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War Update with Jon Elmer at The Electronic Intifada
Jon Elmer details the complex resistance ambush that chased the Israeli military from Khan Younis. Nora Barrows-Friedman, Asa Winstanley, Ali Abunimah and Jon Elmer of The Electronic Intifada were joined by independent investigative journalist Antony Loewenstein, on the day 187 livestream.
Nous avons vu précédemment comment la réglementation européenne a transformé le marché de la fourniture d’énergie en imposant des énergies
L’article Comment le marché européen de l’énergie nous entraine vers un choc frontal avec la Russie est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
Qui bono?
By Peter Koenig
3 April 2024
The collapse, at about 1 AM on 26 March 2024, of the Francis Scott Key Bridge (FSB) in Baltimore, spanning the 2.4 km large Patapsco River, is a mystery as of this day. The river is used by massive cargo ships from Baltimore Harbor to reach the Chesapeake Bay and then the Atlantic Ocean and in reverse.
The story goes that the downfall of the bridge was caused by the container ship “The Dali” hitting one of the bridges two main pilons – in the deep of night, 1 AM, when few witnesses were around.
And one may question, who made the endlessly shown same video of the collapse?
The Merchant Vessel (MV) “The Dali”, Singapore-registered, was apparently headed for Sri Lanka, coming from the Baltimore harbor, the 14th largest in the US, but the nation’s largest and most important port for specialized cargo and passenger facilities. See this.
The Dali is about 300 meters long, can carry 10,000 standard-size containers (6 m long) and weighs empty 95,000 tons. The ship was carrying about 4,700 containers with an average weight of 2.5 tons / container, total cargo weight approximately 12,000 tons. The sluggishly slow speed of The Dali, about 14 km/h, with its total weight of roughly 110,000 tons supposedly rammed one of the main pillars of the FSB, and brought the entire bridge down within seconds. The entire structure collapsed as if it was made of matchsticks.
The Dali is owned by Singapore-based Grace Ocean Private Ltd. It is managed by Synergy Marine Pte Ltd., also based in Singapore. The MV Dali was built in South Korea by Hyundai Heavy Industries, and completed in 2015, for Oceanbulk Container Management of Greece.
As of March 2024, the vessel is chartered by Maersk (Danish). The captain of The Dali, when it hit the bridge was supposedly Ukrainian.
Protocol demands that a Chesapeake Bay pilot is on board to guide large vessels in and out of the harbor. Was this the case with MV Dali?
Strangely, The Dali ship’s black box has 2-minutes of missing data right before it crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge. How convenient.
And there it is…
The Dali ship’s black box has 2 minutes of missing data right before it crashed into the Francis Scott Key bridge
How convenient pic.twitter.com/x75WUJecek
— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) March 28, 2024
Synergy Marine Group is said to have strong business links to China, though no further explanations are given, other than apparently a growing number of Synergy Marine Group’s managed vessels are owned by China, and secondarily, because a large portion of Dali’s cargo from-and-to is between China and the United States.
There is no clear evidence on either. The destination of The Dali, leaving Baltimore harbor at mid-night was supposedly Sri Lanka.
See this. Joe Hoft, author of this article, also claims that China specializes in “Remote System Monitoring”, meaning in straight language “cyber-attacks”. But again, no justification for this accusation is given.
The complexity of flag-registration, ownership, management, construction, destination after construction, ship-chartering, is so confusing and complex that most readers will roll their eyes and stop thinking.
The first reaction by General Mike Flynn was that “the accident” was a Black Swan event, similar to 9/11 – with financial and political implications way beyond what meets the eye.
“Black Swan” means an extremely negative event that suddenly appears from nowhere, unpredicted, and unstoppable. The term is most often used in the world of finance. See this interview by “Redacted”.
Currently an almost uncountable number of rumors, “conspiracy theories”, accusations, innuendos, are making the round. None are fully substantiated.
“China Did It”
One that could immediately be expected is, China Did It. That stems from another pretense without proof, that it was a cyber-attack, and China apparently is specialized in cyber-science, leading to “cyber-attacks”; pure western hypothesis and unproven accusation.
Geopolitical analyst, Lara Logan from “Real America’s Voice”, refers to inside information (no source given, though) to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) being behind this attack. When asked whether it was a terrorist group or a state actor, she said clearly, “100% a state actor” – and meant China. But nothing is substantiated.
Lara Logan on the bridge collapse:
"This is what you call death by a thousand cuts. It's an absolutely catastrophic impact on critical infrastructure and you cannot see it because a cyberattack is unseen, just like the attack on 2020 on the voting machines that you cannot see." pic.twitter.com/NCiLKR1ppJ
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) March 27, 2024
China is a logical target for western blames. It is either – Russia, Russia, Russia! – or – China, China, China! – Most often there is no proof, just western propaganda-indoctrinated hatred. As so often, Tavistock at its best.
BOMBSHELL REPORT:
DEVELOPING..pic.twitter.com/Ug2tEcTYUi
— Chuck Callesto (@ChuckCallesto) March 31, 2024
Tavistock is a UK-based agency known for its science of social engineering and mind manipulation, perfected during the last about eight decades. Tavistock is closely linked to the Pentagon thinktank, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).
Tavistock is responsible for many, if not most of the lies with which western societies have been brainwashed over the past decades, to believe the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) and the UN Agenda 2030 deception theories for world dominance, by a One World Order or a One World Government, is a good thing; that the elite’s silly-sounding, non-explicit slogan, of “build back better”, is good for society. It never says, what needs to be built back better, first must be destroyed, clearly expressed by the Club of Rome’s “First Global Revolution” (1991).
——-
Most westerners do not know, that an aggressive act like the downing of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, is not China’s way. Historically and philosophically, China does not know aggression western style. China is reserved, discrete, diplomatic, mediating, and does not mingle in other countries’ business and politics. China can de facto and de jure be excluded from the list of potential suspects.
Operation Bridge Takedown
More plausible versions are to be looked for “US-internally”, as in “false flag”. If it was indeed a cyber-attack that knocked out the ships navigation system and replaced it with remote cyber-guidance, one would have to ask, who has control of cybersecurity in the port?
CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) oversees cyber security. According to Whitney Webb, CISA is controlled by Israel’s Mossad with CIA and MI6. Just like 9/11, the Deep State intelligence cartel.
See also this transcript of a podcast of Whitney Webb and Clayton Morris on Redacted, discussing Cyberreason, an outfit with close ties to Israeli Intelligence and its role in CISA activities.
CISA was created in November 2018 by then President Trump. The law was enhanced by President Biden’s Executive Order (EO) 14028, “Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity” in May 2021.
Cybereason is an Israeli / Zionist agency – renown for doing “election simulations”, but being closely linked to CISA.
CISA works under the Coast Guard and CG is under the military’s oversight – so CISA (Israel) and the US military are working together. CISA is the “Deep State”, the Cabal’s cyber agency, embedded everywhere.
Journalist Whitney Webb is also referring to a Klaus Schwab (WEF) quote of a few years ago, when he talked about a coming “cyber pandemic”; and also, to the 2023 Obama produced movie “Leave this World Behind” – “predictive planning”, exactly what a diabolical Cult needs to do for its success.
See trailer (2-min clip) of “Leave this World Behind” –
and this, ending scene of “Leave this World Behind” (3-min clip)
Here is yet another theory. The taking down of the FSB is another 9/11. This interview with Ann Vandersteel, from Peak Prosperity, is pretty revealing.
She says it is not the Russians or the Chinese. The southern border crisis and destruction of borders globally is part of the One World Government agenda. It is not a war on the US specifically; she says the US is just “in the way”.
They discuss “The Declaration of North America,” signed by Biden, Trudeau (Canada) and Obrador (Mexico) in Jan. 2023, basically a revival of the Amero idea, no borders between Canada, the US and Mexico.
The collapsed bridge and the ensuing consequences is a needed disruption in American life – a borderless world, beginning with a borderless North America. It would be yet another step towards a One World Order (OWO).
All of this leads to believe the “accident” with the container cargo vessel “The Dali” ramming into one of the key pilons of the Francis Scott Key Bridge Baltimore, was not really an accident, but an event of auto-destruction, comparable to 9/11 – with economic and political implications way beyond US borders.
Now comes the bombshell
The State of the Nation says, “hard evidence is now pouring in which conclusively proves that the staged Baltimore Bridge collapse after the cargo ship hit was a deliberate sabotage carried out by all the usual suspects.”
The video shows explosives going off all over the bridge exactly at the time when The Dali hit one of bridge’s the pillars.
If this video proofs true – if ever any evidence of truth emerges – an auto-coup, self-destruction to build back better – the effects are going to be indeed similar to 9/11 – with implications worldwide.
Just look at the physical similarity. Airplanes hit the World Trade Towers. A cargo vessel hits a key pilon of an important bridge. Transportation and Trade in both cases.
Remarkably, Peggy Hall of TheHealthyAmerican, points to the strangeness of the FSK Bridge collapse. Her video, the one forever repeated video, of the sluggish moving MV Dali in direction of the bridge, what looks to be a sharp turn towards the pilon, shows that the moving 110,000 ton vessel leaves no ripples in the water, no splashing from the bow of the ship, the vessel looks like gliding over a mirror, and the splashes when Dali hits the pilon are relatively minor, as well as the immediate collapse of the entire bridge – like built on matchsticks – all very unusual.
She says the video appears like a very poorly made video game. See this 8-minute video-clip with Peggy Hall commenting. At the end she promises continuing her investigation and publish the research.
Maybe her next video will also show the explosives going off all over the bridge – reminiscent of the explosives going off under the structures and in the lower walls of the World Trade Center towers, when the supposed airplanes hit the buildings.
Supply Chain Failures
This attack on the FSK Bridge is also an attack on the Baltimore harbor, meaning an economic disaster, a supply chain disruption for the US and worldwide – food shortages, possibly famine – playing right into the Great Reset’s and the UN Agenda’s 2030 depopulation agenda.
The Baltimore port is one of the busiest on the US East Coast and the most important one for special cargos. It connects any point of the US East Coast through highway I-95 that runs all the way from Florida to Canada.
With the Baltimore port out of container service at least for several years – who knows for how long? – cargo vessels may have to be rerouted via New York, and other East Coast Sea ports, a massive cost to the US economy and a supply chain disruption affecting the world beyond the US.
In the United States, the bridge collapse may be the beginning of a series of cyber-based “false flags” – possibly leading to Biden declaring Martial Law, suspending the 2024 Presidential elections.
The globalist Deep State cabal, seeking desperately to install the New World Order, needs to sow disorder, confusion, disruption, chaos, in every sphere of western life. It must destroy to build back better, according to the wishes of a small elite that pretends to rule the new world, with a drastically reduced population. This is their goal, after implementation of their long-planned Reset which is congruent with the United Nation’s Agenda 2030.
Just to know, the UN has long ceased to be what it was created for – an institution to promote and work for Peace in the World.
As a reminder – this nefarious Dark Cult has an iron rule to follow. For their success, they must tell us in advance – in any confusing way they want – what they are planning to do. We were warned about cyber-attacks, we were warned about virus “X”, we were warned about “global climate change”, meaning in clear text, but not said, geoengineered weaponized extreme weather patterns throughout the world.
They have stuck to that rule, like an iron fist hitting for the future. So far, we just have not cared taking it seriously.
We the People, MUST resist this planned diabolical takeover.
—-
Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020)
Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
A continuation with this week’s speech of the Yemeni leader on the state of the war against Zio-USUK, Gaza, and the wider region. He gives his speech on Thursdays, the day before their now-regular million man marches in most cities of Yemen on each Friday.
This week’s edition reviews exploits against Zio-USUK on the seas and Eilat; mocks the futile Drang of USUK against Yemen — informing them the Age of Plunder and gunboat diplomacy has ended; the abject situation of the losing zionists, now resorting to Volkssturm like their cousins the UkroNazis; the pitiful and heartless arab compradore hypocrites who built their glass palaces on sand; and the severely deteriorated plight of the poor starving Palestinians.
He enjoins patience on his people. The correlation of forces are in the firm favor of the Resistance. The war is attritional and going according to the consensual plan of the many fronts, as drawn by General Soleimani. The western enemy is starved economically, morally, geopolitically, and its all-essential naval force projection rendered null. As irreversible demilitarization takes full hold, the land war component will swing into action, completing the deZioNazification of the Arabian Peninsula. In the meanwhile, the Zio-USUK frog boils.
@Resistance News Network:
Ansarallah Commander, Sayyed Abdulmalik Badr El-Din Al-Houthi, in his speech, March 28th, 2024
—
To the criminal zionists:
Your crimes will inevitably take you more swiftly to the inevitable demise that Allah has promised you in His books.
You are occupiers, and the blood is a curse upon you that will sweep you from the land of Palestine. Your injustice will not be forgotten by generations and will be etched in their consciousness.
Revenge for those oppressed and animosity towards you runs like blood through the veins of all the free.
To the Americans:
The era of control, colonization, subjugating nations, and enslaving them through genocide and intimidation to enforce surrender has passed and ended.
Go back a bit in history to remember what happened to you in Vietnam, Iraq, and other countries.
In this battle, you are in a bigger predicament, and your loss is massive as you sacrifice the interests of your people to serve the zionists.
You are facing damages that you will not be able to compensate for generations, and if you persist, the consequences will be worse, bigger, and more dangerous.
You will inherit from Britain the disappointment and defeat, and the British patronage is one of disappointments, defeats, and failure.
Your protégé “israel” that you planted in our region is indeed facing a historic scandal.
The tragedy in Gaza grows
crimes become increasingly brutal every day, with the criminal zionist killer becoming more determined, overbearing, and savage. The audacity and insistence of the American partner to support and protect zionist criminality increases.
What is happening in Gaza is a disgrace to all humanity and a warning to everyone about the zionist danger and the savage American colonial inclination.
Over the course of half a year, the enemy “israeli” army has been incapable of achieving a military victory in the narrowest geographic area in the history of wars.
The enemy’s army engaged in a fierce battle for 5 hours with the participation of helicopters and drones against one of the Palestinian heroes in Ramallah. A single fighter humiliated the enemy’s soldiers and settlers for nearly half a day on his own.
Kuwait Roundabout has become a scene for zionist starvation crimes every week.
Behind the air drop operations is an American plan coordinated with the “israeli” on the ground to kill the locals in the areas of aid drops.
The “israeli” enemy leaves the displaced with choices of death by starvation, epidemics, or murder.
The “israeli” enemy announces a safe area, then when people gather there, it targets them as happened this week in the Al-Mawasi camp.
For the second consecutive week, the “israeli” enemy continues its invasion and siege of the al-Shifa medical complex, creating a tragedy for patients, medical staff, and displaced people.
The “israeli” enemy has made hospitals primary targets for its criminal and savage offensive operations.
The “israeli” enemy has failed and was disappointed
in creating a rift between the clans and the fighters due to the steadfastness of the tribes in their supportive stance towards the resistance.
The “israeli” enemy’s ongoing failure is also a failure for the American, complicit in the crime of genocide and mass destruction in Gaza.
Fighters in all fronts of battle are inflicting losses on the enemy and its machinery.
After the enemy’s celebration of the depletion of the fighters’ rocket stockpile, rockets were launched from areas that the enemy had declared under its control towards Asdod.
The [IOF] recruitment crisis continues, evidencing the “israeli” enemy’s significant failure.
Evidence of the enemy’s failure and defeat is the ongoing reverse migration from Palestine and the escape of zionist Jews from there.
The enemy’s economic losses are continuously rising, with Hezbollah’s operations having a significant impact on the enemy’s factories in the north of occupied Palestine.
Hezbollah continues in its direct front impacting the “israeli” enemy, inflicting daily losses on the “israeli” enemy.
Our front in Yemen, in the battle of Promised Conquest and Sacred Jihad, by the grace of Allah and His success, is an active, ongoing, and effective front.
This week, 10 operations were carried out using 37 ballistic and cruise missiles and drones.
This week, 9 ships were targeted, bringing the total number of ships associated with the “israeli” enemy, America, and Britain targeted to 86.
The enemy’s movement at sea has become rare, and they try to camouflage to the utmost extent, attempting to mislead through media and information. The movement of the enemy’s ships is akin to a smuggling operation, yet they fail, and effective strikes are executed.
A missile strike operation with cruise missiles was carried out towards Um Al-Rashrash [“Eilat”] to target objectives belonging to the “israeli” enemy.
By the grace of Allah, the impact of military operations at sea and also towards Palestine and the enemy’s inability to stop them is a clear matter acknowledged by the enemy.
It is a great blessing that Allah grants success in impactful actions against the enemy, starting from its economic situation, which it relies on in its military aggression.
The only solution is to stop the aggression, crimes, and siege on the Gaza Strip.
According to a U.S. officer, the U.S. Navy has not reached this level of humiliation since the 19th century
American stubbornness in supporting zionist criminality and aggression against our country has truly placed it in a dilemma.
The Americans and British have entangled themselves in the problem with “israel” , despite the rise in prices of goods, shipping, and insurance.
The Americans and British have reached this predicament and failure while still in military confrontation with our armed forces.
The Americans and British should imagine their situation if they were to get involved in any ground attack against hundreds of thousands of heroes supported by millions.
The British are in a very bad situation.
demeaning themselves as a pitiful follower of the Americans and the hand of zionism that guides them.
British Navy leaders acknowledge facing missiles launched from Yemen traveling at speeds more than three times the speed of sound.
A commander of a British destroyer states that Yemenis are currently using more advanced and lethal weapons in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.
British Navy leaders said that one of the destroyers faced a deadly attack by a large number of drones.
British Navy leaders describe the pace of operations in the Red Sea as challenging and its concentrations as exhausting.
The American is proceeding with the aggressions against our country
its attacks this week reaching 13 air raids and naval bombardments.
Like previous ones, this week’s enemy attacks were unsuccessful and could not undermine the capabilities of our armed forces or impact our decision to support the Palestinian people.
The aggression against our country will only contribute, unintentionally from the enemies, to the development of military capabilities.
The enemy also continues to incite mercenaries and the coalition, seeking to involve them, and continues to distort the honorable stance of our people.
“Israeli” committees using Arab dialects participate in social media campaigns against our people’s stance.
The media campaigns distort the Palestinian position itself and any supporting stance.
The enemy continues to pressure the humanitarian file to deprive the Yemeni people of the aid that comes through the United Nations.
Our people continue unaffected by any of the hostile actions from the Americans, British, and their agents.
The million-man march turnout last Friday was a great, large, and honorable mobilization with 154 major marches in governorates and directorates.
There is no equivalent to our people’s widespread movement in any Islamic country, although demonstrations take place in some countries.
Some countries are aligning with the “israeli” enemy on the media level and through various normalization activities.
Our people’s participation stems from their faith and sense of responsibility, feeling deeply of the unparalleled suffering of the Palestinian people.
Given the magnitude of the Palestinian people’s tragedy, our responsibility indeed grows to take serious action for jihad and to mobilize in all fields.
If we do not stand with the Palestinian people in their enormity of oppression, then when will we act?
If we do not carry the banner of jihad for the sake of Allah against the tyranny and criminality of the zionist “israelis”, Americans, and British, then against whom and when will we wage jihad?
It is extremely dangerous for a person not to stand in any position in countries where greater stances are possible.
It is a great blessing for us in our country that we have conditions conducive to a comprehensive stance.
We were not able to mobilize hundreds of thousands of fighters to participate directly in the Gaza Strip against the enemy due to geographical landscapes, the countries between us and the enemy not agreeing to open land corridors for our people to cross. [iirc, this is the first instance he calls the Saudis “the enemy” since October 07]
The weekly million-man march turnout is a great, important, and comprehensive act alongside military operations and other activities.
Media activity is an important front in supporting the Palestinian people and countering enemy campaigns.
Our people have achieved a comprehensive stance as a fruit of past sacrifices and their liberating and revolutionary movement at all previous stages.
If a person completely ignores what is happening in Gaza, they become a partner in creating the tragedy
they are an accomplice to the “israeli” enemy.
The Palestinian people have suffered greatly from the betrayal of their Arab and Islamic surroundings, except for a rare few, and from the “israeli” aggression and criminality.
Our people’s battle in support of the Palestinian people is an extension of the battles of their honorable fathers and earliest ancestors.
I call on our dear people to honorably come out tomorrow, on the third Friday of Ramadan, in Sana’a and other governorates.
My hope in you is very great, and with fasting during these blessed days, the reward and closeness to Allah the Almighty are magnified.
You are people of faith and proximity to Allah, people of loyalty, steadfastness, chivalry, integrity, and manhood.
Il est hasardeux de prétendre commenter un évènement de guerre clandestine surtout « à chaud ». La petite expérience de l’auteur lui
L’article Point de vue sur l’attaque terroriste au Crocus City hall de Krasnorgorsk est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
In the west, they don’t like those who defend themselves, who fight against them, and especially those who win.
By Andre Vltchek via The Greanville Post.
When it comes to Russia or the Soviet Union, reports and historical accounts do get blurry; in the West they do, and consequently in all of its ‘client states’. Fairytales get intermingled with reality, while fabrications are masterfully injected into the sub consciousness of billions of people worldwide. Russia is an enormous country, in fact the largest country on Earth in terms of territory. It is scarcely inhabited. It is deep, and as a classic writer once wrote: “It is impossible to understand Russia with one’s brain. One could only believe in it.”
The Western mind generally doesn’t like things unknown, spiritual and complex. Since the ‘old days’, especially since the crusades and monstrous colonialist expeditions to all corners of the world, the Westerners were told fables about their own “noble deeds” performed in the plundered lands. Everything had to be clear and simple: “Virtuous Europeans were civilizing savages and spreading Christianity, therefore, in fact, saving those dark poor primitive souls.”
Of course, tens of millions were dying in the process, while further tens of millions were shackled and brought to the “New Worlds” as slaves. Gold, silver, and other loot, as well as slave labor had been (and still are) paying for all those European palaces, railroads, universities and theatres, but that did not matter, as the bloodshed was most of the time something abstract and far away from those over-sensitive eyes of the Western public.
Westerners like simplicity, particularly when it comes to moral definitions of “good and evil”. It matters nothing if the truth gets systematically ‘massaged’, or even if the reality is fully fabricated. What matters is that there is no deep guilt and no soul-searching. Western rulers and their opinion makers know their people – their ‘subjects’ – perfectly well, and most of the time, they give them what they are asking for. The rulers and the reigned are generally living in symbiosis. They keep bitching about each other, but mostly they have similar goals: to live well, to live extremely well, as long as the others are forced to pay for it; with their riches, with their labor and often with their blood.
Culturally, most of the citizens of Europe and North America hate to pay the bill for their high life; they even detest to admit that their life is extremely ‘high’. They like to feel like victims. They like to feel that they are ‘used’. They like to imagine that they are sacrificing themselves for the rest of the world.
And above all, they hate real victims: those they have been murdering, raping, plundering and insulting, for decades and centuries.
Recent ‘refugee crises’ showed the spite Europeans feel for their prey. People who made them rich and who lost everything in the process are humiliated, despised and insulted. Be they Afghans or Africans, the Middle Easterners or South Asians. Or Russians, although Russians fall into their own, unique category.
Prince Alexander Nevsky’s legendary defeat of the Teutonic Knights on a frozen lake in the 13th century has always captivated and inspired the Russian people in their struggles against foreign invaders, especially from the West.
Many Russians look white. Most of them eat with knife and fork, they drink alcohol, excel at Western classical music, poetry, literature, science and philosophy.
To Western eyes they look ‘normal’, but actually, they are not.
Russians always want ‘something else’; they refuse to play by Western rules.
They are stubbornly demanding to remain different, and to be left alone.
When confronted, when attacked, they fight.
They rarely strike first, almost never invade.
But when threatened, when assaulted, they fight with tremendous determination and force, and they never lose. Villages and cities get converted into invader’s graves. Millions die while defending their Motherland, but the country survives. And it happens again and again and again, as the Western hordes have been, for centuries, assaulting and burning Russian lands, never learning the lesson and never giving up on their sinister dream of conquering and controlling that proud and determined colossus.
In the West, they don’t like those who defend themselves, who fight against them, and especially those who win.
Russo-Korean symphony
It gets much worse than that.
Russia has this terrible habit… not only it defends itself and its people, but it also fights for others, protecting colonized and pillaged nations, as well as those that are unjustly assaulted.
It saved the world from Nazism. It did it at a horrific price of 27 million men, women and children, but it did it; courageously, proudly and altruistically. The West never forgave the Soviet Union for this epic victory either, because all that is unselfish and self-sacrificing, is always in direct conflict with its own principles, and therefore ‘extremely dangerous’.
The Russian people had risen; had fought and won in the 1917 Revolution; an event which terrified the West more than anything else in history, as it had attempted to create a fully egalitarian, classless and racially color-blind society. It also gave birth to Internationalism, an occurrence that I recently described in my book The Great October Socialist Revolution: Impact on the World and the Birth of Internationalism.
Soviet Internationalism, right after the victory in WWII, helped greatly, directly and indirectly, dozens of countries on all continents, to stand up and to confront the European colonialism and the North American imperialism. The West and especially Europe never forgave the Soviet people in general and Russians in particular, for helping to liberate its slaves.
That is when the greatest wave of propaganda in human history really began to roll. From London to New York, from Paris to Toronto, an elaborate web of anti-Soviet and covertly anti-Russian hysteria was unleashed with monstrously destructive force. Tens of thousands of ‘journalists’, intelligence officers, psychologists, historians, as well as academics, were employed. Nothing Soviet, nothing Russian (except those glorified and often ‘manufactured’ Russian dissidents) was spared.
The excesses or contextual errors of the Great October Socialist Revolution and the pre-WWII era were systematically fabricated, exaggerated, and then engraved into the Western history textbooks and mass media narrative. In those tales, there was nothing about the vicious invasions and attacks coming from the West, aimed at destroying the young Bolshevik state. Naturally, there was no space for mentioning the British, French, U.S., Czech, Polish, Japanese, German and other’s monstrous cruelties.
Soviet and Russian views were hardly ever allowed to penetrate the monolithic and one-sided Western propaganda narrative.
Like obedient sheep, the Western public accepted the disinformation it was fed. Eventually, many people living in the Western colonies and ‘client states’, did the same. A great number of colonized people were taught how to blame themselves for their misery.
The most absurd but somehow logical occurrence then took place: many men, women and even children living in the USSR, succumbed to Western propaganda. Instead of trying to reform their imperfect but still greatly progressive country, they gave up, became cynical, aggressively ‘disillusioned’, corrupt and naively but staunchly pro-Western.
Gorbachev: supremely, unaccountably, criminally foolish when dealing with the most ruthless mafia the world has ever seen.
It was the first and most likely the last time in the history, Russia got defeated by the West. It happened through deceit, through shameless lies, through Western propaganda.
What followed could be easily described as genocide.
The Soviet Union was first lulled into Afghanistan, then it was mortally injured by the war there, by an arms race with the United States, and by the final stage of propaganda that was literally flowing like lava from various hostile Western state-sponsored radio stations. Of course, local ‘dissidents’ also played an important role.
Under Gorbachev, a ‘useful idiot’ of the West, things got extremely bizarre. I don’t believe that he was paid to ruin his own country, but he did almost everything to run it into the ground; precisely what Washington wanted him to do. Then, in front of the entire world, a mighty and proud Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics suddenly shook in agony, then uttered a loud cry, and collapsed; died painfully but swiftly.
A new turbo-capitalist, bandit, pro-oligarch and confusedly pro-Western Russia was born. Russia which was governed by an alcoholic Boris Yeltsin; a man loved and supported by Washington, London and other Western centers of power.
It was a totally unnatural, sick Russia – cynical and compassionless, built with someone else’s ideas – Russia of Radio Liberty and Voice of America, of the BBC, of black marketers, of oligarchs and multi-national corporations.
Is the West now daring to say that Russians are ‘interfering’ in something in Washington? Are they out of their minds?
Washington and other Western capitals did not only ‘interfere’, they openly broke the Soviet Union into pieces and then they began kicking Russia which was at that point half-alive. Is it all forgotten, or is Western public again fully ‘unaware’ of what took place during those dark days?
The West kept spitting at the impoverished and injured country, refused to honor international agreements and treaties. It offered no help. Multi-nationals were unleashed, and began ‘privatizing’ Russian state companies, basically stealing what was built by the sweat and blood of Soviet workers, during long decades.
Interference? Let me repeat: it was direct intervention, invasion, a grab of resources, shameless theft! I want to read and write about it, but we don’t hear much about it, anymore, do we?
Now we are told that Russia is paranoid, that its President is paranoid! With straight face, the West is lying; pretending that it has not been trying to murder Russia.
Those years… Those pro-Western years when Russia became a semi-client state of the West, or call it a semi-colony! There was no mercy, no compassion coming from abroad. Many of those idiots – kitchen intellectuals from Moscow and provinces – suddenly woke up but it was too late. Many of them had suddenly nothing to eat. They got what they were told to ask for: their Western ‘freedom and democracy’, and Western-style capitalism or in summary: total collapse.
I remember well how it was ‘then’. I began returning to Russia, horrified, working in Moscow, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Leningrad. Academics from Akadem Gorodok outside Novosibirsk were selling their libraries in the bitter cold, in dark metro underpasses of Novosibirsk… Runs on the banks… Old retired people dying from hunger and cold behind massive doors of concrete blocks… unpaid salaries and starving miners, teachers…
Russia under the deadly embrace of the West, for the first and hopefully last time! Russia whose life expectancy suddenly dropped to African Sub-Saharan levels. Russia humiliated, wild, in terrible pain.
Patriarch Kirill consecrates Alexander Nevsky monument dedicated to 800th anniversary of Alexander Nevsky — village of Samolva, Gdovsky district, Pskov, 11.09.2021
But that nightmare did not last long.
And what happened – those short but horrible years under both Gorbachev and Yeltsin, but above all under the Western diktat – will never be forgotten, not forgiven.
Russians know perfectly well what they do not want, anymore!
Russia stood up again. Huge, indignant and determined to live its own life, its own way. From an impoverished, humiliated and robbed nation, subservient to the West, the country evolved and within a few years, the free and independent Russia once again joined the ranks of the most developed and powerful countries on Earth.
And as before Gorbachev, Russia is once again able to help those nations which are under unjust and vicious attacks by the Western empire.
A man who is leading this renaissance, President Vladimir Putin, is tough, but Russia is under great threat and so is the world – this is no time for weaklings.
President Putin is not perfect (who is, really?), but he is a true patriot, and I dare say, an internationalist.
Now the West, once again, hates both Russia and its leader. No wonder; undefeated, strong and free Russia is the worst imaginable foe of Washington and its lieutenants.
That’s how the West feels, not Russia. Despite all that was done to it, despite tens of millions of lost and ruined lives, Russia has always been ready to compromise, even to forgive, if not forget.
Russia stood up again.
There is something deeply pathological in the psyche of the west. It cannot accept anything less than full and unconditional submission. It has to control, to be in charge, and on top of everything; it has to feel exceptional. Even when it murders and ruins the entire Planet, it insists on feeling superior to the rest of the world.
This faith in exceptionalism is the true Western religion, much more than even Christianity, which for decades has not really played any important role there. Exceptionalism is fanatical, it is fundamentalist and unquestionable.
It also insists that its narrative is the only one available anywhere in the World. That the West is seen as a moral leader, as a beacon of progress, as the only competent judge and guru.
Lies are piling on top of lies. As in all religions, the more absurd the pseudo-reality is, the more brutal and extreme are the methods used to uphold it. The more laughable the fabrications are, the more powerful the techniques used to suppress the truth are.
Today, hundreds of thousands of ‘academics’, teachers, journalists, artists, psychologists and other highly paid professionals, in all parts of the world, are employed by the Empire, for two goals only – to glorify the Western narrative and to discredit all that is standing in its way; daring to challenge it.
Russia is the most hated adversary of the West, with China, Russia’s close ally being near second.
The propaganda war unleashed by the West is so insane, so intense, that even some of the European and North American citizens are beginning to question tales coming from Washington, London and elsewhere.
Wherever one turns, there is a tremendous medley of lies, of semi-lies, half-truths; a complex and unnavigable swamp of conspiracy theories. Russia is being attacked for interfering in U.S. domestic affairs, for defending Syria, for standing by defenseless and intimidated nations, for having its own powerful media, for doping its athletes, for still being Communist, for not being socialist anymore; in brief: for everything imaginable and unimaginable.
Criticism of the country is so thorough and ludicrous, that one begins to ask very legitimate questions: “what about the past? What about the Western narrative regarding the Soviet past, particularly the post-Revolutionary period, and the period between two world wars?”
The more I analyze this present-day Western anti-Russian and anti-Chinese propaganda, the more determined I am to study and write about the Western narrative regarding Soviet history. I’m definitely planning to investigate these matters in the future, together with my friends – Russian and Ukrainian historians.
… when only Victory could save the world, Russian fists are hard, and the same is true about Russian armor.
In the eyes of the West, Russians are ‘traitors’.
Instead of joining the looters, they have been standing by the ‘wretched of the world’, in the past, as well as now. They refused to sell their Motherland, and to enslave their own people. Their government is doing all it can to make Russia self-sufficient, fully independent, prosperous, proud and free.
Remember that ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ and many other terms, mean totally different things in distinctive parts of the world. What is happening in the West could never be described as ‘freedom’ in Russia or in China, and vice versa.
Frustrated, collapsing, atomized and egotistic societies of Europe and North America do not inspire even their own people, anymore. They are escaping by millions annually, to Asia, Latin America, and even to Africa. Escaping from emptiness, meaninglessness and emotional cold. But it is not Russia’s or China’s business to tell them how to live or not to live!
In the meantime, great cultures like Russia and China do not need, and do not want to be told by the Westerners, what freedom is, and what democracy is.
They do not attack the West, and expect the same in return.
It is truly embarrassing that the countries responsible for hundreds of genocides, for hundreds of millions of murdered people on all continents, still dare to lecture others.
Many victims are too scared to speak.
Russia is not.
It is composed, gracious, but fully determined to defend itself if necessary; itself as well as many other human beings living on this beautiful but deeply scarred Planet.
Russian culture is enormous: from poetry and literature, to music, ballet, philosophy… Russian hearts are soft, they easily melt when approached with love and kindness. But when millions of lives of innocent people are threatened, both the hearts and muscles of Russians quickly turn to stone and steel. During such moments, when only victory could save the world, Russian fists are hard, and the same is true about Russian armor.
There is no match to Russian courage in the sadistic but cowardly West.
Irreversibly, both hope and future are moving towards the east.
And that is why Russia is desperately hated by the West.
Après avoir abordé les notions de base des mécanismes principaux du marché européen de l’énergie nous allons pouvoir comprendre l’interaction
L’article Comprendre le marché européen de l’énergie – suite est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
Certains éléments rendus publics permettent de préciser l’analyse des possibles conséquences de l’engagement de l’armée française directement contre les forces
L’article Macron s’en va en guerre… (suite) est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
Palestinians defeat Israeli armored vehicles
War Update with Jon Elmer at The Electronic Intifada
NATO headed for Nuclear war with Russia? Scott Ritter, Steve Starr, and Jose Vega with Diane Sare
[42:50] “… what that tells Russia now is that you have to strike EVERYTHING in Europe..”
A cornered Hegemon finds itself in a desperate cul-de-sac at a time of inflexion. Not being alarmist, but the moment is so acutely on the brink. Listen to Ritter carefully. The lunatic adherence to Exceptionalism of the West inexorably leads to the self-fulfilling and forced demonstration of the long-voiced “Nuclear Primacy Doctrine.”
Each inadequate technocrat is so focused on the immediate square meter around his portfolio and specific role that the larger ramifications and linked consequences are lost. Politicians are busy demonstrating “strength” to Russia; military brass are busy drawing up “limited deep-strikes” which they trust will not provoke Russia into nuclear war; the media is busy obfuscating and lying to all, earning their daily bread as usual, crucially denying insight to those who can stop the madness or to the larger population.
In all this, Russia’s clearly stated warnings of triggers of spread of war to NATO countries and then likely nuclear war are ignored. Its right to self-defense and willingness and ability to escalate remain duly ignored. Europe is sleep-walking into predictable catastrophe. What good will it do the madmen if they state they do not intend to use nuclear weapons, but the cumulative actions they undertake so lower the threshold that it leads to a nuclear response?
The following is this week’s speech and cogent observations of the Yemeni leader on the state of the war against Zio-USUK, Gaza, and the wider region. He is every bit as sharp and wide ranging as Hezbollah’s Nasrallah. He gives his speech on Thursdays, the day before their now-regular million man marches in most cities of Yemen each Friday.
This week’s edition is a sober review of the ramifications of the latest UNSC veto and dismantling of the UN life-support systems by the US regime, the abjectness of the arab compradore hypocrites, the severely deteriorated plight of the poor starving Palestinians, and the losses and absolute barbarism of the savage zionist beast which is being steadily defeated in relentless and effective attrition.
@Yemen | Bab-el-Mandeb:
Statement from Sayyed Commander Abdulmalik Badraddin Al-Houthi regarding the latest developments and updates on 12 Sha’ban 1445 AH – 22-02-2024 AD:
— The oppressed Palestinian people in Gaza have been suffering for 20 weeks the most severe forms of suffering due to the Israeli aggression.
The Israeli enemy in Gaza has pursued from the beginning a criminal and genocidal behavior, using all means of extermination.
On the first day of the aggression, America, Britain, and most major European countries rushed to provide all forms of support to the Zionist enemy.
Despite the immense military capabilities of the Israeli enemy, America and the West have provided it with weapons, money, and experts.
— Where is the support of the [wealthy, powerful, neighboring] Muslims for the oppressed Palestinian people, who are part of them and have clear and established rights?
The Palestinian people deserve support and solidarity for humanitarian reasons and all other considerations.
Most countries, regimes, and governments are taking the stance of onlookers, some of them are complicit, and some secretly support the Israeli enemy.
The betrayal of most governments and regimes, and the silence of the people, is one of the reasons for the boldness of the Israeli enemy to continue its crimes and tighten its siege.
— For the third time, the American veto is used in the Security Council to prevent any decision to stop the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza.
America insists on continuing the genocide of the people of Gaza by all means of extermination.
The US provided the greatest cover for the starvation of the Palestinian people in Gaza to reach blatant levels for countries and Western institutions.
The US has used the veto power more than any other country since the formation of the Security Council to date in order to serve the Israeli enemy.
The US is a key partner of the Israeli enemy in all its crimes against the Palestinian people in all past stages.
The US inherited from the British the role of sponsoring the Zionist criminality and protecting the Israeli enemy, and providing all forms of support to it.
The US turned the Security Council’s role and obstructed the role of the UN in any humanitarian direction in favor of the oppressed peoples.
— The responsibility of everyone, especially in the Muslim world, increases with the deterioration of the humanitarian situation in Gaza and the magnitude of the tragedy.
What are Muslims waiting for to act? Do they want a full-blown genocide to happen to the people of Gaza?!
The number of martyrs, mostly children and women, continues to rise, and the number of massacres reached 2,544, in a clear violation of human life.
— The Israeli enemy continues on its savage approach in preventing food for the people and disallowing trucks carrying food supplies from reaching the residents.
The suspension of the World Food Program’s activities amid the painful levels of suffering and hunger in Gaza reveals the nature of its role.
The malfeasance of the US and Israel is seen in their manipulating of international organizations and programs that operate under humanitarian titles.
Deaths from starvation are on the rise, including children and the elderly.
Animal feed has run out or is near depletion in many areas of the Gaza Strip, particularly in the northern part.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza are starving and appealing to their brethren through their hunger and suffering.
— Where are the wealthy Arab countries that waste hundreds of billions of dollars on nonsense, trivial matters, and fueling sectarian strife yet do not offer food that is meager to the Palestinians?
Many countries waste huge amounts of good food that ends up in their garbage cans, and their citizens suffer from obesity, without providing a thing of this food to the Palestinians.
There are no serious and tangible moves by major Arab countries as if their role were confined to conflicts and destructive struggles that tear the nation from within.
Why can’t the major Arab countries endeavor to play an honorable and positive role, even if it is something in the humanitarian vein, by delivering food, medicine, and aid to the residents of Gaza?
We have seen some people’s seriousness during trivial issues when they dealt with it with great interest, and took various procedures from boycotting to waging wars.
The Israeli enemy opened fire on a group of thousands of residents who were trying to obtain some food and flour, killing and wounding them.
— The Israeli enemy carried out cold-blooded executions while they were detained against the abductees, including children and women.
— Where are the women’s rights that the West is bragging about, in front of the executions of women by the Israeli enemy?!
The West does not repeat the slogan of women’s rights, except in immoral or trivial contexts, or to dismantle society from within.
Women’s rights disappeared in the West when this woman was the Palestinian woman, and when the perpetrator and aggressor was the Israeli enemy.
— The Israeli enemy stormed the Nasser Medical Complex with tanks and drones, as if it were storming one of the largest military bases.
The Israeli enemy targeted hospitals, even premature, infant, and patients of all categories.
There is a real tragedy on the health side, and hundreds of thousands are suffering, and the most affected of them are the children.
The Israeli enemy committed a heinous crime by forcibly kidnapping infant children from their mothers and separating thousands of children from their families during the displacement.
There are 17,000 children separated from their families, according to unofficial statistics, and they are in a difficult situation.
— Given the scale of the tragedy, injustice and criminality, the Israeli enemy failed to achieve its declared goals, the most prominent of which is the return of its prisoners.
The enemy has failed miserably in recovering its prisoners, despite the passage of 20 weeks of the war and in a [tiny] limited geographic area.
The enemy was unable to eliminate the Mujahideen in Gaza, who are still holding on and fighting valiantly and effectively.
The Mujahideen in Gaza are humiliating the enemy, despite living the same suffering that their families are experiencing in the sector.
The enemy’s barbarism and its comprehensive targeting of the Palestinian people did not benefit it and did not obtain a picture of victory.
— The enemy accumulates its criminal record in terms of destruction, killing, siege and starvation, but it is becoming increasingly frustrated.
The enemy’s human losses are in the thousands, but it is trying to hide it and makes an effort in this regard.
Some of the Zionist soldiers suffer from mental disorders as a result of the horrors of the battles and the clash with the Mujahideen from zero distance.
The transformation of the Zionist soldier into a mentally ill or mentally disturbed person is a widespread condition among them because of their criminality and tyranny and their keenness to live.
The psychological and moral harm is a disaster for the Zionists because their situation is shaky, they do not live in a state of reassurance.
It is estimated that more than a million Zionists have fled the occupied territories, either permanently or temporarily, due to instability.
There is a path for reverse migration because the Zionists live the act of existential threat.
— The enemy’s military losses are large and its economic losses are unprecedented, despite the huge American and Western support it enjoys.
The Israeli currency is no longer stable, with a decline in foreign exchange reserves and a rise in public debt, and on the level of the large deficit in the enemy’s budget.
There are repercussions in all economic fields from production and investment to labor shortage and the real estate sector.
There is paralysis in the ports, a decline in tourism, and a decline in air navigation.
There are terrible losses in the Israeli enemy’s economy, amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars.
The enemy’s losses are an important lesson despite the [western] support he enjoys.
— The enemy’s losses in confronting the modest capabilities of the Mujahideen in Gaza mean that it is an enemy that can be defeated, just as it was defeated in Lebanon and Gaza before.
The support fronts continue from Lebanon with high efficiency and inflict major direct losses on the enemy.
Brothers Mujahideen in Iraq continue, despite the enemy’s intensive targeting of them.
— In the Yemeni front, we have moved towards escalating our operations in response to the enemy’s increased escalation in the Gaza Strip.
Our operations on “israeli” targets in the occupied lands have reached 183 missiles and drones.
Support operations for Gaza in the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Bab Al-Mandeb Strait are ongoing and we have escalated them.
Escalation in sea operations has increased both in quantity and quality, with the activation of missiles, drones, and military boats.
Submarines have been introduced into our naval operations, which is worrying for the enemy.
The number of targeted ships in the sea reached 48, despite the enemy reducing its movement and camouflaging and withholding information about them.
All means used by them to withhold information about the ships have been used and failed; we still manage to obtain accurate information.
The available missiles have been developed to a level that the American cannot intercept or shoot down with all its technologies.
There are significant real victories in the confrontation in the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea. There are real victories over American technologies, capabilities, and expertise. There are victories at the level of tactics, weapons, and means, and American experts were amazed by our Armed Forces’ tactics.
— This week, 13 distinguished and effective operations were executed.
Among the most prominent and important operations this week was the targeting of a British ship that was hit with a devastating strike that sank it.
By Allah’s will, this week succeeded in downing an American MQ-9 drone, which is one of the most important American aircraft.
— The enemy failed before our sea operations; they were neither able to prevent them nor deter them nor limit them.
Americans, their leaders, and officials admit, according to the established reality, that they failed to prevent Yemeni operations and protect their ships and those associated with the “israeli” entity. The American has put itself in trouble after its barges, destroyers, and military pieces were hit in the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea.
The maritime situation halted 40% of the enemy’s commercial maritime movement, affecting its economy, shrinking its exports, and imports.
— The American has a military problem and admits that it has not faced such a problem since World War II, indicating the effectiveness of the Yemeni front.
The British are implicated, harmed, foolish, and stupid for involving themselves in what does not concern them. British newspapers talk about the impacts on the British economy and predictions of a sharp increase in all prices due to the rise in shipping costs.
Instead of aggression against Yemen, it was supposed to stop war crimes in Gaza and introduce aid to ensure regional stability and prevent the conflict from expanding.
— The number of American and British aggression raids on Yemen and missile strikes from the sea reached 278, yet they failed to destroy Yemeni capabilities and limit their impact.
The American is causing our military capabilities to develop as it tries to move others and implicate them, including Europeans and some Arab countries.
We will provide protection for any ships carrying aid to the people of Gaza, contrary to what the American propagates.
— One of the silliest new American propaganda is that Yemen is extorting some European countries to allow their ships to pass through the Red Sea without targeting them. Propaganda about extorting countries is silly and false, part of countless lies launched by hypocrites.
— Military mobilization is active, with military training outputs reaching 237,123 trainees as a popular army, preceded by hundreds of thousands trained appropriately.
Military parades reached 248, maneuvers reached 566, and military marches reached 359.
Popular stands are part of the distinguished and honorable activity, reaching 70,670, and awareness evenings reached 30,571.
Events are very important for spreading awareness, reaching 23,738 events, and demonstrations reached 2,081 in provinces and directorates.
— The Yemeni people have set an example and become a source of admiration for all free people in the world and anyone with a human conscience.
Our people’s stance in this phase is historic and will remain a proud lesson in freedom, dignity, and honor that generations will be proud of for thousands of years.
Guest: Shireen Al-Adeimi is a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and assistant professor of language and literacy at Michigan State University’s College of Education.
More versions of the podcast at:
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An eloquent short historical profile of the Ansarullah movement by a fair critic from south Yemen. She is from Aden, the traditional rival of north Yemen of the last centuries, and the third most important global sea port in the 19th century.
She dispels Anglo-Zionist agitprop that Yemenis serve Iran, or that Ansarullah are a minority; they control 80-85% of the total population that lives bunched in the smaller but more secure highland north. Zaidi Islam is followed by 40% of all Yemenis and coexists peacefully with Sunni and Shia, being not of either, but a bridge respected by all except fringe salafi extremists imported from the GCC. She reminds us that ALL Yemenis have been devotees of Palestine and their liberation cause for over a century now, starting with the British occupation.
Ansarullah represent and merely discharge the will of at least 30-32 Million of the 40 M Yemenis.
Lavrov: “They believe that for 500 years they have ruled the world as they wish, living at the expense of others, and they think this should continue…”
by Ambassador MK Bhadrakumar at Indian Punchline
There is an old proverb that when misfortunes come, they come in battalions. Coming on top of reports of American soldiers going down like nine-pins on a drone strike against the super secret CIA station for intelligence and covert operations on the Syrian-Jordanian border, ’nyet’ is the word from Beijing to the Biden administration’s entreaties seeking intervention with Tehran to rein in the Houthis of Yemen, against the foreboding backdrop of the Axis of Resistance expanding its operations against American and Israeli interests.
President Biden deputed his National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan to handle this highly delicate mission with Beijing, instead of the US’s top diplomat Antony Blinken. Sullivan is uniquely placed to switch roles between the US’ domestic and foreign policies. He is a trusted hatchet man of the president and is actively involved in Biden’s re-election campaign.
Sullivan stayed overnight in Thailand On Friday/Saturday to launch his charm offensive vis-a-vis Foreign Minister Wang Yi. But he came away with no sign that China is willing to use its influence with Tehran.
Later, an unattributable media briefing by a senior NSC official via teleconference was hastily arranged by the White House to cover Sullivan’s back side. It brought home that reading the Chinese tea leaves is an art in itself. As the NSC official put it, “Beijing says they are raising this with the Iranians … but we’re certainly going to wait before we comment further on how effectively we think they’re actually raising it.”
Sullivan seems to have hit a brick wall. This is curious because the Biden Administration should have learnt from previous experience with Beijing in trying to prod China to convince close ally North Korea to scale back its nuclear weapons programme or roll back its “no limits” friendship with Russia over Ukraine.
Actually, South Korea’s military said on Sunday that North Korea fired several cruise missiles, extending a streak in weapons tests that are worsening tensions with the US and reflecting Pyongyang’s efforts to expand its arsenal of weapons designed to overwhelm remote US targets in the Pacific, including Guam!
Evidently, the Biden administration failed to comprehend that Beijing was under no obligation to use its influence on Pyongyang for serving American interests. It is sheer naïveté to expect Beijing to fall for selective engagement on issues that aim to buy time for the president to give his best shot in the upcoming November elections.
What does China get in return? The question doesn’t occur to the Biden Administration. The assumption in DC is that China is on an ego trip and begging for selective engagement with the No 1 military and economic power on the planet. On the contrary, China too has some legitimate demands to make — such as, for instance, the US not inciting Taiwan surreptitiously to travel on the path of independence, or allowing China a level playing field for setting new technology standards at the global level as an innovative country.
Interestingly, compared to the taciturn readout by the White House on the Sullivan-Wang Yi meeting in Thailand, the Chinese Foreign Ministry issued a candid full-bodied statement on Saturday to set the record straight and pre-empt the spin doctors in the Biden White House from scripting some false narrative. The relevant excerpts from the Chinese statement titled Wang Yi held a meeting with Sullivan, assistant to the President of the United States for National Security Affairs are reproduced below:
(Unofficial translation)
“The two sides conducted frank, substantive and fruitful strategic communications around the implementation of the consensus of the San Francisco meeting between the heads of state of the two countries and the proper handling of important and sensitive issues in Sino-US relations.
“Wang Yi said that this year marks the 45th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and the United States.The two sides should take this as an opportunity to summarise their experiences and learn lessons, treat each other equally rather than condescendingly, seek common ground while preserving differences rather than highlighting differences, effectively respect rather than harm each other’s core interests, and work together to mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation to build a correct way for China and the United States to get along.
“Wang Yi emphasised that the Taiwan issue is China’s internal affairs, and Taiwan’s regional elections cannot change the basic fact that Taiwan is a part of China.The biggest risk to peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait is “Taiwan independence”, and the biggest challenge to Sino-US relations is also “Taiwan independence”.The United States must abide by the one-China principle and the three joint communiqués between China and the United States, implement the commitment not to support “Taiwan independence” into actions, and support China’s peaceful reunification.
“ Wang Yi pointed out that all countries have national security concerns, but they must be justified and reasonable. They cannot engage in pan-politicisation and pan-security, let alone curb and suppress the development of other countries.The two sides agreed to further discuss the boundary between national security and economic activities…
“The two sides also discussed international and regional issues such as the Middle East, Ukraine, the Korean Peninsula, and the South China Sea.”
The Chinese readout did not even make any specific mention of the Houthis or Tehran! Instead, it underscored the perceived threat of Taiwan independence as “the biggest challenge to China—US relations.” And, furthermore, it reiterated Beijing’s concerns that the US is using export restrictions “to contain and suppress the development of other countries” and said that the two countries will discuss “the boundary between national security and economic activities” in future meetings.
What do we make out of this? Simply put, China’s reluctance to use its diplomatic and economic heft to support US moves to address the Red Sea disruptions by reining in the Axis of Resistance (or restrain North Korea’s behaviour) underscores the limitations of the Biden administration’s diplomatic outreach efforts or charm offensive to win over Beijing and get it committed to a selective engagement over Washington’s priorities on flash points that might otherwise become raging controversies in electoral politics till November.
By the way, the Chinese readout also acknowledged that there are areas where Beijing is indeed interested in an engagement with the US at this transformative point in time — viz., the joint implementation of the so-called “San Francisco Vision,” which translates as:
How come the US and its western allies get it all horribly wrong? For an answer, the final word must go to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov who said in New York while on a brief visit to the UN hqs last weekend:
“They believe that for 500 years they have ruled the world as they wish, living at the expense of others, and they think this should continue. This logic completely ignores the objective reality, in particular the fact that the vast majority of former colonies have gained independence, become aware of their national interests, want to strengthen their national, cultural and religious identity and are growing so fast that they have left the West behind – at least the BRICS members are.”
The bottom line is, Beijing will not fall for US attempts to create misperceptions in China’s relations with Iran or North Korea. China has no intentions to help the US to pull its chestnuts out of the fire in West Asia or the Far East. The international environment is rather fraught and Beijing has set its compass to be on the right side of history.
Lowering the Nuclear Threshold? – Sergey Karaganov, Alexander Mercouris, and Glenn Diesen
Many practical steps have been taken by the West to lower the nuclear threshold. US tactical weapons are due to return to the same Britain which has already deployed nearly every weapon in its arsenal against Russia in the Ukraine! Their ability to discharge these plans or be effective is another matter, but the madmen continue to march into the Abyss, flouting common sense, the Russian nuclear doctrine (treating deployment of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons against them as equivalent) and even basic self-preservation. It is, to mirror the Ukies’ current “operations” against civilians and civilian infrastructure within Russia, to speak plainly — nuclear terrorism.
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The Americans and the British are lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons: about the reasons
According to media reports, the United States intends to deploy its tactical nuclear weapons (TNW) and their delivery systems on the territory of the United Kingdom. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation has already reacted rather nervously to this information, since this event is another evidence of the Anglo-Saxons’ readiness to actually use a nuclear arsenal in order, as in World War II, to put a bullet in the Third, completing it on their own terms.
NW
It should be noted that Great Britain itself has long been an official member of the “nuclear club.” This country is the third in the world to test nuclear weapons of its own design, right after the USA and the USSR. Britain’s first nuclear explosive device was so bulky that it had to be installed on board an anchored frigate. Naturally, London chose not its own coast for testing, but the western tip of distant Australia, namely in the area of the Monte Bell Islands. The power of the nuclear explosion was about 25 kilotons.
The location in the immediate vicinity of the coast was not chosen by chance, since the British considered the USSR as a potential enemy and feared that the insidious Russians could themselves deliver nuclear explosive devices to British ports on civilian ships and detonate them there. You have to come up with something like this! Be that as it may, in London they really wanted to assess what effect the detonation of such special ammunition near the coast would have. The tests were successful, which gave Prime Minister Winston Churchill grounds to declare that Great Britain had become the owner of nuclear weapons. However, by this time the USA and the USSR already had thermonuclear bombs, and the British had to quickly catch up with them. Note that Australia and its desert territories were again used as a testing ground.
London’s lag behind Washington and Moscow was due to a number of objective circumstances. The difficult Second World War, which Great Britain went through from bell to bell, played a role. Work on a nuclear bomb there began back in 1940, in 1943 the British joined forces with the Americans, but the 1946 atomic energy law (McMahon Act), adopted in the United States, also limited their access to information about advanced nuclear technologies.
The more interesting is the current state of affairs. Currently, the United Kingdom exclusively possesses strategic nuclear weapons (NSW), which ensure its national security and the ability to add fuel to the fire of other people’s conflicts with impunity. British nuclear weapons are actually American.
These are the fourth-generation Trident II three-stage ballistic missiles designed to be launched from nuclear submarines. They make up 52% of the strategic nuclear forces of the United States and 100% of the British. Only four strategic submarines of the Vanguard class are used as carriers, one of which is constantly on combat duty. This should be remembered by those who, in the comments, call on the Kremlin to hit London with a “vigorous bomb”.
It’s not a problem to strike, but in response, ballistic missiles will fly at Russian megacities from somewhere under the water. The only Vanguard class SSBN can fire 8 missiles carrying a total of up to 40 thermonuclear warheads.
Application threshold
The UK’s nuclear arsenal is believed to number 225, of which 160 are ready for use. It is obvious that strategic nuclear forces are a weapon of strategic deterrence, which is necessary in order to have, but never use. However, the Anglo-Saxons are openly preparing to use nuclear arsenals for the second time in human history.
Thus, back in the relatively calm year of 2020, the Americans created a low-power nuclear warhead W76-2 for underwater-based Trident II missiles. Their power is something like 5 kilotons, which is 5 times less than that of the first British special ammunition, tested back in 1952 off the coast of Australia. Deputy Foreign Minister of Russia Sergei Ryabkov then stated with concern the following, verbatim:
The appearance of low-power charges on US strategic carriers means that the discussions previously voiced in declarative form on the American side about the possibility of using such weapons in a hypothetical conflict are already being embodied in metal, in products. This is a reflection of the fact that the United States is actually lowering the nuclear threshold, that it is allowing itself to wage a limited nuclear war and win such a war.
And now the Americans are preparing to place tactical nuclear weapons in Great Britain, which the British do not currently have at all. Based on an analysis of the draft budget of the US Air Force, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS, Federation of American Scientists) came to the conclusion that the Pentagon intends to return tactical nuclear weapons to the territory of Foggy Albion. It will be located in a storage facility at Lakenheath airbase, 100 km northeast of London:
Due to the arrival of airmen, driven by the launch of the Surety mission and the deployment of two F-35 squadrons, RAF Lakenheath is experiencing a significant shortage of housing available to pilots at the E-4 level and below.
Apparently, we are talking about the newest version of the B61-12 aerial bombs, which will be carried by the F-15E Strike Eagle and F-35A Lightning II fighters. Uncle Sam defiantly loads and hangs the gun on the wall. In whose direction should it then shoot?
Author: Sergey Marzhetsky
and this came out just yesterday on RT:
US to redeploy nuclear weapons to UK – Telegraph
The United States is planning to deploy nuclear weapons to the UK for the first time in 15 years, The Telegraph reported Friday, citing Pentagon documents.
The report comes amid heightened tensions between NATO and Russia over the Ukraine conflict, and calls from some Western politicians to prepare for a potential armed clash with Moscow.
The British newspaper cited procurement contracts for a new facility at the Royal Air Force station at Lakenheath in Suffolk, which point to Washington’s intention to bring nuclear weapons to the base. RAF Lakenheath is expected to house B61-12 bombs that are three times more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, the Telegraph said. The US sent F-35 nuclear-capable fighters to the base last year.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said last year that Moscow would be compelled to enact “compensatory countermeasures” if American nuclear warheads were to return to Britain. Russia has accused the West of stoking tensions in Europe and maintains that the eastward expansion of NATO is one of the root causes of the Ukraine conflict.
High-ranking European officials, including German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, have spoken of the need to brace for a potential war with Russia. Last week the chair of the NATO Military Committee, Admiral Rob Bauer, urged the bloc to be “readier across the whole spectrum” for direct confrontation.
The head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergey Naryshkin, dismissed the claims that Moscow was planning an offensive against NATO as “information warfare” aimed at justifying “hybrid aggression.”
To invoke Chinese wisdom, picture a single rock changing the course of a stream, which then changes the course of a mighty river.
by Pepe Escobar at The Cradle
“When there is a general change of conditions,
It is as if the entire creation had changed
and the whole world been altered,
as if it were a new and repeated creation,
a world brought into existence anew.”
— Ibn Khaldun
Yemen’s Ansarallah resistance forces have made it very clear, right from the start, that they set up a blockade in the Bab el-Mandeb and the southern Red Sea only against Israeli-owned or destined shipping vessels. Their single objective was and remains to stop the Gaza genocide perpetrated by the Israeli biblical psychopathy.
As a response to a morally-based call to end a human genocide, the United States, masters of the Global War Of Terror (italics mine), predictably re-designated Yemen’s Houthis as a “terrorist organization,” launched a serial bombardment of underground Ansarallah military installations (assuming US intel know where they are), and cobbled together a mini-coalition of the willing that includes its UK, Canadian, Australian, Dutch, and Bahraini vassals.
Without missing a beat, Yemen’s Parliament declared the US and UK governments “Global Terrorist Networks.”
Now let’s talk strategy.
With a single move, the Yemeni resistance seized the strategic advantage by de facto controlling a key geoeconomic bottleneck: the Bab el-Mandeb. Hence, they can inflict serious trouble on sectors of global supply chains, trade, and finance.
And Ansarallah has the potential to double down — if need be. Persian Gulf traders, off the record, have confirmed insistent chatter that Yemen may consider imposing a so-called Al-Aqsa Triangle — aptly named after the 7 October Palestinian resistance operation aimed at destroying the Israeli military’s Gaza Division and taking captives as leverage in a sweeping prisoner swap deal.
Such a move would mean selectively blocking not only the Bab el-Mandeb and the Red Sea route to the Suez Canal, but also the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off oil and gas deliveries to Israel from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE – although the top oil suppliers to Israel are in fact Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan.
These Yemenis are afraid of nothing. Were they able to impose the triangle – in this case only with direct Iranian involvement — that would represent the US-assassinated Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani’s Grand Design on cosmic steroids. This plan holds the realistic potential of finally bringing down the pyramid of hundreds of trillions of dollars in derivatives — and consequently, the whole western financial system.
And yet, even as Yemen controls the Red Sea and Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz, Al-Aqsa Triangle remains just a working hypothesis.
Welcome to the Hegemon’s blockade
With a simple, clear strategy, the Houthis perfectly understood that the deeper they draw the strategy-deprived Americans into the West Asian geopolitical swamp, in a sort of “undeclared war” mode, the more they’re able to inflict serious pain on the global economy, which the Global South will blame on the Hegemon.
Today, Red Sea shipping traffic has plunged in half, compared to the summer of 2023; supply chains are wobbly; ships carrying food are forced to circumnavigate Africa (and risk delivering cargo after its expiry date); predictably, inflation across the vast EU agricultural sphere (worth €70 billion) is rising fast.
Yet, never underestimate a cornered Empire.
Western-based insurance giants perfectly understood the rules of Ansarallah’s limited blockade: Russian and Chinese ships, for instance, have free passage in the Red Sea. Global insurers have only refused to cover US, UK, and Israeli ships — exactly as the Yemenis intended.
So the US, predictably, changed the narrative into a big, fat lie: ‘Ansarallah is attacking the whole global economy.’
Washington turbo-charged sanctions (not a big deal as the Yemeni resistance uses Islamic financing); increased the bombing, and in the name of sacrosanct “freedom of navigation” – always applied selectively — placed its bets on the “international community,” including leaders of the Global South, begging for mercy, as in please keep the shipping lanes open. The goal of the new, reframed American deceit is to elbow the Global South into ditching its support for Ansarallah’s strategy.
Pay attention to this crucial US sleight of hand: Because, from now on, in a new perverse twist of Operation Genocide Protection, it is Washington that will be blockading the Red Sea for the entire world. Washington itself, mind you, will be spared: US shipping depends on Pacific trade routes, not West Asian ones. This will ratchet up the pain on Asian customers and especially on Europe’s economy – which already took the heavies blows from Ukraine-associated Russian energy sanctions.
As Michael Hudson has interpreted it, there is a strong possibility that the neocons in charge of US foreign policy actually want (italics mine) to have Yemen and Iran implement the Al-Aqsa Triangle: “It will be the main energy buyers in Asia, China, and other countries that are going to be hurt. And that (…) will give the United States even more power to control the oil supply of the world as a bargaining chip in trying to renegotiate this new international order.”
That, in fact, is the classic Empire of Chaos modus operandi.
Calling attention to “our people in Gaza”
There is no solid evidence the Pentagon has the slightest clue about what its Tomahawks are hitting in Yemen. Even several hundred missiles won’t change a thing. Ansarallah, which has already endured eight years of nonstop US-UK-Saudi-Emirati firepower — and basically won — will not relent today over a few missile strikes.
Even the proverbial “unnamed officials” informed the New York Times that “locating the Houthi targets has proven more difficult than expected,” essentially because of lousy US intel on Yemeni “air defense, command centers, ammunition depots, and drone and missile storage and production facilities.”
It’s quite enlightening to listen to how Yemeni Prime Minister Abdulaziz bin Saleh Habtoor frames Ansarallah’s Israel-blockade initiative decision as “based on humanitarian, religious and moral aspects”. He refers, crucially, to “our people in Gaza.” And the overall vision, he reminds us, “stems from the vision of the Axis of Resistance.”
It is a reference smart onlookers will recognize as General Soleimani’s ever-lasting legacy.
With a keen historical sense — from the creation of Israel to the Suez crisis and the Vietnam war — the Yemeni prime minister recalls how “Alexander the Great reached the shores of Aden and Socotra island but was defeated (…) Invaders tried to occupy the capital of the historical state of Shebah and failed (…) How many countries throughout history have tried to occupy the west coast of Yemen and failed? Including Britain.”
It’s absolutely impossible for the west and even the Global Majority to understand the Yemeni mindset without learning a few facts from the Angel of History.
So let’s go back to the 14th century universal history master Ibn Khaldun — the author of The Muqaddimah.
Ibn Khaldun cracks the Ansarallah Code
Ibn Khaldun’s family was a contemporary to the rise of the Arab Empire, on the move alongside the first armies of Islam in the 7th century, from the austere beauty of the Hadramawti valleys in what is now southern Yemen all the way to the Euphrates.
Ibn Khaldun, crucially, was a precursor of Kant, who offered the brilliant insight that “geography lies at the basis of history.” And he read the 12th century Andalusian philosophy master Averroes – as well as other writers exposed to Plato’s works and understood how the latter referred to the moral strength of “the first people” in the Timaeus, in 360 B.C.
Yes, this boils down to “moral strength” — for the west, a mere soundbite; for the east, an essential philosophy. Ibn Khaldun grasped how civilization began and was constantly renewed by people with natural goodness and energy; people who understood and respected the natural world, who lived light, united by blood or brought together by a shared revolutionary idea or religious drive.
Ibn Khaldun defined as asabiyya this force that binds people together.
Like so many words in Arabic, asabiyya exhibits a range of diverse, loosely connected meanings. Arguably, the most relevant is esprit de corps, team spirit, and tribal solidarity – just as Ansarallah exhibits.
As Ibn Khaldun demonstrates, when the power of asabiyya is fully harnessed, reaching way beyond the tribe, it becomes more powerful than the sum of its individual parts, and can become a catalyst to reshape history; to make or break Empires; to encourage civilizations; or force them to collapse.
We are definitely living an asabiyya moment, brought about by the Yemeni resistance’s moral strength.
Solid as a rock
Ansarallah innately understood the threat of eschatological Zionism — which happens to mirror the Christian Crusades a millennium ago. And they are virtually the only ones, in practical terms, trying to stop it.
Now, as an extra bonus, they are exposing the plutocratic Hegemon, once again, as bombers of Yemen, the poorest Arab nation-state, where at least half the population remains “food-insecure.”
But Ansarallah is not heavy-weapons-free like the Pashtun mujahideen who humiliated NATO in Afghanistan.
Their anti-ship cruise missiles include the Sayyad and the Quds Z-O (range up to 800 km) and the Al Mandab 2 (range up to 300 km).
Their anti-ship ballistic missiles include the Tankil (range of up to 500 km); the Asef (range of up to 450 km); and the Al-Bahr Al-Ahmar (range of up to 200 km). That covers the southern part of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, but not, for instance, the islands of the Socotra archipelago.
Accounting for roughly one-third of the country’s population, Yemen’s Houthis, who form the backbone of the Ansarallah resistance, do have their own internal agenda: gaining fair representation in governance (they launched Yemen’s Arab Spring); protecting their Zaydi (neither Shia nor Sunni) faith; fighting for the autonomy of the Saada governorate; and working for the revival of the Zaydi Imamate, which was up and running before the 1962 revolution.
Now, they are making their mark on The Big Picture. It’s no wonder Ansarallah fiercely fights the Hegemon’s vassal Arabs – especially those who signed a deal to normalize relations with Israel under the Trump administration.
The Saudi-Emirati war on Yemen, with the Hegemon “leading from behind,” was a quagmire that cost Riyadh at least $6 billion a month for seven years. It ended with a wobbly 2022 truce in a de facto Ansarallah victory. A signed peace agreement, it should be noted, has been disallowed by the US, despite Saudi efforts to seal a deal.
Now, Ansarallah is turning geopolitics and geoeconomics upside down with not just a few missiles and drones but also oceans of craftiness and strategic acumen. To invoke Chinese wisdom, picture a single rock changing the course of a stream, which then changes the course of a mighty river.
Epigones of Diogenes can always remark, half in jest, that the Russia-China-Iran strategic partnership may have contributed with their own well-placed rocks in this path to a more equitable order. That’s the beauty of it: we may not be able to see these rocks, only the effects they cause. What we do see, though, is the Yemeni resistance, solid as a rock.
The record shows the Hegemon, once again, reverting to auto-pilot mode: Bomb, Bomb, Bomb. And in this particular case, to bomb is to redirect the narrative from a genocide committed in real time by Israel, the Empire’s aircraft carrier in West Asia.
Still, Ansarallah can always increase the pressure by sticking firmly to its narrative and, driven by the power of asabiyya, deliver to the Hegemon a second Afghanistan, compared to which Iraq and Syria will look like a weekend at Disneyland.
Joining us today is @CarlZha , a Chinese-born political commentator and the host of the “Silk And Steel Podcast.” We’ll be delving into Zelensky getting shut down by China at Davos, the Taiwan Elections, and exploring safe methods for traversing the Red Sea.
He discusses at length:
Even Lavrov was forced to use the Palestinian Authority as official face of Palestine at the UN, despite being discredited and reviled by Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza in most recent polls, since the PLO remains the only consensual modus vivendi to enforce an urgent permanent ceasefire. Yet both Hamas and the Zionists are dead set against coexistence (and do you blame Palestinians after the frank unrepentant satanism they face??). The forms must be observed, including this two-state offer by the arabs, guaranteed to be rejected by the combined West through their zionist proxy, further exposing them. This will serve as the equivalent of the Russian Ultimatum of December 2021, with a subsequent free hand given to the Resistance Axis to enforce peace. Organized by the same Russians at the UN and through the Saudis and OIC! Priceless
US-British Strikes on Yemen Seek to Provoke Wider War with Iran
US-British strikes on Yemen have predictably only escalated regional tensions;
Yemen has been targeted for years not only by US-British backed Saudi air and missile strikes, but also a multi-year, Saudi-led ground invasion, neither of which impacted Ansar Allah’s military capabilities;
US-British strikes on Yemen have only made passage through the Red Sea more dangerous, delaying by many months the possibility of commercial shipping returning to the route;
US policy papers have laid out the ultimate objective for the region is removing Iran as a competitor through regime change using covert action within Iran while undermining Iranian allies across the region;
Rather than attempting to de-escalate and stabilize the region, it is clear the US is determined to do exactly the opposite, ultimately hoping to draw Iran into a direct confrontation;
Follow The New Atlas on Telegram: https://t.me/brianlovethailand
George Galloway interviews Muhammed Al-Bukhaiti of Yemen’s Ansar Allah (Houthi) Political Bureau, and Governor of the Dhamar Governorate, an area bombed recently by the United States and Britain.
Join us as the renowned economist discusses Russia’s new status as largest economy of Europe, the Red Sea economic crisis brewing and China’s forecasted collapse despite becoming the largest car producer in the world this year. All this and much much more!
In a new discussion with Danny Haiphong, Michael Hudson continues his analysis of why US policies aimed at hurting Russia, China, and Iran are damaging US allies, particularly Europe. That both shrinks US markets and the resource base the US has available were it to be so dumb as to act on its military escalation threat display.
HAIPHONG: Welcome, everyone. Welcome to the stream. It’s Danny Haiphong, your host. As you can see, I’m joined by the renowned economist and author, Professor Michael Hudson. You can find his website in the video description. Please do hit the like button as we begin. That helps boost this stream. And, of course, you can find not only Michael’s website, but all the ways you can support this channel in the video description. How are you doing today, Michael?
HUDSON: Pretty good. It’s snowing here in New York, so I’m pretty much snowed in.
HAIPHONG: Yep. Yes, yes, it is quite bad out there today. But I am glad to have you here because there’s a lot of economic news. But you emphasize, and this channel tries to emphasize, the relationship between geopolitics and economics, geopolitical economy, as you, Radhika [Desai], and Ben Norton, and other great journalists have attempted to do.
And so I wanted to start, then, let’s talk about Ukraine first. Let’s begin there. There’s all kinds of talks about there being a quote-unquote stalemate with regard to Ukraine.
However, the realities, especially economically and on the battlefield, are a lot different. So, Michael, I’m just going to let you go on what you would like to comment on with regard to Ukraine, because the situation is not as hot in the news, but there are massive changes happening in this conflict.
HUDSON: Well, it’s the United States that’s saying that it’s a stalemate in Ukraine. What they mean is that the Ukraine counter-offenses have been utterly ineffective. Ukraine has lost the war.
And there have been almost all of the discussions that you get, for instance, on Judge Napolitano’s interviews, and the European press, the Russian press, the Chinese press, they all say, Well, the war is over. Russia can just continue to take however much it wants, but there is no point in Russia trying to take more land right now because Ukraine, or rather Mr.
Zelensky, is sending all of the Ukrainians he can find, especially the Hungarian Ukrainians, the Russian-speaking Ukrainians, and the Romanian Ukrainians, in the fight to get killed.
So, maybe we can convince Russia, Don’t mop up, don’t lock in your victory. Why don’t we just say it’s a stalemate and leave things the way they are since you’re winning so strongly?
Well, obviously, Russia has already said, We’ve already given the terms for our peace. Of course, we can negotiate anytime. Our terms are simple, total surrender. We’re going to get rid of Nazism. We’re going to make sure that Ukraine will never join NATO. And we’re going to make sure that the Russian speakers and Crimea are part of Russia. So anytime you want to negotiate, meaning, say yes to our terms, we’ll be glad to. But meanwhile, we’re just going to sit here. And if you want to send more and more troops in, that’s fine.
Now, the Americans think that, okay, if Russia isn’t taking any more land, it’s a tie. But it’s really not a tie because if you read President Putin’s speeches and Foreign Secretary Lavrov’s speeches, he says, Well, Ukraine is only the tip of the iceberg. We’re talking about the big picture. The big picture is, for instance, that Russia on January 1st became the lead administrator of the BRICS+.
And the United States is meanwhile losing the fight all over the world. It’s losing the economic fight against Russia and China. Russia is increasing its industrial production, not only military, but in the production of aircraft, automobiles. China is growing and the United States is not. And most of all, Europe is going into a depression led by the collapse of, or I should say, the destruction of German industry as a result of the sanctions against Russia. And also the sanctions that the United States are insisting that Europe impose against China.
The United States has told Europe, you really can only trade with us and our NATO allies.
We want you to reduce your trade with China to what the head of the EU, Mr. Borrell, has said. He said, Well, you know, China, we import a lot more from you than we export. It’s got to be even. And China said, well, there are plenty of things we’d like to import from you, Europeans, such as the chip-making etching machinery for ultraviolet etching that’s made by Holland. And Borrell says, Oh, we can’t, the United States won’t let us send you, sell you anything that potentially is used in the military. And China says, well, anything that can be used economically can be military because the military is part of the economy.
So I guess we’re quite happy to agree with you and have balanced trade between China and Europe. We’ll just cut back our trade with you to maybe the $100 a year trade that you have to trade with us.
So Europe is voluntarily isolating, limiting its trade and investment to the United States, cutting off the trade with Russia. And without Russian gas and oil, you’re going to have the German, French, and Italian manufacturing industry, chemical industry, fertilizer industry, and agriculture continue to shrink.
And so the stalemate that America is talking about really means we’re shrinking our allies in Europe. We’re losing the third world. And what is happening in Ukraine, fighting to the last Ukrainian, now looks like a similar fight in the Near East, where it looks like there’s a similar stalemate, which really has been inflaming the world’s global majority and the global South into thinking that all of a sudden this is something awful. I’ll get to that later.
But the important thing is that I think the Americans have already realized that they’re going to lose the war in Ukraine. And the problem, as you read the New York Times and the Washington Post, and especially the Financial Times, is if we lose the war in Ukraine, how will Biden win the election in November? Because he’s been pushing, his whole policy is we can essentially wreck Russia. Our sanctions are going to lead to the collapse of Russian industry. The Russian people will get so upset with the war, there’s going to be a regime change. They’ll overthrow Mr. Putin and we can get another Boris Yeltsin in who is going to really wreck Russia in the way that our neoliberal advisors were able to wreck it in the 1990s.
Well, that hasn’t happened. So what’s going to happen? Well, the public relations people of the Democratic Party have got together and they’ve all decided, Okay, what we want to tell the people is, it really didn’t matter in Ukraine. It doesn’t matter because we don’t have to win in Ukraine because America can fight [with] a kind of soft power. And we have other ways of dominating the world and maintaining America number one, even though we’re de-industrializing our economy. Even though we’re the largest debtor in the world, we’re going to be able to dominate. And the new Democratic Party public relations push is what’s called “soft power”.
And in yesterday’s January 15th Financial Times, there was a long discussion. They had a whole page by a man who had been President Clinton’s advisor, National Intelligence Council advisor Joseph Nye. For a whole page. And it was Nye who coined the term soft power. A few decades ago, when he was arguing with Paul Kennedy, who was saying that the Americans were on the decline. And he came up with this idea to say, the United States can still be able to exert influence, but not of a military type, but of financial power, regime change.
And what he said, he gave five reasons why the United States would not necessarily be eclipsed by China or by Russia or by any other countries. And it’s hilarious to look at the five reasons that the Financial Times yesterday trotted forth for why there’s not going to be any threat to the United States.
The first reason he gave was geography and friendly neighbors. Well in the last few months, especially since the fighting and Israeli attacks on Gaza have occurred, America’s lost public opinion. And even Secretary Blinken has said that the fight in Israel is creating antagonism, not only against Israel, but America has lost its moral dominance as a result of backing the genocide and opposing any criticism of Israel within the United Nations. So it’s lost foreign support. There’s a growing anti-Americanism, not only in Asia, Africa, and the global South, but in Europe.
Well, the second reason that Nye cited was domestic energy supplies. America controls oil. Not only does it produce its own oil, but it’s just been able to block the rest of the world from importing Russian oil, and it’s been able to blow up Nord Stream. And now it’s pushing Israel to essentially act as another Ukraine. It’s pushing Israel to incite Lebanon and Iran into a provocation, into a military response to the Israeli attacks that is going to enable Israel to do what a Senate majority leader, the Republican leader, has been pushing for, and what Biden is pushing for, and what the neocons have been pushing for for 20 years, war with Iran to grab the oil reserves of what were Iran, Syria, Iraq, and Libya. And if it can control the oil reserves of the Near East and be able to block off their energy exports to all the other countries, just as it’s been able to block Russia’s oil exports to Europe, then it can control the industrialization of other countries because industry basically runs on oil and gas. Industry is energy, and without energy, you’re not going to be able to have your own industrialization independently of the United States. So the U.S. foreign policy, as we’ve talked before, I think, in our last show, for 100 years, the United States has used oil as an attempt to control the world’s economy.
Well, the third point that Nye points out is the dollar-based financial system. Well, it’s amazing that he could say that in yesterday’s Financial Times when the whole world was trying to de-dollarize. You’re getting one speech after another, not only from Russia and from China, but from the global South countries. And even in the Near East, they’re saying now that America has grabbed Russia’s foreign exchange reserves, $300 billion, all of the money that we’ve saved in our domestic monetary reserves are subject to confiscation by the United States. And they’ve already told Saudi Arabia that if they do not keep their international reserves from oil exports in the form of United States stocks and bonds, that would be treated as an act of war. So here in the Near East, you’re having Saudi Arabia and Bahrain under increasing pressure to support the Arabs being attacked by Israel, and yet they’re afraid to act because the United States is holding their dollars hostage. Well, very quickly, you’re seeing other countries move out of dollars as quickly as they can.
And finally, the fifth argument that Nye points out for why America cannot lose is demo-graphic and technological leadership. But that’s the one fatal Achilles heel of the United States economy. Its hope, its idea of technological leadership is to get monopoly power over information technology, pharmaceuticals, and other areas that it can dominate for intellec-tual property through copyrighting and through essentially suing countries that will adopt the technology that’s developed in the United States.
Prof. Hudson steps away for a minute.
HAIPHONG: That summary, Joseph Nye outlined it, and Professor Hudson broke it down, broke down the facade, or the reality behind the facade that the neocons spread. And what’s so interesting about this piece is that, I mean, Joseph Nye, I mean, he is a Carter and then Clinton functionary, someone who served as an Undersecretary of State and Undersecretary of Defense for these administrations. And he is someone who actually has been considered less hawkish, but if we went through this article, you would see that what he is arguing with regard to soft power is actually regime change by other means.
And that regime change is heavily connected to the economic realm, as perhaps Professor Hudson outlined so eloquently. There is so many connections to be made. We have a lot of them I’m going to raise with Professor Hudson, including on Russia, Russia being now the biggest economy in Europe by purchasing power parity terms.
Also, the China collapse theory. There’s new news. There’s recent news about China actually surpassing Japan and leading the world now in car manufacturing and how its electric vehicle production is causing so much alarm.
Prof. Hudson returns
I wanted to now ask you about a development, given all that you outlined with regard to Joseph Nye’s assessment and analysis on soft power in the US’s so-called advantages. I wanted to talk to you about this story here. Vladimir Putin was just meeting with business leaders in the Far East, and he made a claim about Russia now being the biggest economy in Europe by purchasing power parity (PPP) terms, becoming Europe’s first economy, despite pressure from all sides.
And here’s what he said. He said, It seems that we are being strangled and pressured from every side, but still we are the largest economy in Europe. We left Germany behind and climbed into fifth in the world. China, the U.S., India, Japan and Russia. We are number one in Europe. And so there’s reports in that conversation with business leaders from the region that Russia is set to grow three percent year on year, and it’s likely to be even higher, maybe four and five percent.
Now, there’s also the news, you brought it up, but there is a huge stagnation going on in Europe. In an analysis also in Financial Times, there are 48 economists that talked about the eurozone set for weak growth this coming year. And the prediction was across these economists, zero point six percent on average, with many indicating less than that. And of course, some indicating more. But the vast majority said it was going to be less than half of one percent. So, Michael, your thoughts. How did this, how did this happen? And perhaps you can explain the economic intricacies on how this happened.
HUDSON: Well, we’ve discussed in the past how it happened. The United States, starting with President Clinton and actually with President Carter, decided to help American firms make higher profits by moving their labor force out of the United States, by trying to shift manufacturing first to Mexico, along the maquiladoras under Carter, and then under Clinton to China and Asia.
And the idea was to create increasing industrial unemployment in the United States to prevent labor’s wages from rising. And the theory that has guided the Democratic Party’s economists is, if you can cut wages, there will be higher profits and higher profits will lead to more prosperity.
Well, the reality is that you cut wages by moving your industry outside of the country, by de-industrializing. And that is still the policy that America has taken. And it has replaced industrialization with financialization to make money financially, hoping that the companies that have now moved out towards China and Asia and other countries are going to be able to have higher profits and essentially become more prosperous for the donor class to the Democratic and also the Republican parties.
But what President Putin was talking about was something much more. Russia already, along with China, have begun to produce their own airplanes. Take a look at the last week’s news, all about Boeing, yet again, having other accidents on its airplanes. Boeing used to be a technological leader in aircraft, but then it was merged with McDonnell Douglas and became a financial company. So it broke up the Boeing system of making airplanes and began to outsource to various other companies, all the little parts. And all Boeing is now is assembling diverse parts that it buys from various suppliers, very much like television sets are made. You buy different parts from different suppliers.
Well, the reason Putin is making his speech in the Near East is Russia and China are working together for an enormous industrial development to take place in eastern Siberia, which has been obviously underpopulated because of the bad weather for many centuries now, but also is now beginning to warm up. And the idea is to integrate Chinese industry and Russian industry and technology and to design entire cities that are going to be technological complexes producing all sorts of interrelated parts together, computer parts, airplanes, trains, automobiles. China is already the largest automobile exporter in the world. And so you’re going to have this whole new center of industrial growth in eastern Asia.
Well, the idea is that this is going to be a great increase in prosperity. And the way in which these cities are developing, when I first went to Russia in 1994, I stayed at the home of the professor who had designed Togliatti City, the city where they were going to begin producing automobiles designed by the Italians. And he explained how he designed the whole city together to combine the factories and production to workers’ housing, to workers’ entertainment, to workers’ health, and all of the different forms of supplying materials and parts of cars all dovetailed together. Well, he was basically an industrial engineer. And that is how Russia and China are developing the cities that they’re creating along with universities, training systems in East Asia and Siberia.
So essentially, Putin is saying to the world, if you’re a global south country or an Arab country, and you want to have your economy grow and trade more, who are you going to tie your economy to? The world is being split into two parts, the US-NATO “garden” and the rest of the world, 85% jungle. The jungle is growing. The garden isn’t growing because its philosophy is not industrialization. Its philosophy is to make monopoly rents, meaning rents that you make in your sleep without producing value. You just have a privilege of a right to collect money on a monopoly technology that you have.
But China and Russia are way ahead of the United States in most of the growth technologies that we’re talking about, not yet in the ultraviolet etching of computer chips, but in many areas.
So you’re having the whole shift of technological advance move away from North America and the United States, where it was ever since World War I, to Russia and China.
How is the United States going to cope with the rest of the world industrializing and not needing any contact with the United States?
President Biden keeps saying China is our enemy. Ultimately, our military says we’re going to have war with China within two or three years. We’re at war with Russia right now in the Ukraine. That’s our objective, war.
But the rest of the world, essentially, its response is not a mirror image of this, is not to say, well, we can go to war. We’re going to have Russia fighting Europe.
Just in the last few days, you had numerous American military magazines and especially European spokesmen saying, if we lose in Ukraine, Russia is going to march right through Poland and Romania, right to retake Germany. It’s going to conquer Europe, and maybe it won’t even stop in England.
Well, that’s just nonsense. The reality is that Russia and China don’t need Europe anymore.
They don’t need the United States. Whereas under the Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright said, America is the unique country. It’s the necessary country.
The fact is that the rest of the world not only finds America unnecessary, but America and its NATO allies to be the major threat to their own prosperity. So they’re essentially splitting into their own world. And the BRICS group is expanding its trade relations, its investment relations, and especially its financial clearing and monetary operations to be independent of the dollar, de-dollarizing, and certainly independent of the euro, which seems to have no visible means of support right now, and going their own way.
Now, that is exactly what has led the United States to push Israel [essentially] to follow Netanyahu’s belligerence, because the United States says, We realize we’re losing power.
We know that it’s really not a stalemate. We know that we’ve lost the chance for world dominance. We may be re-elected by telling people, you know, it doesn’t really matter.
But we know that it does matter. The last chance we have to assert American power is military. And the main military prize is the Near East now, just as it was after 9-11, when Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld pressed for an invasion of Iraq to begin grabbing its soil and to essentially create America’s foreign legion in the form of ISIS and al-Qaeda Iraq. So now America has two armies that it’s using to fight in the Near East, the ISIS/al-Qaeda foreign legion (Arabic-speaking foreign legion) and the Israelis. The plan is—and America is willing to fight to the last Israeli, just as it’s willing—it’s trying to fight to the last Ukrainian in order to make this final grab of the Near East in fighting Iran.
This is a crazy idea, but it seems that that’s exactly what is being planned.
General Petraeus, who lost the war in Afghanistan, has said, we’ve got to conquer Iran. That’s going to be—we can regain all the power that we’ve lost by attacking Iran. And so now it looks like President Biden is hoping to make a political comeback by saying, Well, we may not have blocked Russia and Ukraine, but at least we’ve conquered the Near East.
But the way in which it’s conquering it [somehow has] become a catalyst to make the whole global majority, the whole rest of the world, especially Africa, South America, and South Asia, to think, Wait a minute, what’s happening in Israel and Palestine today is exactly what happened to us at our beginning.
In the United States, what did the Americans do? The White people came, the Anglo-Saxons and the other Europeans, and they killed 90% of the Indians, drove them out, isolated them, put them in basically concentration camps. And then when they found out that there was oil under these concentration camps, they essentially murdered the Indians there or drove them out to grab the oil.
Same thing in Latin America. When the Spaniards came to Latin America, they grabbed the land, drew up land grants, and these land grants created latifundia, which has been the great problem of Latin America for the last five centuries, because it’s prevented Latin America from growing their own food. It’s fought against the indigenous population feeding itself to turn the land into export crops, largely under World Bank guidance for all of this.
Same thing in Africa. They say, wait a minute, what is happening in Israel is what happened to us, with the colonizing powers. This is what Germany did in Africa. It’s what the Dutch did in South Africa. It’s Germany in Namibia, the Dutch in South Africa, the English through Africa, and especially the French in its territories. All of this has occurred before.
And all of a sudden, just as Americans go to the movies and mourn more for the Westerns, they’re cheering for the Indians against the cavalry. You’re having the rest of the world cheering for the underdog because the underdog is who they were. The underdog is them today.
And this idea is turning into a feeling of, Let’s throw off all of the barriers to colonialism.
Let’s start with French Africa, which we’re throwing off the French there. We’re not going to let French banks, French mineral companies, mining companies, French oil companies simply take all of our wealth because they conquered it five centuries ago. We can identify with the—we know what the Palestinians are fighting for.
And yet, in a way, they’re also saying, well, wait a minute, look at what Israel’s doing.
Israel says, God gave us this land. We used to have it. Well, the South Americans and Africans and Asians are saying, Well, this is our land, but we never left it. We’re still on the land. And even though we’re on the land, we’re still locked up, like Israel is treating the Palestinians. We don’t have to live this way. We can decolonize.
And the whole split of the world and the turning towards the China, Russia, Iran, BRICS
access is an attempt to reverse, undo, and roll back the whole colonial expansion that’s occurred over the last five centuries.
HAIPHONG: You just gave an incredible summary in breaking down the interconnections of these developments, and I wanted to, given that the Near East, West Asia, is so “hot” right now.
Iran just launched numerous strikes in Erbil, in Iraq, against a Mossad headquarters, as well as other targets locating certain terrorist groups that Israel supported. There are reports now of Pakistan, also in northern Pakistan.
There also is the situation with regard to Yemen, the Red Sea crisis that is ongoing. The Ansar Allah movement has just hit an American ship. There’s constant activity there. And of course, there’s still the conflict you mentioned, the fighting going on in Gaza, the brutal attack on the people of Palestine that has been correctly labeled a genocide.
And here’s what Joseph Nye had to say, and I’ll kick it back to you, Michael. He said it with regard to U.S. soft power. In that Financial Times article, he said, The U.S., even so, can seem powerless. It has failed to convince its ally, Israel, to act with restraint in Gaza. Could it have done so in the past? It’s not clear they could have done it 20 years ago. George W. Bush intimated in 1991 that American aid could be cut and that they may have helped to stimulate the Oslo process, but that didn’t bring about two states. Israel is not only, not the only ally that has proved quite capable of resisting the U.S., pointing to Saudi Arabia and others. For the moment, Israel is hurting its own soft power and by extension hurting American soft power.
Kick it back to you, Michael.
HUDSON: This is the big lie that America is trying to promote. The idea that, the pretense that when Blinken goes to talk to Netanyahu, he says, when you drop the next bombs and kill the next 20,000 Gaza-era Palestinians, please be gentle with them. Please obey the laws of war and stop bombing the ambulances, stop bombing the hospitals.
That’s all public relations crap. The reality is that he’s telling Netanyahu to go forward.
It’s America. All these bombs that are dropping are made in America and sent to Israel to drop. Every week, America is saying, Here is a new delivery of bombs. Go to it. Here is billions of dollars more for you to get by while you’ve drafted your working population into the army. America is pushing Israel.
Beginning 50 years ago, I used to travel to work with Netanyahu’s main Mossad and now National Security Advisor, Uzi Arad. I remember, I think I’ve mentioned before on one occasion, we were going to Japan and stopped off in San Francisco for some discussions.
An army officer came up, threw his arms around Uzi and said, you Israelis are our landed aircraft carrier in the Near East. Well, that was 50 years ago.
Last week in the New York Times, I hear exactly the same phrase. Israel is our aircraft carrier. To the United States, Israel is America’s Ukraine in the Near East. It’s the United States that is pushing Israel to goad first Lebanon and then Iran into doing something that will justify a huge American attack, trying to do to Iran what Hillary Clinton did to Libya, utterly destroying it and destroying the population. In the process, grabbing its gold supply, we don’t know what’s happened to that, installing ISIS as its foreign legion in as much of Libya as possible and grabbing the Libyan oil supply.
In the New York Times, in the Wall Street Journal and on TV, whenever they talk about Hamas or Hezbollah, they don’t say Hamas and Hezbollah. They say “Iran-backed Hamas”,
“Iran-backed Hezbollah”. They don’t talk about the Yemeni army, the Houthis. They say the “Iranian-backed Houthis”. There is a huge public relations push to convince the American population that Iran is the big enemy and President Biden says again and again that Iran is the enemy. The army, Petraeus, and the neocons have said from the very beginning, Iraq and Syria are merely the dress rehearsal for where we really want to go, Iran.
Their hatred of Iran stems from the fact that they overthrew the Iranian government of Mosaddegh back in the 1950s, along with British help as usual. And they’re sure that, well, we’ve hurt you so much that we’re sure you must hate us. And since we know you hate us because of what we’ve done to you, we’ve got to attack you because we’ve made you an enemy by overthrowing your government when we grabbed your oil and put in the Shah that ran a murderous torture regime for a few decades in Iran. Well, that basically is the 7
American policy that is goading it into a war that probably will be more disastrous for the United States than the war in Ukraine was.
At least in Ukraine, all the Americans lost were Ukrainians. And I guess they had a few mercenary troops that they hired over there. But in the Near East, they’re going to lose a lot more than it was at stake in just Ukraine. They’ll probably lose Israel’s role as a landed aircraft carrier. And in fact, they’re going to lose a lot of their own floating aircraft carriers that are near there. And they’ve already lost control of the Red Sea and the oil gulf, basically, between Iran and Egypt.
And there’s also a possibility that they’ll even lose the support of Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Because even though in the Arab Spring, the Americans pulled a “color revolution”, Arab Spring, where they replaced the hated Egyptian President Mubarak with his own protege, Sisi, who is now running it. Sisi is totally in the US pockets. And yet, the Egyptian population, needless to say, being largely Arabic, is supporting Gaza, not the United States.
Similarly, in Saudi Arabia. Here, Saudi Arabia and Ukraine were in the process of making a rapprochement, actually an alliance with Israel, along sort of the same lines that Greece had been making with Israel for a Mediterranean military force. Well, now much of the Saudi population is Palestinian. They’ve found jobs in Saudi Arabia, and they’re outraged at Saudi Arabia’s trying to sit on the fence at the same time that it has joined the BRICS.
It realizes that all of its foreign reserves are held hostage by the United States. What’s going to be more important to Saudi Arabia? Fighting to protect the Islamic population under attack, or saving its own reserves that are kept in the United States, not to help Saudi Arabia at all.
Same thing with Egypt.
The population there, between Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, these were the main American bastions in the Near East. And now it’s in danger of losing them if, in the case of war, they’re under tremendous political pressure and instability.
And further to the West in Africa, you have the former French colonies also being Islamic.
You can imagine, you know, they’re breaking away not only from France and supporting the rest of Africa, Central Africa, from breaking away from France, but essentially moving into an alliance with the BRICS countries, with Russia and China.
So all of a sudden, the American decision to go to war with Russia in Ukraine after the 2015 Maidan massacre and regime change, putting in the neo-Nazis, you’re having the fighting in Israel. And those two US-sponsored attacks have had the exact opposite effect of what the United States politicians promised. Just as they promised that Russia would break up and essentially the economy would crash under the sanctions and under the force of war, they believed that Israel’s army was so strong that it was going to simply be able to wipe out Hamas.
And the big fighting — there’s not a word of this in the United States press — but the big fighting is on the West Bank. Netanyahu is saying, well, here while they’re all looking at what we’re bombing the civilians and the hospitals and the ambulances and starving Gaza, we’ve distracted the world and we can now wipe out the Arabs on the West Bank and move right into Syria on the Golan Heights. And apparently the United States has promised Israel that it can take whatever it wants of Syria, which it’s still opposing.
We don’t know what Russia is going to do in all of this. Russia, China have been completely silent in all of this. And I can understand they’re silent. China has moved naval ships into the area because it’s itself is very dependent on the Red Sea and the sea lanes to oil in Saudi Arabia.
When the United States keeps saying, threatening, oh, the Yemenis are going to bomb ships there and block the trade, that’s what they want. The United States realizes that if they can goad Yemen and Iran into blocking the Straits of Hormuz and the Gulf, this will indeed stop the oil trade. And it’s true that as Yves Smith pointed out in Naked Capitalism today, the sea lanes to Saudi Arabia were closed for many years after the 1967 war. They were closed numerous times for many months. And it’s not unthinkable that they’re closed. But that was then.
Now, if you close them, it will be the main energy buyers in Asia, China, and other countries that are going to be hurt. And that is, from the United States point of view, that will give the United States even more power to control the oil supply of the world as a bargaining chip in trying to renegotiate this new international order.
So you’re having the United States basically play the only tactic that it can actually use.
It can’t use the tactic to say, “We’re the growing economy and you want to trade with us, not with China and Russia,” because they’re growing faster than the U.S. and Europe. They don’t really have anything to offer except the ability to disrupt foreign trade and foreign monetary and financial systems and agree to stop disrupting it if other countries will simply let the United States be the unipolar decision maker.
And I should have added the dimension before when we were talking about China and Russia and the Siberian development. The Eurasian countries have one great advantage over the United States and Europe. The United States and Europe have essentially privatized what was the whole public infrastructure system. And being privatized, they’re now natural monopolies. And they’re run in the way that, say, Thames Water is run in England. They’re run as monopolies that are under-investing and simply using a choke-hold to increase their monopoly rents, which they report as profits.
But China, Russia, Asian countries have kept the basic infrastructure—transportation, education, health care, communications—as public utilities. And they are investing, they are run by engineers, industrial engineers, not financial engineers. And they are run not only much more efficiently, but they don’t have the financial overhead and the monopoly rent overhead that plagues privatized infrastructure. So the cost of production in the non-neoliberalized world, I guess we can call it the world moving towards socialism, is so much more efficient than the neoliberal financialized West that you can see the magnetic pull of Africa and South America.
And as it happens, these are also the main raw material suppliers of the world. So if the United States and Europe don’t have raw materials, don’t produce their own oil, except what the Europeans have to pay enormous markups to American producers, you’re going to have Europe looking pretty much like post-Soviet Latvia and Estonia. The population is going to emigrate. They’re going to shrink. You’re going to have a flowering of interaction throughout all of Eurasia and Africa.
And essentially, the United States can try to stop this by triggering a new oil war in the Near East. But that’s really the last gasp. It’s very unlikely that this is going to lead Taiwan to say, Well, you know, we’re going to follow Ukraine and Israel and you can fight to the last Taiwanese, just as you’re fighting to the last Ukrainian, the last Israeli. I think that the United States is creating a turmoil that is demonstrating to the other world the need for essentially, I won’t call it an iron curtain, but for it to go its own way and for a break in economic systems.
And as President Putin has said again and again, this is a civilizational war. It’s a war to say in what direction is civilization going to go? Is it going to be towards neo-feudalism, back toward feudalism, which is the neoliberal rent-seeking 1%? Or is it going to be towards where industrial capitalism was originally evolving towards, towards socialism and towards raising living standards instead of imposing IMF financial austerity on the dollar block? So that’s the choice that America is seeing in the Near East and in other countries right now.
Are you going to have a future of austerity or essentially prosperity and economic growth?
HAIPHONG: I don’t think there’s a better way to connect all of those developments, especially with regard to what’s happening in the Near East, or what some call the Middle East, or what others call West Asia. I mean, the clashes are escalating. There’s clashes even between Egypt and Israel, which is almost unheard of.
With everything that you said, you’re saying that this is not going to work at all, that the United States won’t be able to wrestle control as it is seeking in the region. How do you see this playing out? Maybe we can close on this point, given that it’s not going to work.
And if it’s not going to work, then what other options do the United States and maybe the broader collective West have? Because you’ve outlined it perfectly, this is an economic war, this is a war for economic dominance and control. So will it just crumble on its own, or will the United States and whoever it can drag along with it, you know, escalate and maneuver in a manner that we should all be aware of?
HUDSON: The United States has one dynamic more than any other country of the world, and that is rage. That is the feeling that you have in Washington now. Not only rage, but as with most rage, it’s combined with fear. The Democrats fear that they’re going to lose the election and that Donald Trump is going to come in and clean up the FBI police state and to get rid of the CIA. That’s basically what he’s pledged to do, the deep state.
So the deep state is worried that it’s going to be, not that the United States is going to be left to stagnate, but that they themselves, their control of the United States will stagnate.
And the deep state is willing to destroy the U.S. economy. The Democratic Party, since Clinton, has the objective of destroying the U.S. economy in order to benefit the control of the 1% over the 99%. And it’s willing to use military war to fight, to escalate in the Near East, to escalate in Ukraine, and to escalate, presumably, in the China Sea to somehow provoke and essentially saying, Well, we’re going to go to war. We’re going to have a grab bag because who wants to live in a world that we don’t control?
Well, just, you know, this is like what Russia said when America was threatening to atom bomb it with its withdrawal from the arms agreements. Russia said, Don’t think that we won’t fight back. Who wants to live in a world without Russia? Well, the United States government is saying, who wants to live in America that we can’t control? That the banks and the military industrial complex and the pharmaceutical complex and basically the finance-monopolist sector can’t control. If we can’t control it, we’re willing to have the whole country go under. That’s really what it is. And they’re using the control of the press for any of this.
For instance, on Saturday and Sunday in Washington, there were huge demonstrations against the attacks on the Palestinians. Not a word of this in the New York Times or not a word of it on television. There’s not a word of what’s happening in the Near East or what President Putin and President Xi are saying in the news at all. It’s as if the world is already divided into a visible world, the deep state world and the invisible world, reality, of the 95% or 85%.
The fight politically towards November is, are people going to be able to really believe that the Biden administration is helping the economy instead of defending the CIA, the FBI, the national security state, the military industrial complex, the pharmaceutical complex, real estate, and Wall Street against the population by de-industrializing? Or has all this been a detour that’s made us poor? That’s going to be the question.
And the fact that you’re already having on social media, blocking of any criticism of Israel or the United States, you’re having a kind of control here that is a very similar control that you’re having in the Ukraine.
HAIPHONG: It really is mind blowing how quickly all of these developments have, in many senses, spiraled out of control. Even if we can look at this in years, but even in just the last few months, of course, with October 7th being another breaking point.
HUDSON: I think you should say October 2nd. That was the destruction of the attempt to destroy the mosque. It’s October 2nd that triggered all of this. It was the Israeli attack on the mosque that was intended to say, We are going to destroy the Islamic presence in Palestine so that it can be entirely non-Islamic. That was the declaration of war. So don’t be suckered into the New York Times saying it’s all October 7th.
It began the week earlier, just as in Ukraine. The Ukraine war did not begin with Russia moving to protect its population, its Russian speaking population in Donetsk and Luhansk.
It began not only with Maidan, but with the Ukrainian army shelling, bombing civilian apartment buildings and civilians in the Russian speaking territories and refusing to pay any social security or healthcare to the Russian speaking territories and banning the Russian language. Russia was the country under attack, not the attacker.
So again, you have to be very careful as when you date the beginning of this. And the Americans want to date all wars as when after it attacks and when other countries are protecting themselves. They call other countries protecting themselves an attack on the United States. Yeah.
HAIPHONG: October 7th, February 22nd, 2022. I mean, it’s a tactic. So it’s a great point that you brought up.
And maybe, Michael, we could close our conversation with China because China, you mentioned earlier in your analysis. And, you know, I believe China is the end game here. And there are a few developments. You mentioned China surpassing, in terms of car exports, car manufacturing, Japan, and becoming number one in the world. There and I’m going to pull up the articles as you speak.
There’s also the boards of the major auto manufacturers, the monopolies in a state of shock over BYD, the car manufacturer in China that has essentially taken over the world market with regard to electric vehicles. And there’s also reports that China is going to meet its 5
percent growth target. Despite the fact I’m sure you’ve seen this, Michael, there is collapse after collapse after collapse theory being bandied about in the mainstream media by the deep state. “China’s on the collapse. China’s economy is flailing. It’s declining. It’s crashing.”
So, Michael, I’m going to pull up the pieces as you go. But perhaps you can give your take, your reaction to this development and the notion of China being the end game for the neocons and the monopoly system of post-industrial capitalism, finance capitalism that you write and analyze so much about.
HUDSON: Well, there are a number of reasons why China is becoming the main car producer. This is led by the shift towards electric vehicles. And there’s one key dimension of electric vehicles.
Number one is they’re electric. You need electricity. How are you going to produce the electricity: with American oil, with Russian oil? How are you going to make it with atomic power? The other thing is once you get the electricity into the car, how are you going to get a battery to run the car and not have to keep stopping at the filling station even more often than you have to go to the bathroom?
Well, the answer is you need lithium for that. And China has been controlling most of the lithium sites. And you also need to have computerized vehicles. You need all sorts of materials that are cobalt, the rare earths that also are controlled with China. And China has gained control of most of the metallurgy, of the refining of the key metals that are needed for automobile production and for other industrial production.
So you have China as an integrated economy producing all of these. And you have the West becoming dependent on achieving these same metals. Now, let’s look at what could have happened back in 1990. Suppose there had not been a Cold War. Suppose that America actually in 1990, when the Soviet Union disbanded, America would have disbanded NAT and really had a mutual kind of growth with open, continued international trade.
Well, without the world splitting into the two parts, somehow there wouldn’t have been enough motivation for other countries to explicitly make the civilizational break from neoliberalism to socialism. There would have been a kind of social democracy in Asia, but it could have been the social democracy going the oligarchic way that it’s gone in, say, Sweden, which used to be called a great social democracy. And now it’s the most unequal country in Europe. You could have had slowly that development, but there would have been world trade and anybody could have bought the various metals, lithium, the rare earths. There would have been oil. There would have been continued trade and the whole world economy could have grown.
All of that was broken up by the American insistence that if we can’t control world trade, there won’t be world trade. If we can’t control world international finance and make the whole world use the U.S. dollar that we can print on computers and print and issue to finance all of the military spending to encircle the rest of the world with military bases, if we can’t do that, then there won’t be a world financial system because the United States believed that without the dollar, there couldn’t be de-dollarization because there was no alternative.
They’re tricked into the Margaret Thatcher type slogan. There is no alternative. And they really believe that the rest of the world could not prosper without using the dollar. They could not prosper without selling off and privatizing their public utilities and making natural monopolies that would be bought up by American buyers printing the dollars to say, we’ll print the dollars and we’ll buy your transportation system, your communication system and your factories. They couldn’t believe that there was an alternative to neoliberalism. And yet you’re seeing this. They couldn’t believe that if they simply bombed another country, that somehow the population of that country would say, Oh, we don’t want to be bombed.
We’re going to overthrow our government and support a government that supports you so that you won’t bomb our country anymore.
Instead, the effect of bombing a country when the United States does it is the same as bombing a country when any other country does it. It galvanizes the population together to oppose the country that’s bombing it and defend the country that’s under attack. So the whole image that the United States has is, there’s only one actor in the world, and that’s us. And we can smash other countries. And if that doesn’t work, we’ll upset the chessboard and just wreck the whole game.
So the United States is acting in the role of wrecker and other countries are in the role of builder. And the whole global majority is saying, What side do you want to be on, the wreckers or the builders?
And you can look at Ukraine as an example of how the United States would like Russia, China, and the Arab countries to exist. You would suspend elections once you have your guys, your president in there. You would become the most corrupt country in your region, as Ukraine has been. You will ban local languages and religions that are not Judeo-Christian.
You will essentially prevent strikes.
And you know the joke, the aristocrats. A stage group of actors talks about a family coming on and doing all sorts of horrendously devious sexual acts and incest, and it goes on and on. The producer who’s being offered this act and said, what do you call this act? And the answer is, the aristocrats.
Well, what do you call the Ukrainian act of suspending elections, banning foreign languages, assassinating critics? We call it democracy. Well, that’s hilarious. That’s indeed what America calls it. America has two models of democracy, Ukraine and Israel. Again and again in the press, it says Ukraine is the model of democracy that we want for what used to be the whole Soviet Union. And you have Latvia and Estonia and Lithuania clapping, and we want the democracy in Israel. Israel is the only democratic country in the Near East.
We want Israel to be the model for the Near East.
Well, what are they saying? That there won’t be any more Arabs in the Near East? That they’ll all be Americans with dual citizenship? This is what it’s all come to. We’re living in an Orwellian world is trying to deter people’s consciousness from realizing the reality of work and the dynamics that are at work. And how long can you convince people that they’re really not doing well just because the 1% is doing well? How can you convince the people that America is really a model leader when it’s trying to destroy the whole rest of the world instead of helping it, as at least it could pose to be doing back in 1945 when World War II ended?
You’re having really unwinding of the whole world system of the World Bank, the IMF, the United Nations, the whole diplomatic system of the world that was put together in 1945 is now being outmoded. And you could see the inability of the United Nations to cope with the war in the Near East, to cope with the war in Ukraine. This is the death knell of the old world. And you’re seeing a new world being created spontaneously, not ideologically, but basically spontaneously in an ad hoc fashion by China, Russia, and the 99%.
HAIPHONG: Yes. Yeah, yes, indeed, Michael. And, you know, final thoughts on the fact that given all that you said, and this reality, I mean, it’s this myth and reality, the myth, the idea, that China’s collapsing, you know, China’s economy is in decline. And yet you have not only these recent developments, but you also have these broader developments that you speak of.
So can you just give a sense, you’ve been to China, you’ve studied China’s economy very deeply. Just to close, help our audience here understand why China’s economy is able to industrialize like it is.
Europe is about to go through this probe. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this, this probe of the, you know, Chinese auto manufacturing, especially around electric vehicles, because of these nefarious state subsidies. Can you talk about this, talk about China’s economy, how it works, and why Europe and the United States, of course, has been waging economic war as well, why they would resort to what seems to be counterproductive measures?
HUDSON: Well, the key to understanding the West is neoliberalism is privatization of basic needs and basic utilities. The most important public utility throughout history has always been the ability to create money and credit.
And what China has that no other country had was its central bank created the own money.
And when the government creates money through the treasury, spending money into the economy, it spends money in order to actually build things, mainly to build real estate, to house the Chinese, but also to build the high speed railroads, to provide an educational system, universities all over China, to build communications.
Other countries, such as the United States, don’t have this. Money is created, especially in the United States, by commercial banks, and they create money not to finance new construction of factories or new investment of any sorts. Banks lend money in the West against collateral that is already in place. You can go to a bank to get money to buy a building that exists, an office building, although the office building’s prices are all collapsing now. You can go and borrow money to buy a whole company. That’s what private capital does. It buys money to buy Sears. It drives it bankrupt, collapses it, and fires the [workers].
It can buy Toys R Us, drives it bankrupt, collapses it, and it’s gone. You can buy companies and loot them and essentially close them down and turn factories into gentrified buildings for the 1% of financial operatives who are doing the looting.
But banks in the West do not fund public utilities, and once you cut the taxes and force a government into deficit, you then finance the deficit by privatizing your roads, turning them into toll roads. You privatize your postal system. You privatize your health care system so that there’s not much health care anymore, as you have in England, for instance, the crisis that you’re having in English medicine and hospitals and privatization. You make the whole economy in the West look like England after Margaret Thatcher, where people who are actually wage earners can’t afford to live in London anymore. That’s for the foreign investors or the people who work in the financial sector. The wage earners have to live in suburbs to take privatized rail transportation.
In the United States, for instance, Greyhound, the bus system, was just bought out by private equity. They did exactly what Stagecoach, England’s largest bus company, did in England. They sold off the bus terminal that was in the center of the city that people would go to to catch the buses, and they sold it for gentrified real estate and told people, there’s now a parking lot we have on the outside of the city. You go and wait in the parking lot.
We hope it’s not raining or too cold or snowing, but we don’t have a terminal anymore. Well, you can just imagine this way of doing things. It turns into a race to the bottom.
Well, China, by [keeping control of] finance, really controls who is going to get the credit, and credit is really the economic planner. Neoliberalism in the West says the government shouldn’t do the planning. Wall Street should do the planning because Wall Street is what provides the credit that determines who is going to get the resources and what they’re going to do with it.
Well, Wall Street gives the credit to financial engineers that are trying to make money by increasing stock prices, increasing capital gains, and making money financially.
It’s true that China has made many billionaires. That was part of the Let 100 Flowers Grow, but now that it’s had that spontaneous growth, now it’s seen what forms work and what forms don’t work. Now it’s consolidating the economy to essentially create credit to finance tangible industrial growth, tangible infrastructure growth, tangible agricultural modernization, and general improvement of living standards.
The whole aim of the Chinese economy is growth, not looting and downsizing and a smash-up of corporate raiding. There’s no corporate raiding going on in China. There’s not going to be any financial interest that’s going to buy Huawei or the other Chinese developers. You don’t have the parasitical financial class that have become the central economic planners of the United States.
Because that’s what libertarianism is. Libertarians want a centralized economy, not run by government but run by Wall Street and the financial sector. The libertarians are essentially the advocates of what normally used to be called fascism, central planning by the wealthy financial and monopoly sector against the population at large.
You have the Republican and the Democratic Party both supporting a dismantling of government just with a different kind of rhetoric, but the same policies, the same military policies and the same anti-industrial policies. China, Russia and their now more and more BRICS countries are rejecting that whole self-defeating neo-feudal path of growth.
HAIPHONG: Well, Michael, you’ve been very generous with your time today. I really appreciate you giving this what was an incredible rundown of all the interconnections, all the developments geopolitically that have, at their base, economic roots. And so, Michael, thank you so much.
Where can people find you? I have your website in the video description.
HUDSON: My website is michael-hudson.com and there’s a Patreon list associated with that. But all my articles are on my website and the other sites that I publish on, Naked Capitalism and Counterpunch and other such sites.
HAIPHONG: Well, definitely check out his work. He has a number of books that are key reads. So, Michael, it was great to be with you. Thanks so much for joining me today and I’ll talk to you again soon.
HUDSON: Thanks for having me. We were lucky politically, but the whole world was at a turning point this week, it looks like.
Please use as an Open Thread for the new aggression on Yemen, especially those who lack Salon access. I will continue my updates there as that format better supports mixed media (writing, images, links, embedded YT videos, etc). Here: https://globalsouth.co/globalsouthforum/topic/west-asia-front-thread-10-jan-2024/
IMO, this new expansion of West Asian war shouldn’t immediately result in a conflagration. The Empire delivered a symbolic show last night, a mafia-posture demonstrating “resolve” and “demonstration of strength” to “deter the Houthi hordes” as if a school-teacher wielding a stick against unruly children (!!).
The desired switcheroo will not be accommodated. Incomprehensibly larger Victories ripen in Palestine, in the Hague, and in the court of global public opinion. The civilizational-states will ensure Yemenis and others of the Resistance Axis keep their Eyes on the Ball.
So the Resistance has its priorities and its own pace. They remain attuned to the Genocide of Gaza, which will NOT be taken off the screens and attention of mankind. Rather this is another well laid trap, as pointed out by dear Pepe.. In hindsight, everything unfolding has been gamed and played to a “T,” knowing the eternal profile and Cro-Magnon reflexes and primitive urges of the dying Anglo-Zionists!
It is absolutely riveting and shocking the exposure and total isolation of the Anglo-American elites, chained at the hip to the now universally abhorred and Pariah Zionists. Today is the Zionist “defense” against charges of Genocide at the ICJ in the Hague.
Yemeni retaliation, which is a given, and some has already been dealt, can be expected to be measured and muted so as not to distract public attention off their evisceration at the ICJ, along with the entire combined West, equally on Trial. Perhaps audiovisual documentation of last night’s retaliation will be subsequently publicised at the right moment, and so on. Many operations by other Resistance members were displayed later, sometimes weeks later as by Hezbollah and Iraqis. The horrifying Spectacle in Gaza was paramount.
The Focus will remain on Gaza, at all costs, including sucking up momentary indignities and deferring revenge, or publication of documented hits, so as not to play into the desperate need of their enemies to deflect attention from the Annihilation of Palestinians which they CANNOT halt at this point. The Zionists’ deranged eschatological timeline, with its extremely limited time-window, is being used so beautifully against them. Unable to retreat, they are invited ever deeper into total strategic loss.
Thus the overriding goal of the coordinated Resistance Axis is that the messianic Jews, and the implacably supportive Christian Zionist Anglo-American elite, be exposed in front of mankind as satanic anti-Human supremacists that require the extremely brutal solutions now underway. Even at cost of a portion of the dear Palestinians, willing to endure anyhow for Liberation, building the moral imperative for total action against the crazed is the supreme task. So it was in the eight years of patiently suffering the slower genocide in the Donbass by the same parties, which led to global recognition of the inherent justness of the SMO. These are the sad prices moral societies must pay for remaining moral whilst fighting absolute amoral madness.
The Russia-China strategic partnership played it beautifully.
Abstention at a UN Security Council vote on Yemen.
Desperate Hegemon falls into the trap.
Opens yet another war front against the Houthis – who are capable of resisting ANYTHING.
— Pepe Escobar (@RealPepeEscobar) January 12, 2024
History will register that on the same day that BRICS member South Africa's legal team eviscerated the apartheid Zionist Project in court, the Hegemon under Straussian neocon psychos bombed Yemen to change the narrative.
— Pepe Escobar (@RealPepeEscobar) January 12, 2024
Ainsi qu’évoqué dans la première partie de cette étude sur les armes légères, la guerre en Ukraine met en œuvre
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Washington and its allies will regret it if they make good on their threats
By Abdel Bari Atwan at Rai Al Youm
In its all-out defence of Israel’s interests and support for its three-month-old war of extermination on the Gaza Strip, the US is rapidly heading into a military trap laid by the Yemenis in the Arabian and Red Seas.
The Yemenis, true to their Arab and Islamic values and in solidarity with Gaza, closed the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandeb strait to Israeli shipping and vessels taking goods to Israeli-occupied ports. They vowed to maintain this blockade until the Israeli assault is halted and all aid convoys are allowed into the Strip.
They were as good as their word. They intercepted several Israeli, Israeli-owned, or Israel-bound vessels, undeterred by threats from the US, and went even further by launching missiles and drones towards US warships in the Red Sea.
The Biden administration, in response, made two bad moves, which it could end up paying dearly for.
First, the US navy sank three Yemeni boats on Sunday, killing ten crew members, after they approached an American warship, which proceeded to fire on them.
Second, the US put together a coalition of 20 states (later reduced to 12) ostensibly to protect freedom of navigation in the Red Sea—in reality, to protect Israeli ships and shipping. This coalition (including Bahrain, Australia, Canada, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, the UK, Denmark, and the Netherlands) threatened Yemen with dire consequences if it did not stop harassing Red Sea shipping.
President Biden held consultations with his national security team to discuss options for deterring the Yemenis after sending the aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower to the vicinity to back up his threats.
But Yemen’s naval forces took no notice at all. On Wednesday, their missiles targeted a container vessel, and a couple of days ago struck a Haifa-bound car transporter after its crew ignored orders to turn back. Images were posted on social media showing the ship in flames.
Ansarullah leader Abdelmalik al-Houthi responded to the US’ threats by warning that any aggression against Yemeni forces or boats “will not go unanswered.” He called on supporters to take to the streets in mass demonstrations to reaffirm the Yemeni people’s solidarity with the Palestinians and refusal to yield to the threats of the arrogant.
The hostile US stance towards Yemen in support of Israel’s occupation and massacres could cause major losses for it and its allies. The Yemeni people, heirs to an 8,000-year-old civilization, are renowned for their pride and resilience and their history of never submitting to any foreign aggressor or invader, whether a global empire or a neighbouring power. The US will not be an exception.
The Yemenis are forbearing. Their patience knows no bounds. They value sacrifice and martyrdom and keep fighting off their enemies to the end — until victory. That is why membership of the US naval coalition dwindled to 12. The first to withdraw was France, out of fear, or rather, to avoid inevitable defeat.
It is telling that the coalition did not include a single Arab or African Red Sea littoral state, notably Egypt or Saudi Arabia. Important countries like Spain opposed it because they did not want to support a state that was committing genocide and ethnic cleansing. The only Arab state that broke this consensus was the Kingdom of Bahrain.
If the US gets entangled in a war against Yemen, it will regret it. It will recall its fiascos in Afghanistan and Vietnam and join Yemen’s long list of defeated aggressors.
Les affrontements en Ukraine ont vu la presse occidentale égrainer nombre « d’armes miracles » (Wunderwaffen dans le texte), de « game changers »
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