News that the U.S. is about to deploy a PAC-3 missile battery in Poland led Russia’s ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, to recently state: “Do they really think that we will calmly watch the location of a rocket system, at a distance of 60 km from Kaliningrad?”
In terms of the purpose of its existence the Berlin Wall was a complete analog of the Great Chinese Wall whose construction began in the III century BC (475-221). The Chinese Wall was meant to fortify the frontiers of the Chinese civilization and to help unite the enormous Empire. The second wall – described as the anti-fascist defensive structure at the interface of socialism and capitalism in the DDR – embodied for nearly three decades the frontier of the socialist world and separated the two worlds and socioeconomic systems. In this quality, the Berlin Wall turned into a symbol of stability sustained by confrontation in the era marked with the dormant conflict of the Western and the Eastern blocs.
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.
NATO’s reputation as the guardian of peace on Earth is in tatters these days. Once avowedly an alliance of North America and Western Europe to fight the communist hordes of Eurasia, it morphed into something quite difference with the collapse of the socialist bloc two decades ago. It now pretends to unite all of Europe to fight the Muslim hordes wherever they be found and, of course the Russians, just for good measure.
In the face of total global economic collapse, the prospects of a massive international war are increasing. Historically, periods of imperial decline and economic crisis are marked by increased international violence and war. The decline of the great European empires was marked by World War I and World War II, with the Great Depression taking place in the intermediary period.
Currently, the world is witnessing the decline of the American empire, itself a product born out of World War II. As the post-war imperial hegemon, America ran the international monetary system and reigned as champion and arbitrator of the global political economy.
Filed in Creative-i on Afghanistan, Creative-i on Capitalism, Creative-i on NATO, Creative-i on the USA
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Also tagged Albania, cia, Croatia, imf, KLA, oil, PNAC, serbia, world bank, yugoslavia, Zbigniew Brzezinski
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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.
What do China, India, Brazil, Russia, France and Germany have in common? These countries most often can’t agree on anything. But they are united in one strange—and ominous—way. They blame the United States for wrecking the global economy. And they think the dollar is the wrecking ball.
Integral as the de facto motion of various pipeline projects now underway or in discussion across Eurasia hold the potential to integrate the economic space of Eurasia in a way that poses a fundamental challenge to Washington’s projection of Full Spectrum Dominance over the greatest land mass on earth.
According to their draft communiqué, the BRICs will not formally discuss the role of the dollar in world finance and trade nor the creation of a supranational currency, despite the numerous discussions by BRIC members on these topics before today’s gathering. Subjects under consideration may include revamping the increasingly obsolete contemporary financial system and expanding trade among the BRICs. Whether or not the BRIC members will be able to come forth with relevant findings and a mutuality of ideas and programs will soon be seen.
The attendees have assured American diplomats that dismantling the US financial and military empire is not their aim. They simply want to discuss mutual aid – but in a way that has no role for the United States, NATO or the US dollar as a vehicle for trade. US diplomats may well ask what this really means, if not a move to make US hegemony obsolete. That is what a multipolar world means, after all. For starters, in 2005 the SCO asked Washington to set a timeline to withdraw from its military bases in Central Asia. Two years later the SCO countries formally aligned themselves with the former CIS republics belonging to the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), established in 2002 as a counterweight to NATO.
The first indication that the United Nations was marked for marginalization, selective application (and exploitation) or even de facto dissolution, however, occurred three years earlier in 1996 when the United States single-handedly browbeat the other fourteen then members of the Security Council to depose Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and replace him with Kofi Annan, who the preceding year had been appointed UN special envoy to NATO and authorized the NATO bombing in Bosnia behind the back of Boutros-Ghali.
Not only has the post-World War II global domination of the West, given an extended and virtually unbridled license after the end of the Cold War, been curtailed by the new assertiveness of a revived Russia, a democratized and progressively more integrated Latin America and new formations like the SCO, but its power to dictate economic, financial, trade, copyright, political and energy terms to the rest of the world – and its ability to reserve the exclusive prerogative of using military force outside its own borders – has begun to collapse under its own weight.
Insular, comparatively isolated, unthreatened Australia has no legitimate reason to amass such an array of offensive, advanced weapons for use on land and sea and in the air. An article in a major Australian daily entitled ‘Kevin Rudd’s push for missile supremacy,’ referring to the prime minister’s unprecedented peacetime military expansion, states inter alia that the ‘navy will acquire a formidable arsenal of long-range cruise missiles for its new submarines, destroyers and frigates, able to strike at targets thousands of kilometres from Australia’s shores.’
The Russians believe that Afghan drug trafficking is the most serious threat to the security of Russia and Central Asia. Russia’s anti-drug chief Viktor Ivanov last week called the coalition’s anti-drug policy a fiasco, noting that opium production in Afghanistan had soared since the deployment of US and NATO troops in the country.
NATO’s original raison d’être, the supposedly menacing Soviet bloc, has been dead for twenty years. But like the military-industrial complex itself, NATO is kept alive and growing by entrenched economic interests, institutional inertia and an official mindset resembling paranoia, with think tanks looking around desperately for “threats”.
His soldiers were in a battlefield, caught in a cycle of attack and counterattack with an enemy that usually slipped away by the time the artillery shells rained down. There was no military solution
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. imperialism and their NATO partners have encircled Russia with a string of bases in Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus in tandem with the eastward expansion of NATO.
Whatever good changes might occur in regard to non-foreign policy issues, such as what’s already taken place concerning the environment and abortion, the Obama administration will not produce any significantly worthwhile change in US foreign policy
Filed in Creative-i on the USA, Creative-i’s Featured Writer
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Also tagged afghanistan, Barack Obama, Bolivia, Central America, colombia, Creative-i on Iran, Creative-i on Iraq, cuba, israel, kosovo, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, School of the Americas, vietnam
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Ukraine refuses to pay market prices for its own gas imports from Russia, and even stopped paying its gas debt, preferring to steal Europe’s gas as it transits Ukrainian territory
The OSCE concluded that the conflict began on August 7 when US-trained Georgian troops shelled Russian peacekeepers and civilians in the capital of Georgia’s breakaway province of South Ossetia, Tskhinvali.
