine its democratic institutions, and discredit the country’s law enforcement agencies.
Freedom House is a non-profit, majority U.S. government funded organization in Washington, D.C., that conducts research and advocacy on democracy, political freedom, and human rights.
In 1990, Tom Cruise, star of the 1986 blockbuster, ‘Top Gun’, said:
Some people felt that “Top Gun” was a right-wing film to promote the Navy. And a lot of kids loved it. But I want the kids to know that’s not the way war is – that “Top Gun” was just an amusement park ride, a fun film with a PG-13 rating that was not supposed to be reality. That’s why I didn’t go on and make “Top Gun II” and “III” and “IV” and “V.” That would have been irresponsible.
It would indeed, and one can only admire Cruise’s honesty and selfless determination… in 1990… not to mislead young people.
Why, then, 32 years later, would Cruise decide to appear in ‘Top Gun: Maverick’? The Daily Mail provides a clue:
The 59-year-old superstar was “only” paid $13million, although he will also earn a percentage of every dollar taken at the global box office. He made $100million for the original Mission: Impossible film – and could earn even more if Top Gun: Maverick is a box office smash.
Top Gun: Maverick” has already grossed $548.6 million worldwide, making it easily one the biggest hits of Cruise’s career.
His earlier refusal to be ‘irresponsible’ was in response to claims that Cruise’s bright, shining film was, in reality, a propaganda fecalith expelled from the bowels of ‘the Military-Entertainment Complex’. Thus, director Oliver Stone, in 1998:
“Top Gun,” man – it was essentially a fascist movie. It sold the idea that war is clean, war can be won … nobody in the movie ever mentions that he just started World War Three!’
In 1986, Time magazine reported that for the cost of just $1.8 million, the US Department of Defense allowed the Top Gun producers ‘the use of Miramar Naval Air Station’ as well as ‘four aircraft carriers and about two dozen F-14 Tomcats, F-5 Tigers and A-4 Skyhawks, some flown by real-life Top Gun pilots’.
It’s unlikely the film could have gotten made without the Pentagon’s considerable support. A single F-14 Tomcat cost about $38 million. The total budget for “Top Gun” was $15 million.
It wasn’t Catch-22, but there was a catch: in exchange for this lavish military support, the producers agreed to let the US Department of Defense make changes to the script. The changes were substantial but trivial compared to the real issue missed by almost all ‘mainstream’ journalists; namely, that the US war machine would not have spent millions of dollars subsidising a movie unless the core themes of the story provided a powerful propaganda service to the US war machine. And such, indeed, was the case:
The film conquered the box office, as well as the hearts and minds of young Americans. Following its release, applications to become Naval Aviators reportedly jumped by 500 percent. To capitalize on the craze, some enterprising Navy recruiters even set up stands outside theaters.
The high-flying hardware turns Top Gun into a 110-minute commercial for the Navy – and it was the Navy’s cooperation that put the planes in the picture.
No surprise, then, as The Washington Post reported:
Top Gun” (1986), turned out to be so influential it set the blueprint for a new kind of corporate movie product fusing Hollywood star power with the U.S. military’s firepower. Think “Black Hawk Down,” “Transformers” or “American Sniper.”
Donald Baruch, the Pentagon’s special assistant for audio-visual media, commented that the US government ‘couldn’t buy the sort of publicity films give us’. In reality, they do, in effect, buy this publicity:
Before a producer receives military assistance for a TV or movie project, the screenplay is reviewed by officials at the Department of Defense and by each of the services involved. The Pentagon ends up rejecting many projects that come its way on the grounds that they distort military life and situations.
Movies critical of the military will be difficult to make,” says former Navy Lieut. John Semcken, who served as the liaison on Top Gun.
The War Zone website provides some details behind military backing for the new, follow-up film, ‘Top Gun: Maverick’:
The War Zone obtained the official production assistance agreements, 84 pages in total, in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Office of the Secretary of Defense…
The documents confirm that filming was conducted on location at Naval Base Coronado, Naval Air Station (NAS) Fallon, NAS Lemoore, Naval Air Facility (NAF) El Centro, Naval Air Weapons Station (NAWS) China Lake, and Naval Air Station (NAS) Whidbey Island. Fallon is home to the Navy’s real-life Topgun program.’
How many aircraft carriers were thrown in?
The Nimitz class aircraft carriers USS Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt were also made available. Some filming even took place inside Roosevelt’s Combat Direction Center, which is the ship’s nerve center.
The War Zone adds:
Two different agreements say that the Navy was expected to provide between four and 12 actual F/A-18 fighters for film, “dependent on availability of aircraft.” There is at least one scene in the trailers that have been released so far showing a row of these jets, including one wearing a special paint job created specifically for the movie.
In addition, the Navy was to “allow for the internal and external placement of the Production Company’s cameras on F/A-18 E/F Super Hornets and Navy helicopters with the approval of the Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR).
And:
There are some details about set construction in various locations, including the complete transformation of a hangar and squadron spaces belonging to Fleet Logistics Support Squadron 30 (VRC-30) at NAS North Island, part of Naval Base Coronado, for the movie.
While the recent, 75th Cannes film festival banned any official delegations or reporters from Russia, ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ was massively promoted. The Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the gala opening of the festival on a huge screen via a video link from Kyiv. Drawing heavily on Charlie Chaplin’s classic film, The Great Dictator (1940), Zelensky said:
If there is a dictator, if there is a war for freedom, once again, everything depends on our unity. Can cinema stay outside of this unity?
Quoting directly from Chaplin’s anti-war speech at the end of the film, Zelensky said:
In the end, hatred will disappear and dictators will die.
On The World Socialist Website, Stefan Steinberg responded:
The Ukrainian president’s duplicitous speech was then given a standing ovation by the well-heeled audience of film celebrities, super-models, media figures and critics gathered at the festival’s Grand Théâtre Lumière…
Zelensky, whose government’s promotion of unfettered free market capitalism and extreme nationalism includes full support for the notorious fascist Azov battalion, and his US-NATO backers stand for everything that Chaplin abhorred. In fact, what would a Chaplin make out of the self-satisfied rubbish about “poor, defenseless little Ukraine,” armed to the hilt and financed by the biggest imperialist robbers on the planet?
The Independentreports that the ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ film has come at just the right time:
In April, state senators were told how the US army faced a “war for talent” amid shrinking battalion numbers, echoing admissions from air force officials that its own pool of qualified candidates had fallen by half since the beginning of Covid. Things haven’t looked rosy for the navy either, which declared in February that it was 5,000 to 6,000 sailors short at sea. ..
Little wonder, then, that Uncle Sam once again welcomed Paramount Pictures with open arms for Maverick, granting director Joseph Kosinski and his crew all-access passes to highly sensitive naval facilities, including a Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. World-class technicians provided cast members with top-level fighter pilot training right down to seat ejection…
The US Navy is [again] setting up “recruiting stations” in cinema foyers across America. After the first film there was a 50 per cent increase in applications to join the Navy’s fighter programme. A spokesman said: “Obviously we are hoping for the same outcome this time around.”
If any readers notice any journalists asking Tom Cruise if he still wants ‘the kids to know that’s not the way war is’, that ‘Top Gun’ is just an amusement park ride’ that is ‘not supposed to be reality’, and that it would be ‘irresponsible’ to make ‘Top Gun III’ and ‘IV’ and ‘V’ – do let us know (gro.snelaidemnull@rotide).
The Guardian’s Mark Kermode – ‘I Give Up’
Given the military involvement in both ‘Top Gun’ films and the massive impact of the first film on US military recruitment, a natural concern for anyone reviewing the new film would seem to be the role of the US military since 1986.
A really salient fact about the world since the mid-eighties, as we all know – as our newspaper front pages, echoing ‘Top Gun’ heroics, never tire of telling us – is that the US has been relentlessly bombing countries like Serbia, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia and Pakistan ever since. In 2015, a study by Physicians for Global Responsibility reported:
The purpose of this investigation is to provide as realistic an estimate as possible of the total body count in the three main war zones Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan during 12 years of “war on terrorism”. An extensive review has been made of the major studies and data published on the numbers of victims in these countries… This investigation comes to the conclusion that the war has, directly or indirectly, killed around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, i.e. a total of around 1.3 million.
Of course, even these vast numbers omit the untold carnage inflicted by the US military between 1986-2001, and since 2015, but they do give an idea of what ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ and its admirers are actually celebrating.
In the Guardian, film critic Mark Kermode supplied a summary of the plot:
Maverick has in fact been called back to the Top Gun programme – not to fly, but to teach the “best of the best” how to blow up a uranium enrichment plant at face-melting velocity, a mission that will require not one but “two consecutive miracles”.’
As we know, ‘Real men go to Tehran’ – and Iran clearly is ‘the enemy’ here. The Independent acknowledged as much in noting that the US navy was given script approval:
This might also explain why Top Gun: Maverick never goes into detail about its villains – instead, audiences are simply informed that “the enemy” is a rogue state hellbent on uranium enrichment. Let’s assume it rhymes with “Diran”.
When Iran is bombed in real life, Westerners will cheer because they’ll think they’re watching their movie heroes annihilating The Bad Guys. When ‘the best of the best’ move on to trash the whole country, the public will have been so brainwashed, so desensitised, they will rate the ‘action’ on a par with something they saw on the silver screen. The same thing happened during the Gulf War that began in January 1991. One of us saw a spoof ‘Iraqi calendar’ behind the bar of an English pub, which showed the year ending for Iraq on January 16, the date the US-UK attack was launched.
When the state-corporate culture of a highly aggressive imperial power produces war films that deliberately blend fiction and reality, there are real-world consequences. Actual high-tech death and destruction are made to seem ‘cool’, ‘fun’ – an impact that no serious reviewer can ignore. Assuming, that is, we reject the idea that a review in a corporate viewspaper is mere ‘entertainment’ that has nothing to do with the real world it so clearly impacts. Assuming, further, that we reject the idea that we should function as passive, apolitical, amoral consumers manipulated by powerful elites who are not themselves passive or apolitical at all, but who work relentlessly to extend their influence, wealth and power.
As though spoofing, Kermode concluded his review:
Personally, I found myself powerless to resist; overawed by the “real flight” aeronautics and nail-biting sky dances, bludgeoned by the sugar-frosted glow of Cruise’s mercilessly engaging facial muscles, and shamefully brought to tears by moments of hate-yourself-for-going-with-it manipulation. In the immortal words of Abba’s Waterloo, “I was defeated, you won the war”. I give up.
Kermode gave up. In reality, the outcome of his personal ‘Waterloo’ was never in doubt. As Noam Chomsky famously told the BBC’s Andrew Marr:
… if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.
Kermode’s review bowed down to an intellectually and morally castrated version of what it means to be a film critic, one that casually waves away the appalling, real-world impact of propaganda efforts like ‘Top Gun: Maverick’. It’s a version of film criticism that just happens – ‘My, my!’ – to align itself with the agenda of the consistently pro-war Guardian newspaper and wider corporate media system that makes him wealthy and famous for the back-breaking task of writing a few clever, filtered words every week.
In the Telegraph, Boris Starling managed to recall some military history:
Since then [“Top Gun”, 1986] we have had two wars in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, 9/11, Syria, and of course the current Russian invasion of Ukraine – all of which have, one way or another, dented the concept of unfettered American military might.’
Clearly, Nato’s devastation of Libya – executed with the assistance of more than a dozen US navy ships and a similar number of aircraft – never happened.
Starling’s distorted vision of history reminds us of the BBC’s unfortunate animated web article: ‘The Incredible Change The Queen Has Seen’. Reviewing major international political events since 1952, the BBC comments:
Russia invades Ukraine twice, bringing it into conflict with the West once again.
According to the BBC, then, no-one spread death and destruction in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Iraq, Libya, Syria… on and on. The BBC piece concludes:
Happy Jubilee Ma’am
The fact, as we have discussed, that the West got its hands on both Iraqi and Libyan oil challenges Starling’s idea that ‘unfettered American military might’ has been ‘dented’.
In a parallel universe, a film critic might have reflected on whether the vast death toll from US wars has ‘dented’ the ethical status of films like ‘Top Gun’ and ‘Top Gun: Maverick’. Instead, Starling noticed a different problem with the new film:
But at a time when a real conflict with unimaginable casualties and featuring medieval levels of brutality is taking place on NATO’s border – a conflict into which the US is still refusing to countenance direct military intervention – Top Gun: Maverick may be construed in certain quarters as borderline tasteless.
In other words, the problem with the ‘Top Gun’ franchise is not that the US military machine has been blitzing the world before and since 1986. The problem is that, after all that good work, it is refusing to ‘countenance direct military intervention’ in Ukraine – having merely sent $60 billion in ‘aid’, most of it military – making the latest ‘Top Gun’ heroics somewhat embarrassing. This is what passes for ‘mainstream’ ethical discussion in our high-tech, neon-lit dark age.
Another piece by the Telegraph’s chief film critic, Robbie Collin, notes:
The assignment involves neutralising a uranium enrichment plant somewhere overseas, though we’re told details about the enemy regime behind it are “scarce” – as they have to be these days when you’re trying to sell a blockbuster into as many overseas markets as possible.
Presumably, any Iranians wishing to see the film will be too dumb to realise what is blindingly obvious to everyone else:
Certain military details suggest it might be Iran, but it doesn’t matter either way: the film is low on militaristic swagger, and instead focuses on Maverick’s missionary-like determination to have these youngsters not just reach their potential but surpass it, with the help of their extraordinary aircraft.
Yes, who cares? We all know it’s Iran; so what if that background awareness makes it easier for the public to applaud when Iran receives a generous dose of ‘humanitarian intervention’? Collin concluded by heaping praise on ‘this absurdly entertaining film’.
And that’s all that matters – it’s ‘entertaining’. It’s also somehow ‘low on militaristic swagger’, despite being jam-packed with gleaming warplanes, aircraft carriers and military uniforms. Needless to say, it wouldn’t have mattered how ‘absurdly entertaining’ the film was, if it had depicted Iranian or Russian pilots heroically preparing to bomb the US.
In the Independent, Geoffrey Macnab’s article did manage to reference some history, but only in the sense suggested by the title: ‘Why Tom Cruise’s latest thrill ride is a take-off of traditional Hollywood flying movies’:
These films have a poetical dimension you don’t find in conventional earthbound war movies. Their protagonists are young and courageous, performing their own ethereal, Icarus-like dances with death. They’re fighting as much against the elements as against their enemies.
Again, no concern for the front-page carnage inflicted year after year.
Also in the Independent, Clarisse Loughrey supplied the standard, faux-feminist ‘dissent’, commenting on the new film’s compassionate treatment of its male characters :
The film, unfortunately, doesn’t extend as much of a loving hand toward the women of Top Gun – neither McGillis nor Meg Ryan, who played Rooster’s mother, make any kind of return.
But this shouldn’t be allowed to spoil the party:
Again, there’ll come a time when we need to talk about why Hollywood only accepts older women who look a certain way. Until then, who can be blamed for getting swept up by a film this damned fun?
In the Daily Mail, Jan Moir noted Cruise’s fearlessness in performing his own stunts, adding:
But there is one thing this Hollywood hero is scared of – old ladies! That’s where he draws the line – at the genuine and the realistic. And that is his biggest crime of all in my book… where are the women from the 1986 original? Excuse me. Simply nowhere to be seen. Vaporised by the Hollywood Age Patrol, the girls have somehow fallen off their perch and simply ceased to be.
There is one thing that Moir, like essentially all of corporate journalism, is scared of – the dead, injured, grieving and displaced victims of the West’s endless wars of aggression. The victims are not allowed to exist or matter. They’re not allowed to spoil the celebration of this ‘damned fun’, of the state-corporate fundamentalist faith that ‘we’ are The Good Guys.
But anyway, is it really such ‘damned fun’? Somehow managing to defy the corporate hypegeist, A.O. Scott of the New York Timeswrites of the new film’s characters: ‘the world they inhabit is textureless and generic’, ‘the dramatic stakes seem curiously low’, the movie is ‘bland and basic’. Scott’s conclusion:
Though you may hear otherwise, “Top Gun: Maverick” is not a great movie. It is a thin, over-strenuous and sometimes very enjoyable movie.
If United States taxpayers knew that half the income tax dollars they sent to the Internal Revenue Service every year was being spent on weapons, war and war preparation, political support for such programs might significantly decline. Unfortunately, no agency of the federal government communicates to taxpayers how the Congress spends their money.
Massachusetts State Rep. Carol Doherty and State Sen. Jo Comerford have introduced a bill into the state legislature, the Taxpayers’ Right to Know Act, supported by Massachusetts Peace Action and allies. The bill instructs the state treasurer to communicate to Massachusetts taxpayers how the state and the federal government spend their income tax dollars. This is a first step toward federal legislation bringing transparency to the Congressional Discretionary Budget.
Organizers hope to promote such bills in other states, given the roadblock against such open and honest reporting from the federal government. These are small but important first steps in focusing attention on income taxes being used to finance corporate drivers of dangerous and costly nuclear weapons purchases, especially in the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Ukraine War Profiteering
Purchasing weapons and military services with taxpayer dollars has always been, and continues to be, a highly profitable endeavor for defense contractors. But it is in a real war, such as in Ukraine, that such profiteering truly thrives.
President Joe Biden recently sent to Congress his budget proposal for 2023. It included an astounding $813 billion for Pentagon and military expenditures. This is more than half the income taxes citizens send to the federal government each year, and a more than $31 billion increase over the already bloated fiscal year 2022 Pentagon budget. It also more than the defense budgets of the eight next biggest military spenders put together, including Russia, China and India.
The proposed increase for 2023 was cloaked in the flag of support for Ukrainians, but make no mistake, most of this bloated budget was in the pipeline years back, prior Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
In late April, the president announced a plan to spend another $33 billion for weapons and military supplies for Ukraine. On May 19, Congress quickly passed an even larger $40 billion appropriation, with unanimous Democratic support. This included some humanitarian aid but was primarily for the $20 billion in weapons and weapons support, including Patriot anti-aircraft missiles, Javelin anti-tank missiles and artillery.
This is closer to the true war budget, with built-in assumptions of material loss and need for replacement. Such expenditures can be even more lucrative than the base Pentagon budget. The weapons shipments to Ukraine will be considered justification for further purchases to maintain the U.S.’s stockpile, according to The New York Times:
Noting that the more than 5,000 Javelins sent to Ukraine amounted to a third of the administration’s stockpile of anti-tank missiles, Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri asked the pentagon officials … if they were prepared to quickly replace the anti-tank missiles. “It is not only possible; we will do that” said Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III.
The purchase of weapons and supplies in preparation for war and for maintenance of forces in the field is a singularly lucrative and profitable business because of the cost and nature of most contracts; the guarantee of Pentagon purchases; and the protection from offshore competition, such as industries in China, India or Mexico. During “peacetime,” missiles, artillery shells, airplanes and armored vehicles need to be replaced at a relatively slow rate. This limits the weapons sales market. That is part of the reason for pressure from the industry for “new” weapons to increase their markets.
Beating the drums of war will enhance the corporate bottom line, as noted by Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes commenting on the benefits to their business of the Ukraine crises:
We would expect … a benefit to the [Raytheon missiles and defense business] top line” and to the wider business, as defense budgets and replenishment orders increase over the coming years, chief executive Greg Hayes told analysts on the company’s first-quarter earnings call on Tuesday.
Too often during Pentagon budget debates, foreign policy “concerns” obscure the driving imperative coming from the weapons industries. As The Nation pointed reported, at the onset of the invasion of Iraq,
Even before US troops arrived in Baghdad, looting broke out — in Washington. While Republicans in Congress and their allies in the media yammered about the need to silence dissent and “support the troops,” corporations with close ties to the Bush Administration were quietly arranging to ink lucrative contracts that would put them in charge of reconstructing Iraq. Bechtel’s contract, worth up to $680 million, to rebuild Iraqi roads, schools, sewers and hospitals drew a lot of media attention, but it was chump change compared with the deal greased through by Vice President [Dick] Cheney’s old oil-services firm, Halliburton.
Historians of World War II, often fail to emphasize the role of the major Japanese and German major manufacturing industries in driving their country’s war efforts. As long as the war continued, these businesses were guaranteed continuing weapons sale to their governments and military forces.
U.S. naval historians note that the Japanese Kamikaze attacks were very wasteful, since both plane and pilot were lost and neither could engage in further sorties. But in fact, they were not wasteful for corporations like Mitsubishi, since every fighter lost meant a new sale to the Japanese government.
The Pentagon Budget Is Only Peripherally for Protecting Ukrainians
Earlier this year Congress voted $768 billion as the 2022 Defense authorization. Such bloated budgets have been voted for many years and are not a response to events in China, Ukraine or any actual foreign or military threat. Thus the 2021 Congressional Discretionary Budget was voted in 2020, long before the Ukraine conflict.
Among the most expensive items — more than $34 billion — are the upgrades of all three legs of the U.S. nuclear triad: land-based intercontinental ballistic missile systems, nuclear-armed submarines and long-range bombers. Unfortunately, nuclear saber rattling by Russia and North Korea provides cover for these expenditures. These upgraded weapons systems won’t be operable for many years. They cannot be used to protect Ukrainians from their neighbors, Afghans from the Taliban, or South Koreans from the North Korean government.
The presence of thousands of U.S. nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert hasn’t prevented the North Korean regime from moving ahead with their nuclear programs; Britain’s nuclear weapons did not prevent the Argentinian government from occupying the Falkland Islands; Russia’s nuclear weapons didn’t deter Chechen rebels from attacking Russia. Neither India nor Pakistan’s nuclear arsenals have deterred each other’s militants from attacking one another across the contested Srinagar boundary in Kashmir. Despite claims to the contrary, nuclear weapons cannot protect the people of Ukraine, who would be decimated in a nuclear exchange.
Given that these weapons cannot be used in any conventional war, and if used would be disastrous for the U.S. public, why are our tax dollars being invested in upgraded nuclear weapons? The answer has nothing to do with foreign policy — the red herring used to justify the expenditures. These purchases are better understood as the business plan of the nuclear weapons and military-industrial-congressional complex, guaranteeing high profitability. As President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned Americans more than 60 years ago, our congressional budget has fallen fully under the control of a narrow segment of U.S. corporations.
More than half of the Pentagon appropriation goes to large defense contractors, of which the leaders are Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman. Together, they reaped $198 billion in taxpayer funds last year alone. In 2020, the top 100 contractors took in $551 billion.
The profits of these corporations are guaranteed by costly contracts; legislation prohibiting awarding such contracts to foreign firms, assuring virtual monopolies; and national security criteria used to prevent auditing and close fiscal oversight.
At the same time Congress voted some $782 billion for Pentagon accounts, they couldn’t find the $5-$10 billion needed to insure that vaccination against COVID-19 is available to all Americans.
One of the components of the bloated $782 Pentagon budget is for purchase of new nuclear-armed submarines, even though the U.S. already has 14 lethal Ohio Class submarines, each capable of launching 192 nuclear warheads. Cancelling two of these unnecessary and provocative new weapons systems would save more than $10 billion. This would easily provide the funds needed to insure vaccination for all Americans from COVID, and also to finance vaccines for those in under-developed economies.
The pie chart below shows the division of the Congressional Discretionary Budget for 2021 — pre-Ukraine — among competing agencies and programs including the Defense Department, Veterans Affairs, the Department of Health and Human Services, food stamps, agricultural subsidies, the Department of Energy (nuclear weapons) and the National Science Foundation. (The discretionary budget does not include the two major mandatory funds Medicare and Social Security. These are trust funds — citizens pay in and hopefully are paid back. Congress cannot use these funds for other purposes.) A number of the categories in the annual congressional budget (from income taxes) are labelled here:
This pie chart from the National Priorities Project shows the allocation of our Congressional Discretionary Budget among diverse categories for the 2021 fiscal year, voted on in 2020, prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The military sector is underestimated, since a number of military-related programs, such as nuclear weapons and foreign military aid, are listed under domestic programs.
The single most important fact is that more than half of the income taxes remitted to the U.S government are spent on Pentagon accounts. In general, citizens are not aware of the scale of these expenditures. Though the government is aggressive in collecting income taxes, no agency of the government reports back to the taxpayers how their tax dollars are spent. Thus, many Americans assume that taking care of service men and women wounded in war or other military actions are covered by the defense budget. In fact, Veterans Affairs and veterans’ hospitals are part of the civilian or “domestic” budget, often squeezed by pressures of the military-industrial-congressional complex to increase funding for the Pentagon.
Pentagon Spending Versus Preventing Disease
It’s very difficult to grasp the impact of a $782 billion Pentagon budget. One approach is to compare it to other appropriations. For the past two years, our nation and all the nations of the world have faced the crises of the COVID pandemic. The virus has killed more than 1,000,000 Americans. How did this happen in the wealthy, technologically advanced U.S., the world leader in biomedical research and development, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals?
One major reason has been the failure to invest in a robust health care and public health system, as well as the failure to develop a comprehensive national testing and vaccination policies. However, a source of the failure to invest in these sectors has been to the diversion of tax dollars in the Congressional Discretionary Budget to Pentagon accounts. The development of diagnostics, vaccines and therapeutics rests on the research federally financed through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), entirely dependent on annual congressional appropriations.
The NIH budget of about $45 billion is responsible for developing prevention and cures of all the diseases that afflict us — cancer, heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and many others. Let’s consider only the health burden and social impacts on our population of people afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease. More than 6.5 million Americans suffer from this tragic and debilitating illness with the numbers steadily increasing. Alzheimer’s patients accounted for some 20 percent of Medicare and Medicaid’s budgets, more than $250 billion a year. Unfortunately the NIH investment in searching for a underlying mechanisms, more reliable diagnosis and more effective therapies was for 2020 on the order of $2.8 billion per year.
Given the human suffering and debilitating social and economic impacts, this is clearly an inadequate investment. For a social cost of $250 billion, perhaps 10 percent of the $250 billion in medical costs — $25 billion — would approach a sound and humane NIH research budget. Though Congress couldn’t find it in the budget to appropriate such funds. Instead, they are sending $33 billion in primarily military aid to Ukraine.
Many millions of Americans face suffering and death from these ills would be saved if we understood these diseases more deeply and invested more. There is no comparison between the health value of $45 billion NIH investments with the $782 billion defense budget. The new bombers, submarines and missiles don’t house us, don’t clothe us, don’t get us to work, don’t cure or prevent disease, and don’t protect our environment or climate.
Sadly, these Pentagon expenditures will also not increase national security, at home or abroad. Rather, they will increase the chance of a devastating nuclear weapons exchange. They represent not the needs of the people, but the business plan of the military-industrial complex, which President Eisenhower so tellingly warned us against on leaving office, and scholar Seymour Melman described in detail in The Permanent War Economy.
The the award-winning Director’s Cut of The Ghosts of Jeju lays bare what Pax Americana is all about, focusing on the exceedingly cruel debasement of the democratic will of Koreans.
Amadou Sanogo (Mali), You Can Hide Your Gaze, but You Cannot Hide That of Others, 2019.
On 25 May 2022, Africa Day, Moussa Faki Mahamat – the chairperson of the African Union (AU) – commemorated the establishment of the Organisation for African Unity (OAU) in 1963, which was later reshaped as the AU in 2002, with a foreboding speech. Africa, he said, has become ‘the collateral victim of a distant conflict, that between Russia and Ukraine’. That conflict has upset ‘the fragile global geopolitical and geostrategic balance’, casting ‘a harsh light on the structural fragility of our economies’. Two new key fragilities have been exposed: a food crisis amplified by climate change and a health crisis accelerated by COVID-19.
A third long-running fragility is that most African states have little freedom to manage their budgets as debt burdens rise and repayment costs increase. ‘Public debt ratios are at their highest level in over two decades and many low-income countries are either in, or close to, debt distress’, said Abebe Aemro Selassie, the director of the African Department at the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF’s Regional Economic Outlookreport, released in April 2022, makes for grizzly reading, its headline clear: ‘A New Shock and Little Room to Manoeuvre’.
Jilali Gharbaoui (Morocco), Composition, 1967.
Debt hangs over the African continent like a wake of vultures. Most African countries have interest bills that are much higher than their national revenues, with budgets managed through austerity and driven by deep cuts in government employment as well as the education and health care sectors. Since just under two-thirds of the debt owed by these countries is denominated in foreign currencies, debt repayment is near impossible without further borrowing, resulting in a cycle of indebtedness with no permanent relief in sight. None of the schemes on the table, such as the G20’s Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI) or its Common Framework for Debt Treatments, will provide the kind of debt forgiveness that is needed to breathe life into these economies.
In October 2020, the Jubilee Debt Campaign proposed two common sense measures to remove the debt overhang. The IMF owns significant quantities of gold amounting to 90.5 million ounces, worth $168.6 billion in total; by selling 6.7% of their gold holdings, they could raise more than enough to pay the $8.2 billion that makes up DSSI countries’ debt. The campaign also suggested that rich countries could draw billions of dollars towards this cancellation by issuing less than 9% of their IMF Special Drawing Rights allocation. Other ways to reduce the debt burden include cancelling debt payments to the World Bank and IMF, two multilateral institutions with a mandate to ensure the advancement of social development and not their own financial largess. However, the World Bank has not moved on this agenda – despite dramatic words from its president in August 2020 – and the IMF’s modest debt suspension from May 2020 to December 2021 will hardly make a difference. Along with these reasonable suggestions, bringing the nearly $40 trillion held in illicit tax havens into productive use could help African countries escape the spiralling debt trap.
Choukri Mesli (Algeria), Algeria in Flames, 1961.
‘We live in one of the poorest places on earth’, former President of Mali Amadou Toumani Touré told me just before the pandemic. Mali is part of the Sahel region of Africa, where 80% of the population lives on less than $2 a day. Poverty will only intensify as war, climate change, national debt, and population growth increase. At the 7th Summit of the leaders of the G5 Sahel (Group of Five for the Sahel) in February 2021, the heads of state called for a ‘deep restructuring of debt’, but the silence they received from the IMF was deafening. The G5 Sahel was initiated by France in 2014 as a political formation of the five Sahel countries – Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger. Its real purpose was clarified in 2017 with the formation of its military alliance (the G5 Sahel Joint Force or FC-G5S), which provided cover for the French military presence in the Sahel. It could now be claimed that France did not really invade these countries, who maintain their formal sovereignty, but that it entered the Sahel to merely assist these countries in their fight against instability.
Part of the problem is the demands made on these states to increase their military spending against any increase in spending for human relief and development. The G5 Sahel countries spend between 17% and 30% of their entire budgets on their militaries. Three of the five Sahel countries have expanded their military spending astronomically over the past decade: Burkina Faso by 238%, Mali by 339%, and Niger by 288%. The arms trade is suffocating them. Western countries – led by France but egged on by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) – have pressured these states to treat every crisis as a security crisis. The entire discourse is about security as conversations about social development are relegated to the margins. Even for the United Nations, questions of development have become an afterthought to the focus on war.
Souleymane Ouologuem (Mali), The Foundation, 2014.
In the first two weeks of May 2022, the Malian military government ejected the French military and withdrew from G5 Sahel in the wake of deep resentment across Mali spurred by civilian casualties from French military attacks and the French government’s arrogant attitude towards the Malian government. Colonel Assimi Goïta, who leads the military junta, said that the agreement with the French ‘brought neither peace, nor security, nor reconciliation’ and that the junta aspires ‘to stop the flow of Malian blood’. France moved its military force from Mali next door to Niger.
No one denies the fact that the chaos in the Sahel region was deepened by the 2011 NATO war against Libya. Mali’s earlier challenges, including a decades-long Tuareg insurgency and conflicts between Fulani herders and Dogon farmers, were convulsed by the entry of arms and men from Libya and Algeria. Three jihadi groups, including al-Qaeda, appeared as if from nowhere and used older regional tensions to seize northern Mali in 2012 and declare the state of Azawad. French military intervention followed in January 2013.
Jean-David Nkot (Cameroon), #Life in Your Hands, 2020.
Travel through this region makes it clear that French – and US – interests in the Sahel are not merely about terrorism and violence. Two domestic concerns have led both foreign powers to build a massive military presence there, including the world’s largest drone base, which is operated by the US, in Agadez, Niger. The first concern is that this region is home to considerable natural resources, including yellowcake uranium in Niger. Two mines in Arlit (Niger) produce enough uranium to power one in three light bulbs in France, which is why French mining firms (such as Areva) operate in this garrison-like town. Secondly, these military operations are designed to deter the steady stream of migrants leaving areas such as West Africa and West Asia, going through the Sahel and Libya and making their way across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe. Along the Sahel, from Mauritania to Chad, Europe and the US have begun to build what amounts to a highly militarised border. Europe has moved its border from the northern edge of the Mediterranean Sea to the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, thereby compromising the sovereignty of North Africa.
Hawad (Niger), Untitled, 1997.
Military coups in Burkina Faso and Mali are a result of the failure of democratic governments to rein in French intervention. It was left to the military in Mali to both eject the French military and depart from its G5 Sahel political project. Conflicts in Mali, as former President Alpha Omar Konaré told me over a decade ago, are inflamed due to the suffocation of the country’s economy. The country is regularly left out of infrastructure support and debt relief initiatives by international development organisations. This landlocked state imports over 70% of its food, whose prices have skyrocketed in the past month. Mali faces harsh sanctions from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which will only deepen the crisis and provoke greater conflict north of Mali’s capital, Bamako.
The conflict in Mali’s north affects the lives of the country’s Tuareg population, which is rich with many great poets and musicians. One of them, Souéloum Diagho, writes that ‘a person without memory is like a desert without water’ (‘un homme sans mémoire est comme un desert sans eau’). Memories of older forms of colonialism sharpen the way that many Africans view their treatment as ‘collateral victims’ (as the AU’s Mahamat described it) and their conviction that it is unacceptable.
News outlets in the United States give prime coverage to the war in Ukraine but mostly ignore the devastating war that the U.S. has supported since March 2015 between a Saudi-led coalition that includes the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the Houthis in Yemen. As a result, most of the U.S. public is unaware of the war’s catastrophic impact on the Yemeni population: according to the United Nations, around 400,000 people have died and 16.2 million are at the brink of starvation.
The causes of this devastation include a Saudi-led bombing campaign that targets infrastructure, food sources and health services, as well as coercive measures, including a blockade, directed at destroying Yemen’s economy. The UN has called the situation in Yemen the largest humanitarian crisis in the world.
Recently, the Houthis have retaliated against the Saudi-led coalition by launching transborder attacks into Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Most of those attacks have been deflected with the help of U.S. weapons. The Saudi/UAE airstrikes, missile attacks and strangling blockades regularly overwhelm the relatively ineffective weapons and military power of the Houthis. Yet, the U.S. media confer a disproportionate amount of media coverage and sympathy to Saudi/UAE aggression.
What’s important to realize — and what the news media fail to discuss — is that the U.S. is complicit in causing this crisis. The U.S. is the main supplier of weapons to Saudi Arabia. According to the Brookings Institute, 73 percent of Saudi arms imports come from the U.S. In fact, 24 percent of U.S. weapons exports go to Saudi Arabia.
Former President Donald Trump was eager to brag about the high sales of U.S. arms to the Saudis. Although President Joe Biden indicated that he would sell only defensive weapons to Saudi Arabia, the U.S. continues to provide the Saudis with missiles, parts, maintenance, logistical support and intelligence. Without U.S. support, the Saudi war effort would be greatly hampered.
In view of the devastation to Yemen, it’s no surprise that several efforts were made by Congress to end U.S. support for the war. In 2019, Congress passed a War Powers Resolution calling for an end to U.S. support for the Saudis, partly in response to the brutal assassination of journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi. However, President Trump at the time vetoed the resolution. Likewise, the House of Representatives passed several versions of the National Defense Authorization Act that included language calling for a complete halt to U.S. support for the war. But during final negotiations, those provisions were dropped.
Recently, lawmakers in Congress, including Representatives Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) and Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon), indicated that they will introduce a Yemen War Powers Resolution to end all U.S. support for the war. We call on our federal lawmakers — especially our own Rep. Adam Smith (D-Washington), who chairs the House Armed Services Committee — to cosponsor the resolution.
Still, some policy makers want the U.S. to continue support for the Saudi war on Yemen. Their motivations include a desire for continued oil supplies, as well as strategic issues related to China — Saudi Arabia has supposedly considered accepting yuan as payment for oil — and Iran. Another factor is the money earned from arms sales.
But others point to the high costs of the U.S.-Saudi relationship, including security concerns. In April of this year, 30 members of Congress wrote a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken calling for a recalibration of the U.S.-Saudi partnership. The letter mentions the brutal war on Yemen, Saudi oppression at home, and Saudi Arabia’s flirtations with China.
Furthermore, the Saudis have been unwilling to raise oil production to aid the international coalition that is confronting Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. Others have published on the ways in which the Saudi-U.S. relationship is damaging to U.S. interests, including dispelling the myth of U.S. dependency on Saudi oil and threats to our national security.
A discouraging development is that on May 17, Saudi Deputy Defense Minister Khaled bin Salman met with U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl, and the U.S confirmed its commitment to the U.S.-Saudi military collaboration.
Moreover, recent reports indicate that President Biden is planning to meet with Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman early next month. This planned meeting is distressing to many antiwar activists because President Biden had earlier promised to make bin Salman a “pariah” for his role in the killing of Khashoggi and the war in Yemen.
On April 2, a truce between the warring parties went into effect, the first in six years. The agreed upon truce included an end to attacks and provisions for better movement of goods and people into Yemen. The truce will expire on June 2, 2022, and it is unclear if it will be renewed. It is crucial that we prevent a lapse in the truce and the resumption of fighting.
The threat of the U.S. ending its support for the Saudi-led coalition, especially the War Powers Resolution, has made the April 2 truce possible. Although the truce is fragile, and although not all the conditions were met, it is a first step to ending the devastating war and bringing peace to Yemen. The UN is discussing an extension to the truce, which the Houthi are considering.
Without U.S. support, the Saudis would struggle to continue the war. So, it is crucial now that Congress supports the War Powers Resolution to send a signal to both the Biden administration and to Saudi Arabia that it will no longer support their war. It is time for Congress to exercise its constitutional right to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led War in Yemen.
Plans to double Japan’s defence budget to around £86bn may mark the final winding down of the country’s anti-militarist posture. But the move will only make the world more dangerous, according to one Japanese foreign policy expert. University of East Anglia scholar Ra Mason also said that the US is driving the shift.
Writing in The Conversation, Mason said that the defence hike reflected those in European countries and signalled a bonanza for arms firms.
Imperial ambitions?
Mason said the change:
had been prompted by the conflict in Ukraine, but also reflected growing regional pressure from China, North Korea and Russia.
However, the pressure to militarise is not necessarily home grown. As Mason wrote:
The US has been pressuring Japan for some time to increase its defence spending to share the security bill in the Asia-Pacific region.
Japan’s post-war constitution still bans particular kinds of militarist behaviour, including the possession or development of nuclear weapons. However, in recent years defence reforms have still gone ahead under different governments. Article 9 of the constitution was created to prevent Japan becoming a military power again. Article 9 reads:
Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.
In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.
Recent polls suggest that while many Japanese people oppose abandoning it, a clear majority of elected politicians back reform.
Other experts also point to the gradual move away from a pacifist-type foreign policy over many years. Japan deployed troops to Iraq and Afghanistan (albeit in support roles) and it’s navy sank a North Korean ship in 2001. And, as the Council on Foreign Relations has pointed out:
Pressure from Washington has only increased since the 9/11 attacks.
US influence
Mason argued that US relations have been key to the change:
In the current era, relations with Washington have been paramount. But with America seemingly overstretched and in decline, Tokyo’s move to strengthen its military and deepen the alliance poses questions about Japan’s security identity.
There is an increasing danger for Japan of:
entrapment into American proxy wars and increasing economic involvement in the US “military-industrial complex”, the system by which the defence sector encourages arms spending and war.
Big-money reforms
Mason added that the current push for a more militarist Japan would allow big profits for defence firms. Much as we have seen in the West since the war in Ukraine began:
Mason also argued that Japan’s ministers are using goodwill over Ukraine to fuel militarism at home. Japan has taken refugees, and large donations have been made to help those affected by the war. But, he warns, that goodwill should not be used to ramp up Japanese militarism in the region.
Japan’s involvement in international politics since WW2 has been very different to other former imperial powers. It would be a tragedy if that shifted to a more aggressive foreign policy, but this seems to be occurring despite public pride in Japan’s role in the world. There will be few winners from a re-militarised Japan, least of all the Japanese people.
This is a commentary upon N.Y. Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s statement on May 6 that Ukraine’s Government is and ought to be the U.S. Government’s agent in its war against Russia, not representing the interests of the Ukrainian people in it. He introduced the statement by noting that Ukraine is a bad country,
a country marbled with corruption. That doesn’t mean we should not be helping it. I am glad we are. I insist we do. But my sense is that the Biden team is walking much more of a tightrope with Zelensky than it would appear to the eye — wanting to do everything possible to make sure he wins this war but doing so in a way that still keeps some distance between us and Ukraine’s leadership. That’s so Kyiv is not calling the shots [I boldfaced that — he didn’t] and so we’ll not be embarrassed by messy Ukrainian politics in the war’s aftermath.
He starts there by putting down Ukraine as a “country,” and then asserts that, fortunately, “Kyiv is not calling the shots and so we’ll not be embarrassed by messy Ukrainian politics in the war’s aftermath.” Perhaps an underlying assumption of his in saying this is that America is NOT “a country riddled with corruption,” and, so, that it is right and good that Ukraine is America’s slave in this matter.
He continues there:
The view of Biden and his team, according to my reporting, is that America needs to help Ukraine restore its sovereignty and beat the Russians back — but not let Ukraine turn itself into an American protectorate on the border of Russia. We need to stay laser-focused on what is our national interest and not stray in ways that lead to exposures and risks we don’t want.
I believe that Friedman truly does represent the U.S. Establishment that he is a part of, and that “Biden and his team” likewise do. I accept Friedman’s statement as reflecting accurately the way that “Biden and his team” (which, given the U.S. Congress’s virtually 100% voting for it in this matter of Ukraine, also includes virtually every U.S. Senator and Representative) feel about the matter: they feel that Ukraine must be their slave in it and must do whatever the U.S. Government demands that it do in its war with Ukraine’s next-door-neighbor, Russia.
That view — the view that it’s not only true but good that “Kyiv is not calling the shots” in this matter — reflects the view that an imperialist government has toward one of its colonies or vassal-nations (which the imperialist nation nowadays calls instead its ‘allies’). And this is the reason why they treat not only their armies but all of the residents in their ‘allies’ as being appropriate cannon-fodder or ‘proxy soldiers’ in their foreign wars, wars to conquer other countries — such as, in this case, Russia.
The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come. … Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums. … It will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world.
It could as well have been said by England’s royals and other aristocrats during their imperialistic heyday.
All other nations are “dispensable.” America’s military is an extension of international economic competition so that America’s billionaires will continue to rule the world in the future, as they do now. “Rising middle classes compete with us” and are consequently America’s enemies in the “dispensable” countries (everywhere in which vassalage to America’s billionaires — being “America’s allies” — is rejected), so that “it will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world.” So he told America’s future generals, regarding those who live (as the 2017 U.S. Army report put it) “in the shadow of significant U.S. military capability and the implied promise of unacceptable consequences in the event that capability is unleashed.” America’s military are the global gendarmes not of Hitler’s nazi regime in WW II, but of America’s nazi regime in the lead-up to WW III.
Thomas Friedman, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and all of the other U.S. major ‘news’-media, feel this way about it, and report and comment upon the ’news’ that way, but I think that it was a slip-up that Friedman and the Times expressed it, for once, so honestly, especially given that they are master-liars on most international-news reporting and commentary. The pièce de résistance in his commentary was its ludicrously hypocritical line that “America needs to help Ukraine restore its sovereignty.” (They must be America’s slaves but restore their sovereignty. How stupid do they think that the American public is?) That too is typical of aristocrats’ hypocrisies and general corruptness — including that of the U.S. Government itself, which represents ONLY America’s billionaires and other super-rich — it’s a regime and no democracy at all.
Incidentally, the title of Friedman’s commentary was “The War Is Getting More Dangerous for America, and Biden Knows It.” It’s an interesting title, because it concerns ONLY what Friedman and America’s other aristocrats care about, which is themselves, and not at all about what any of the ‘dispensable’ countries (including Ukraine) care about. Since the publics everywhere care about preventing a WW III (nuclear war between Russia and America — including all NATO countries), that is a stunningly narrow sphere of concern regarding a potentially world-ending catastrophe. Clearly, America’s aristocrats are rank psychopaths. They control the U.S. Government, and this is the result of that. It’s a Government in which the worst come first, the public last. Russia is up against that: it is up against America, and Ukraine is only the first battleground of WW III, now only at the proxy stage for the U.S. regime but not for the Russian Government, which, in this matter, truly does represent the most-vital national-security interests of its citizens. Everyone except U.S.-and-allied aristocracies (many of whom are buyers of billionaires’ bunkers) have an overriding interest in America’s defeat in this war, before it ever reaches the nuclear stage, of direct Russia vs. U.S. warfare.
The shame of today’s U.N. is that it’s not enraged against the U.S. Government. This is shaping up to be the biggest scandal and failure in the U.N.’s entire history, virtually its own collapse.
Vladimir 
(@mfa_russia) 
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