The twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall is approaching, but has the Cold War really ended and is it really a historic relic of the not too distant past? The Soviet Union may no longer exist and the Warsaw Pact may have long been dissolved, but many of the remnants of the Cold War still exist, like the conflict in the divided Korean Peninsula, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and finally the issue of missile defense.
A Europe united under the EU and especially NATO is to be strong enough to contain, isolate and increasingly confront Russia as the central component of U.S. plans for control of Eurasia and the world, but cannot be allowed to conduct an independent foreign policy, particularly in regard to Russia and the Middle East.
Filed in Creative-i on Capitalism, Creative-i on Europe, Creative-i on NATO, Creative-i on Pakistan, Creative-i on Russia
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Also tagged Brzezinski, Kyrgyzstan, Rick Rozoff, SCO, Tajikistan, The Grand Chessboard, Uzbekistan
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“Not only does one country account for the overwhelming plurality of world military expenditures, but that nation also has troops and bases on all six habitable continents (as well as a 54-year military mission in Antarctica, Operation Deep Freeze) and eleven aircraft carrier strike groups and six navy fleets that roam the world’s oceans and seas at will. It is also expanding a global interceptor missile system on land, on sea, in the air and into space that will leave it invulnerable to retaliation.”
Filed in Creative-i on NATO, Creative-i on the USA
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Also tagged afghanistan, africa, Armenia, Baltic Sea, Bangladesh, black sea, colombia, Creative-i on Iraq, Czech Republic, india, israel, Korean Peninsula, kosovo, Operation Allied Force, pakistan, Persian Gulf, poland, Rick Rozoff, Sweden, The Philippines, Yemen
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In Georgia, NATO-led military exercises are preparing the country’s troops to operate in Afghanistan. The FIRST Georgian soldiers head to the conflict zone within weeks. RT’s Irina Galushko looks at whether people’s lives are being used as a bargaining chip to join NATO.
The century’s longest war continues to rage in South Asia with no sign of abating. Instead, the invasion of Afghanistan on October 7, 2001 has exploded into endless armed hostilities that have spread across the length and breadth of the nation, with U.S. and NATO military forces fighting an intensified counterinsurgency conflict in the north, south, east and west of Afghanistan, now paralleled by equally brutal and even larger-scale combat operations in neighboring Pakistan.
The support and positions of various foreign governments in regards to the diabolic fighting between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan military, which cost the lives of thousands of innocent civilians, says a great deal about the geo-strategic interests of these foreign governments. The position of the governments of India and a group of states that can collectively be called the Periphery, such as the U.S. and Australia, were in support of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam (LTTE) or Tamil Tigers, either overtly or covertly. Many of these governments also provided this support tacitly, so as not to close any future opportunity of co-opting Sri Lanka after the fighting was over.
Tensions are mounting in the Black Sea with the threat of another conflict between U.S. and NATO client state Georgia and Russia as Washington is manifesting plans for possible military strikes against Iran in both word and deed.
U.S. Marines and Green Berets have become regular fixtures in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Iraq, Kuwait and the Horn of Africa over the past decade. With the widening of the Afghan war they are soon to take up permanent residence in the capital of Pakistan, in the Caucasus, in the Black Sea region and the Caspian Sea Basin among other locales.
What a resumption of fighting between Georgia and South Ossetia will entail is indicated by an examination of the scale of the catastrophe that was narrowly averted a year ago.
A few days ago the government of Abkhazia shared information on what Georgia planned had its invasion of South Ossetia proven successful. The plan was to, having launched the war on the day of the Olympic Opening Ceremony in Beijing while world attention was diverted, have Georgian troops and armor rapidly advance to the Roki Tunnel which connects South Ossetia with the Russian Republic of North Ossetia and prevent Russia from bringing reinforcements into the war zone.
Filed in Creative-i on Asia, Creative-i on the Caucasus
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Also tagged Abkhazia, Adjaria, afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Balkans, caspian, Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, Karabakh, kosovo, Matthew Bryza, NATO, North Ossetia, oil, Saakashvili, south ossetia
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War clouds refuse to disperse a year after Georgia waged war against Russia. On the anniversary of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s ill-fated invasion of South Ossetia 8 August, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev warned: “Georgia does not stop threatening to restore its ‘territorial integrity’ by force. Armed forces are concentrated at the borders near Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and provocations are committed,” including renewed Georgian shelling of the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali.
Two months before the eighth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the beginning of NATO’s first-ever ground war the world is witness to a 21st Century armed conflict without end waged by the largest military coalition in history. A nation that borders Pakistan, Iran, China and two Central Asian nations has been thrown into turmoil. The world’s seven official nuclear nations are either in the neighborhood – China, Pakistan, India and Russia – or are engaged in hostilities – the U.S., Britain and France.
Currently Russia and Georgia are locked in a conflict tantamount to an unannounced war, and even a regime change in Tbilisi would not do for a recovery. The current political landscape has been created by serious mistakes made both by Tbilisi and by Russia, but the share of responsibility of the former is much greater than that of the latter.
Tensions were running high in the regions bordering Georgia’s breakaway republic of South Ossetia ahead of the first anniversary of the last year’s ‘five day war’. Soon after the checkpoints near the capital of Tskhinval were caught under fire, Russia’s Defence Ministry promised to take adequate measures to protect the citizens of the de facto republic of South Ossetia. According to Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin, ‘the Georgian authorities plotted various provocations ahead of the first anniversary of the war conflict in the Caucasus’. And those could be not just armed attacks on checkpoints but also ‘peaceful marches on the occupied territories’ (like it was in the beginning of the first war with South Ossetia under Gamsakhurdia).
Following the break-up of the USSR and the armed conflicts of the early 1990s the situation in the South Caucasus followed the path that proved unfavourable to Russia. The United States and its allies started gaining a footing in the region and pursued a policy of gradually ousting Russia from the South and, in the future, also from the North Caucasus. Moscow pursued a laissez-faire policy, one that bore the imprint of defeatism and unjustified illusions about prospects for future cooperation with the West. The scale of the Russian Federation’s political, military and economic presence in the South Caucasus was steadily shrinking as a result.
It all began with United States Vice President Joseph Biden choosing a tour of Ukraine and Georgia on July 20-23 to rebuke the Kremlin publicly for its “19th-century notions of spheres of influence”. Clearly, Biden’s jaunt was choreographed as a forceful demonstration of the Barack Obama administration’s resolve to keep up the US’s strategic engagement of Eurasia — a rolling up of sleeves and gearing up for action after the exchange of customary pleasantries by Obama with his Kremlin counterpart Dmitry Medvedev. Plainly put, Biden’s stark message was that the Obama administration intends to robustly challenge Russia’s claim as the predominant power in the post-Soviet space.
Filed in Creative-i on China, Creative-i on Russia, Creative-i on the USA
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Also tagged Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Joseph Biden, Moldova, NATO, pakistan, ronald reagan, Sergei Lavrov, Ukraine
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At the superficial level Obama is presiding over an undisciplined administration; on a more realistic and sinister construction, he is facing mutiny, publicly conducted by two people who only a year ago were claiming that their qualifications to be in the Oval Office were far superior to those of the junior senator from Illinois.
Video: Biden pushes Bush NATO policy. VP Joe Biden told Georgia and the Ukraine the US still supports their membership in NATO
Yes, it’s clear now that Obama must have winked at Putin at the Moscow summit when the subject of Ukraine, Georgia and NATO came up. That was the only way he could get his troops through Russia to the killing fields in Afghanistan. But the Nabucco pipeline success surely irks Russia, as do continued NATO “exercises” in the Black Sea and the close ties between NATO and all the Black Sea countries — except Russia. And Poland has boldly announced its first missiles are expected this year.
Russia cannot compete with NATO, certainly not without strengthening the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), and certainly not with Afghanistan a black hole threatening to suck in its Central Asian neighbours. The CSTO is important less as a counterbalance to NATO than as a viable guarantor of regional security and it’s only a matter of time for Russia’s neighbours to realise this.
Russia has laid out its welcome carpet leading all the way from the rugged Caucasus, a theater of events that is interesting in the highest degree to US-Russia relations, to the Russian capital to receive Obama. It is a carpet of intriguing design, laden with compelling legends of the roots of conflict that acted as barriers to peaceful co-existence between the two powers, and the wisdom and valor of taking arms unseasonably without any unity of purpose.
