Category Archives: Foreign Policy

SCOTT RITTER: The Nightmare of NATO Equipment Being Sent to Ukraine

Posted on January 25, 2023 | Leave a comment

Russia is still going to win the war. They will do to the new weapons what they did to the previous weapons—destroy them. The new weaponry does escalate the risk of nuclear war, as all other tactics come to naught for the U.S. and its pawn and they grow increasingly desperate. From Scott Ritter at consortiumnews.com:

The West’s recent approval of more military assistance for Kiev risks nuclear nightmare, fails Ukrainian expectations and rebukes the World War II history enshrined in a prominent Soviet war memorial in Berlin.

Soviet War Memorial, Tiergarten, West Berlin. (Mike Peel, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

On Tuesday the White House decided that it would send about 30 M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, which was seen as political cover for Germany, which decided to ship 14 Leopard 2 tanks to Kiev.

Early on the morning of May 2, 1945, General Vasily Chuikov, the commander of the Soviet 8thGuards Army, accepted the surrender of the German garrison of Berlin.

Two days prior, soldiers from the 150th Rifle Division, part of the Soviet 5th Shock Army, had raised the victory banner of the Red Army over the Reichstag. An hour after the banner went up, Adolf Hitler and his mistress, Eva Braun, committed suicide in his study inside the Furhrerbunker.

Chuikov, the hero of Stalingrad whose battered 62nd Army was renamed the 8th Guards Army in honor of their victory in holding that city in the face of a massive German onslaught, had led his troops into the heart of the Nazi capital, battling stubborn Nazi resistance in the Tiergarten district of Berlin, where the den of the Nazi beast was located. The Soviet general was rewarded for the courage and sacrifice of his soldiers by being in position to accept the German surrender.

“Raising a flag over the Reichstag” photo by Yevgeny Khaldei. (Russian Defense Ministry)

In honor of this accomplishment, and the sacrifice it entailed, the Soviet Army inaugurated, in November 1945, a commemorative monument along the Tiergarten. Constructed from red marble and granite stripped away from the ruins of Adolf Hitler’s Neue Reichskanzlei (New Imperial Chancellery), the monument, consisting of a concave colonnade of six joined axes flanked by Red Army artillery and a pair of T-34 tanks, with a giant bronze statue of a victorious Red Army soldier standing watch from the center pylon.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Military, War

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Scott Ritter: NATO Is a Suicide Pill for the World… Pray That Russia Wins, by Finian Cunningham

Posted on January 24, 2023 | Leave a comment

If you’re looking for someone to cut through the crap, watch the interview with Scott Ritter. From Finian Cunningham at strategic-culture.org:

Former Marine Corps officer Scott Ritter says the U.S.-led NATO military alliance is driving the war in Ukraine with the ultimate objective of defeating Russia.

The conflict is not about defending Ukraine as the Western media would tell us, it is and always has been about defeating Russia.

NATO is already now in a direct war with Russia and Russia has every right to strike targets in NATO countries like Germany and Poland that are acting as logistical centers in the supply of munitions to Ukraine.

Washington and its NATO allies are recklessly raising the stakes of military victory or defeat, rather than trying to find a diplomatic, political solution to a long-running conflict. Ukraine is being callously exploited as a proxy for the U.S.-led NATO war on Russia.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Military, Politics, Propaganda, War

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“Chinese Aggression” Sure Looks An Awful Lot Like US Aggression, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on January 24, 2023 | Leave a comment

So much for Kevin McCarthy. He’s just as stupid as Nancy Pelosi, reprising her “poke China” trip to Taiwan. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

Punchbowl News reports that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is planning a trip to Taiwan, which will be yet another incendiary provocation against Beijing if it occurs. The previous House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, sparked a significant escalation in hostilities with her visit last year, the consequences of which are still reverberating today.

Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp explains:

Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan was viewed in Beijing as a major provocation, and it sparked the largest-ever Chinese military drills around the island. The exercises included China firing missiles over Taiwan and simulating a blockade of the island, both unprecedented actions.

China has kept up the military pressure on Taiwan since Pelosi’s visit, and its warplanes regularly now cross the median line, an informal barrier that divides the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. Before Pelosi’s trip, China barely crossed the line. Now, it’s an almost-daily occurrence.

Beijing views the US House speaker visiting Taiwan as an affront to the one-China policy and the understanding the US and China reached in 1979, when Washington severed formal relations with Taipei.

US-led provocations and escalations against China are becoming a regular occurrence, both from the US itself and from its imperial assets like Australia and Taiwan. Yet according to the western political/media class, the urgent threat of our day is “Chinese aggression”.

After the House of Representatives voted to approve the new Select Committee on China — a Republican initiative designed to increase internal pressure in the US government to ramp up the new cold war — the committee’s chairman Mike Gallagher put out a statement saying that it is “time to push back against the Chinese Communist Party’s aggression in bipartisan fashion.”

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Let’s Nuke The World Over Who Governs Crimea: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on January 22, 2023 | Leave a comment

Caitlin Johnstone has a gift for pinpointing insanity. From Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

Critics of the US empire have spent months compiling mountains of evidence showing that the empire knowingly provoked the war in Ukraine. Supporters of the US empire have spent months posting dog memes and accusing strangers of being paid by Putin. It’s clear who’s in the right.

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So does everyone else in the world get a vote on whether their lives should be risked in an offensive to control who governs Crimea? Or will the Biden administration just be making that call on behalf of all living creatures?

It’s so crazy how the fate of everyone alive and everyone who could potentially be born in the future is riding on the way two governments choose to navigate a conflict in Ukraine, just because those two governments have most of the world’s nuclear weapons. It’s like two people in a bar getting into a brawl that kills everyone in their city. Nobody else in the world gets a vote on the decisions being made that could kill everyone alive and end humanity forever; just a few people within those two governments and their militaries.

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The US empire is telling Moscow “I’m the craziest motherfucker around, I’ll keep ramping up the brinkmanship looking you right in the eye and daring you to use nukes,” while telling the rest of the world “I am the voice of sanity that you should all look to for leadership.”

One of the empire’s faces is the virtuous upholder of freedom and democracy, while the other face puts on an intimidating show of viciousness like a prisoner biting off someone’s cheek in the prison yard. At least one of those faces is necessarily lying.

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Dollar Hegemony, Saudi Arabia, Oil, and Ron Paul, by Adam Dick

Posted on January 21, 2023 | 1 comment

The world has grown tired of U.S. hegemony and its reserve currency exorbitant privilege. From Adam Dick at ronpaulinstitute.org:

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Interviewed Tuesday at Bloomberg, Saudi Arabia Finance Minister Mohammed Al-Jadaan indicated that Saudi Arabia would be open to conducting trade, including involving oil, in various currencies — mentioning in particular the euro and the Saudi riyal — instead of the United States dollar. This is the latest in a series of developments suggesting the Middle East nation and large oil producer is shifting away from supporting US dollar hegemony through trade.

In February of 2006, then US House of Representatives member Ron Paul (R-TX) discussed the history of US dollar hegemony and its looming doom in a House floor speech titled “The End of Dollar Hegemony.” Paul began his speech with his assessment that the dollar dominance, called dollar hegemony more recently and dollar diplomacy in earlier decades of the prior hundred years, “is coming to an end.”

The full history and analysis Paul related in the speech is fascinating. But, there is a particular portion of Paul’s speech that relates to the Saudi finance minister’s comment. This is when Paul focused on the key role the trade of oil has played in supporting dollar hegemony and the related position of the US dollar as the world reserve currency.

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All Quiet (Panic) on the Western Front, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on January 17, 2023 | Leave a comment

If the World Economic Forum is the best of the West, the West doesn’t stand a chance against the emerging multipolar order. From Pepe Escobar at unz.com:

Shadows are falling / And I’ve been here all day / It’s too hot to sleep / And time is running away / Feel like my soul / has turned into steel /I’ve still got the scars / That the sun didn’t heal / There’s not even room enough / To be anywhere / Lord it’s not dark yet, / but it’s getting there

Bob Dylan, Not Dark Yet

Lights! Action! Reset!

The World Economic Forum (WEF)’s Davos Freak Show is back in business on Monday.

The mainstream media of the collective West, in unison, will be spinning non-stop, for a week, all the “news” that are fit to print to extol new declinations of The Great Reset, re-baptized The Great Narrative, but actually framed as a benign offer by “stakeholder capitalism”. These are the main planks of the shady platform of a shady NGO registered in Cologny, a tony Geneva suburb.

The list of Davos attendees was duly leaked. Proverbially, it’s an Anglo-American Exceptionalist fun fest, complete with intel honchos such as the US Director of National Intelligence, Avril “Madam Torture” Haines; the head of MI6 Richard Moore; and FBI director Christopher Wray.

Remixed Diderot and D’Alembert Encyclopedias could be written about the Davos pathology – where a hefty list of multibillionaires, heads of state and corporate darlings (owned by BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street and co.) “engage” in selling Demented Dystopia packages to the unsuspecting masses.

But let’s cut to the chase and focus on a few panels next week – which could easily be mistaken for Straight to Hell sessions.

The Tuesday, January 17 list is particularly engaging. It features a “De-Globalization or Re-Globalization?” panel with speakers Ian Bremmer, Adam Tooze, Niall Ferguson, Péter Szijjártó and Ngaire Woods. Three Atlanticists/Exceptionalists stand out, especially the ultra-toxic Ferguson.

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Posted in Crime, Cronyism, Foreign Policy, Government

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America’s Dumbest War, by Bob Moriarty

Posted on January 15, 2023 | Leave a comment

Has there ever been a smart war? From Bob Moriarty at 321gold.com:

According to documents put out by a report service working for Congress the US has launched 251 foreign military interventions in the last thirty years. The report also says the US started more than 80% of all military conflicts since the end of World War II.

We are in luck because the US (Stanford University IT Department says that using the words America or American should be forbidden) may well have fought their next to last war because it is having unintended consequences no one could have forecast. Actually that is not true either. They were forecast.

Before I dive into why this war is so obscenely stupid and self destructive, I’d like to comment about something I have learned about life in general.

To succeed overall, you need to be good at something. It could be singing. It could be writing. It could be working as a mechanic or a cook. Actually it could be nearly anything. You just need to find something you are good at.

Once you find something that you are good at, you need to do more of it. Frankly there are a couple of things I am good at that somehow manage to pay the bills but there are hundreds of more tasks I am pretty useless at. So do more of what you are good at and less of the things you are not good at and you will get along just fine.

Can I give you a classic example?

Let’s say you work for the government. You got your job because basically you are a freak. You think that you would make a great luggage thief. You take a flight; you stand around the luggage area after the flight and see a bag you would like so you walk off with it. Alas, the baggage area has cameras all over so you get caught.

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Help! The Beatles to Save America? By Batiushka

Posted on January 15, 2023 | Leave a comment

The war is existential for Russia and not for the West. That should tell you who’s going to win. From Batiushka at thesaker.is:

I need somebody,
Not just anybody,
You know I need someone, help!

So much younger than today,
I never needed anybody’s help in any way,
but now these days are gone,
I’m not so self-assured.
And now I find I’ve changed my mind
And opened up the doors.

In, oh, so many ways
My independence seems to vanish in the haze.
But every now and then
I feel so insecure.
I know that I just need you like
I’ve never done before.

Help me if you can, I’m feeling down,
And I do appreciate you being ’round.
Help me get my feet back on the ground,
Won’t you please, please help me, help me, help me?

The Beatles

The West has lost the Battle of Soledar. 25,000 Ukrainian and western mercenaries lie dead. Artemovsk is about to fall with all its fortifications. Where next?

A limited policing operation all started with the Russian wish to protect its people in two Russian provinces in the far east of the Ukraine. This soon had to be extended to four Russian provinces, two more added from the south-east of the Ukraine, so linking up with the much-persecuted Crimea. That had been Russian until 1954, just as all the east of the Ukraine was Russian until 1922 and the far west Polish, Hungarian and Romanian until 1939 – the Ukraine is a uniquely Communist creation. And then there was the Russian wish to prevent the Ukraine from becoming an American base, specifically for its ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, and also to protect the many Russian speakers elsewhere in the Ukraine from hate-filled Nazi persecution of them. The project and the aim were all relatively modest. Then it all changed:

If the West continues to pump the Ukraine full of weaponry out of impotent rage, or a desire to exacerbate the situation…then that means our geographical tasks will move even further from the current line.

Sergey Lavrov, Foreign Minister of Russia

So it all became an operation, forced on Russia by the aggressiveness of Washington, to take back, directly or indirectly, more or less the whole of the Ukraine. This was not because Russia is fighting against the Ukraine, or against the EU, or against NATO, or against ‘the West’, or even against the USA, but against the neocons, who pull the money-strings, in Washington. And so now Russia has to demilitarise all NATO ground forces (cowardly NATO naval and air forces are hiding) and ultimately to denazify the whole Western world. It is actually on its way to doing that. Certain types of NATO equipment are in short supply. And despite strict Western censorship, more and more Western people are realising that the Ukraine, the most corrupt country on earth, is simply not worth a penny of their taxes, let alone billions, let alone living in hunger or cold: ‘Eat or heat’, as they say in the strikebound UK.

What the Western world, which is ruled over by a bunch of neocons in Washington, has never understood, is that this is an existential war for Russia and therefore Russia will fight to the end, if the neocons force it too. And although the neocon elite likes to consider that this is an existential war for the US, it is not, let alone for the peoples of Western Europe. Find a single ordinary Western person who is voluntarily willing to die for the Ukraine. You will not find a single one. (Western mercenaries die only for money, not for the Ukraine). This Western crusade is existential only for the neocon fantasy ideology, that ‘The West is Best’ and that ‘History Has Ended’ (with our triumph). And here there is a problem.

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Patrick Lawrence: Europe and the Legitimization of Deception

Posted on January 15, 2023 | Leave a comment

As we were all told as kids and as we all learned growing up: lies always come back to bite you on the ass. From Patrick Lawrence at sheerpost.com:

Federal Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel, President of Russia Vladimir Putin, President of France François Hollande at the Kremlin to discuss solutions to the situation in southeast Ukraine. (2015-02-06). Kremlin.ru, CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The U.S., having no need of or gift for statecraft, has long practiced what I’ve taken to calling the diplomacy of no diplomacy. You can’t expect much from bimbos such as Antony Blinken or Wendy Sherman, Blinken’s No. 2 at the State Department. All they can do is roar, even if they are mice next to any serious diplomat.

But have the European powers now followed along? I fear to ask because I fear the answer. But I must, given recent events.

Early last year, when Petro Poroshenko stated publicly that the post-coup regime in Kyiv had no intention of abiding by diplomatic commitments it made in 2014-15 to a peaceful settlement of the Ukraine crisis, a few eyebrows arched, but not over many. Who was the former Ukrainian president, anyway? I had him down from the first as a self-interested dummkopf who did what Washington told him to do and nothing more, no shred of statesmanship about him.

It was another matter when, in early December, Angela Merkel admitted in back-to-back interviews that the European powers were up to the same thing. The objective of diplomatic talks in late 2014 and early 2015, the former German chancellor told Der Spiegel and Die Zeit, was not, as they had pretended, a framework for a federalized Ukraine in the cause of a lasting peace between its hostile halves: It was to deceive the Russians to give Kyiv time to prepare for a military assault on the Russian-speaking provinces in the east, whose people had refused to accept the U.S.–orchestrated coup that brought compulsively Russophobic Nazi-inflected nationalists to power in February 2014.

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Why the CIA attempted a ‘Maidan uprising’ in Brazil, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on January 11, 2023 | 1 comment

The CIA is addicted to regime change. However, what worked in the Ukraine hasn’t worked in Brazil . . . so far. From Pepe Escobar at thecradle.co:

The failed coup in Brazil is the latest CIA stunt, just as the country is forging stronger ties with the east.

https://media.thecradle.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Lula-1.jpg

A former US intelligence official has confirmed that the shambolic Maidan remix staged in Brasilia on 8 January was a CIA operation, and linked it to the recent attempts at color revolution in Iran.

On Sunday, alleged supporters of former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro stormed Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court, and  presidential palace, bypassing flimsy security barricades, climbing on roofs, smashing windows, destroying public property including precious paintings, while calling for a military coup as part of a regime change scheme targeting elected President Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva.

According to the US source, the reason for staging the operation – which bears visible signs of hasty planning – now, is that Brazil is set to reassert itself in global geopolitics alongside fellow BRICS states Russia, India, and China.

That suggests CIA planners are avid readers of Credit Suisse strategist Zoltan Pozsar, formerly of the New York Fed. In his ground-breaking 27 December report titled War and Commodity Encumbrance, Pozsar states that “the multipolar world order is being built not by G7 heads of state but by the ‘G7 of the East’ (the BRICS heads of state), which is a G5 really but because of ‘BRICSpansion’, I took the liberty to round up.”

He refers here to reports that Algeria, Argentina, Iran have already applied to join the BRICS – or rather its expanded version “BRICS+” – with further interest expressed by Saudi Arabia, Turkiye, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Indonesia.

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