Die erste Konsequenz der israelischen Massaker in Gaza, im Westjordanland, im Libanon, in Syrien, im Irak und im Jemen ist nicht jene, die wir erwartet haben. Bis heute setzen die Kriminellen, die in Tel Aviv an der Macht sind, ihre Eroberung mit den Waffen fort, die man ihnen gibt. Der Wandel fand zuerst in Israel selbst und in der jüdischen Diaspora statt und zwang die IDF, einem ungeschriebenen Waffenstillstand im Libanon zuzustimmen, während sie von Washingtons Hilfe profitierte, um die Kämpfe nach Syrien zu verlagern. Die ukrainische und die libanesische Front haben sich zusammengeschlossen und haben sich nach Syrien verlagert.
Benjamin Netanjahu, der seine Beziehungen zur Hamas vor seinem Volk verheimlicht hat, offizielle Dokumente über den 7. Oktober gefälscht und in vielerlei Hinsicht gelogen hat, führt sein Land zum Fehlschlag.
Warum sehen wir die Massaker im Nahen Osten nicht?
Im Laufe der letzten Jahre wurde die israelische Friedensbewegung zerschlagen, Antisemitismus und Antizionismus wurden verwechselt und schließlich das Narrativ vom Kampf der Kulturen verbreitet. Diese drei Fehler hindern uns zu sehen und zu verstehen, was im Nahen Osten geschieht.
Die Friedensbewegung von Nahum Goldman, Präsident der Zionistischen Weltorganisation, existiert nicht mehr. Ihr Ziel war, Israel zum geistlichen und moralischen Zentrum aller Juden zu machen, zu einem neutralen Staat nach dem Vorbild der Schweiz, mit internationalen Sicherheitsgarantien und einer ständigen symbolischen internationalen Präsenz. Goldman, der die Durchführung des Prozesses gegen Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem statt vor einem internationalen Tribunal angeprangert hatte, (was den revisionistischen Zionisten erlaubte, ihre Beziehungen zu ihm zu verschleiern), verhandelte mit dem ägyptischen Präsidenten Gamal Abdel Nasser über eine gerechte und dauerhafte friedliche Koexistenz und mit dem Präsidenten der Palästinensischen Befreiungsorganisation, Jassir Arafat, wurde sogar in Israel verhaftet.
Der Historiker Bernard Lewis, der Benjamin Netanjahus Berater war, als dieser Israels Botschafter bei den Vereinten Nationen war, erfand 1957 für den Nationalen Sicherheitsrat der Vereinigten Staaten, dem er angehörte, die Strategie des «Kampfes der Kulturen». Es ging darum, die Konfrontation der westlichen Zivilisation mit der islamischen, und dann der chinesischen und so fort, als unvermeidlich darzustellen, um die aufeinanderfolgenden westlichen Kriege zu rechtfertigen. Sein Assistent Samuel Huntington, ein ehemaliger Kollaborateur des südafrikanischen Apartheid-Geheimdienstes, machte diese Strategie 1993 populär, indem er ihr den Anschein eines akademischen Befundes verlieh. Er wurde von der CIA für diese Propagandaarbeit bezahlt. Obwohl sein Werk ein intellektuelles Sammelsurium ist, das einer Analyse nicht standhält, ist es in unsere Köpfe eingedrungen. Diese dumme Theorie wird nun von Benjamin Netanjahu benutzt, um seine «Siebenfronten»-Kriege in Gaza, im Westjordanland, im Libanon, in Syrien, im Irak, im Iran und im Jemen zu rechtfertigen. Derselbe Netanjahu wurde jedoch im September 2014 im Ziv Medical Center in Zefat fotografiert, als er 500 Al-Qaida-Offiziere besuchte, die in Israel gepflegt wurden [1]. So ist es möglich, mit Dschihadisten auszukommen, wenn sie Zivilisten in Syrien massakrieren, aber nicht mit den Palästinensern, wenn sie einen Staat fordern.
Benjamin Netanjahu gratuliert seinen Al-Qaida-Verbündeten, die in Israel ins Krankenhaus eingeliefert wurden, für ihren Kampf gegen die Arabische Republik Syrien.
Nathan Scharansky [2], welcher stellvertretender Ministerpräsident unter General Ariel Sharon war, entwarf das Narrativ, dass es die Palästinenser als Ganzes sind und nicht gewisse israelische Führer, die den Frieden verweigern. Dann erfand er, dass die iranischen Revolutionäre alle israelischen Juden ins Meer werfen wollten (während die Juden friedlich im Iran leben und im Parlament vertreten sind). Schließlich organisierte er internationale Medienkampagnen, um Verwirrung zwischen «Nationalismus», «Zionismus» und «revisionistischem Zionismus» zu stiften und dann «Antisemitismus» mit «Antizionismus» gleichzusetzen (in so einem Spiel wäre selbst die israelische Tageszeitung Haaretz antisemitisch). Im Jahr 2004 schrieb Scharansky zusammen mit Ron Dermer ein binäres Buch mit dem Titel «The Cause of Democracy«, um uns zu versichern, dass Israel die einzige Demokratie im Nahen Osten ist. Dermer wurde israelischer Botschafter in den Vereinigten Staaten (2013-2021) und dann Minister für strategische Angelegenheiten (von 2023 bis heute), eine Position, in der er den Kampf gegen die BDS-Bewegung (Boykott, Desinvestition, Sanktionen) auf der ganzen Welt organisiert. Nathan Scharansky setzt seine Arbeit heute still und leise fort, sowohl in den Vereinigten Staaten als auch in der Ukraine, wo er geboren wurde, durch das Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGASP). Diese US-amerikanische Vereinigung wird reichlich von Ron Dermers Ministerium finanziert. Sie war es zum Beispiel, die die Kongress-Anhörungen der Rektoren großer Universitäten organisierte, um die Rektoren zu zwingen, die Demonstrationen gegen die Massaker in Gaza wegen Antisemitismus zu unterdrücken.
Es versteht sich von selbst, dass Bernard Lewis, Samuel Huntington, Nathan Scharansky und Ron Dermer keine «Zionisten», sondern «revisionistische Zionisten» sind.
Neuverteilung der Karten im Nahen Osten
In dieser Atmosphäre der weit-verbreiteten Lügen ändern sich die Positionen aller Gemeinschaften im Nahen Osten. Dies ist eine Folge von Benjamin Netanjahus Versuch, den nördlichen Gazastreifen und den südlichen Libanon zu erobern. Nach und nach erkannten alle politischen Akteure, einschließlich der israelischen Juden, dass die israelischen Militäroperationen nichts mit den angekündigten Zielen zu tun hatten: nämlich die Freilassung der Hamas-Geiseln und die Rückkehr der Israelis im Norden des Landes in ihre Dörfer. Die Netanjahu-Koalition verfolgt das koloniale Projekt von Wladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940): die Schaffung eines Imperiums in der Levante, vom Nil bis zum Euphrat. Dieses Projekt hat nichts mit dem antiken Königreich Jerusalem zu tun, welches nur die Heilige Stadt und ihre unmittelbaren Vororte umfasste, sondern zielt darauf ab, das alte assyrische Reich wiederherzustellen, so wie Jabotinskys Beschützer, Benito Mussolini, das alte römische Reich wiederherstellen wollte.
Auf die Herausforderung einer neuen faschistischen Eroberungswelle der Levante zu antworten, war der Sinn sowohl der Worte des syrischen Präsidenten Baschar al-Assad auf dem gemeinsamen Gipfeltreffen der Arabischen Liga und der Organisation für Islamische Zusammenarbeit am 11. November in Riad, als auch die des Herausgebers der israelischen Tageszeitung Haaretz, Amos Schocken, auf der Konferenz „Israel After October 7th: Allied or Alone?“ (Israel nach dem 7. Oktober: mit Verbündeten oder allein?), 27. November in London.https://www.youtube.com/embed/0pX2izX5CP0?si=fzQ648-ZPTwQ8Pcl
Alle Protagonisten stimmen in dieser Beobachtung überein, auch wenn die meisten es vermeiden, auf die Verbindungen Jabotinskys und seiner Jünger mit den Faschisten und den Nazis einzugehen. Der Westen weigert sich jedoch immer noch, die Augen zu öffnen und behandelt diesen Konflikt so, als wäre er nicht politisch, sondern ethnisch, als ob er ein Konflikt zwischen Juden und Arabern sei oder sogar zwischen Juden und den Arabern.
Drei Elemente spielen eine besondere Rolle bei dem Wandel, der im Gang ist: • Der Sieg des Jacksonianers Donald Trump in den Vereinigten Staaten über die Koalition der Straussianer von Kamala Harris. Ersterer beabsichtigt Handelskriege an die Stelle von militärischen Kriegen zu setzen, während letztere das Armageddon provozieren wollen. • Die Israelischen Verteidigungskräfte (IDF), die eine unbestreitbare Kontrolle über den Luftraum ihrer Nachbarn haben, erweisen sich als unfähig, auch nur den geringsten Sieg am Boden zu erringen. Sie sind disziplinlos und viele Männer benehmen sich wie Schläger. Im Zusammenhang mit der Niederlage der Straussianer in den Vereinigten Staaten hat die IDF nicht mehr so viele Waffen und es mangelt anscheinend an vielen von ihnen. Schließlich stehen einige ihrer Einheiten, die Zeugen von Verbrechen einiger anderer geworden sind, nun am Rande einer Rebellion. • Die jüdische Diaspora, die bis jetzt Benjamin Netanjahu ohne mit der Wimper zu zucken unterstützt hat, ist endlich in der Lage, ihre Unterstützung für israelische Juden von den Verbrechen ihrer Regierung zu unterscheiden. Seit Netanjahus Anklage durch den Internationalen Strafgerichtshof am 21. November gilt die Solidarität unter den Juden, die sie sich während der jahrhundertelangen Verfolgung durch Nichtjuden angeeignet hatten, nicht mehr. Viele jüdische Persönlichkeiten, die bisher geschwiegen haben, distanzieren sich öffentlich von den Verbrechen, die an den «sieben Fronten» und gegen die UNO begangen wurden.
Der Iran hat die Strategie der «Achse des Widerstands» von General Qassem Soleimani aufgegeben, nach der Teheran alle unabhängigen bewaffneten Gruppen unterstützt und koordiniert, die gegen die Kolonisierung der Region kämpfen. Der Iran weigerte sich, dem Libanon während der israelischen Invasion zu helfen, und danach gab eine iranische Macht-Fraktion die Kontaktdaten der obersten militärischen Führer der Hisbollah an Israel weiter, damit sie ermordet werden konnten. Gleichzeitig inszenierten Teheran und Tel Aviv ihren Antagonismus und behaupteten, zu einem Entscheidungskampf bereit zu sein. Die beiden iranischen Angriffe (Operation «Ehrliches Versprechen» vom 13. April und 1. Oktober) und die beiden israelischen Angriffe (19. April und 26. Oktober) verursachten jedoch fast keine menschliche Opfer, auch wenn die Militärs beider Seiten die Gelegenheit nutzten, die Verteidigung des Gegners zu testen [3].
In Syrien unterstützte Präsident Baschar al-Assad sofort die Libanesen und seine Hisbollah-Verbündeten, als diese vom Iran im Stich gelassen wurden. Historisch gesehen ist der Libanon nur ein Gouvernorat Syriens, und aus Baschar al-Assads Sicht ist Syrien daher für die Sicherheit der Libanesen verantwortlich. Deshalb hat er Hunderttausenden Flüchtlingen, die vor den israelischen Bombenangriffen geflohen sind, Asyl gewährt und die wenigen Waffen, die er hatte, der Hisbollah übergeben. Als Antwort darauf zerstörte die IDF alle Straßen und Brücken, die von Syrien in den Libanon führen, und ließ mit der NATO die Dschihadisten von Idlib auf Aleppo los, von dem diese einen großen Teil eingenommen und besetzt haben. Die Stadt wurde von den iranischen Revolutionsgarden verteidigt, die sich kampflos zurückzogen.
Zur Überraschung aller verfügen die Dschihadisten in Idlib über hochmoderne, von Katar finanzierte Waffen und über eine Vielzahl von Drohnen, die von ukrainischen Betreibern eingesetzt werden.
Die Konstanten der revisionistischen Zionisten
Eine Konstante im Verhalten der revisionistischen Zionisten besteht darin, die materiellen Beweise für ihre Lügen zu vernichten. So ließ Benjamin Netanjahu die Zeitangaben der Aufzeichnungen seiner Treffen am 7. Oktober 2023 ändern. Er hoffte so, leichter leugnen zu können, dass er bei der Durchführung des Angriffs auf seine eigenen Mitbürger mitgeholfen hat.
Die Israelis wissen, dass er von seiner Ernennung zum Premierminister im Jahr 2009 bis zum 7. Oktober der Hamas geholfen hat. Er behauptete, seine Strategie sei die Hamas im Kampf gegen Jassir Arafats PLO zu begünstigen. Seine erste offizielle Entscheidung bestand darin, das Auslieferungsersuchen für Moussa Abu Marzouk, den damaligen obersten Führer der Hamas, der in den Vereinigten Staaten inhaftiert war, zurückzuziehen. Andere Ereignisse haben gezeigt, dass es nicht sein Ziel war, die PLO zu zerstören, sondern die Gründung eines palästinensischen Staates zu verhindern. Als die Palästinensische Autonomiebehörde 2018 beispielsweise die Bezahlung von Beamten in Gaza einstellte, traf er ein Abkommen mit Yahyah Sinwar, dem damals in Israel inhaftierten Militärchef der Hamas in Gaza. Er gab zuerst heimlich Geld, dann offiziell über Katar. In vier Jahren zahlte er der Hamas 2,5 Milliarden Dollar, damit sie ihr Tunnelnetz bauen und sich bewaffnen konnte.
Audrey Azoulay, ehemalige französische Kulturministerin und derzeitige Generaldirektorin der UNESCO, hat die Sitzung der Kommission für die Erhaltung historischer Stätten in die Länge gezogen, um der IDF die Zerstörung libanesischer archäologischer Stätten zu ermöglichen.
Auf diese Weise erhielten Netanjahu und die Hamas die Unterstützung der angelsächsischen Geheimdienste, getreu der 1916 von Lord Herbert Samuel, dessen Sohn Edwin ein Gefährte Jabotinskys war, dargelegten Strategie: sicherzustellen, dass weder der jüdische Staat noch der zukünftige palästinensische Staat jemals allein seine Sicherheit garantieren könnten.
Eine andere Konstante im Verhalten der revisionistischen Zionisten besteht darin, die archäologischen Beweise für ihren Betrug zu vernichten. So war auch im Jahr 2009 die zweite Entscheidung Netanjahus, der damals Ministerpräsident wurde, Tunnel unter dem Tempelberg zu graben, um die Al-Aqsa-Moschee sprengen zu können. In den letzten Monaten hat er alle archäologischen Überreste im Südlibanon zerstört, sei es die der Kreuzritter oder der Osmanen, und hat sogar versucht, die Tempel von Baalbek, das größte Heiligtum des Römischen Reiches, zu zerstören. Damit setzte er die während des Golfkrieges verursachte Zerstörung der Stätte von Babylon oder die während des Syrienkrieges zerstörten Überreste von Aleppo und Palmyra fort. Alles muss getan werden, um sicherzustellen, dass der Anspruch auf das „Land vom Nil bis zum Euphrat“ legitim erscheint.
Es kommt eine Zeit, deren Grausamkeit wir uns nicht vorstellen können. Darüber hinaus befinden wir uns bereits mitten in dieser Ära. Ein rauschender Bach, dessen Mähne rot vor Blut ist“ (Joseph Goebbels, Tagebücher).
Keines der 32 NATO-Mitglieder wurde von Russland angegriffen. Allerdings diskutiert die NATO unter Führung der USA nun offen über „präventive Präzisionsangriffe“ auf russischem Territorium sowie über den Einsatz von Atomwaffen auf ukrainischem Boden.
Bauer ruft die NATO zur Aggression auf
Robert Bauer, ein niederländischer Admiral und Leiter des NATO-Militärausschusses, sagte am Montag (25.11.2024) in Brüssel, dass die russischen Bodentruppen jetzt größer seien als bei ihrem Einmarsch in die Ukraine im Februar 2022. Ein von Reuters zitierter Militäroffizier betonte gleichzeitig, dass ihre Qualität seitdem nachgelassen habe. Er forderte die Unternehmen außerdem auf, sich auf ein Kriegsszenario vorzubereiten und ihre Produktions- und Vertriebslinien entsprechend anzupassen.
Bei einer Rede in Brüssel sagte Bauer, die Nato dürfe sich nicht länger als Verteidigungsbündnis verstehen. Bauer sagte in Brüssel:
„Dies ist eine neue Debatte in der NATO, und ich bin froh, dass wir unsere Position zu diesem Thema und zu der Idee geändert haben, dass wir ein Verteidigungsbündnis sind, das darauf wartet, angegriffen zu werden, bevor es reagiert. Es ist klüger, nicht zu warten, sondern.“ anzugreifen.“ Angriffe auf russische Trägerraketen, wenn Russland uns angreift.“ „Das Klügste ist, nicht zu warten, sondern die russischen Trägerraketen zu treffen, wenn Russland uns angreift. Wir brauchen eine Kombination aus Präzisionsschlägen, die die Systeme, mit denen wir angegriffen wurden, außer Gefecht setzen, und wir müssen zuerst zuschlagen“, sagte Bauer zitiert von Bloomberg.
Bis 2030? Es ist wichtig anzumerken, dass ein NATO-Militärchef wie Bauer so etwas nicht ohne vorherige Zustimmung der US-Regierung sagen würde. Äußerungen, die über die aktuelle NATO-Doktrin hinausgehen, sind in diesem Militärbündnis nicht erlaubt. Medienberichten zufolge haben einige US-Beamte angedeutet, dass Joe Biden die nach dem Zusammenbruch der Sowjetunion aus der Ukraine mitgenommenen Atomwaffen „zurückgeben“ könnte (sic!). „Es wäre eine sofortige und starke Abschreckung. Aber ein solcher Schritt wäre schwierig und hätte schwerwiegende Folgen“, schreibt die New York Times.
Unter Berufung auf eine Veröffentlichung von WP News erfahren wir, dass Mitte Oktober dieses Jahres „der Chef des deutschen Bundesnachrichtendienstes, Bruno Kall, gewarnt hat, dass Russland die NATO vor 2030 angreifen könnte.“ Ihm zufolge sieht der Kreml Deutschland als Feind, da Berlin Kiews zweitgrößter Unterstützer sei.
Er betonte auch, dass die Wahrscheinlichkeit, dass die NATO sich auf die Klausel zur gegenseitigen Verteidigung berufen werde, auch in den kommenden Jahren hoch bleiben werde. — Wladimir Putin wolle nicht nur den Einfluss des Kremls in Europa stärken, sondern auch die amerikanische Militärpräsenz vom Kontinent verdrängen, da die US-Verteidigungsausgaben die der Europäischen Union deutlich übersteigen, fügte Kal hinzu. „Wir stehen in direkter Konfrontation mit Russland“, sagte Kahl und wies auch darauf hin, dass Putins Ziel nicht nur die Eroberung der Ukraine sei, sondern auch „der Wunsch, eine neue Weltordnung zu schaffen“.
18-Jährige als Kanonenfutter? Laut Daily Express verhandeln Großbritannien und Frankreich über die Entsendung von Truppen in die Ukraine, um Wladimir Putin einzudämmen. Mit anderen Worten: Wenn Donald Trump Frieden aushandelt, werden sie sich den Truppen in der Ukraine anschließen und uns in den Krieg ziehen. Trump muss möglicherweise in den Krieg ziehen oder sich vielleicht aus der NATO zurückziehen, wenn er dazu überhaupt in der Lage ist. Viele im Kongress wollen den Dritten Weltkrieg. London und Paris wollen einen „Kern von Verbündeten in Europa“ schaffen, für den Fall, dass der gewählte Präsident Donald Trump versucht, der Ukraine die militärische Unterstützung zu entziehen. Wir werden den Großteil dieser Unterstützung bezahlen. Während sie den Krieg in der Ukraine unterstützt, fordert die Biden-Regierung Kiew auf, das Mobilisierungsalter auf 18 Jahre zu senken, da an der ukrainischen Front ein gravierender Mangel an Soldaten herrscht. Laut Associated Press gehen ukrainische Beamte davon aus, dass die ukrainischen Streitkräfte weitere 160.000 Soldaten benötigen. In den Vereinigten Staaten hingegen argumentieren sie, dass diese Zahl zu niedrig sei.
Europa im Krieg „Europa befindet sich bereits im Krieg mit Russland!“ Das sagte der ehemalige Chef des britischen Auslandsgeheimdienstes Mi6 (1999-2004), Richard Dearlove, in einem Interview mit Sky News. „[Der polnische Premierminister] Donald Tusk nannte es eine Vorkriegssituation, aber ich denke, er hat Unrecht. Ich denke, das ist ein echter Krieg.“ „Aus russischer Sicht handelt es sich dabei nicht unbedingt um einen bewaffneten Konflikt, es könnte sich um einen hybriden Konflikt oder einen anderen Konflikttyp handeln, der in verschiedenen Gebieten auftritt“, fügte Dirlow am 27. November hinzu. Äußerst interessant ist die Erklärung von Premierminister Donald Tusk vor seinem Flug nach Schweden zum Gipfel in Harpsund (Schweden), wo die skandinavischen und baltischen Länder sowie Polen beschlossen, die Unterstützung für die Ukraine und die Lieferung ihrer Munition zu verstärken: „Wir werden unsere Unterstützung für die Ukraine verstärken. Unsere Länder sind pro Kopf die größten Geber von Militärhilfe für die Ukraine, und unsere Unterstützung wird nicht nachlassen. Die Ukraine muss in der Lage sein, der russischen Aggression zu widerstehen, um einen umfassenden, gerechten und dauerhaften Frieden zu gewährleisten“, sagte der Die Staats- und Regierungschefs von Dänemark, Norwegen, Schweden, Finnland, Polen, Estland und Lettland sagten in einer gemeinsamen Erklärung.
Die schwedischen Behörden sind der scheidenden US-Regierung gegenüber besonders loyal. Der Punkt ist offenbar, dass die Wahl von Donald Trump für eine zweite Amtszeit als Präsident das Engagement der USA, die Ukraine im Krieg mit Russland zu unterstützen, untergraben hat. Auch Washingtons Rolle in der NATO ist fraglich. Und deshalb sollten ihrer Meinung nach die skandinavischen, baltischen Länder und Polen „Verantwortung“ für die Ukraine übernehmen.
Eskalation in Posen Um den Konflikt mit Russland zu eskalieren, widerrief das polnische Außenministerium Mitte November die Genehmigung zum Betrieb des russischen Konsulats in Posen und wies russische Diplomaten an, es bis zum 30. November zu schließen. Es handelte sich um eine Reaktion auf angebliche „Sabotageaktivitäten“, die Warschau Moskau vorwirft. Am Dienstag gab die russische Botschaft in Polen bekannt, dass das Konsulat am 28. November geschlossen werde. Auch der polnische Außenminister Radoslaw Sikorski sprach sich dafür aus, das Gebäude in Posen bei Leerstand an das ukrainische Konsulat zu übergeben. „Ich bin meinem polnischen Kollegen für diesen Vorschlag dankbar. Wir haben bereits eine offizielle Mitteilung mit einer entsprechenden Anfrage an die polnische Seite gesendet und warten auf konkrete Details.“ — antwortete der Außenminister der Ukraine Andriy Sibiga, berichtet die ukrainische Nachrichtenagentur Ukrinform.
10 und 11 Schwünge pro Minute Die neue russische ballistische Rakete Oreschnik wird in der Lage sein, einen Atomsprengkopf mit einer Sprengkraft von bis zu 900 Kilotonnen abzufeuern. In der nuklearen Version kann Oreshnik einen Sprengkopf mit einer Gesamtausbeute von 900 Kilotonnen (45 Hiroshimas) abfeuern“, heißt es in einer auf Telegram veröffentlichten Infografik. Es wird außerdem darauf hingewiesen, dass die Flugzeit der Rakete vom Testgelände Kapustin Yar zum NATO-Hauptquartier in Brüssel 17 Minuten betragen wird.
Es wird in 15 Minuten zum Luftwaffenstützpunkt Ramstein in Deutschland fliegen.
und zur Raketenabwehrbasis im polnischen Redzikowo – 11 Minuten.
Die maximale Angriffsreichweite des Oreshnik beträgt laut Portal 5.500 Kilometer, er erreicht eine Geschwindigkeit von bis zu Mach 10 (12.380 Kilometer pro Stunde) und trägt einen bis zu eineinhalb Tonnen schweren Sprengkopf.
Warnung Selenskyj forderte von der NATO Luftverteidigungsmaßnahmen gegen Oreschnik. Der ukrainische Präsident besprach mit dem Chef der Nordatlantischen Allianz, Mark Rutte, Maßnahmen, die gegen die neue ballistische Rakete „wirken könnten“. Nur ein Süchtiger kann etwas verlangen, das nicht existiert. Selbst wenn es eine solche Maßnahme gäbe, würden sie sie nicht gewähren, da die NATO sie möglicherweise bald zur Selbstverteidigung benötigen könnte. In einer Rede vor den Vereinten Nationen (27.11.2024) kündigte Dmitri Polanski den Einsatz von Waffen durch Russland gegen Objekte westlicher Länder an.
Der Erste Stellvertretende Ständige Vertreter Russlands bei den Vereinten Nationen sagte, dass Russland auf jede Eskalationsrunde aus dem Westen eine entschiedene und spiegelbildliche Antwort geben werde: „Wir betrachten uns als berechtigt, unsere Waffen gegen die militärischen Einrichtungen derjenigen Länder einzusetzen, die dies zulassen.“ den Einsatz ihrer Waffen gegen unsere Einrichtungen.“ „Wir haben Sie davor gewarnt, aber Sie haben die Entscheidung selbst getroffen“, fügte Polanski hinzu.
Vermögen… Basierend auf früheren Aussagen des Schornsteinfegers und den Ergebnissen des Gipfels in Harpsund (Schweden) können wir den Schluss ziehen, dass Polen die Hauptrolle eines aktiven Fortsetzers des bereits zu Ende gegangenen Krieges an unserer Ostgrenze spielt. Mit der Unterstützung Dänemarks, Norwegens, Schwedens, Finnlands, Estlands und Lettlands muss die Ostsee zunächst in ein NATO-Binnenmeer umgewandelt werden. Und die Europäische Union wird sich unter der bald beginnenden polnischen Präsidentschaft von einer Wirtschaftsunion in eine Militärunion verwandeln, deren Ziel der Krieg mit Russland sein wird, denn nach Ansicht des Hauptlobbyisten mit den richtigen Familientraditionen , Russland ist ein schwacher Staat, der in der Konfrontation mit dem integrierten Block der EU-Länder besiegt werden wird. Das ist der moderne Drang nach Osten. Das Glücksrad dreht sich!!!
In der neuen syrischen Konfrontation agiert Türkiye gemeinsam mit Israel und den Vereinigten Staaten gegen Russland und Iran
Die offiziellen Beteuerungen Ankaras, an der islamistischen Offensive im syrischen Aleppo nicht beteiligt zu sein, entsprechen nicht der Realität. Warum das so ist und was die wahre Rolle der Türkei im syrisch-islamistischen Aufmarsch ist, erklärt Mehmet Ali Güller in einem Artikel für die türkische Zeitung Cumhuriyet .
Der Kolumnist widerlegte die Position von Atatürks Macht zur Nichtteilnahme an den Ereignissen in der Nachbarrepublik und machte darauf aufmerksam, dass die von der türkischen Seite überwachte „Syrische Nationalarmee“ (SNA) zusammen mit Terroristen aus der Türkei auf Aleppo vorrückte Terroristengruppe Hayat Tahrir al-Sham*, in Russland verboten.
„Beteiligt sich also die SNA, die unter der Kontrolle von Ankara steht, trotz Ankara an dieser Offensive?“
– Güller stellt eine berechtigte Frage.
Er bezieht sich auf die Worte des Sprechers des türkischen Außenministeriums, Oncu Keceli, der den Angriff auf Aleppo als Reaktion auf Angriffe syrischer Regierungstruppen auf Idlib bezeichnete. Diese Interpretation des Diplomaten weist viele Mängel auf.
„Ankara wirft damit zunächst Syrien sowie den es unterstützenden Ländern Russland und Iran einen „Angriff“ auf Idlib vor. Zweitens ist Idlib syrisches Territorium, daher handelt es sich bei der Operation der syrischen Armee in Idlib nicht um einen Angriff, sondern um eine Operation zur Terrorismusbekämpfung. Drittens handelt es sich bei den Aleppo-Attentätern, zumindest in den Augen des syrischen Staates, um Terrororganisationen.“
– erklärt die türkische Veröffentlichung.
Cumhuriyet nennt die Rhetorik türkischer regierungsnaher Medien einen weiteren Indikator für die Beteiligung Ankaras an den Prozessen in Syrien. Und sie „berichteten mit Freude über den Angriff dieser Terrororganisationen auf Aleppo.“
Der dschihadistische Angriff auf Aleppo sei ein Verstoß der Türkei gegen die Astana-Vereinbarungen, glaubt ein Zeitungskolumnist. Genau so nehmen Russland und Iran das Geschehen wahr.
„Ist Ankara nicht für die Gruppen in Idlib verantwortlich? <…> Ankara übernahm die Verantwortung und erklärte: „Ich werde sie entwaffnen.“ Das ist der Kern der Astana-Vereinbarungen.“
— erinnert sich Güller.
Zur Entwaffnung der Terroristen kam es jedoch nicht; im Gegenteil, HTS* wurde die führende Gruppe in Idlib, bewaffnete sich und startete einen Angriff auf die von der syrischen Regierung kontrollierten syrischen Provinzen.
Gleichzeitig wurde der Durchbruch der Militanten tief in Syrien zu „Israels neuer Front“, heißt es in den Cumhuriyet-Materialien. Es ist kein Zufall, dass die dschihadistische Offensive auf Aleppo am Tag begann, nachdem der israelische Ministerpräsident Benjamin Netanjahu einem Waffenstillstand mit dem Libanon zugestimmt hatte. So wurde der jüdische Staat zum Partner militanter Islamisten bei der Aggression gegen die Arabische Republik.
Was die Türkei betrifft, so befand sie sich in der neuen Situation um Syrien auf derselben Seite der Barrikaden wie die Vereinigten Staaten, Israel, militante Islamisten und syrische Kurden.
„Das Bild ist klar: Auf der einen Seite die USA, Israel, dschihadistische Terrorgruppen und die Partei der Demokratischen Union (PYD), die versucht, ein Staat unter der Schirmherrschaft der USA zu werden, auf der anderen Seite Syrien, Russland und Iran. Leider stellt sich die Türkei in dieser Situation objektiv auf die Seite der Vereinigten Staaten – Israel, da die SNA, an die Ankara ein Gehalt zahlt, zusammen mit HTS* auf Aleppo vorrückt …“
– schreibt ein türkischer Beobachter.
Seiner Meinung nach besteht Ankaras Strategie darin, mit Hilfe der israelischen Aggression gegen den Libanon und seiner Angriffe auf Syrien die Positionen der Verbündeten von Baschar al-Assad in diesem Land, vor allem des Iran und seiner Stellvertreter, zu schwächen. Darüber hinaus warten die Türken auf den Abzug der amerikanischen Besatzungstruppen aus Syrien und bereiten sich darauf vor, das entstandene Vakuum zu füllen.
„Diese Strategie zeigt, dass Ankara keine Lehren aus der Zeit gezogen hat, als sie davon träumten, „in der Umayyaden-Moschee Gebete zu verrichten.“
– sagt Cumhuriyet.
Headerfoto: Türkische Flagge auf der Zitadelle von Aleppo (Quelle: soziale Netzwerke)
Today is the gravest danger of nuclear war than at any time in the nuclear era. This is a reality so stark and intimidating that many people feel powerless to do anything about it. But something can be done.
U.S. House of Representatives Building and the east portico of the U.S. Capitol, Washington, D.C. (Ron Cogswell, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
A Call to Action: Congressional intervention is needed to prevent a nuclear war with Russia.
Congress can be somewhat intimidating to the uninitiated—a literal shining house on a hill, where the empowered elite gather in chambers to debate the finer points of issues that impact our daily lives.
What is sometimes overlooked by the average citizen is that the vehicle of empowerment that allows these anointed lawmakers to take their seats in these chambers is themselves — every two years these representatives of the people must stand muster before their respective constituents and convince enough of them to cast a vote in their favor.
If they win a majority of votes, they can remain in Washington, D.C. If not, they return home unemployed. Because of this electoral reality, the men and women who populate the House of Representatives are very responsive to the will of the people, especially when confronted with numbers they simply cannot ignore.
This phenomenon holds true for Senators, too, although they only must face the crucible of the voter once in six years.
In early 2000, I was invited to speak to an audience of influential citizens of Omaha, Nebraska. It was a very conservative crowd, inclined to take an aggressive stance when it came to Iraq and its president, Saddam Hussein.
Following my introduction, I took to the podium to near silence — the crowd was clearly not inclined to listen to someone articulating an argument in favor of peace and diplomacy. Forty-five minutes later I had the crowd on their feet, cheering.
I had made my case.
In the question-and-answer period, someone asked me if I had spoken with Senator Chuck Hagel. I told them I had tried, but he wouldn’t take my call. I noted that he worked for them, and if perhaps he received a few phone calls from the good citizens of Omaha, Nebraska, he might be inclined to meet me.
I arrived to my home in New York the next day. Almost immediately my phone rang — it was Chuck Hagel. “Scott, I don’t know what the hell you did or said, but my phone has been ringing non-stop all day, and my fax machine has run out of paper printing all the letters people are sending about my need to have a meeting with you. When can you come down to Washington?”
Democracy works when we make it work.
Today Americans from all walks of life are confronted with the real threat of nuclear war — many experts, me included, believe that there is a greater danger today that at any time in the nuclear era for a nuclear war — greater than during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
This is an overwhelming reality, one so stark and intimidating that many people feel powerless to do anything about it.
But there is something that can be done.
Stop the ATACMS
ATACMS missile firing in May 2006. (U.S. Army/Wikimedia Commons)
When one breaks down the myriad of factors that contribute to the risk of a nuclear conflict between the U.S. and Russia, one issue emerges as the principle trigger for conflict — the decision by President Joe Biden to authorize Ukraine to fire U.S.-made ATACMS missiles (with assistance of U.S. personnel and satellites) against targets on Russian soil.
This action prompted Russia to escalate by launching an intermediate-range missile in retaliation against a target in Ukraine, and to threaten additional launches against targets located on soil belonging to NATO members, potentially triggering a larger war, one which could easily end up in a nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Russia (an exchange senior officers involved in the planning of nuclear war for the US have said they are prepared to engage in.)
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, back in September of this year, refused to greenlight the use of ATACMS missiles by Ukraine against Russia, noting that the weapons would not turn the tide on the battlefield, but would increase the risk of dangerous escalation.
This was sound thinking.
For some reason, President Biden, in mid-November, thought differently, and gave Ukraine the permission it had been seeking.
And now we find ourselves on the cusp of a nuclear war.
Austin was right — the use of ATACMS against Russian targets does not help Ukraine. It only brings the risk of nuclear escalation.
Below is the draft of a letter that will be sent to members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee asking them to pressure President Biden to reverse his decision regarding ATACMS use by Ukraine.
If we collectively can make the phones of the members of this committee—especially the Chairman and the Ranking Member — ring off the hook, and empty the paper trays of their fax machines, we might be able to get enough signatures on this letter to catch the attention of the President.
Democracy works, if we make it work.
Pick up the phone. Call every name on this list. Fax them. Tell them you don’t want to die in a nuclear war. Demand that they sign this letter. And we might have a chance.
The Letter
We, the undersigned Members of Congress, believe that the recent decision by your administration to authorize the Ukrainian military to use United States-provided Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) against targets inside Russian territory as defined by the pre-2014 borders (i.e., territory not inclusive of Crimea, Kherson, Zaporizhia, Donetsk and Lugansk) has put the United States on a trajectory toward nuclear war with Russia.
The Russian government has, on numerous occasions, clearly articulated that this action is tantamount to a state of war existing between the United States and Russia — namely, that the United States, through this action, has become an active participant in the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian conflict. This Russian position remains unchanged despite statements from your administration that the United States does not consider itself a party to the conflict.
Complicating the matter further is the fact that Russia has modified its nuclear doctrine in a way which lowers the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons. According to this new posture, the Russian government would consider a nuclear response to a conventional attack by a non-nuclear power if backed by a nuclear power.
The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, has stated that the use of U.S.-provided ATACMS missiles by Ukraine against targets inside Russia meets this threshold, and could potentially be a trigger for a nuclear response under the revised doctrine.
The U.S. Intelligence community has reportedly issued an assessment which holds that Russia is unlikely to use nuclear weapons in retaliation for escalatory actions carried out by Ukraine with or without the assistance of the United States and NATO allies.
This assessment is contradicted by the words and actions of the Russian leadership, including Russian President Vladimir Putin. Russia has recently employed an intermediate-range strategic missile, the Oreshnik, armed with a conventional warhead, against a military industrial target in Ukraine in retaliation for the ATACMS attacks. Russia has promised further such attacks against Ukrainian targets and, if the ATACMS attacks continue unabated, NATO targets outside of Ukraine.
Such an action would trigger Article 5 of the NATO Charter, putting Russia in direct conflict with NATO, an action most experts believe would likely end in a nuclear conflict. Russian authorities, including its most recent Ambassador to the United States, has made it clear a nuclear conflict would not be limited to Europe, but also include the territory of the United States.
It is imperative that your administration reverse the decision regarding the use of ATACMS missiles by Ukraine against targets inside the borders of pre-2014 Russia. Such an action would, in and of itself, significantly reduce the risk of nuclear war, and could pave the way for a potential negotiated settlement of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. If you fail to do so, the risk of a Russian nuclear retaliation against NATO prior to the end of your term in office is very high.
Click on the name of your representative and others below to contact them and send them this letter to sign and send to the White House.
Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. His most recent book is Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, published by Clarity Press.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Moshe Ya’alon has refused to apologize for saying Israel is committing ethnic cleansing in Gaza because it “reflected reality on the ground.” He also said the IDF was “not the most moral army.” Joe Lauria reports.
Israel’s then Minister of Defense Moshe Ya’alon at the Pentagon, Oct. 28, 2015. (Sr. Master Sgt. Adrian Cadiz/Wikimedia Common)
Moshe Ya’alon, a former Israeli defense minister and army chief, has caused an uproar in Israel by publicly accusing the Israeli government of ethnically cleansing Palestinians in Gaza.
Twenty-four hours after he first made the remark he was invited by a television interviewer on Monday to apologize. He refused.
“What I said accurately reflects what’s happening on the ground,” he said, adding that he intentionally used the term “ethnic cleansing.”
Ya’alon defined it as “evacuating civilians from their homes and demolishing those homes, as is happening in Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya,” in northern Gaza. In his initial remarks, Ya’alon said Israel’s aim in Gaza was to “conquer, to annex, to purify an ethnic identity.” He added: “They are cleansing the area from the Arabs.”
Ya’alon is not blaming the IDF, but the government, whose extremist ministers like National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Betzalel Smotritch “have repeatedly declared their intentions to build Jewish settlements in Gaza,” according to the Haaretz daily.
“These politicians … speak openly and proudly of depleting Gaza’s population by half and building settlements on the ruins of the Strip’s destroyed cities and villages,” the newspaper said.
Ya’alon said these ministers should have been issued arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
Despite not blaming the IDF, Ya’alon told Channel 12 News in Israel: “Thanks to political intervention, which has corrupted the army, it would be hard for me to say that the IDF is the most moral army in the world.”
This isn’t your simple expert speaking.
He is actually the former Israeli defense minister and former IDF Chief Moshe Ya’alon, who clearly says ethnic cleansing is underway in Gaza to establish Jewish settlements
The IDF denied their former chief’s accusation, contending that it is “acting in accordance with international law, and evacuating the population temporarily in accordance with operational need, for its defense.” It accused Ya’alon of harming the army and its soldiers.
Though the International Court of Justice is trying Israel for genocide, Ya’alon said he was not accusing Israel of that crime. Nonetheless, the outrage against Ya’alon was fierce in a society clearly in denial.
‘Sick With Hatred’
Naftali Bennett, the former prime minister, tweeted: “There is no military more moral than the Israel Defense Forces. The IDF has bent over backwards to minimize loss of civilian life. All of Israel’s actions in Gaza adhere to the Geneva Conventions.”
May Golan, a Likud member of the Knesset, said: “It’s clear that we’re dealing with a sick person, sick with power, sick with envy, sick with hatred, sick. The man is simply sick. It’s clear. …. Show empathy for his condition, don’t let his nonsense go viral. It also harms the country, but mainly humiliates him.”
“Ya’alon has long since lost his direction and moral compass, and his false and slanderous statements are a gift to the International Criminal Court and to Israel’s enemies,” read a statement from his former party, Likud.
“Israel is waging a just war against a murderous terrorist organization that carried out a mass slaughter against it,” the statement said.
These reactions reflect widespread credulity — or cynicism — in Israel that believes the purpose of the “war” is to defeat Hamas and rescue the hostages despite all evidence to the contrary: Hamas has not been defeated in 14 months and the hostages have not been returned, when they could have been in a prisoner swap.
This major Israeli military operation is instead intended to complete the process of indeed ethnic cleansing of Arabs in Palestine envisioned by Israeli founding father David Ben Gurion, first carried out on a large scale in 1948 and now continuing in Gaza.
Bluster about Hamas and hostages is just an excuse and a cover for massive criminal intent.
There are just too many clear statements of such intent and corresponding action by high-ranking Israeli officials to think otherwise, and those statements and those actions now appear as evidence before two world courts.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.
By Leonid SavinAsia-Pacific Research, December 03, 2024
The 35th summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, which consists of 21 countries from the Americas and Southeast Asia, held last week in Peru, showed that the balance of power is changing rapidly. It is noticeable that the U.S. is losing its influence, although it is trying various methods to retain its hegemony.
APEC itself is a platform that falls well within the description of classical liberalism. In fact, even if one reads the declarations and statements adopted, they may also fit the statements of the US leadership.
For example, the general ministerial declaration reflects that
“we recognize the important role of an enabling, open, fair, non-discriminatory, safer and inclusive digital ecosystem that facilitates trade, as well as the importance of building confidence and security in the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). We encourage countries to intensify efforts to advance digital transformation. Under the agreement with AIDEN, we will work together to facilitate the flow of data, recognizing the importance of privacy and protection of personal data, and building consumer and business confidence in digital transactions.”
Quite the White House Style
On November 16, the Machu Picchu Declaration came out, bearing the signatures of leaders of participating nations, including rival powers like the U.S. and China.
It also spoke of the need for fair, transparent and predictable trade without discrimination and promoting the interconnectedness of the region at various levels. It also decided to hold the next summits from 2025 to 2027 in Korea, China and Vietnam respectively, which shows the role of Southeast Asia in APEC affairs for the next three years.
However, there are nuances. Tellingly, the B3W (Build Back Better World) initiative launched by Joe Biden in 2021 was not mentioned at all in the summit documents. Although its stated goals are quite close to the APEC program documents.
This once again confirms that this U.S. geo-economic project has failed miserably, although representatives of the White House and the State Department occasionally try to use this narrative to exercise influence both in Latin America and the Indo-Pacific region.
China, on the other hand, looked like a clear leader and constructive actor. It was not just the symbolic photo of the leaders of the countries, with Xi Jinping standing in the middle of the first row next to forum hostess Dina Boluarte, and U.S. President Joe Biden modestly tucked away on the edge of the second row. On November 15, the presidents of Peru and China inaugurated the large port of Chancay on the Pacific coast, 70 kilometers from Lima.
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Family photo at the APEC Leaders’ Retreat, Saturday, November 16, 2024, in Lima, Peru. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
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The share of the Chinese logistics company, COSCO Shipping, in this project is 60 percent. That is, China owns a controlling stake. And the total investment is $3.4 billion.
The design capacity of the new port is 1 million TEU (twenty-foot equivalent unit—a conventional unit of measurement of cargo transport capacity) per year in the short term and 1.5 million TEU in the long term. According to Global Times, construction of the main dock structures was completed earlier this year, with more than 80 percent of the project completed.
For China, the emergence of a new transportation hub in Latin America can significantly reduce logistics costs (up to 20 percent) and delivery time (will be 23 days). Previously, cargoes from China were shipped to Mexico or Panama, from where they reached South America. Now China has the opportunity to deliver directly to South America, and Peru becomes an additional transit zone for neighboring countries in the region—Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia, Chile and Brazil, and through these countries to Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay.
In addition to goods from China, Peru will also be able to increase its exports, which have grown significantly in recent years. Last year, Peru sold $23 billion worth of goods to China, a fourfold increase in revenue compared to 2009. This means increased production, more employment and more foreign exchange to buy the goods it needs. About 90% of what Peru exports to China consists of minerals.
And China is now interested in increasing their volumes. It should be noted that Peru and Chile are leaders in copper mining. And neighboring Bolivia has large reserves of lithium.
Overall, the category of major export items from Peru to China includes ore slag and ash ($19.8 billion), copper ($1.18 billion), food processing waste and animal feed ($733.5 million), and copper ($1.18 billion), fish, crustaceans, mollusks, aquatic invertebrates ($336.9 million), edible fruits, nuts, citrus peels, melons ($282.3 million), mineral fuels, oils, distillation products ($258.8 million) – data for 2023.
Obviously, such a breakthrough by China’s Belt and Road Initiative goes against Washington’s desire to pursue its own policy and tell Latin American countries with whom to trade. That is why they immediately began criticizing the project there.
Laura Richardson, a retired general who recently headed the U.S. Southern Command, expressed concern that the port could be used to berth Chinese warships. Richardson also opposed a proposal to build a Chinese port in southern Argentina.
Foreign Policy also quotes anonymous Peruvian analysts as saying the port raises more serious concerns than competition from great powers. Allegedly, construction of the roads and railroads needed to bring cargo to the port is lagging behind.
But it is quite obvious that these problems are solvable and China, together with Peru, will deal with them. And the port itself, as a new hub, will be an example for other countries to see what China can do and compare it to what the US is doing.
What is interesting is that China is using a purely geo-economic approach, which the U.S. itself has previously promoted. Only it does not have ideology and hard power attached to it, which is practiced by Washington. Beijing’s approach is both pragmatic and without imposing any additional political demands, which makes it more attractive than the United States.
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Leonid Savin is Editor-in-Chief of the Geopolitika.ru Analytical Center, General Director of the Cultural and Territorial Spaces Monitoring and Forecasting Foundation and Head of the International Eurasia Movement Administration. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Geopolitika.
Featured image: Family photo at the APEC Leaders’ Retreat, Saturday, November 16, 2024, in Lima, Peru. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared that Israel’s war on Gaza will continue until achieving what he terms “total victory.” Instead of critically examining Netanyahu’s vague and open-ended objectives, much of the Western media and many governments frame the onslaught as self-defense, and some even normalize the genocide as a “humane” attempt to “free” Israeli captives.
At the same time, the same pundits decontextualized the Palestinian right to self-defense by ignoring that the October 7 revolt was a direct response to over two decades of Israel’s imposed “starvation diet” blockade on Gaza. Exactly, as the West turns a blind eye, and continues to enable Israel’s theft of Palestinian-occupied land in the West Bank to benefit Jewish-only colonies.
Meanwhile, these media outlets downplay or dismiss Israel’s treacherous undeclared war objectives, even to the detriment of Israeli captives and the immense civilian suffering in Gaza.
For over a year, Netanyahu has prioritized an agenda to reoccupy and to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza rather than engage in negotiations for prisoner’s swap. Especially since the release of Israeli captives would undermine one of Netanyahu’s primary pretexts for pursuing his sinister objectives.
This is only possible in the wake of Western leaders embracing Netanyahu’s racist perspective, focusing only on the well-being of Israeli captives, while ignoring the over 10,000 Palestinian hostages held in Israeli jails, and the welfare of the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza. For instance, Joe Biden has expressed recently his concern over Netanyahu potentially delaying action to secure the release of Israeli captives until January 20, 2025, while expressing no sympathy for the suffering of Palestinians in 2024 and beyond.
With the conspicuous silence or impotence of world bodies, the Israeli captives became a convenient fig leaf under which Netanyahu saw as an opportunity to reoccupy Gaza. It is worth recalling that in 2005, Netanyahu resigned from the Israeli government in protest against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s decision to “disengage” and remove the Jewish-only colonies from the Gaza strip.
Immediately following October 7, Netanyahu launched a genocidal war, disregarding the Palestinian Resistance’s proposal for prisoner’s exchange. His decision to pursue war instead of negotiations was motivated by several factors:
a) Deflect responsibility for the intelligence failure under his watch. b) Evade scrutiny of his role in facilitating external funding to Hamas. d) Execute a campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing to reoccupy Gaza.
The strategy to ethnically cleanse Gaza was openly advocated by Israel’s racist Finance MinisterBezalel Smotrich, who three months following October 7 called for Palestinians to leave Gaza. The scion of an Ukrainian immigrant repeated the century-old European Zionist myth of blooming the desert⎯a narrative that not only ignores historical and geographical realities but also contradicts his own Old Testament that once described Canaan, the land of the Filastin (Palestine), as the “land of milk and honey,” before the ancient Hebrews migrated from their original homes to Palestine.
Further, and on January 1, 2024, Smotrich’s fellow racist National Security Minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, declared in a Knesset speech that Israel should never withdraw from any territory it occupies and explained that the establishment of new Jewish-only colonies in Gaza as “an important thing.” The following day, on January 2, Ben Gvir doubled down, stating that displacing “hundreds of thousands” of Palestinians from Gaza would help pave the way for the creation of the new Jewish-only colonies.
More recently, on Monday, November 25, Smotrich declared to the Yesha Council, an umbrella group representing the Jewish-only colonies in the occupied West Bank, “We can and must conquer the Gaza Strip.” He claimed there is “a unique opportunity” with Donald Trump’s election to halve Gaza’s population—a veiled euphemism for ethnic cleansing. On Thursday, November 28, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir echoed similar calls to “reoccupy the Gaza Strip.”
On the ground inside Gaza, the tools of occupation were more explicit in defining the meaning of Netanyahu’s ostensible mantra: “total victory.” Israeli soldiers posed before an orange banner that read, “Only (Jewish-only) settlement (in Gaza) would be considered victory!” Notably, the orange color harkens back to the banners used by the settler movement in 2005 to protest Sharon’s decision to evacuate the Jewish-only colonies from Gaza.
On November 29, Ajith Sunghay, head of the U.N. Human Rights Office for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, stated after visiting Gaza that the “U.N. had been unable to deliver any aid to northern Gaza” due to “repeated impediments or outright rejections of humanitarian convoys by the Israeli authorities.”
Regarding the genocide by terror, U.N. Human Rights Chief Volker Türkreported that residents of northern Gaza are subjected to “non-stop” bombing. Simultaneously, hundreds of thousands have been ordered to evacuate, likely to make way for new Jewish-only settlements.
As part of the forced depopulation of Gaza’s northern region—the most fertile land in the strip—Israel is constructing a topographic barrier to isolate this area from the rest of Gaza. Beginning in early October, Israel carried out extensive controlled explosions, demolishing multi-story buildings to clear a path for a 5.6-mile road cutting across the strip. This road divides Gaza City from the northern towns of Jabalia, Beit Hanoun, and Beit Lahia. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has characterized this widespread forced displacement as part of an official government policy amounting to “crimes against humanity.”
On November 30, former Defense Minister and IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alonconfirmed HRW findings, stating that Netanyahu and “far-right” (racist) elements are waging a war of “occupation, annexation, and ethnic cleansing.” He added, “There is no Beit Lahia, there is no Beit Hanoun.”
The live documented ethnic cleansing in Gaza, much like in 1948, alongside the expansion of Jewish-only colonies in the West Bank, underscores the true undeclared objectives in Israel’s ostensible “total victory.” In this contest, Netanyahu’s deliberate undermining of U.S.-led negotiations for prisoner’s swap exemplifies his quintessential diabolical persona: exploiting the predicament of his own Israeli captives to further his cynical undeclared agenda of slaughtering the “Amalek,” and ethnically cleansing Gaza to pave the way for new Jewish-only colonies.
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Jamal Kanj is the author of “Children of Catastrophe,” Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America, and other books. He writes frequently on Arab world issues for various national and international commentaries. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
[Links to Parts I to XIII-A are provided at the bottom of this article.]
“If the United Nations once admits that international disputes can be settled by using force, then we will have destroyed the foundation of the organization and our best hope of establishing a world order.” (Dwight D. Eisenhower)
1. International Law or ‘Rules-based International Order’?
On 8 March 1992, The New York Times published excerpts from the Pentagon’s draft of the Defense Planning Guidance for the Fiscal Years 1994-1999. This important piece of archive addressed the “fundamentally new situation which has been created by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the disintegration of the internal as well as the external empire, and the discrediting of Communism as an ideology with global pretensions and influence”. The new international environment, it was explained, has “also been shaped by the victory of the United States and its coalition allies over Iraqi aggression – the first post-cold-war conflict and a defining event in U.S. global leadership.”
The drafters of this “Guidance” stated that the United States’ first objective should be “to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and “requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia.” And the second objective is “to address sources of regional conflict and instability in such a way as to promote increasing respect for international law, limit international violence, and encourage the spread of democratic forms of government and open economic systems.” They also acknowledged that while the U.S. cannot become the world’s “policeman”, by assuming responsibility for righting every wrong, the U.S. will “retain the pre-eminent responsibility for addressing selectively those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies or friends, or which could seriously unsettle international relations”. They furthermore determined the various types of U.S. interests involved in such instances as being: access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf oil; proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles; threats to U.S. citizens from terrorism or regional or local conflict; and threats to U.S. society from narcotics trafficking.”
As a matter of fact, during the whole decade of the 1990s, as the tumultuous twentieth century shuddered toward its close, the global geopolitical landscape was overwhelmingly dominated by a much-heated American internal debate about a big question: will America strive to dominate the world, or lead it?
This topic was the object of an influential book[1] written by Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor under President Jimmy Carter. In it, he reminded Americans that their might should not be confused with omnipotence, and their well-being and the world’s are entwined. He explained that panicky preoccupation with “solitary American security, an obsessively narrow focus on terrorism, and indifference to the concerns of a politically restless humanity neither enhance American security nor comport with the world’s real need for American leadership.” The conclusion Brzezinski then quite logically drew was that “unless it can harmonize its overwhelming power with its seductive but also unsettling social appeal, America could find itself alone and under assault in a setting of intensifying global chaos.”
Such a conclusion was all the more logical, accurate and timely as America – and the world with it – found themselves at the turn of the new millennium in an unprecedented state of disarray in the wake of the 2001 September 11th attacks. These led, among other epochal events, to the American blunders of Afghanistan and Iraq invasions in 2001 and 2003 respectively whose adverse consequences the world at large is still suffering from.
It is equally worthwhile to recall that when G. W. Bush took office in 2000, he brought with him Vice President Dick Cheney,Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, all of whom had served together in Ronald Reagan’s and G. H. Bush’s administrations. In 1992, while he was in the Defense Department, Wolfowitz – long recognized as the intellectual force behind a radical neoconservative fringe of the Republican Party – was asked to write the first draft of a new National Security Strategy, a document entitled “The Defense Planning Guidance”.[2] The most controversial elements of that strategy were that the United States: should dramatically increase its defense spending; be willing to take preemptive military action; and be willing to use military force unilaterally, with or without allies.
Out of power during the Clinton administration, Wolfowitz and his colleagues presided over the creation, in 1997, of the Neoconservative think tank called “Project for a New American Century” (PNAC), which was placed under the chairmanship of William Kristol, the “Godfather” of American neoconservatism. And as soon as it was brought back to power within the G. W. Bush’s administration in 2000, Wolfowitz’s team got involved in shaping the U.S. neoconservative foreign policy, whose main principles were laid down in a defining document titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century”.[3] This 90-page document was written in September of 2000, a full year before the 9/11 attacks.
Interestingly enough, in its section V entitled “Creating Tomorrow’s Dominant Force”, it stated that “the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor”. One year later, that event would indeed happen, and two decades later, the most important question of “what did really happen on September 11, 2001?” remains unanswered. Was it the result of a needed conspiracy to execute a premeditated plan? Or was it a mere coincidence exploited by believers in conspiracy theories? Only time will tell. However, what History has already recorded for sure is that this catastrophic event brought about equally catastrophic consequences, both intended and unintended, for America itself, for the Arab and Islamic world, and for the entire world.
In hindsight, Brzezinski’s 2004 assessment and expectations represented something of an unexpected 180-degree turn compared to his previous well-known ideological and geostrategic attitude and writings. In effect, only seven years before, he had written a hugely authoritative book[4] in which he outlined a strategy entirely based on the oft-cited phrase of Sir Halford J. Mackinder, who is generally considered the founding father of geopolitics: “Who rules Eastern Europe rules the continental heart; who rules the continental heart rules the world-island; who rules the world-island rules the world”.[5] Brzezinski argued that the last decade of the twentieth century witnessed a tectonic shift in world affairs:
“For the first time, a non-Eurasian power rose not only to the position of a key arbiter of relations among the states of Eurasia, but also to the position of the dominant global power. The defeat and fall of the Soviet Union completed the rapid rise of a northern hemisphere power, the United States, as the sole and, indeed, the first truly global power. Eurasia, however, retains its geopolitical importance. Not only does its western periphery – Europe – still hold much of the world’s political and economic power, but its eastern region – Asia – has recently become a center of vital economic growth and growing political influence.” That said, the ability of the United States to effectively and sustainably exercise global primacy will depend entirely on how it manages its complex relationships with the powers of this region, and particularly on the absolute imperative of “preventing the emergence of a dominant and antagonistic Eurasian power.”
In a language strongly reminiscent of that of “The Prince” of Niccolò Machiavelli, Brzezinski first specifies that in the blunt terminology of past empires, the three great geostrategic imperatives would be summarized as follows: “Avoid collusion with vassals and maintain them in the state of dependence justified by their security; cultivate the docility of protected subjects; prevent barbarians from forming offensive alliances.” He then advocates, on this basis, a strategy of unilateral domination, which had been called for before him by neoconservative ideologues and would later be adopted as a line of conduct during the terms of George W. Bush.
The essential point to keep in mind, Brzezinski says – giving sense to current events in Ukraine – is that
“Russia cannot be in Europe without Ukraine being there as well, while Ukraine can be in Europe without Russia being there (…) Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state (…) However, if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as its access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state spanning Europe and Asia. Ukraine’s loss of independence would have immediate consequences for Central Europe, transforming Poland into the geopolitical pivot on the eastern frontier of a united Europe.”
In the final analysis, and contrary to Brzezinski’s “updated” wishes and predictions, America succeeded in being neither the guarantor of its own and the world’s security nor the promoter of the global common good. Far from it. What the United States effectively did is what all states normally do, as Lord Palmerston once famously proclaimed[6] – most probably having in mind the United States precisely – that’s to say to pursue their interests.
And while Brzezinski seemed to make amends in this respect, many other scholars and ideologues were advocating for American empire. Renowned economist Deepak Lal for one, also in 2004, wrote a controversial book[7] in which he laid out a historical and cross-civilizational examination of the role empires have played to provide the order required for peace and prosperity, and how this imperial role “has come to be thrust on the United States.” Expressing wish fulfillment for America of the exact same Virgil’s hope for Rome, Lal argued that “if the U.S. public does not recognize the imperial burden that history has thrust upon it, or is unwilling to bear it, the world will continue to muddle along as it has for the past century – with hesitant advances, punctuated by various alarms and by periods of backsliding in the wholly beneficial processes of globalization. Perhaps, if the United States is unwilling to shoulder the imperial burden of maintaining the global pax, we will have to wait for one or other of the emerging imperial states – China and India – to do so in the future.” Till then, he concluded, “we may be fated to live with the ancient Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times.’”
To be sure, since its founding, the United States has consistently pursued a grand strategy focused on acquiring and maintaining preeminent power over various rivals, first on the North American continent, then in the Western hemisphere, and finally globally. During the Cold War, this strategy was manifested in the form of “containment”, which provided a unifying vision of how the United States could protect its systemic primacy as well as its security, ensure the safety of its allies, and eventually enable the defeat of its adversary, the Soviet Union. This is exactly what a 2015 Council on Foreign Affairs (CFR) report stated.[8]
Unlike the March 1992 “Guidance” which rarely, if ever, mentions China as being a rival or a foe, CFR’s President, Richard Haas – who has written the forward part of this report – concurs with the authors’ conclusion according to which “Of all the nations – and in most conceivable scenarios – China is an and will remain the most significant competitor to the United States for decades to come.”
Said omission of China in previous similar literature is also explained in the report by the fact that
“the American effort to ‘integrate’ China into the liberal international order has now generated new threats to U.S. primacy in Asia – and could eventually result in consequential challenge to American power globally.”
In reality, behind those openly expressed fears and criticism, lies an undisclosed threat that perhaps supersedes all others. That is the fact that Beijing’s domestic policies that have succeeded in transforming China from an impoverished nation into a world superpower, in a relatively short period of time – more precisely thanks to the reforms implemented by Deng Xiaoping since 1978, after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976 – have been performed within a paradigm that does not fully comply with the conventional fundamental Western liberal values and recipes. Those policies are thought to have contributed to an “economic miracle” distinctively characterized by an eightfold growth in gross national product over two decades. This prompted Joshua Cooper Ramo in 2004 to coin the term “Beijing Consensus”,[9] a moniker that nods to the “Washington Consensus” whose set of political and economic development prescriptions severely impacted the socio-economic situation of so many developing countries, especially in Latin America in the late 1980s.[10]
Hence, the overarching argument for China’s ideological threat to the West in general and the United States in particular is that China’s prodigious and rapid growth is providing an attractive alternative development model for the Global South, thereby signaling a challenge to American soft power. Stefan Halper argued in his 2010 book[11] that the “net effect of these developments is to reduce Western and particularly American influence on the global stage – along both economic and ideational axes.”
In the face of the challenge represented by the meteoric growth of the Chinese economy and its military power, Washington thus needs “a new grand strategy that centers on balancing the rise of Chinese power rather than continuing to assist its ascendancy.” This strategy, the report goes on to say, cannot be built on a bedrock of containment, as earlier effort to limit Soviet power was, because of the current realities of globalization.” And short of a “fundamental collapse of the Chinese state [that] would free Washington from the obligation of systematically balancing Beijing”, even the alternative of a “modest Chinese stumble would not eliminate the dangers presented to the United States in Asia and beyond”, and would constitute a serious threat to the U.S.-dominated international order.
The “Chinese challenge” continues unabated to haunt the American security establishment – which is largely autonomous and operates behind a wall of secrecy – lending additional credence and great contemporary relevance to the prescient views put forward by French Alain Peyreffitte in his 1973 essay.[12] Indeed, in 2021 the Atlantic Council published a paper titled “Global Strategy 2021: An Allied Strategy for China”.[13] It was prepared in collaboration with policy planning officials and strategy experts from ten “leading democracies”.[14] Its forward part was written by none other than Joseph S. Nye, who has coined the term “soft power” in the late 1980s, before circling the globe and coming into widespread usage following an article he wrote in 1990 in Foreign Policy magazine.[15]
The strategy states that
“China is the foremost geopolitical threat to the rules-based international system since the end of the Cold War, and the return of great-power rivalry will likely shape the global order for decades to come. Likeminded allies and partners need to take deliberate and coordinated action to strengthen themselves and counter the threat China poses, even as they seek longer-term cooperation with Beijing.” The Free world, the concluding remarks read, has “an impressive record of accomplishment in defeating challenges from autocratic great-power rivals and constructing a rules-based system.”, and by pursuing this strategy “with sufficient political will, resilience, and solidarity”, they can “once again outlast an autocratic competitor and provide the world with future peace, prosperity, and freedom.”
In contrast to other similar previous papers, one sentence is repeated time and again in this strategy, namely “the rules-based system”. It has since become the alpha and omega of American – and British – officials, academics, and media pundits.
For example, as recounted by John Dugard in a particularly insightful study,[16] President Biden published an op-ed[17] about Ukraine in the New York Times in which he declared that Russia’s action in Ukraine “could mark the end of the rules-based international order and open the door to aggression elsewhere, with catastrophic consequences the world over”.[18] There is no mention of international law. Later, in a press conference at the conclusion of the June 2022 NATO Summit Meeting in Madrid, he warned both Russia and China that the democracies of the world would “defend the rules-based order” (RBO). Again, there is no mention of international law. On 12 October 2022 the US President published a National Security Strategy which makes repeated reference to the RBO as the “foundation of global peace and prosperity”, with only passing reference to international law.[19]
So, what is this RBO “creature”, that American political leaders have increasingly invoked since the end of the Cold War instead of international law? Is it a harmless synonym for international law, as suggested by European leaders? Or is it something else, a system meant to replace international law which has governed the behavior of states for over 500 years?
The RBO may be seen as the United States’ alternative to international law, an order that encapsulates international law as interpreted by the United States to accord with its national interests, “a chimera, meaning whatever the US and its followers want it to mean at any given time”.[20] Premised on “the United States’ own willingness to ignore, evade or rewrite the rules whenever they seem inconvenient’,[21] the RBO is seen to be broad, open to political manipulation and double standards, and “seems to allow for special rules in special – sui generis – cases”.[22]
According to Dugard and many other scholars who have studied this subject, the rationale behind the reference by Washington to the RBO rather than to international law is that the U.S. is not a party to a number of important multilateral treaties and other legal instruments that constitute the backbone of international law as it is commonly known, including some fundamental legal instruments governing international humanitarian law.[23]
And as it relates to the War on Gaza, the rationale is that the United States is unwilling to hold some states, such as Israel, accountable for violations of international law. They are “treated as sui generis cases in which the national interest precludes accountability.” This exceptionalism in respect of Israel was spelled out by the United States in its joint declaration with Israel on the occasion of President Biden’s visit to Israel in July 2022,[24] which reaffirms “the unbreakable bonds between our two countries and the enduring commitment of the United States to Israel’s security” and the determination of the two states “to combat all efforts to boycott or de-legitimize Israel, to deny its right to self-defense, or to single it out in any forum, including at the United Nations or the International Criminal Court.”
This commitment explains the consistent refusal of the United States to hold Israel accountable for its repeated violations of humanitarian law, support the prosecution of perpetrators of international crimes before the International Criminal Court, condemn its assaults on Gaza, insist that Israel prosecute killers of a US national (journalist Shireen Abu Akleh), criticize its violation of human rights as established by both the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly, accept that Israel applies a policy of apartheid in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,[25] and oppose its annexation of East Jerusalem. And, of course, there is the refusal of the United States to acknowledge the existence of Israel’s nuclear arsenal or allow any discussion of it in the context of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East.[26] Such measures on the part of Israel are possibly seen as consistent with the “rules-based international order” even if they violate basic rules of international law.
Image: Sergey Lavrov
The RBO has been routinely criticized by Russia and China. Thus, in 2020 Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, declared that the West advocated a “West-centric rules-based order as an alternative to international law with the purpose of replacing international law with non-consensual methods for resolving international disputes by bypassing international law.”[27] He further explained that the RBO was coined to “camouflage a striving to invent rules depending on changes in the political situation so as to be able to put pressure on disagreeable States and even on allies.” And again, on 25 May 2022 Lavrov, on the occasion of Africa Day, read out a statement by President Putin in which he declared in the context of Russia’s action in Ukraine that: “The main problem is that a small group of US-led Western countries keeps trying to impose the concept of a rules-based world order on the international community. They use this banner to promote, without any hesitation, a unipolar model of the world order where there are “exceptional” countries and everyone else who must obey the “club of the chosen”.[28]
As for China, its foreign minister Wang Yi stated in 2021, at a virtual debate of the UN Security Council on the theme of multilateralism, that “International rules must be based on international law and must be written by all. They are not a patent or privilege of a few. They must be applicable to all countries and there should be no room for exceptionalism or double standards.”[29]
2. The “Global South”: From Fence-Sitter to Arbiter?
The existing world order is at an inflection point, and the times ahead will likely be radically different from those experienced in our lifetimes and will determine the course of decades to come. The last similar epochal circumstances in recent history occurred between 1930 and 1945 and between 1999 and 2008. In both periods a confluence of peculiar political, economic, social, and cultural conditions led to fundamental shifts in world order; and in both instances such conditions paved the way for American leadership, or more accurately, global primacy.[30]
In the currently changing global strategic environment, opposition to and disapproval of the RBO – due to its incompatibility with international law as enshrined in the UN charter, multilateral treaties, and customary rules – are not exclusive to a resurging Russia and a rising China. They also have been, and still are being voiced by an increasing number of emerging countries of a more assertive Global South, determined to play its legitimate part and have a say in the governance of world affairs.
Moreover, the West’s – and especially the US’– support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, in blatant violation of international and humanitarian law, when combined with condemnation of and imposition of immediate and unprecedented sanctions on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine, proves that the RBO talk is sheer hypocrisy, thereby immensely complicating the West’s position in the battle of narratives and global influence it is engaging with Russia and China.
As I referred to earlier, the essential narrative of the West is built into the U.S. national security strategy, the core idea of which is that China and Russia are implacable foes that are “attempting to erode American security and prosperity” and are determined “to make economies less free and less fair”, and “to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence.”
The irony, as remarked by Prof. Jeffrey Sachs – who has served as adviser to three UN Secretaries-General, and is currently serving as a Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Advocate under Secretary-General António Guterres – is that
“since 1980 the US has been in at least 15 overseas wars of choice (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Panama, Serbia, Syria, and Yemen just to name a few), while China has been in none, and Russia only in one (Syria) beyond the former Soviet Union. The US has military bases in 85 countries, China in 3, and Russia in 1 (Syria) beyond the former Soviet Union.”[31]
The same irony is also manifested in the unconvincing West’s mantra that it is opposing dictatorships and championing freedom, human rights and democracy around the world. No wonder the Global South sees hypocrisy in the US’s framing of its hostility to and competition with such countries as China, Russia, Iran and North Korea – regularly singled out in successive National Security Strategies and lumped together in an “Axis of Upheaval”[32] – as a battle between democracy and autocracy. How else can one explain the fact that Washington continues to support many “undemocratic” and even “dictatorial” regimes and governments, selectively providing them with multifaceted aid and assistance?
Indeed, according to Freedom House, as of fiscal year 2015 the U.S. government has been providing military assistance to 36 of the 49 nations the NGO counts as dictatorships”, a percentage of 73%! In 2021, this proportion had not changed since 35 out of 50 continued to receive such aid. Worst still, Freedom House informed[33] that during the same period, as COVID-19 spread, “governments across the democratic spectrum repeatedly resorted to excessive surveillance, discriminatory restrictions on freedoms like movement and assembly and arbitrary or violent enforcement of such restrictions by police and non-state actors. Waves of false and misleading information, generated deliberately by political leaders in some cases, flooded many countries’ communication system, obscuring reliable data and jeopardizing lives.” Also, and inevitably, the “parlous state of US democracy” did not go unnoticed; it was conspicuous in the early days of 2021 as an “insurrectionist mob, egged on by the words of outgoing president Donald Trump and his refusal to admit defeat in the November election”, stormed the Capitol building, the symbolic heart of US democracy. The United States, the NGO advised, will need “to work vigorously to strengthen its institutional safeguards, restore its civic norms, and uphold the promise of its core principles for all segments of society if it is to protect its venerable democracy and regain global credibility.” All these withering blows marked the 15th consecutive decline in global freedom, the NGO lamented.
An answer to this big and troubling question of the U.S. relations with authoritarian countries was given in a thoroughly-researched study[34] published by Carnegie Endowment for international Peace in 2023. The paper reached three overarching conclusions:
First, Biden’s policy with regard to authoritarian countries represents, on the whole, more continuity with than change from most previous U.S. presidents, reflecting deep structures of interest that have shaped U.S. relations with these countries for decades.
Second, security issues are the dominant driver of U.S. relations with authoritarian countries – for both positive and negative relations – and span a wide range of security concerns, including competition with China and Russia, terrorism, and regional instability. Economic interests – such as energy investments, critical minerals, arms sales, or ensuring U.S. market access – also play a role in spurring positive U.S. relations with some authoritarian states, but overall are far less important than security concerns. Therefore, when the United States has a clear security interest in maintaining friendly relations with an authoritarian country, concerns about democracy are usually on the back burner, if not absent entirely.
Third, the trends going forward appear to be mixed. With U.S.-China and U.S.-Russia tensions continuing to escalate, “the United States will have more reasons to put aside its concerns about democracy and human rights in some authoritarian countries as it tries to convince them to move closer to its camp. It will also be motivated to turn a cold shoulder to other countries that align themselves with its rivals.”
The Carnegie study points to the fact that many people in U.S. policy circles debate the wisdom of the administration’s trade-offs between its stated interest in supporting democracy globally versus countervailing interests that lead it to maintain close ties with some autocrats. But these debates are often confined to a few high-profile cases and rarely draw from a broader understanding of the overall landscape of U.S. relations with authoritarian regimes and the trajectory of such relations across recent decades.
The authors of the paper conclude by saying that Washington’s policy “produces justifiable charges of hypocrisy among observers around the world who see a U.S. administration apply the principle and deliver generous doses of self-righteous rhetoric in one country and then completely ignore democracy and rights issues in another.”
With regard to the Ukraine war, the West’s narrative is that it is a brutal and unprovoked attack by Vladimir Putin in his quest to recreate the Russian empire. Yet the real story of what caused the crisis is the Western promise to the reformist President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not enlarge to the east. “Not one inch eastward”[35] was the assurance given by US Secretary of State James Baker to Gorbachev on February 9th, 1990. What has followed, however, is a wave of aggrandizements that concerned former members of the defunct Warsaw Pact and two Scandinavian nations as of late: three in 1999, seven in 2004, two in 2009, one in 2017 and 2020, and one in 2023 (Finland) and 2024 (Sweden), in addition to the 2008 commitment to incorporate Georgia and Ukraine – two countries in the immediate vicinity of Russia. Since the Alliance was created in 1949, its membership has thus grown from the 12 founding members to today’s 32 members.
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Michail Gorbachev discussing German unification with Hans-Dietrich Genscher and Helmut Kohl in Russia, July 15, 1990. Photo: Bundesbildstelle / Presseund Informationsamt der Bundesregierung.
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All this despite early warnings emanating from very experienced U.S. diplomats. In fact, on 5 February 1997, diplomat-historian George Kennan did not mince words in arguing that “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error in American policy in the entire post-cold war era. Such a decision may be expected… to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”[36] And one year later, on 1 February, William Burns – then U.S. ambassador in Moscow and now CIA Director – sent a confidential cable to Washington D.C., which he titled “Nyet Means Nyet: Russia’s NATO Enlargements Redlines”. The main part of that famous cable read: “Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.”[37]
President Valdimir Putin also sent strong messages to the West at least on three occasions: in his speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 where he denounced the U.S.-led unipolar order; through his war against Georgia, at the end of which Tbilisi lost Abkhazia and South Ossetia in 2008; and finally with the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Retrospectively, one may conclude that those messages have been inadequately understood, to put it mildly.
Back in 2022, John Mearsheimer said in this regard that
“My argument is that the West, especially the United States, is principally responsible for this disaster. But no American policymaker is going to acknowledge that line of argument. So they will say the Russians are responsible.”[38] More recently, he reiterated this same conviction in a conference titled “The Causes and Consequences of the Ukraine Crisis”.[39]
For all these main reasons and others, Jeffrey Sachs was perfectly right to conclude that
“Europe should reflect on the fact that the non-enlargement of NATO and the implementation of the Minsk II agreements would have averted this awful war in Ukraine”, and that “It’s past time that the US recognized the true sources of security: internal social cohesion and responsible cooperation with the rest of the world, rather than the illusion of hegemony.”
With such a revised foreign policy, he added, the US and its allies would avoid war with China and Russia, and enable the world to face its myriad environment, energy, food and social crises.[40]
Sachs’s good advice is precisely what China in particular has been advocating and applying through a series of eye-catching initiatives aimed at increasing its power and boosting its diplomatic clout and global prestige to fulfil President Xi Jinping’s “Chinese Dream” vision, all the while countering Western hegemony.
On that account, Beijing launched the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) in 2013, the “Community of Shared Future of Mankind” in 2015, the “Global Development Initiative” (GDI) in 2021, and the “Global Security Initiative” (GSI) in 2022. Moreover, in light of President Biden’s “Democracy vs. Authoritarianism” narrative and ahead of the second Summit for Democracy,[41] President Xi Jinping announced the “Global Civilization Initiative” (GCI).[42] At the Communist Party of China’s “Dialogue with World Political Parties High-level Meeting”, he said that the initiative will allow nations worldwide to adopt a new type of modernization and development and assist them in having a firm hold on their future development and progress.[43] He also declared that China wants other nations to uphold the principle of equality, have an open mindset, refrain from imposing its values and models, and build a global network for inter-civilizational dialogue and cooperation.
As a result of this frantic battle of narratives, today more than ever the Global South is being courted by both sides, hence finding itself in an historically favorable condition to pursue its own interests, which have, for too long, been cynically disregarded by too often condescending world’s great powers. And the answer to the important question of which direction the majority of the Global South’s countries and public opinion will be tipped seems to be embodied in the compelling fact that bold actions and initiatives are being undertaken together with China and Russia, not with the West.
Among other significant common undertakings that signal a new age of international relations ushering the world into a multipolar global order is the creation of the BRICS group in 2009 and the “Group of Friends in Defense of the Charter of the United Nations” in 2021.
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The plenary session of the Outreach/BRICS Plus meeting. (By Alexei Danichev / Photohost agency brics-russia2024.ru)
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Named after its five founding members (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), the BRICS group is a collective of emerging economies eager to sustain and improve their economic trajectory. The four fundamental values and principles that underpin this non-Western grouping are: economic development, multilateralism, global governance reform, and solidarity.
The inclusion of Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates in the 16th BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia, in October 2024 formally marked its expansion. During that Summit convened under the theme “Strengthening Multilateralism for Just Global Development and Security”, the leaders of the member states commended the Russian chairship for hosting an “Outreach”/ BRICS Plus” Dialogue with participation of emerging developing countries from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and Middle East under the motto: “BRICS and Global South: Building a Better World Together”. Almost three dozen more countries – including NATO member Türkiye, close US partners Thailand and Mexico, and Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country – have applied to join the henceforth BRICS+.
The group now dwarfs the Western G7, both demographically (46% of the world’s population, compared with the G7’s 8.8%) and economically (35% of global GDP, compared to the G7’s 30%). It also has the potential “to serve as a catalyst for a long-overdue revamping of global governance so that it better reflects twenty-first-century realities.”[44]
As far as the “Group of Friends of the Charter of the United Nations” (GoF), so far composed of 18 member states[45], it concurs that “one of the key elements for ensuring the realization of the three pillars of the Organization of the United Nations and of the yearnings of its peoples, as well as of a peaceful and prosperous world and a just and equitable world order, is ensuring precisely, compliance with and strict adherence to the purposes and principles enshrined in the Charter, for it is the consolidation of relations and cooperation among States that will ensure peace, security, stability and development to the international community as a whole.” It, however, considers that multilateralism, which is at the core of the Charter, is currently under an unprecedented attack, which, in turn, threatens global peace and security.
The GoF members also reject the attempt to establish a RBO. On the occasion of the first meeting of national coordinators of the GoF held in Tehran, Iran, on 5 November 2022, the participants reiterated their “serious concern” at continued attempts aimed at replacing the tenets enshrined in the UN Charter, which have been agreed upon by the entire international community for conducting their international relations, with a “so-called ‘rules-based order, that remains unclear, “that has not been discussed or accepted by the wide membership”, and that has the “potential, among others, to undermine the rule of law at the international level”. Further, they called for the redoubling of efforts toward “democratization of international relations”, the “strengthening of multilateralism and of a multipolar system”, while expressing their “categorical rejection of all unilateral coercive measures, including those applied as tools for political or economic and financial pressure against any country, in particular against developing countries.”
It is worth recalling that the GoF’s initial creation came shortly after the U.S. and a number of its allies and partners supported Venezuelan opposition-controlled National Assembly head’s claim to the presidency in defiance of President Nicolás Maduro, who stood accused of engineering his win at the elections, and that the group’s recurrent calls for additional membership come amid renewed great power competition between the U.S. and its top rivals, China and Russia.[46]
In 2023, just a few months before the wreckage of the international and humanitarian law in the mass killing fields of Gaza, Foreign Affairs magazine’s executives had the good idea of devoting much of the May/June issue[47] to the topic of the state of world order. On that occasion, several policymakers and scholars from Africa, Latin America, and South and Southeast Asia were invited to explore the dangers, as well as the new opportunities, that the war in Ukraine and the broader return of great-power conflict present for their respective countries and regions.
The overarching conclusion of the different contributors was that Russia’s war in Ukraine has drawn Western allies together, but it has not unified the world’s democracies in the way U.S. President Joe Biden might have hoped for when the war started. Instead, the unfolding events highlighted just how different much of the rest of the world sees not only the war but also the broader global landscape.
Voicing the point of view of Africans, South African Prof. Tim Murithi[48] pointed out that many African countries declined to take a strong stand against Moscow, and more and more nations in the continent and elsewhere in the Global South are refusing to align with either the West or the East, “declining to defend the so-called liberal order but also refusing to seek to upend it as Russia and China have done.” The reason for that, Murithi argues, is that the rules-based international order has not served the African interests. On the contrary, it has preserved a status quo in which major world powers, be they Western or Eastern, have maintained their positions of dominance over the Global South, relegated African governments to “little more than bystanders in their own affairs”, and ignored their longstanding calls for the UN Security Council to be reformed and the broader international system to be reconfigured on more equitable terms. If the West wants Africa to stand up for the international order, he says, then “it must allow that order to be remade so that it is based on more than the idea of might makes right.”
For Brazilian Prof. Matias Spektor[49], developing countries are increasingly seeking to avoid costly entanglements with the major powers, trying to keep all their options open for maximum flexibility; they are pursuing a strategy of hedging because they see the future distribution of global power as uncertain and wish to avoid commitments that will be hard to discharge. They hedge not only to gain material concessions but also to raise their status, and they embrace multipolarity as an opportunity to move up in the international order. If the United States wants to remain first among the great powers in a multipolar world, Prof. Spektor concludes, it “must meet the Global South on its own terms.”
For her part, Nirupama Rao[50], India’s Foreign Secretary from 2009 to 2011 and formerly ambassador to China and the United States, believes that India has “limited patience for U.S. and European narratives which are both myopic and hypocritical”, and although Europe and Washington may be right that Russia is violating human rights in Ukraine, “Western powers have carried out similar violent, unjust, and undemocratic interventions – from Vietnam to Iraq.” New Delhi is therefore uninterested in Western calls for Russia’s isolation. To strengthen itself and address the world’s shared challenges, Rao added, “India has the right to work with everyone.” This perspective isn’t unique to her country, and much of the Global South is wary of being dragged into siding with the U.S. against China and Russia. Developing countries, she rightly observes, are “understandably more concerned about their climate vulnerability, their access to advanced technology and capital, and their need for better infrastructure, health care, and education systems. They see increasing global instability – political and financial alike – as a threat to tackling such challenges. And they have watched rich and powerful states disregard those views and preferences in pursuit of their geopolitical interests.” That’s why Rao goes on to say, India “wants to make sure the voices of these poorer states are heard in international debates” and is positioning itself as “a heartland of global South – a bridging presence that stands for multilateralism.”
In a remarkably balanced piece he wrote in the same Foreign Affairs issue, former UK Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, David Miliband concurred with the views and legitimate demands of the “fence-sitting” Global South. It is to be hoped that Miliband’s fellow Western citizens will listen carefully to his message and, more importantly, heed his wise advice, because as he rightly highlighted in the subtitle of his contribution[51], what is also at stake in the present historical juncture is no less than “the survival of the West”.
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Amir Nour is an Algerian researcher in international relations, author of the books “L’Orient et l’Occident à l’heure d’un nouveau Sykes-Picot” (The Orient and the Occident in Time of a New Sykes-Picot) Editions Alem El Afkar, Algiers, 2014 and “L’Islam et l’ordre du monde” (Islam and the Order of the World), Editions Alem El Afkar, Algiers, 2021.
Notes
[1] Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership”, Basic Books, 2004.
[4] Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives”, Basic Books, 1997.
[5] Halford J. Mackinder, “Democratic Ideals and Reality”, Holt, New York, 1919.
[6] Twice UK Prime Minister (1855-58 and 1859-65) Lord Palmerston, also known as Henry John Temple, said before Parliament in 1848: “Therefore I say that it is a narrow policy to suppose that this country or that is to be marked out as the eternal ally or the perpetual enemy of England. We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”
[7] Deepak Lal, “In Praise of Empires: Globalization and Order”, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2004.
[8] Robert D. Black will and Ashley J. Tellis, “Revising U.S. Grand Strategy Toward China”, Council Special Report No. 72, March 2015.
[9] Joshua Cooper Ramo, “The Beijing Consensus”, The Foreign Policy Centre, 2004. Later on, in 2016, Ramo explained that the Beijing Consensus shows not that “every nation will follow China’s development model, but that it legitimizes the notion of particularity as opposed to the universality of a Washington model”. See Maurits Elen, “Interview: Joshua Cooper Ramo”, The Diplomat, August 2016.
[10] See Jhana Gottlieb, “The Beijing Consensus: A Threat of Our Own Creation”, Center for International Maritime Security, 22 April 2017.
[11] Stefan Hapler, “The Beijing Consensus: Legitimizing Authoritarianism in Our Time”, Basic Books, 2010.
[12] Alain Peyreffitte, “Quand la Chine s’éveillera… le monde tremblera” (When China Awakens… the World Will Tremble), Fayard, Paris, 1973. The essay’s main thesis is that given the size and growth of the Chinese population, it will inevitably end up imposing itself on the rest of the world as soon as it masters sufficient technology, and that “Today’s China only makes sense if we put it in perspective with yesterday’s China.” As for the title, it comes from a phrase attributed to Napoléon I: “Let China sleep, because when China awakens the whole world will tremble.” Napoléon would have uttered this sentence in 1816 in Saint Helena after reading “Voyage en Chine et en Tartarie” (Journey to China and Tartary) written by Lord George Macartney, Great Britain’s first envoy to China.
[14] United States, Italy, Japan, Germany, Australia, India, France, Canada, UK, and South Korea.
[15] Joseph S. Nye, “Soft Power”, Foreign Policy No. 80. 1990: “These trends suggest a second, more attractive way of exercising power than traditional means. A state may achieve the outcomes it prefers in world politics because other states want to follow it or have agreed to a situation that produces such effects. In this sense, it is just as important to set the agenda and structure the situations in world politics as to get others to change in particular cases. This second aspect of power – which occurs when one country gets other countries to want what it wants – might be called co-optive or soft power in contrast with the hard or command power of ordering others to do what it wants.”
[16] John Dugard, “The choice before us: International law or a ‘rules-based international order’?”, Cambridge University Press, 21 February 2023.
17] Joe R. Biden Jr., “How the US Is Willing to Help Ukraine”, The New York Times International Edition, 2 June 2022.
[23] Among others: the 1977 Protocols to the Geneva Conventions on the Laws of War, the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, the 1989 Rights of the Child Convention, the 1997 Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention, the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the 2006 Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions.
[29] State Councilor and Foreign Minister W. Yi, ‘Remarks by State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi at the United Nations Security Council High-level Meeting on the Theme ‘Maintenance of International Peace and Security: Upholding Multilateralism and the United Nations-centered International System”’, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, 8 May 2021, available at: www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjdt_665385/zyjh_665391/202105/t20210508_9170544.html.
[30] See Ray Dalio, “Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail”, Simon & Schuster, 2021.
[32] Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Richard Fontaine, “The Axis of Upheaval: How America’s Adversaries Are Uniting to Overturn the Global Order”, Center for a New American Security, 23 April 2024.
[33] Sarah Repucci and Amy Slipowitz, “Freedom in the World: Democracy under Siege”, Freedom House.
[34] Thomas Carothers and Benjamin Feldman, “Examining U.S. Relations With Authoritarian Countries”, The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 13 December 2023.
[44] Brahma Chellany, “The BRICS Effect”, Project Syndicate, 18 October 2024.
[45] Algeria, Belarus, Bolivia, China, Cuba, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Mali, Nicaragua, the State of Palestine, the Russian Federation, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Syria, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe.
[46] Tom O’Connor, “China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and More Join Forces ‘in Defense’ of U.N.”, 3 December 2021.
[47] Foreign Affairs, “The Nonaligned world: The West, the Rest, and the New Global Disorder”, May/June 2023.
[48] Tim Murithi, “Order of Oppression: Africa’s Quest for an International System”.
[49] Matias Spektor, “In Defense of the Fence Sitters: What the West Gets Wrong About Hedging”.
[50] Nirupama Rao, “The Upside of Rivalry: India’s Great-Power Opportunity”.
[51] David Miliband, “The World Beyond Ukraine: The Survival of the West and the Demands of the Rest”.
Syria is an indispensable part of Israel’s ambitious plan to remake the Middle East. The country sits at the heart of the region and serves as both a critical landbridge for the transport of weaponry and foot-soldiers from Iran to its allies, as well as the geopolitical center of the armed resistance to Israeli expansion.
In order to truly dominate the region, Israel must topple the government in Damascus and install a puppet regime similar to Jordan and Egypt. Now that Washington has been persuaded to ‘unconditionally’ support Israel’s interests (over its own), there is no better time to affect the changes that are most likely to achieve Tel Aviv’s overarching plan. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is thus prepared to launch a ground war from the South to create a two-front war that will split Syrian forces in half greatly improving his prospects for success. At the same time, US-backed jihadis will continue their rampage in the North gradually eroding Syria’s tattered defenses while further securing Syria’s industrial capital, Aleppo. If Damascus falls and Assad is removed from power, Israel’s dream of regional hegemony will be within reach and likely attainable if—as we assume—President Trump has committed to initiating a war with Iran as part of a quid pro quo with powerful Lobbyists who shoehorned back him into the White House. But, first, Syria must be pacified, its army defeated, and its present ruler ousted. That is the only way that Iran can be effectively cut off from its allies and partners and thus prepared for the dreadful onslaught ahead.
At present, there is only one man on earth who can put an end to Israel’s bloodthirsty crusade:
If Putin does not act fast and provide emergency assistance to Assad, then the current course of events is likely to be irreversible. This could even mean the deploying of Russian combat troops to stave off the US-backed terrorist offensive or (the soon-to-be) provocations in the South. In short, the sovereign state of Syria now faces an existential crisis which will negatively impact the entire region and the world if Putin does not abandon his typically cautious approach and provide the tools Syria needs to fend off the barbarians.
Israel is watching the jihadist rebels’ advances in Syria with considerable wariness, with intelligence chiefs telling the political echelon developments in Syria could ultimately spell trouble for Israel, Channel 12 reports…. Netanyahu was reportedly told that Hezbollah’s attention will now be shifted to Syria, and “so will its forces, in order to defend the Assad regime.”….
The intelligence chiefs ….have warned, “the collapse of the Assad regime would likely create chaos in which military threats against Israel would develop.”
Channel 12 further reports that concerns were raised at Friday’s security consultation that “strategic capabilities” of the Assad regime could fall into the jihadists’ hands. The prime concern relates to “the remnants of chemical weapons,” the report says.
The IDF is said to be preparing for a scenario where Israel would be required to act, the report says without elaboration.
There it is in black and white, the justification for invading Syria. Israel has a number of excuses from which to choose; everything from “chemical weapons” to “Iranian forces” to post regime change “chaos” to Hezbollah forces “defending the Assad regime.” At every step, you can see how well-prepared Israel is for any eventuality. This plan has been in the works for years if not longer. And, of course, the strategy needs to be executed quickly to prepare the battlefield for the Grand Finale, the January inauguration, when the most pro-Zionist president in US history will ascend the throne and reward Israel with the war on Iran it so ardently seeks. Nothing is left to chance.
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Video—Syrian President Assad explains that “Terrorists are the new armies of the West” 3 minutes
Surprisingly, the folks at the Jerusalem Post are more straightforward about their views on the developments in Aleppo. In fact, one astute analyst candidly admits that the capitulation of the nation’s industrial Capital at the hands of fanatical throat-cutters is “good news”. Say what?? Her’s an excerpt from the article:
The Islamist attack on Aleppo is “ostensibly good news for Israel,” Daniel Rakov, a senior research fellow for the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, said in a Saturday post to X/Twitter….. he said that “the fall of northern Syria to the rebels damages the infrastructure of the Iranians and Hezbollah there and will make it difficult for them to work to restore Hezbollah.”……
The Israeli researcher also stated that Russian state media is largely ignoring the conflict in Aleppo while claiming that Russian commentators on global conflicts said that Moscow is not responsible for the defense failure of the Syrian city, saying that Russia had very few forces there and the incident was a huge failure for the Assad regime….
Rakov then entertains the idea of Israel having the opportunity to attack Syria due to the weakness demonstrated by the Assad regime….
“Assad’s loss of Aleppo damages Russia’s image as a power capable of projecting influence outside the post-Soviet space and threatens an important strategic asset of Putin’s, which is the bases in Syria,” he wrote. “This also reflects negatively on Russia’s image in the region.
“The Russians, as we can learn from the Ukrainian offensive in Kursk, are in no hurry to get hysterical, but the speed with which Aleppo fell will require them to respond quickly,” he wrote.
The JISS researcher concluded his post by saying that while the unstable situation in Syria may cause Assad and the Russians to open the gates more strongly for the entry of Iranian military forces, the collapse of the Assad regime may create a scenario for the growth of significant military threats against Israel. Attacks in Aleppo ‘ostensibly good news for Israel,’ JISS researcher says, Jerusalem Post
Repeat: “An opportunity for Israel to strike Syria”?
It is, but it is equally interesting to see that ‘driving Russia out of the Middle East” is nearly as important as toppling Assad. (from Israel’s point of view.) And it’s also clear that Mr. Rakov thinks Putin is ‘on the ropes’ and will fail to respond in a timely manner and that this could be greatly to Israel’s advantage. But, of course, what is most shocking about Rakov’s overall assessment, is the sheer joy he derives from the destruction of a thriving city at the hands of deranged savages bent on replacing a stable, rational system with a despotic religious autocracy. But, I suppose, if genocide is your benchmark for success, nothing should surprise us.
This is a Sunday update on the extremely volatile situation on the ground in Syria:
Russian and Syrian government air strikes pounded central Aleppo on Saturday as rebels claimed control of the city’s international airport and advanced towards Hama… It was the first time air strikes had targeted Aleppo since 2016, when the Syrian opposition was driven out of the city.
However, rebels led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and allied groups, including some backed by Turkey, claimed stunning gains on Saturday. They claimed to have seized Aleppo International Airport and the strategic city of Khan Sheikhoun in southern Idlib. The administrative borders of Idlib Governorate were fully under their control, they added.
They also claimed to have begun marching towards Hama, successfully capturing six towns and villages in the countryside, including Morek, which lies along an important highway connecting central Syria to the north.
The offensive began on Wednesday when rebels broke out from opposition-held territory in northwest Syria towards Aleppo. Within two days, they had seized dozens of towns and villages, as well as a section of the strategic M5 highway, cutting off supply routes to Damascus. They have taken several military bases and fortified positions since, often meeting little resistance.
Collapse of government forces
According to SOHR, government forces have collapsed in Idlib and Aleppo. This has left Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city, outside government control for the first time since the country’s independence in 1946, the monitoring group said….
Amid fast-moving developments, the foreign ministers of Turkey and Russia – both major stakeholders in Syria – spoke by phone on Saturday and agreed to coordinate efforts to stabilise Syria, according to Moscow.
“Both sides expressed serious concerns at the dangerous development of the situation in the Syrian Arab Republic in connection with the military escalation in the Aleppo and Idlib provinces,” the Russian ministry said….
Most of Idlib province has since been held by HTS, a former al-Qaeda affiliate, which has established a civilian administration. Turkey-backed rebel groups in the Syrian National Army coalition have held sway in other areas of the north.
However, despite Russia being distracted by the war in Ukraine and Assad’s forces weakened by frequent Israeli attacks, Syrian and Russian warplanes have stepped up air strikes on opposition-held areas since August 2023. Syria: Deadly strikes hit Aleppo as rebels seize airport, push towards Hama,Middle East Eye
Video: Turkish-backed terrorists enter the president’s villa in Aleppo
Readers should be aware that Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the other so-called “rebel groups”, are mainly Al Qaida affiliates that have been recruited, armed and trained by the US, Qatar and Turkey to pursue a proxy war against the opponents to Israeli expansion and the remaking of the Middle East. Author and analyst Max Blumenthal has done considerable research on the origins of these groups and presented his findings in a recent article titled The US has backed 21 of the 28 ‘crazy’ militias leading Turkey’s brutal invasion of northern Syria. Here’s a short blurb from his article:
Former and current US officials have slammed the Turkish mercenary force of “Arab militias” for executing and beheading Kurds in northern Syria. New data from Turkey reveals that almost all of these militias were armed and trained in the past by the CIA and Pentagon…..
According to a research paper published this October by the pro-government Turkish think tank SETA, “Out of the 28 factions [in the Turkish mercenary force], 21 were previously supported by the United States, three of them via the Pentagon’s program to combat DAESH. Eighteen of these factions were supplied by the CIA via the MOM Operations Room in Turkey, a joint intelligence operation room of the ‘Friends of Syria’ to support the armed opposition. Fourteen factions of the 28 were also recipients of the U.S.-supplied TOW anti-tank guided missiles.”…
In other words, virtually the entire apparatus of anti-Assad insurgents armed and equipped under the Obama administration has been repurposed by the Turkish military to serve as the spearhead of its brutal invasion of northern Syria. The leader of this force is Salim Idriss, now the “Defense Minister” of Syria’s Turkish-backed “interim government.” He’s the same figure who hosted John McCain when the late senator made his infamous 2013 incursion into Syria…..
This band of hacks (The media) is now fully exposed for foisting a bloody scam on the public, marketing some of the most brutal fanatics on the planet as revolutionaries and “moderate rebels” while they destabilized an entire region. Like the extremists they once promoted, most have somehow managed to evade accountability and remain employed. The US has backed 21 of the 28 ‘crazy’ militias leading Turkey’s brutal invasion of northern Syria, Max Blumenthal, The Grayzone
So, who is the world’s biggest supporter of terrorism?
You guessed it: Uncle Sam.
Finally, I’ll finish with a quote from a blogger who I just discovered but with whom I agree on nearly every point she makes. I would be interested to know if other readers feel the same:
This US-Israel-Al Qaeda-Turkey backed operation against Syria, using various proxies and terrorist groups, was long planned in order to divert the Syrian Army’s forces, destabilize & overextend them, allowing Israel to come in from the south, preventing the flow of weapons to Hezbollah from Iran into Iraq, Syria & then Lebanon. The war continues, they merely shifted the theater slightly.
That’s why moments before this “ceasefire” Israel was attacking the border between Syria and Lebanon and continued after. The ceasefire gives Israel time to recover because it’s weak, and time to strategize with Washington until the most Zionist administration comes in. Make no mistake Trump will do what Bibi wants regarding Syria which will now be the focus, as it’s a huge resistance block standing in the way of the greater Israel project. …
Turkey & the two-faced conman Erdogan want control of the North (Syria) and will sell themselves to Israel and the West while condemning Bibi on Gaza. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte went to Turkey & worked out a deal with Washington giving F35s to Turkey right before this attack. He also met with Trump in DC days prior on 11/23.
None of this is coincidence. Essentially Israel isn’t going to follow through with this ceasefire. It’s in essence moot. The collective West including Tel Aviv are already at war against those fighting them to hold onto their national sovereignty. They want to stop Iran, Russia, & Syria, from cooperating to halt their expansionist, warmongering ambitions. Fiorella Isabel @FiorellaIsabelM
First-rate analysis. It helps to explain what’s going behind the fog of media coverage.
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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.
Michael Whitney is a renowned geopolitical and social analyst based in Washington State. He initiated his career as an independent citizen-journalist in 2002 with a commitment to honest journalism, social justice and World peace.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
US Decline, APEC and Geo-Economics the Chinese Way
By Leonid SavinAsia-Pacific Research, December 03, 2024
The 35th summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, which consists of 21 countries from the Americas and Southeast Asia, held last week in Peru, showed that the balance of power is changing rapidly. It is noticeable that the U.S. is losing its influence, although it is trying various methods to retain its hegemony.
APEC itself is a platform that falls well within the description of classical liberalism. In fact, even if one reads the declarations and statements adopted, they may also fit the statements of the US leadership.
For example, the general ministerial declaration reflects that
“we recognize the important role of an enabling, open, fair, non-discriminatory, safer and inclusive digital ecosystem that facilitates trade, as well as the importance of building confidence and security in the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). We encourage countries to intensify efforts to advance digital transformation. Under the agreement with AIDEN, we will work together to facilitate the flow of data, recognizing the importance of privacy and protection of personal data, and building consumer and business confidence in digital transactions.”
Quite the White House Style
On November 16, the Machu Picchu Declaration came out, bearing the signatures of leaders of participating nations, including rival powers like the U.S. and China.
It also spoke of the need for fair, transparent and predictable trade without discrimination and promoting the interconnectedness of the region at various levels. It also decided to hold the next summits from 2025 to 2027 in Korea, China and Vietnam respectively, which shows the role of Southeast Asia in APEC affairs for the next three years.
However, there are nuances. Tellingly, the B3W (Build Back Better World) initiative launched by Joe Biden in 2021 was not mentioned at all in the summit documents. Although its stated goals are quite close to the APEC program documents.
This once again confirms that this U.S. geo-economic project has failed miserably, although representatives of the White House and the State Department occasionally try to use this narrative to exercise influence both in Latin America and the Indo-Pacific region.
China, on the other hand, looked like a clear leader and constructive actor. It was not just the symbolic photo of the leaders of the countries, with Xi Jinping standing in the middle of the first row next to forum hostess Dina Boluarte, and U.S. President Joe Biden modestly tucked away on the edge of the second row. On November 15, the presidents of Peru and China inaugurated the large port of Chancay on the Pacific coast, 70 kilometers from Lima.
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Family photo at the APEC Leaders’ Retreat, Saturday, November 16, 2024, in Lima, Peru. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
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The share of the Chinese logistics company, COSCO Shipping, in this project is 60 percent. That is, China owns a controlling stake. And the total investment is $3.4 billion.
The design capacity of the new port is 1 million TEU (twenty-foot equivalent unit—a conventional unit of measurement of cargo transport capacity) per year in the short term and 1.5 million TEU in the long term. According to Global Times, construction of the main dock structures was completed earlier this year, with more than 80 percent of the project completed.
For China, the emergence of a new transportation hub in Latin America can significantly reduce logistics costs (up to 20 percent) and delivery time (will be 23 days). Previously, cargoes from China were shipped to Mexico or Panama, from where they reached South America. Now China has the opportunity to deliver directly to South America, and Peru becomes an additional transit zone for neighboring countries in the region—Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia, Chile and Brazil, and through these countries to Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay.
In addition to goods from China, Peru will also be able to increase its exports, which have grown significantly in recent years. Last year, Peru sold $23 billion worth of goods to China, a fourfold increase in revenue compared to 2009. This means increased production, more employment and more foreign exchange to buy the goods it needs. About 90% of what Peru exports to China consists of minerals.
And China is now interested in increasing their volumes. It should be noted that Peru and Chile are leaders in copper mining. And neighboring Bolivia has large reserves of lithium.
Overall, the category of major export items from Peru to China includes ore slag and ash ($19.8 billion), copper ($1.18 billion), food processing waste and animal feed ($733.5 million), and copper ($1.18 billion), fish, crustaceans, mollusks, aquatic invertebrates ($336.9 million), edible fruits, nuts, citrus peels, melons ($282.3 million), mineral fuels, oils, distillation products ($258.8 million) – data for 2023.
Obviously, such a breakthrough by China’s Belt and Road Initiative goes against Washington’s desire to pursue its own policy and tell Latin American countries with whom to trade. That is why they immediately began criticizing the project there.
Laura Richardson, a retired general who recently headed the U.S. Southern Command, expressed concern that the port could be used to berth Chinese warships. Richardson also opposed a proposal to build a Chinese port in southern Argentina.
Foreign Policy also quotes anonymous Peruvian analysts as saying the port raises more serious concerns than competition from great powers. Allegedly, construction of the roads and railroads needed to bring cargo to the port is lagging behind.
But it is quite obvious that these problems are solvable and China, together with Peru, will deal with them. And the port itself, as a new hub, will be an example for other countries to see what China can do and compare it to what the US is doing.
What is interesting is that China is using a purely geo-economic approach, which the U.S. itself has previously promoted. Only it does not have ideology and hard power attached to it, which is practiced by Washington. Beijing’s approach is both pragmatic and without imposing any additional political demands, which makes it more attractive than the United States.
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Leonid Savin is Editor-in-Chief of the Geopolitika.ru Analytical Center, General Director of the Cultural and Territorial Spaces Monitoring and Forecasting Foundation and Head of the International Eurasia Movement Administration. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Geopolitika.
Featured image: Family photo at the APEC Leaders’ Retreat, Saturday, November 16, 2024, in Lima, Peru. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
Der Friedensstifter 
