Category Archives: Foreign Policy

Quake Delivers Earth-Shattering Blow to U.S.-Led NATO Hypocrisy, by Finian Cunningham

Posted on February 9, 2023 | 2 comments

Billions for the corrupt Ukraine regime, nothing for Turkey or Syria, and no relief for Syria from U.S. sanctions. And we wonder why most of the world despises the U.S. government. From Finian Cunningham at strategic-culture.org:

When a real-world emergency happens, all of NATO’s pious and self-regarding talk implodes in a pile of dust.

A 7.8. magnitude earthquake hits Europe’s southern neighbors Türkiye and Syria – and the NATO alliance does next to nothing in response. What sort of security organization is that?

Rather, it seems to be too busy trying to start World War Three by undertaking an unprecedented mobilization of resources and equipment in Ukraine against Russia. A mobilization that is completely unwarranted and indeed is an audacious gaslighting charade played on the Western public.

The United States-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization has an annual military budget that exceeds well over $1 trillion spread over its 30 member nations. One of those members is Türkiye.

What sort of priorities has NATO? Not rhetorical, theoretical, or presumed priorities, but real-life practical, demonstrable priorities.

On Monday morning this week, southern Türkiye and neighboring Syria were devastated by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake and multiple huge aftershocks. The death toll in both countries has risen to over 11,000 with tens of thousands injured and made homeless. With thousands of missing people trapped under rubble, the casualties will increase over the coming days.

Many countries were quick to send emergency rescue teams to the zone of havoc that straddles the border between Türkiye and Syria. Russia and Iran – experienced in such natural disasters – were among the first neighboring countries to send in aid and salvage crews.

By contrast, the apathetic response from the U.S.-led NATO bloc has been abject. What’s even more incredible, Türkiye is a long-time prominent member of the organization and is considered a vital partner for the European Union.

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Colin Powell’s anthrax vial taught the US a valuable lesson – that it can get away with any lie it wants, by Azǝrbaycan24

Posted on February 9, 2023 | 1 comment

The U.S. didn’t start lying with Colin Powell’s anthrax vial, but it’s been lying with impunity ever since. From Azǝrbaycan24 at azerbaycan24.com:

US Secretary of State Colin Powell holds up a vial that he said was the size that could be used to hold anthrax as he addresses the United Nations Security Council 5 February, 2003 at the UN in New York. ©  Timothy A. CLARY / AFP

It’s been 20 years since the Secretary of State made his UN Security Council address, fake anthrax vial in hand, which led to the Iraq war and millions of deaths Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika: Arms Control and the End of the Soviet Union.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika: Arms Control and the End of the Soviet Union.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. @RealScottRitter@ScottRitterUS Secretary of State Colin Powell holds up a vial that he said was the size that could be used to hold anthrax as he addresses the United Nations Security Council 5 February, 2003 at the UN in New York. © Timothy A. CLARY / AFP

Twenty years ago, former Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered his now-infamous address before the United Nations Security Council, making the case for war against Iraq.

The presentation would later be revealed as lies. Sadly, it would also turn out that no one seemed to care.On February 5, 2003, I watched it all with a sense of boiling anger. The day before, I had made the following prediction to Japanese media:

“He’s [Powell] going to present circumstantial evidence that packaged together and presented will make a compelling case that [UN weapons] inspections don’t work, inspections can’t work, that Iraq is actively conspiring against inspections, thereby, denigrating the efficacy of inspections, while the world waits for inspectors to do their job. The purpose of Colin Powell’s presentation tomorrow is to destroy international trust and confidence in weapons inspections and that is a darn shame.”

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An Overblown Balloon Headline Inflates False Narrative on China, by Patrick Macfarlane

Posted on February 9, 2023 | 2 comments

Much ado about nothing, but when people fearfully fall for nothings like the Covid fraud, the Ukraine fraud, and now the Chinese balloon, it says a lot about the state of the country. From Patrick Macfarlane at libertarianinstitute.org:

For several decades the American public has been instilled with an intrinsic fear of and hatred for China.

No singular event in this seemingly inevitable march to war is more emblematic of the American public’s warped psyche than the “Chinese Spy Balloon” narrative—perhaps due, in part, to its facial absurdity. The happening eclipses even similarly nonsensical yarns such as widespread TikTok paranoia (see the NSA’s PRISM program), China’s American farmland purchases (Chinese firms account for approximately .5% of all foreign-owned farm and forest land in the U.S.), and the “invasion” of Chinese fentanyl through the Southern border (fentanyl trafficking is illegal in China).

Indeed, even the pervasive use of the phrase “Chinese Spy Balloon”—an utterly unsupported Pentagon accusation—is emblematic of the absolutely captured state of the American consciousness.

This narrative control is critical to Washington as it manufactures consent for its declared “great power competition” with Beijing.

The saga began on February 2, when an official spokesman announced the Pentagon was tracking the passage of a “high-altitude surveillance balloon” over the continental United States. The spokesman expressed confidence that the “surveillance balloon” belonged to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In this initial announcement, it was importantly noted “[i]nstances of this kind of balloon activity have been observed previously over the past several years.”

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Nord Stream Sabotage Was CIA, US Navy Covert Op: Seymour Hersh Bombshell Prompts White House Response, by Tyler Durden

Posted on February 9, 2023 | Leave a comment

The mainstream press will do its best to ignore this story, but it’s going to be hard. Hersh’s story is obviously big news in Russia and Germany. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Famed journalist and Pulitzer prize winner Seymour Hersh, who for decades was a star reporter writing for The New York Times and New Yorker, on Wednesday published a new bombshell as his first Substack post, prompting a quick White House response

After conducting his own investigation into who sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines via a series of underwater blasts on Sept. 26, Hersh has concluded the United States blew up the Russia-to-Germany natural gas pipeline as part of a covert operation under the guise of the BALTOPS 22 NATO exercise.

Famous investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, Image: Institute for Policy Studies

Hersh, relying on unnamed national security sources, describes months of discussions and back-and-forth involving the Biden White House, CIA, and Pentagon. The report says planning was in the works all the way back to December 2021, with a special task force formed under the aegis of US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.

“The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to assault the pipeline directly. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely. The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes,” the report, entitled How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline reads.

“The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022,” it continues.

As momentum gained to proceed with a covert sabotage attack, “Over the next few weeks, members of the CIA’s working group began to craft a plan for a covert operation that would use deep-sea divers to trigger an explosion along the pipeline,” Hersh writes.

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Posted in Energy, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Media, War

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Tank Wars: NATO’s Sleight Of Hand – Why NATO’s Top Tanks Won’t See Real Action, by Simplicius76

Posted on February 8, 2023 | Leave a comment

Why the tanks aren’t going to make a difference. From Simplicius76 at simplicius76.substack.com:

But instead will be coddled through a carefully curated and choreographed ventriloquist act in Ukraine.

One frothy contingent of the West is gleefully anticipating the upcoming, unprecedented infusion of Western armor into Ukraine as the prelude to Kursk 2.0, where peerless Western tanks will gloriously outman and outgun Russia’s Soviet-legacy armor. (well, the tragi-comic irony of the comparison doesn’t escape us)

But a new bombshell report is putting the brakes on those far-flung ideations.

It’s now come to light that Britain is busy furiously putting together plans to keep their Challenger-2 tanks from falling into Russian hands, so that Russia doesn’t get a peek at their much-vaunted ‘Chobham’ armor.

The plan consists of something we suspected all along: that secret teams will be in place to babysit and coddle the tanks at all times, taking fastidious care to make certain they are never in real danger of falling into Russian hands.

Britain led the world by pledging 14 Challenger 2s to Ukraine — but defence sources say it would be a nightmare if one was captured by Vladimir Putin’s invaders.

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US Hybrid War on Iran Stalling? By Kevin Barrett

Posted on February 8, 2023 | Leave a comment

Iran has an underappreciated array of weapons that can make its opponents’ lives miserable, and they’ve adapted to all the sanctions the U.S. has thrown at them. From Kevin Barrett at unz.com:

Empire poised to lose on two fronts at once–but at least we shot down that *&#! Chinese balloon!

In a lecture and Q&A with foreign journalists last night, strategic analyst Dr. Mostafa Khosh-Cheshm summarized the history and current state of what he described as the US hybrid war on Iran. He asserted that the American campaign has stalled due to Iran’s successful counterattacks and deterrents, but anticipates possible escalation into new battlegrounds despite the American side’s failure to make any progress toward achieving its objectives.

The apparent failure of the Israeli-inspired US hybrid war on Iran comes at the worst possible time for the US empire, which faces impending military catastrophe in Ukraine as even The New York Times has belatedly admitted. Future historians may look back on the neoconservatives’ decision to simultaneously target Russia, China, and Iran as one of the biggest blunders in history, on the scale of those analyzed in Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam. Writing of the foolish Goth king Recared, who inadvertently opened Spain to Muslim conquest, Tuchman notes that “for a ruler opposed by two inimical groups, it is folly to continue antagonizing both at once” (p.16). True enough; and how much more foolish to simultaneously antagonize three such groups!

The biggest mistake, from a US geo-strategic perspective, is making an enemy of Iran. China and to a lesser extent Russia are, due to their size and resources, peer competitors whose aspirations the US has reason to wish to contain. Iran, for its part, is a large and important country blessed with significant natural and human resources, but is not a natural peer competitor of the US. But since it occupies a critically-important strategic location at the crossroads of the Eurasia-Africa world island, and has historically suffered from Russia’s southward expansion, Iran and the US have every reason to maintain friendly relations and make win-win deals. The problem, from Iran’s perspective, is that the US seems incapable of making win-win deals (and sticking to them) while respecting the sovereignty of its partners. Instead, it arbitrarily shreds its own solemn agreements and aggressively insists on economically and militarily subjugating other nations, while exporting its own decadence in the form of “woke” obsessions with deviant sexuality, attacks on traditional family structures, nihilistic Soros-funded revolts against all forms of traditional authority, and other bizarre fetishes that the non-Western world wants no part of.

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Setting the Record Straight; Stuff You Should Know About Ukraine, by Mike Whitney

Posted on February 6, 2023 | Leave a comment

Russia is more sinned against than sinning in the Ukraine-Russia war. From Mike Whitney at unz.com:

On February 16, 2022, a full week before Putin sent combat troops into Ukraine, the Ukrainian Army began the heavy bombardment of the area (in east Ukraine) occupied by mainly ethnic Russians. Officials from the Observer Mission of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) were located in the vicinity at the time and kept a record of the shelling as it took place. What the OSCE discovered was that the bombardment dramatically intensified as the week went on until it reached a peak on February 19, when a total of 2,026 artillery strikes were recorded. Keep in mind, the Ukrainian Army was, in fact, shelling civilian areas along the Line of Contact that were occupied by other Ukrainians.

We want to emphasize that the officials from the OSCE were operating in their professional capacity gathering first-hand evidence of shelling in the area. What their data shows is that Ukrainian Forces were bombing and killing their own people. This has all been documented and has not been challenged.

So, the question we must all ask ourselves is this: Is the bombardment and slaughter of one’s own people an ‘act of war’?

We think it is. And if we are right, then we must logically assume that the war began before the Russian invasion (which was launched a full week later) We must also assume that Russia’s alleged “unprovoked aggression” was not unprovoked at all but was the appropriate humanitarian response to the deliberate killing of civilians. In order to argue that the Russian invasion was ‘not provoked’, we would have to say that firing over 4,000 artillery shells into towns and neighborhoods where women and children live, is not a provocation? Who will defend that point of view?

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Will U.S. ‘Interests’ Become Sacrificed on Altar of New Indo-Pacific Strategy? By Matthew Ehret

Posted on February 5, 2023 | 1 comment

Will the U.S. do any better with its Indo-Pacific strategy than its done with its Eurasian strategy? The question almost answers itself. From Matthew Ehret at strategic-culture.org:

The Anglo-American foreign policy hawks imagine that the world is yearning to be liberated from Beijing’s nefarious agenda to end poverty

As the trans-Atlantic world is pulled into the vortex of a McCarthyite nightmare with a renewed wave of anti-Russian and now anti-China hysterics, a wave of new “Asia Pacific” doctrines have emerged across captured states… I mean “member” states throughout NATO.

Starting with the February 2022 American ‘Indo-Pacific Strategy’, similar anti-China programs have popped up left and right with one principled target in mind: eliminate the threat of China through every tool available.

By early June 2022, the UK announced its own branding of the Asia Pivot remixed into the oddly named ‘Indo-Pacific Tilt’ which focuses less on the liberal eco-friendly language of the EU and devotes itself entirely to vastly increasing its military presence in China’s backyard.

After NATO’s June 2022 Madrid Summit officially designated China as ‘a systemic rival’, Canada’s foreign ministry announced its own Indo-Pacific Strategy in November 2022 followed by an absurd 26 page program published in January 10, 2023 outlining the details of Canada’s new role in the Pacific (which will be the subject of a subsequent report).

On January 25, 2023 NATO’s ironically named ‘Science for Peace and Security Program’ launched a new ‘cooperative initiative on the Indo-Pacific, followed by a January 30, 2023 Atlantic Council Indo-Pacific Security Initiative focused on dealing with “China’s growing threat to the international order”. The same day the Atlantic Council unveiled this new doctrine, an American intelligence spook named Markus Garlauskas was named the program’s new director.

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Posted in Eurasian Axis, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Military, Politics, Propaganda, War

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US Fails Miserably in Efforts to Isolate Russia, by Conor Gallagher

Posted on February 5, 2023 | Leave a comment

Aside from the West, Russia is more popular with the rest of the world than it was before it invaded Ukraine. From Conor Gallagher at nakedcapitalism.com:

“If Russia does not end this war and get out of Ukraine, it will be isolated on a small island with a bunch of sub countries and the rest of us 141 countries will go forward and build a prosperous future, while Russia suffers a complete economic and technological isolation…”

-Victoria Nuland, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and chief architect of NATO war against Russia, in a March 2022 interview with TASS

Nuland has failed miserably. Instead, Russia’s economy is growing, and the inability to isolate Russia is arguably a larger loss than the one NATO is suffering in Ukraine. Last week The New York Times finally got around to admitting the isolation efforts have failed:

Silverado Policy Accelerator, a Washington nonprofit, recently issued a similar analysis, estimating that the value of Russian imports from the rest of the world had exceeded prewar levels by September.

It marks quite the change in script. Consider this sampling of headlines from the past year:

Russia’s isolation from global markets is withering its economy and will wreck its status as an energy superpower, experts say Business Insider

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine will knock 30 years of progress off the Russian economy CNBC

Another Nail In The Coffin Of The Russian Economy Forbes

War against Ukraine has left Russia isolated and struggling — with more tumult ahead NPR

A New Iron Curtain Is Falling: The isolation of the Russian economy is striking in its speed and scope New York Times

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They’re Not Worried About “Russian Influence”, They’re Worried About Dissent, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on February 5, 2023 | 1 comment

Never take liars at their word. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

Being labeled a Russian propagandist all day every day for criticizing US foreign policy is really weird, but one advantage it comes with is a useful perspective on what people have really been talking about all these years when they warn of the dangers of “Russian propaganda”.

I know I’m not a Russian propagandist. I’m not paid by Russia, I have no connections to Russia, and until I started this political commentary gig in 2016 I thought very little about Russia. My opinions about the western empire sometimes turn up on Russian media because I let anyone use my work who wants to, but that was always something they did on their own without my submitting it to them and without any payment or solicitation of any kind. I’m literally just some random westerner sharing political opinions on the internet; those opinions just happen to disagree with the US empire and its stories about itself and its behavior.

Yet for years I’ve watched people pointing at me as an example of what “Russian propaganda” looks like. This has helped inform my understanding of all the panic about “Russian influence” that’s been circulating these last six years, and given me some insight into how seriously it should be taken.

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