We are just a group of retired spooks that discuss things that you’ll not find anywhere else. It makes us unique. Take a look around. Learn a thing or two.
LDNR authorities have identified the chemical substances US PMCs have brought to the cities of Mariupol, Krasnyi Liman and Avdeevka: botulinum toxin and dibenzoxazepine. These chemical weapon were brought over from the USA by USAF contracted aircraft and are now deployed by 120 US mercenaries.
-False flag aborted in the Ukraine.
Jabber, jabber, jabber from the war-mongers in America about China and Russia. These people are deranged lunatics. And they are somehow delirious believing their invincibility and superiority. They have funded an enormous war machine, and they are pushing, pushing, and pushing towards WAR!
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Just this week Congress passed a $7 billion dollar anti-China propaganda campaign to villainize China and to prevent Chinese news from ever reaching America. To put this in perspective, the 2020 budget of NASA is $20 billion dollars. So it’s roughly one third of the entire space budget of America. That’s how serious the USA is determined to garner the population on a war-footing.
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Why bother? Americans already consider China the enemy. video 5MB
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Fools.
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Here’s an interesting discussion in the American Conservative circles discussing a war with China. It’s illuminating. Not only on the points of view being bantered about, but the lack of understanding on the true realities, and the absolutely horrific consequences involved.
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Read and be enlightened.
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Top American conservatives including AT’s David Goldman recently debated the risks of preparing for war with China
Whether the United States should prepare for war with China – and thereby make war almost inevitable – was the matter of a verbal brawl at one of the largest gatherings of American conservatives, the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida, from October 31 to November 2.
It would have been unseemly to have a polite exchange in a hotel ballroom a few miles from Disney World about the desirability of killing millions of people in a nuclear exchange.
So I wasn’t polite.
Although the arguments on both sides are well known, the Orlando debate merited publication of a lengthy edited transcript, for two reasons.
First, the exchange between former Trump adviser and war-hawk Michael Pillsbury on one side, and former Trump National Security Council official Michael Anton and this writer on the other, set the issues in poignant relief.
Second, the audience of conservative activists, the opinion and organizational leaders of the Republican Party, repudiated the war party by a margin of about three to one, by my informal poll of the audience.
Of the informal guess-timation of participants;
75% of the Conservative opposed a war with China.
25% of the Conservatives were neocons in favor of a war with China.
The American right doesn’t want war with China.
That doesn’t mean war won’t come. Christopher Clark’s magisterial account of the outbreak of World War I, The Sleepwalkers, recounts the intellectual corruption and grandiose irresponsibility of the statesmen who stumbled into World War I.
It’s an old story: If one side mobilizes, the other has to mobilize or be defenseless; if one side believes the other is likely to mobilize, it must do so first. Clark proved – contrary to the usual Anglophile account – that it was the Russian mobilization, urged by the French, that started the war.
By the same token, if the United States attempts to force the issue of Taiwan’s independence, China will pre-empt this by seizing the island. If the United States takes military measures – stationing troops on the island, mining the Taiwan Straits – China will have to consider pre-emptive action.
It’s August 1914 all over again, played as farce rather than tragedy. The European powers had existential interests to defend; the United States has nothing to lose but the perception that it can project its power anywhere in the world, including China’s coasts.
The American military wasted US$6 trillion and thousands of lives in misguided nation-building campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, while China built up a massive high-tech defense in and around its coasts.
This weakened America’s strategic position decisively.
The blunderers who vitiated America’s defense will risk war simply to save their reputations. The war hawks have shown scant interest in rising to China’s technological ambition, which presents a real challenge to America’s leading position in the world.
But they will roll the dice on war over issues that do not bear directly on American security.
America is in NO STATE to take on a war against the combined forces of Russia and China.
Compared to them, the sleepwalkers of 1914 were exemplars of enlightened statesmanship.
Transcript
There follows my edit of the transcript of the conference session on China. I have included all the points of substance, leaving out the ancillary discussion in the interest of space.
Video of the event will be available at the conference website.
Pillsbury:The Hundred-Year Marathon [Pillsbury’s best-selling book] was translated by the Chinese military. No royalties, but they had a little ceremony for me. They make fun of Biden. They say Biden is plagiarizing, it’s the Trump administration policy.
Trump loves to say, if Hillary Clinton had won the election, China would be surpassing us now. But it’s not going to happen on my watch. If you’re close watchers of Joe Biden’s TV interviews, four months ago, he said the exact same words.
China wants to surpass us, but it’s not going to happen on my watch. The Chinese reaction to that is to laugh. Because they don’t expect it to come that soon. But when they do surpass us, I think the level of arrogance they showed today is going to be something that we wish for.
When they do believe that they’re superior to us in a number of ways. We will wish that it was 1947 when the Soviet Cold War began, and we did was, we created the CIA by legislation. We created the Defense Department. We created the National Security Council.
There’s not a single new institution in our government to deal with China. I think there should be.
Goldman: We will spend these next few days complaining about how terrible things are. I hear very little discussion of what we need to do about it. My argument is very simple. We’ve done it before. We did it during the Reagan administration. We did it during the Kennedy administration, we did it under Franklin Roosevelt.
We need to rebuild the American economy and we can only do that with a visionary strategy that galvanizes the imagination of Americans like the Kennedy moon-shot, the Reagan SDI.
The numbers show that the Trump policy towards China was a catastrophic failure. We’re importing now more than 30% more from China than we did in January 2018, when Trump imposed tariffs.
And as for technology suppression?
China’s built 70% of the world’s 5G networks and is proceeding to build the applications on top of that, which constitute the Fourth Industrial Revolution. We can do better than China. We’re better equipped to innovate than China.
But we’re not because we’re crushed by a technocratic elite which has sucked the marrow out of the United States economy and generated enormous wealth doing things that, for the most part, harm us. Nothing short of an intervention by the federal government, namely an industrial policy, will turn that around.
That’s not a classically liberal view of things. Industrial policies are dangerous. They lead to rent-seeking behavior, corruption and too much state power. But that’s what you do in a war, and we’ve got the economic equivalent of a war going on.
The thing that worries me the most is the knuckleheads who spent $6 trillion on forever wars and gutted our military by frittering away our resources. If we’d spent a 10th of that on high-tech weaponry, we wouldn’t be worrying about China’s hyper-velocity missiles or anything else like that.
They will steer us into a confrontation with China that will lead to a war that nobody can win.
John Bolton is the most dangerous lunatic roaming the streets of the United States right now.
If you try to force the independence of Taiwan, any Chinese government that wants to rule China will use military action, Communist or not.
The Chinese Communist Party is Communist the same way the mafia is Catholic. They take it very seriously. But it has very little practical importance for running a Chinese empire. You have to suppress rebel provinces. The only thing we can do with Taiwan is to maintain strategic ambiguity, raise the price of the Chinese taking it by force, which we have no means to stop at this point short of a nuclear war.
We should dissuade them from doing it, maintain Taiwanese democracy and walk the fine line.
John Bolton (on the other hand) would call the question, and that gets a lot of people killed.
John Bolton
If you don’t believe me, read Admiral Stavridis’ marvelous thriller 2034. Spoiler alert: We blow up a bunch of their cities. They blow up a bunch of our cities and we’re back to square one.
Now let me talk about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is what’s really critical here. Wars are not won by stealing data, they are not won by spies, they are won by logistics in depth and the willingness to prevail. The first industrial revolution began when James Watt sold his first commercial steam engine in 1776.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution began when China responded to the Covid-19 pandemic by using artificial intelligence applied to massive data sets to predict potential outbreaks. They are now proceeding to roll out the technologies associated with this. This is the real science fiction stuff we’re talking about – 5G permitting groups of industrial robots to communicate on the shop floor and program themselves.
Smart logistics allow individual objects to be tracked from mine to factory to warehouse to ship back to warehouse to truck loaded onto autonomous vehicles and controlled all the way. It allows AI servers to optimize urban traffic and match every passenger and package to a conveyance.
It allows sensors at the base of soybean plants to communicate with drones that deliver fertilizer and pesticides and direct autonomous tractors to harvest them. We’re talking about an explosion of productivity like that of the first and second industrial revolutions.
The main thing the Chinese stole from us was the great idea of the Reagan Revolution that you can have dual-use technologies, which both give you button guns and butter. They foster civilian productivity. They pay for themselves 10 times over, just like the Apollo program did, just like the Strategic Defense Initiative did.
Every single invention of the digital age. No exceptions started with the DARPA project. They were all funded by the Department of Defense.
The Chinese have stolen the American approach. They want to be Reagan in the Cold War against the sclerotic Soviet Union. Now, they’re not as good at it as we are.
My argument is we have nothing to learn; we only need to remember. We know all these things because we’ve done every single one of them.
We only have to dust off the old ideas and get the band back together, and what I put to you is that the conservative movement needs a part of a positive program, a set of solutions to galvanize the American people, capture their imagination, as Kennedy did when he pointed to the Moon, as Reagan did when he promised to defend the homeland against enemy ballistic missiles.
We need a positive view. We need a can-do approach, and we need to found it on the proven track record of the United States of America in pioneering the future for the world.
Anton: I’m just going to go through a couple of historical points to put this in context. In 1842, the Chinese ceded Hong Kong island to the British in perpetuity – in perpetuity. The Chinese regime at the time of Imperial China greatly resented it. And that resentment carried over through Republican China to Communist China, National, etc.
Why is this important?
This is something that was a thorn in the side of the succession of China as a civilization, not of one regime, not of the communist regime of China for 150 years. It bothered them very greatly. They look forward to the day when they could get it back. They were patient and they got it back.
Without conflict, without much of a struggle, with just some gnashing of teeth and hair, pulling and sighing and crying by the British, but they got it back.
A couple of quotes.
“To win without fighting is best.”
Some of you may remember recognize this.
The second one is:
“To destroy the enemy is not the acme of skill; to capture what you want from the enemy, whether that’s a city, a fortress, a ship, an army, that is the acme of skill.”
Those are both from Sun Tzu, a Chinese classic written about 200 BC. This very well encapsulates the Chinese strategy, I would say, with regard to Hong Kong and with regard to Taiwan.
Taiwan is a similar thorn in the psyche of China.
This would be the case, no matter what the regime in Beijing were. It could be, you know, the neocons’ fantasy of a liberal democratic China, and they would still really care about getting Taiwan back. It’s central to the regime’s conception of its territorial national integrity…
One very firm demand of the Chinese government on the international community is Taiwan can never be a full member of an international organization for which statehood is a member and as a requirement, and they make it very plain that they’ll go to war over that.
They’re very, very clear about this.
An Article five guarantee in the NATO charter, for instance, that is a treaty requirement that the United States has got to go to a nuclear war in defense of a place. [Our agreement with Taiwan] is a commitment of sorts. The full extent of it and what it legally obligates us to do is a bit ambiguous compared to an actual mutual defense treaty signed by both sides.
This comes up a lot, especially lately, because we are told constantly that crisis is brewing in the Taiwan Straits.
China’s been patient.
Patience may be running out.
Maybe they’ll try to do something soon.
What we’ve seen now is a pretty dramatic shift toward I still have a bipartisan consensus on China, but now it’s a bipartisan consensus to sort of beat up on them rhetorically not to take any actual action as far as I can see, except some of the things we talked about.
But what, where that rhetoric leads is, you know, we’re obligated to do something about Taiwan and it would be a stain on the national honor and so on and so forth.
And so if something happens, we’ve got to get into a fight.
China’s preference is still to take Taiwan without fighting for it. Time is on their side. Some are saying, some people who claim to know, are saying, Oh no, no, they’re getting impatient and they’re going to … they’re going to do something shortly.
I just have no basis to evaluate that.
But based on historical precedent, I think the Chinese would certainly like to do exactly what they did with regard to Hong Kong, tipped the balance of strategic power, economic power, political power so much against the possibility of continued Taiwanese independence that public opinion in Taiwan comes to accept the notion that we just have to make the best deal we can make.
And then you win without fighting.
You know, a nation of 24 million can only have so big a military and especially against a nation of 1.4 billion … China’s been building up [its military] for decades. The Taiwan-American combination has not caught up either in terms of sheer numbers and certainly not in terms of technology.
So that’s a way of winning without fighting if you have two or three decades to build up so much force on one side that the other side just looks at it and goes, “I can’t win that fight,” then the fight doesn’t happen unless the other side is delusional or crazy brave.
And the last point I will raise, I just want you to think about this.
I’ll tell you the last time a United States aircraft carrier was sunk. It was the battle of Midway, the USS Yorktown, June of 1942. Actually, we did lose an aircraft carrier last year, not a fleet carrier, a smaller carrier, you know why?
Because it burned in San Diego Harbor and the navy couldn’t figure out how to put out the fire.
USS Bonhomme Richard. A compete loss.
And they had to scrap the ship, the USS Bonhomme Richard. Look it up.
The navy crashed four ships in 2017. Read the official reports from the Department of the Navy and the Congressional investigations on those crashes. They were marvels of esoteric writing to try to dodge the cause of what happened, while somehow revealing it between the lines.
If you’re Taiwan and you’re counting on the United States to defend you, what conclusion did you draw from Afghanistan this summer? Did you get the conclusion that here is a great power that knows what it’s doing, that keeps its promises, and that can execute the things that it wants to do?
American military flee Afghanistan just like they fled Vietnam.
Plausibly, if not certainly, the Chinese have had an ability to sink a fleet carrier for the last decade.
And now… ask yourself how the nation would take it.
Right now, there seems to be a massive amount of group think. We’re only allowed to think about this one way. Only one way.
Nobody is allowed to bring up any of the counterfactuals or any, you know, any other outlying considerations.
And when policy is made on that basis, horrible blunders and catastrophes result.
So before the United States commits itself to some policy or before we, whoever we broadly understood as being in this room are right of center conservatives, intellectuals, nationalists want the best for our country, who want the best for our military, who want to maintain our alliance structure with credibility.
But before we commit ourselves to a policy, are we in this room?
Take a stand in favor of X or against Y and make recommendations that other people may read and listen to.
We should be at least thinking about all of these considerations and, in my view, the conversation as it has. I don’t mean this conversation. I mean, the broad conversation on Taiwan has taken insufficient account of the things that I mentioned and others.
Goldman: The most important fact about any country is its people. Taiwan, according to the CIA World Factbook, has the lowest birth rate of any political entity in the world … China does have a demographic crisis, but Japan, South Korea and especially Taiwan are much worse.
So if you simply. Kick the can down the road, maintain strategic ambiguity. What the Chinese will get if they eventually get Taiwan is a bunch of old people. It’s simply, in my view, not worth having a nuclear war over.
The ideal situation is to maintain the status quo as long as possible. Anything else means a war, and the possible loss of American cities. I ultimately don’t care about China. I care about the United States of America. I’m a nationalist and I want what’s best for us.
We can’t abandon Taiwan because it makes us look weak and we lose important economic advantages and leverage against China. We can’t force the issue and start a war.
The Chinese have hundreds of anti-ship missiles.
Michael Pillsbury and I have something in common. He for many years, and I briefly, worked for a great man at the Pentagon, Andrew Marshall, head of the Office of Net Assessment.
Andy told me in 2013 that the Chinese missiles could (and would) sink an American carrier.
Anton: I think the core answer, it is the best outcome is the status quo for as long as possible because any attempt to change the status quo will be worse than the status quo.
There are only two alternatives to the status quo.
One is Taiwanese independence. Well, Taiwanese independence will start a war. Taiwan becoming part of China would be net bad for us. Obviously, if it becomes a part of China through military action, that’s worse than if they just make a deal.
So for as long as the status quo can be maintained, that’s, unfortunately, the best possible scenario. And I just say unfortunately, because it’s an inherently unstable scenario, and it’s also by its very definition, it’s not permanent. The status quo isn’t going to last forever, so let’s stretch it out for as long as we can, and that’s unfortunately about the best we can do.
Pillsbury: President Trump once asked me, How did we used to defend Taiwan? He saw me as the in-house historian who knew all this ancient stuff. Nobody else in the room knew.
So I finally spoke up.
We used to have atom bombs there. We used to have them attached to jet fighters ready to go to hit the mainland with the Chinese made sure that Kissinger took them out in ’74. We used to have a treaty with a garrison and 30,000 troops and a war planning unit underground in Taipei.
Now it’s an art center and a Mongolian barbecue restaurant …
So what do the paranoid group in charge today say when they hear someone like Michael Anton say, oh, we can’t get it in a war, you know, they think that this is American deception.
Of course, the Americans are going to get into a war, which is why they’ve been increasing the deployments and we are moving closer to a nuclear war with China.
It’s not just me saying this, quite a few other people inside the government are saying this as well.
The head of our strategic command in charge of all our nuclear forces, he’s given two interviews. He says the Chinese are engaging in a strategic breakout of their nuclear weapons, including ICBMs, which they are doubling or tripling.
This is the four-star admiral who commands our nuclear forces.
Quite a few other people are talking this way – very different from Michael Anton. They’re more like Churchill. Bill Buckley, the long tradition of Americans like Barry Goldwater …
So I’m going to have to go home to Washington.
So yes, I went to the conservatism conference. A bunch of the people there on the panel said surrender Taiwan. We don’t want to go to war with China. That’s appeasement. Michael and I should clarify his remarks in my humble opinion.
Anton: If they can sink an aircraft carrier and if the only way to stop an invasion of Taiwan is to deploy the forward-deployed aircraft carrier…
and maybe send one or two others out there, which as far as I know, is the only way for the United States to effectively defend the island if the Chinese decide to invade it and they sink one of these 12 to 14 billion dollar behemoths with 6,500 men on board.
What’s the US response going to be at that point?
Pillsbury: Well, we could turn to you and say, I surrender.
Anton: What would you do if you were either the secretary of defense, the president, the head of a Pacific Command and sitting there in Pearl Harbor?
Pillsbury: I’ve been working on this for 30 years. More recently, the US has gotten a much more detailed picture of what it could do.
Exactly which targets inside China could be struck.
Exactly which targets inside China could be struck?
What would happen the first morning?
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New York “concrete jungle” cleared of the underbrush.
More and more work is being done on both sides about how a war would happen and both the Chinese and American military have come to a conclusion.
It would be a long war.
Okay, maybe two or three years – I haven’t read.
There’s a brand new book by the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon under Trump [Elbridge Colby’s The Strategy of Denial, featured in a June 2021 Asia Times webinar].
There’s a whole chapter on how to recapture Taiwan after it’s been partially taken by the Chinese military.
This is the state of the art thinking.
There’s a new piece of legislation, the Taiwan Defense Act … They say, please, Pentagon, give us a plan for how to avoid a fait accompli taking place on Taiwan. The Pentagon is drafting their response.
We’re moving closer to a war.
It doesn’t help for you to tell conservatives, oh, if we lose an aircraft carrier, what are we going to do then? What would Winston Churchill say?
Goldman: What, Winston Churchill? Just before the fall of Singapore in 1942, according to Andrew Roberts, Winston Churchill said in the event of war “the Japanese would fold up like the Italians because there were the wops of the Far East.”
Winston Churchill, when it came to Asia, was an absolute idiot, and we bailed him out. He was as stupid as Nicholas II who lost the Russian fleet at Tsushima [in 1905].
Bridge Colby has been a dear friend for 20 years who is now hallucinating about what the United States might do to take Taiwan back.
This is crazy.
Anton: Following the logic of what you said – because I haven’t read whatever STRATCOM put out – I have read certain analyses: not even analysis. There’s speculations that the Chinese are increasing the size of the nuclear arsenal in this underground network of tunnels that we can’t follow and so on.
The official estimate that we have some confidence in is that the Chinese nuclear arsenal is at least 300 warheads, right?
None of which have to be air-dropped anymore.
That means all [delivered by] ICBM hyper-velocity AI-guided missiles. And if you read their doctrine, unlike ours, they formally take a doctrine of minimal deterrence.
That is to say, they have no kind of nuclear warfighting doctrine at all.
They just have city killers.
And if they feel that the territorial integrity of China or the survival of the state is at stake, they’re willing to use those 300 missiles or some portion of them on American cities. The largest 300 American cities would be blasted into radioactive rubble.
The largest surviving American city would be New Bedford, Massachusetts. With it's five gas stations, and two strip malls. -MM
In fact, once as I’m sure you remember in the far-off year of 1996 on one of the more tense moments in the Taiwan Strait, a Chinese general was quoted as saying, “I don’t think the Americans will do anything at the end of the day. They won’t want to trade Los Angeles for Taipei.”
Their nuclear arsenal is now triple what it was.
And they’re going on a more offensive posture with nuclear weapons and this thing ends up going to nuclear war.
How that fits into the seeming “recommendation” you just gave, I have to admit, being somewhat dim, I don’t see because it would seem to make the danger greater.
And I also would ask: What do you think the American people’s response to losing a fleet carrier would be?
My own estimate is it would be the greatest psychological shock we’ve had in a generation, arguably greater than 9/11.
Unquestionably, getting one single city nuked would be the greatest psychological shock the American nation has ever had in its history.
So how do we deal with something like that, given that Taiwan is orders of magnitude more important to China, and they’re willing to do that over this, as they have said, than it is to us?
From a Chinese point of view, Taiwan is like the US "Statue of Liberty". Destroy it and the Chinese would sacrifice their first born in revenge.
From an American point of view Taiwan is a news item that fits in the bottom of a news feed. Nestled somewhere between a Viagra ad and a cute cat video. -MM
Well, I’m going to be the dove here and say that it’s possible to avoid a nuclear war, whether it be over Taiwan or any other place.
I’d kind of prefer to do that.
If that makes me an outlier, I’m at least I’m in good company with that other famous nuclear dove named Ronald Reagan.
Goldman: [to the audience] Who volunteers to be in the first city that gets nuked? Any takers?
No. Not me!
Pillsbury: One wonderful book shocked the hell out of me. It came out of the Hoover Institution 1962. It’s called Wall Street and Hitler. It’s by a professor who went through the Nuremberg war trials after the war.
I didn’t know Henry Ford’s photo was in Hitler’s office.
I didn’t know the Nazis gave prizes to different American businessmen.
I didn’t know that the Nazis knew they lacked synthetic oil production and that they got the technology from America.
It’s a long book and it goes to in great detail what Wall Street was willing to do even as late as 1938-1939. We had a huge debate about getting involved in Europe … A big group in our country in ’38, ’39 wanted to surrender to Hitler – for lack of a better word; surrender.
Anton: What are they trying to do? I mean, the Soviet Union had to be contained because the Soviet Union was very explicitly an expansionist power.
We know the Chinese would like to expand and take Taiwan.
I’m not aware of the Chinese wanting to expand and take other people’s territory.
They want to exert dominance in East Asia and in the western Pacific, and some of that dominance they will exert in ways that will be deleterious to American interests.
That’s irrespective of our ability to be able to prevent and stop that. But I think there are certain things we could probably be doing better that could push back against some of those influences. But it’s not as if unless, you know, Michael Pillsbury could tell me differently.
Like the Chinese after Taiwan, they’re going to invade South Korea and they’re going to invade Japan, and then they’re going to invade Vietnam.
I don’t know. I don’t get the sense of that from them, nor in the sources that I read. Granted, I can’t read Mandarin. They don’t say that they want to do that.
Pillsbury: Specifically, specifically on Japan and in India … the Chinese think this is part of the key.
They hope the Americans don’t do it.
The Japanese stick to 1% of their GDP on defense, which is very, very low. Maybe that will double to 2% over the coming years.
That’s an alarm sign to the Chinese.
The Indians want to. They’re fiercely independent. The British poured poison in their ears as they left that the Americans are going to be a new colonial power.
You know, we don’t have a treaty with them. So we’ve got a long way with the Indians. We have quite a few military exercises … So slowly, we’re improving our military cooperation with India, other countries in the region.
Trump picked up the idea of the Quad as a magic word. Japanese say they invented it. Biden attacked Trump. You don’t, you know, you’re not seeking help from our allies. I think it was not true.
But the Quad, even under Biden, is starting to increase its consultations, mainly about China. So things are moving in the direction of your question.
Some videos describing what is not being said
It’s like a discussion over tea and crackers. Oh “Taiwan is sort of important to the Chinese, well we can convince them…” In your fucking wet dreams. The Chinese no longer has any tolerance for the United States BULLSHIT. Just like Putin has. These jackasses have no idea who they are dealing with.
I am gonna show you all.
History
Burned into the minds and soul of China. If you all think that China will allow an invasion by any one for any reason, you are very, VERY mistaken. They will rip apart your cities, gut your nations, and then burn it to the ground. They are a serious nation that does not play games.
Atrocities by the Japanese occupation forces 1937. video 6MB
Actual photos, actual sound recordings. Nasty shit. video 11MB
Atrocities by the Japanese inflicted on the Chinese. video 20MB
The Chinese are not individualists. they fight for their community! video 6MB
Serious. Dangerous. Well equipped. Superbly trained. video 3MB
Very dangerous. Not a music video. look at the equipment. video 6MB
You all think that American military can airlift and sea transport forces into Chinese waters safely to fight this formidable army? video 3MB
Reread the dialog
They are talking about a “long drawn out war” with China.
What would actually happen?
The moment a war starts, the USA GDP will fall to under 50% of what it is now. And that is just if there is another “regional police action”. Not a full-borne war. A full on war, would collapse the GDP to a fraction of what it is now. Perhaps in the single digits. Think 2% to 6%.
As such, inflation would skyrocket, and the value of the USD would approach zero. Think $25,000 for a can of Pepsi. That’s pretty pricy even for you Pepsi lovers out there.
99% of all medicines used in the United States come from China. How is America going to deal with providing hospitals medications, and supplies? That means ZERO MEDICINE. When a full 65% of the American population is on some kind of medicine, and you take that away… whether pain medicine, anti-depression medicine, heart or high blood pressure medicine, anti-biotics, aspirin, tums stomach medicine… what will happen? My guess is “Zombie apocalypse”.
How are the people going to react to all this? Bare store shelves? Insane prices for gas and heating oil? Electricity? And periodic internet if any? They will be very frustrated, angry and fearful. And they all will have lots and lots of guns…
America is a mess domestically. You cannot isolate the long drawn out fighting and overlook how it will affect the domestic population.
Any war with China is a war against Russia and China together. There is no fucking way that America is able to fight TWO (x2) above-peer military forces, let alone one. The result would be the destruction of ALL 13 core aircraft carriers, all major naval bases and staging locations.
How will the American public react to that.
And knowing so…
Conclusion
…America would “push the big red nuclear button”. But it would be too late. American cites would already be rubble.
Funny how NO ONE is addressing this very clear and always present danger. My guess is that they are all collectively idiots of the lowest caliber. And I am being generous.
Consider this memo to all the employees at McDonald’s.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
It’s an exciting time. If you can ignore the howls of fright, and fear, from the oligarchy in the United States you can clearly see that the world is uniting and coming together. Roadblocks have been set aside. nations are unifying, sharing resources, and working together for the mutual benefit of all. And it’s long overdue.
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Key to this is the BRI. And all the nations that are connected to the BRI will profit handsomely. But here (in this article) we will concentrate on the main lines or corridors between the big three; Russia, China and Iran. Of course, everyone else near by stands to profit and benefit from all of this. Indeed, it’s a real exciting time.
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Here’s some “meat” as to what the BRI contains. Noting that much is still left out, the roads, the bridges, the tunnels, the high-speed rail lines, and the local community infrastructure. Indeed the scope of the BRI project is vast, just vast. It’s sort of like a major effort to go to the moon, kind of “vast”.
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The following is an article titled “How Eurasia will be interconnected”. I was written by Pepe Escobar. I edited it to fit this venue, and all credit to the author. You also might want to visit the UNZ where most of his articles reside and where there are many other articles of great interest.
The extraordinary confluence between the signing of the Iran-China strategic partnership deal and the “Ever Given” saga in the Suez Canal is bound to spawn a renewed drive to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and all interconnected corridors of Eurasia integration.
"Ever Given" saga in the Suez Canal
EverGiven is one of the largest container ships in the world. The ship is owned by Shoei Kisen Kaisha, and is time chartered and operated by container transportation and shipping company Evergreen Marine, headquartered in Luzhu District, Taoyuan City, Taiwan.
In April 2021, it blocked the Suez Canal for days leading onto weeks, and put a halt to most sea-traffic using the canal.
Iran-China strategic partnership
The Iran-China bilateral 25-year Comprehensive Strategic Partnership was signed in Tehran by foreign ministers Javad Zarif and Wang Yi on 27 March 2021.
While specific details of the agreement are unknown, the joint statement released on signing refers to strengthening political and parliamentary ties, the recognition and pursuit of mutual strategic interests, increased cooperation in defense training, equipment, technology, and intelligence, increased cooperation in counterterrorism and counter-narcotics, and expanded economic ties, especially in finance, mining, energy, agriculture, and infrastructure.
Infrastructure includes ports and railway networks and is linked to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
This is the most important geoeconomic development in Southwest Asia in ages – even more crucial than the geopolitical and military support to Damascus by Russia since 2015.
Multiple overland railway corridors across Eurasia featuring cargo trains crammed with freight (the most iconic of which is arguably Chongqin-Duisburg) are a key plank of BRI. In a few years, this will all be conducted on high-speed rail.
The chongqing duisburg railway.
ChinaandEurope: Reconnecting Across a New Silk Roaddigitalrepository.trincoll.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1129&context=facpub
Chongqing Duisburg BELARUS GERMANY POLAND Venice Athens GEORGIA ARMENIA AZERBAIJAN Colombo TRANS-EURASIA RAILROADThe 11,179-kilometre rail line is the most important connection to Europe.
Launched in 2011 by a joint venture with Germany, China, Kazakhstan, and Russia, the rail goes from the city of Chongqing in southwestern China to Duisburg,Germany.
The key overland corridor is Xinjiang-Kazakhstan. (As shown in the map below.)
And then onwards to Russia and beyond outbound to Europe.
The other overland corridor traverses Central Asia and Iran, all the way to Turkey, the Balkans and Eastern Europe. It may take time – in terms of volume – to compete with maritime routes, but the substantial reduction in shipping time is already propelling a massive cargo surge.
The Iran-China strategic connection is bound to accelerate all interconnected corridors leading to and crisscrossing Southwest Asia.
A visual comparison of maritime travel compared to rail travel.
Crucially, multiple BRI trade connectivity corridors are directly linked to establishing alternative routes to oil and gas transit, controlled or “supervised” by the Hegemon since 1945: Suez, Malacca, Hormuz, Bab al Mandeb.
HegemonyHegemony (UK:, US:) is the political, economic, or military predominance or control of one state over others.
In ancient Greece (8th century BC – 6th century AD), hegemony denoted the politico-military dominance of a city-state over other city-states. The dominant state is known as the hegemon.
In the 19th century, hegemony came to denote the "Social or cultural predominance or ascendancy; predominance by one group within a society or milieu". Later, it could be used to mean "a group or regime which exerts undue influence within a society".
Also, it could be used for the geopolitical and the cultural predominance of one country over others, from which was derived hegemonism, as in the idea that the Great Powers meant to establish European hegemony over Africa, Asia and Latin America.-Wikipedia
Black Ops for the Ever Given Blockage in the Suez Canal?
Informal conversations with Persian Gulf traders have revealed huge skepticism about the foremost reason for the Ever Given saga.
The Ever Given, the 200,000-ton cargo ship that became stuck in the Suez Canal on March 23, was finally freed Monday after blocking the waterway for nearly a week, according to the Associated Press. The ship garnered international media attention and has become the subject of online conspiracy theories.
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Merchant marine pilots agree that winds in a desert storm were not enough to harass a state of the art mega-container ship equipped with very complex navigation systems.
The pilot error scenario, induced or not, is being seriously considered.
Then there’s the predominant shoptalk: stalled Ever Given was…
No wonder cynics, addressing the whole episode, are asking, Cui Bono?
Cui BonoCui bono? (Classical Latin: [kui̯ ˈbɔnoː]), in English "to whom is it a benefit?", is a Latin phrase about identifying crime suspects.
Itexpresses the view that crimes are often committed to benefit their perpetrators, especially financially. Which party benefits may not be obvious, and there may be a scapegoat.
-Wikipedia
Persian Gulf traders, in hush hush mode, also drop hints about the project for Haifa to eventually become the main port in the region. This would be in close cooperation with the Emirates. It would connect via a railway to be built between Jabal Ali in Dubai to Haifa, bypassing Suez.
Back to facts on the ground, the most interesting short-term development is how Iran’s oil and gas may be shipped to Xinjiang via the Caspian Sea and Kazakhstan – using a to-be-built Trans-Caspian pipeline.
Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline (TCP) is a proposed pipeline which would transport gas from Turkmenistan to Azerbaijan across the Caspian sea via an undersea pipeline.[1] It is also known as the South Caucasus Pipeline Future Expansion (SCPFX), due to its connection with the South Caucasus Gas Pipeline. It is similar to the proposed Trans-Caspian 2 Gas Pipeline.
In May 2019 a pre-FEED (front end engineering and design) study began for a plan to build two Trans-Caspian pipelines. The first pipeline would follow an expanded SGC route (South Caucasus Pipeline, Tanap and Tap) to a final destination of Italy. The Trans-Caspian 2 Gas Pipeline would follow the White Stream route from the Georgian coast, entering the EU in Romania and reaching western Europe via existing pipelines in Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Slovakia and onwards.
- Global Fossil Infrastructure Tracker, a project of Global Energy Monitor
That falls right into classic BRI territory.
Actually more than that, because Kazakhstan is a partner not only of BRI but also the Russia-led Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU).
From Beijing’s point of view, Iran is also absolutely essential for the development of a land corridor from the Persian Gulf to the Black Sea and further to Europe via the Danube.
It’s obviously no accident that the Hegemon is on high alert in all points of this trade corridor…
“Maximum pressure” sanctions and hybrid war against Iran;
An attempt to manipulate the Armenia-Azerbaijan war;
The post-color revolution environment in both Georgia and Ukraine – which border the Black Sea;
NATO’s overarching shadow over the Balkans;
It’s all part of the plot.
Now get me some Lapis Lazuli
Another fascinating chapter of Iran-China concerns Afghanistan.
According to Tehran sources, part of the strategic agreement deals with Iran’s area of influence in Afghanistan and the evolution of still another connectivity corridor all the way to Xinjiang.
And here we go back to the always intriguing Lapis Lazuli corridor – which was conceptualized in 2012, initially for increased connectivity between Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey.
Lapis Lazuli corridor
LapisLazuliisan international transit route openedin 2018 linking Afghanistan toTurkeyviaTurkmenistan, Azerbaijan andGeorgia. The name “Lapis Lazuli” isderived from the historic route that Afghanistan'slapislazuliand other semiprecious stones were exported along, over 2,000 years ago, to the Caucasus, Russia, the Balkans, Europe, and North Africa along the ancient Silk Road. The initiative will serve to reinforce the Afghan Government's Infrastructure and Connectivity Development, Energy, and Private Sector Development National Priority Programs. The Lapis Lazuli corridor is funded by the Asian Development Bank. Currently, the transit project’s budget is estimated at $2 billion.-Wikipedia
Lapis Lazuli, wonderfully evocative, harks back to the export of an array of semiprecious stones via the Ancient Silk Roads to the Caucasus, Russia, the Balkans and North Africa.
Now the Afghan government sees the ambitious 21st century remix as…
Departing from Herat (a key area of Persian influence),
Continuing to the Caspian Sea port of Turkmenbashi in Turkmenistan,
Via a Trans-Caspian pipeline to Baku,
Onwards to Tblisi,
And through the Georgian ports of Poti and Batumi in the Black Sea,
And finally connected to Kars and Istanbul.
This is really serious business; a drive that may potentially link the Eastern Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean.
Since Russia, Iran, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan signed the Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea in 2018, in the Kazakh port of Aktau…
…what’s interesting is that their major issues are now discussed at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), where Russia and Kazakhstan are full members.
Iran will soon be;
Azerbaijan is a dialogue partner;
and Turkmenistan is a permanent guest.
Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea ...Publish Year: 2019
Author: Rizal Abdul Kadir
Published: Apr 25, 2019
After twenty-two years of negotiations, in Aktau on August 12, 2018, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Iran, Russia, and Turkmenistan signed the Convention onthe Legal Status of the Caspian Sea. The preamble of the Convention stipulates, amongother things, that the Convention, made up of twenty-four articles, was agreed on by the five states based on principles and norms of the Charter of theUnited Nations and International Law.
The Iranian Caspian Sea Canal
Construction of a navigable channel linking the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf is underway. It is expected the project will be completed in the 2020s.
The project is particularly interesting for Russia due to the cold spell with Turkey, but European and post-Soviet states will also benefit from it.
But it seems the US is worried about this alternative to the Suez Channel.
"The West and Turkey have directly or indirectly tried to block the waterway [from being created]. As a matter of fact, the United States imposed sanctions" on companies that have been involved in the project, economic analyst Alexei Chickin wrote.
-Sputnik News
One of the key connectivity problems to be addressed is the viability of building a canal from the Caspian Sea to Iran’s shores in the Persian Gulf.
Another issue is the imperative transition towards container cargo transport in the Caspian.
In SCO terms, that will…
Increase Russian trade with India via Iran
As well as offering an extra corridor for China trade with Europe.
Now, with Azerbaijan prevailing over Armenia in the Nagorno-Karabakh flare up…
…while finally sealing a deal with Turkmenistan over their respective status in the Caspian Sea…
… impetus for the western part of Lapis Lazuli is now in the cards.
The eastern part is a much more complicated affair, involving an absolutely crucial issue now on the table not only for Beijing but for the SCO: the integration of Afghanistan to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).
And then…
In late 2020, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan agreed to build what analyst Andrew Korybko delightfully described as the PAKAFUZ railway. PAKAFUZ will be a key step to expand CPEC to Central Asia, via Afghanistan. Russia is more than interested.
This can become a classic case of the evolving BRI-EAEU melting pot.
Crunch time – serious decisions included – will happen this summer, when Uzbekistan plans to host a conference called “Central and South Asia: Regional Interconnectedness. Challenges and Opportunities”.
So everything will be proceeding interconnected:
A Trans-Caspian link;
The expansion of CPEC;
Af-Pak connected to Central Asia;
An extra Pakistan-Iran corridor (via Balochistan, including the finally possible conclusion of the IP gas pipeline) all the way to Azerbaijan and Turkey;
With China deeply involved in all these projects.
Beijing will be building roads and pipelines in Iran, including one to ship Iranian natural gas to Turkey.
Iran-China, in terms of projected investment, is nearly ten times more ambitious than CPEC.
Call it CIEC (China-Iran Economic Corridor).
In a nutshell: the Chinese and Persian civilization-states are on the road to emulate the very close relationship they enjoyed during the Silk Road-era Yuan dynasty in the 13th century.
INSTC or bust
An extra piece of the puzzle concerns how the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) will mix with BRI and the EAEU.
Iran, Russia and India have been discussing the intricacies of this 7,200 km-long ship/rail/road trade corridor since 2002.
INSTC technically starts in Mumbai and goes all the way via the Indian Ocean to Iran, the Caspian Sea, and then to Moscow.
As a measure of its appeal, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, Oman, and Syria are all INSTC members.
Much to the delight of Indian analysts, INSTC reduces transit time from West India to Western Russia from 40 to 20 days, while cutting costs by as much as 60%.
It’s already operational.
But not yet as a continuous, free flow sea and rail link.
New Delhi already spent $500 million on a crucial project: the expansion of Chabahar port in Iran, which was supposed to become its entry point for a made in India Silk Road to Afghanistan and onward to Central Asia.
But then it all got derailed by New Delhi’s flirting with the losing United States “Quad” proposition.
Mike Pompeo (USA) with Subrahmanyam Jaishankar (India).
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India also invested $1.6 billion in a railway between Zahedan, the key city in southeast Iran, and the Hajigak iron/steel mining in central Afghanistan.
This all falls into a possible Iran-India free trade agreement which is being negotiated since 2019 (for the moment, on stand-by).
Iran and Russia already clinched a similar agreement.
And India wants the same with the EAEU as a whole.
Following the Iran-China strategic partnership, chairman of the Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, Mojtaba Zonnour, has already hinted that the next step should be an Iran-Russia strategic cooperation deal, privileging…
What Moscow is already seriously considering is to build a canal between the Caspian and the Sea of Azov, north of the Black Sea. Meanwhile, the already built Caspian port of Lagan is a certified game-changer.
Thisisbecause one of the twocanals connecting the Caspian Sea to the outside worldistheVolga–Don Canal, which links the Caspian Sea with the Sea of Azov. Russia hasused the Volga–Don Canal to move warships between the Caspian Sea andtheSea of Azov.
-Russian dominancein the Black Sea: TheSeaofAzov
Volga–Don Canal.
Lagan directly connects with multiple BRI nodes.
There’s rail connectivity to the Trans-Siberian all the way to China.
Across the Caspian, connectivity includes Turkmenbashi in Turkmenistan and Baku in Azerbaijan, which is the starting point of the BTK railway through to the Black Sea and then all the way from Turkey to Europe.
On the Iranian stretch of the Caspian, Amirabad port links to the INSTC, Chabahar port and further on to India. It’s not an accident that several Iranian companies, as well China’s Poly Group and China Energy Engineering Group International want to invest in Lagan.
What we see in play here is Iran at the center of a maze progressively interconnected with Russia, China and Central Asia.
When the Caspian Sea is finally linked to international waters, we will see a de facto alternative trade/transport corridor to Suez.
Himalaya Silk Road
Post-Iran-China, it’s not far-fetched anymore to even consider the possible emergence in a not too distant future of a Himalaya Silk Road uniting BRICS members China and India (think, for instance, of the power of Himalayan ice converging into a shared Hydropower Tunnel).
Himalaya Silk Road to the BRI.
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As it stands, Russia is very much focused on limitless possibilities in Southwest Asia, as Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov made it clear in the 10thMiddle East conference at the Valdai club.
The Hegemon’s treats on multiple fronts – Ukraine, Belarus, Syria, Nord Stream 2 – pale in comparison.
21st Century Geopolitics
The new architecture of 21st century geopolitics is already taking shape, with China providing multiple trade corridors for non-stop economic development…
…while Russia is the reliable provider of energy and security goods, as well as the conceptualizer of a Greater Eurasia home…
… with “strategic partnership” Sino/Russian diplomacy playing the very long game.
Southwest Asia and Greater Eurasia have already seen which way the (desert) winds are blowing.
And soon will the masters of international capital. Russia, China, Iran, India, Central Asia, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Korean Peninsula, everyone will experience a capital surge – financial vultures included.
Following the Greed is Good gospel, Eurasia is about to become the ultimate Greed frontier.
…if left unencumbered.
The United States has a say…
The problem with the BRI is that it links Europe to Russia, Persia and China and permits local currency use instead of the USD and oceanic maritime trade. Over a period of time, the value of the USD will decrease due to it no longer being the global currency, and in order to maintain it’s value the United States would have to revert back tot he “gold standard”.
Which shouldn’t be a problem. Right?
I’m sure that the United States has 30 trillion dollars worth of gold stashed here and there. Somewhere. <\sarcasm>
Of course, it is in the best interests of the United States to prevent any kind of prosperity, or changes at any level from occurring in Asia. Any and all changes will have a negative effect on America at all levels. The only way that America can maintain it’s “rules based hegemony” (The USA makes the rules, and you either follow them or be destroyed) is for it to be the dominant and preeminent ruling structure on the globe.
Here is a couple of links to thorough, in-depth analysis </sarcasm> of this situation from America;
Nah. They pretty much say the same tired old thing. China is doing this because it is evil and wants to ensnare the world like a spider trapping a fly in it’s web. Yada, yada, yada.
The only way to stop this is militarily
And that, in itself open up a “whole can of worms”.
Rick0Sheaon April 10, 2021 · at 5:56 pm EST/EDT
I watched an excellent documentary on war a fews years ago. They talked about wars going back thousands of years to the present. When an army is going to attack, all the plans and logistics are carefully put in place. Once all the preparations have been made the only thing left is to trigger it off. The instigators do not want to be seen as the aggressors so they fabricate (false flag) something so they claim they were attacked first — and off they go. The war they planned and wanted so bad is underway.The Russian military would see all this unfolding – it’s on rails. But what could they do? The USA won’t be deterred. The only way this could have been avoided that I can see is that if the USA feared a nuclear war with Russia to the extent they would not take such ridiculously dangerous chance.
Here’s a great article by John Paul Roberts that is certainly worth a read regarding the sum total of military options that the USA has…
In Continuation of a Conversation with Paul Craig Roberts
Andrei Martyanov • April 7, 2021
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Here are few numbers, we’ll start with two: 447 million and 4.67 billion. These two numbers speak volumes, and are in the foundation of the America’s decline and increasingly irrational behavior which may, quoting Bachman Turner Overdrive’s famous hit, get us to the point of a proverbial ain’t seen nothing yet.
The first number is a population of European Union, while the second one is a population of Asia.
Second place in this count is taken by Africa, around 1.37 billion, and the third–by Latin America and Caribbean with respectable 659 million which is considerably larger still than the population of the European Union. The Northern America’s population is around 371 million, which in the larger scheme of things doesn’t look that impressive. In fact, it isn’t.
The history of colonialism—I deliberately omit here this qualifier “Western”, there were all kinds of colonialisms—as related to classic capitalism was more than just about exploitation of colonies for the benefit of metropole.
While images of extraction of natural resources from colonies and shipping those to metropoles are correct, they do not form a complete picture.
In the end, colonies were viewed as markets where metropole would sell its products. The larger the colony, the more numerous its population was, the larger was the market for products manufactured in metropole.
This all made a complete, however often bloody, economic sense in the times of a good ol’ industrial capitalism when metropole would get resources from colony and turn them into finished product and then will ship this finished product, with a huge value added, to be sold in colony.
For Native Americans who sold Manhattan to Dutch in 1626 for allegedly, and hotly contested by historians, $24 worth in finished goods, whatever was offered was a huge value for them because they could not produce those items, be that, as mythology states, shiny glass bids or whatever else much more technologically advanced Dutch would offer them.
That is how it worked more or less for centuries.
The more and better items one produced the richer one would become.
That is until FIRE economy and simulacrum of the post-industrialism were revealed to the world by people most of who would have difficulty passing a general contractor exam, not to speak of getting industrial engineering degree.
FIRE economyA FIRE economy is any economy based primarily on the finance, insurance, and real estate sectors.
Finance, insurance, and real estate are United States Census Bureau classifications. Barry Popik describes some early uses as far back as 1982. Since 2008, the term has been commonly used by Michael Hudson and Eric Janszen.
It is New York City's largest industry and a prominent part of the service industry in the United States overall economy and other Western developed countries.
-Wikipedia
Fast forward to May 2000 to the passage of House Resolution 4444 China Trade Bill. In one of the most profoundly mindless and ignorant statements of America’s foreign and economic policy, Bill Clinton proclaimed that:
“Today the House of Representatives has taken an historic step toward continued prosperity in America, reform in China and peace in the world. If the Senate votes as the House has just done, to extend permanent normal trade relations with China, it will open new doors of trade for America and new hope for change in China. Seven years ago, when I became president, I charted a new course for a new economy—a course of fiscal discipline, investment in our people and open trade. I have always believed that by opening markets abroad we open opportunities at home. We’ve worked hard to advance that goal of more open and more fair trade since 1993, all the way up to the landmark legislation I signed just a few days ago to expand trade with Africa and the Caribbean Basin.”
Cringeworthy in its sheer falsity and insufferable pathos…
…the economic equivalent of Chamberlain’s “Peace in Our Time” 1938 proclamation, after signing the Munich capitulation to Hitler…
…Clinton’s declaration rattled even those who otherwise wouldn’t even pay much attention to the economic affairs of the United States.
China, wasn’t upset; why would it be?
Both NAFTA and China’s accession to the WTO served as a massive vacuum cleaner sucking the life from American industries and, to be sure, these weren’t banking or financial consulting “industries” which were being shipped abroad.
American manufacturing started to leave its own shores.
America started to lose its only tool which was and even today remains the only valid mean to an end of economic prosperity—manufacturing capacity.
A concept which is beyond the grasp of most American economists and political pseudo-scientists most of who today wear Chinese tailored suits, carry iPhones manufactured in China and use laptops and PCs assembled there as well.
To be sure, America still produces some things—civilian aircraft, as an example.
But since the whole Boeing 737 Max affair, which can only be described in strongest profanity, the shining from the polished outward façade of Boeing is largely gone and the stalwart of the American commercial aviation has de facto lost competition to its EU rival Airbus.
Cars?
Sure. America still remains competitive at manufacturing trucks.
The rest?
America’s sedans are not competitive and lose out to Japanese and Korean car makers both domestically and internationally, enough to take a look at Ford losing Russian market to Asian, Russian and EU automakers, with the last Ford Focus plant closed in Russia recently.
In other, rather startling development, America’s main soft power export, Hollywood is losing its piercing power in China and in Russia.
In fact, it is not just losing it, it already lost it.
Hollywood’s “values” of a radical feminism, anti-male misogyny and promotion of the sexual deviancy are hardly in demand in largely conservative Chinese and Russian societies.
Sure, there are some items which the United States manufactures today which are in demand, or, if one gets to the reality of it all, forcefully imposed on customers—America’s hugely overpriced and dubiously effective weapon systems.
This is what remains of once America’s mighty industrial plant which could produce anything from socks and kitchen combines to good combat and excellent commercial aircraft.
Today this capacity is no more, since it is China who is the world’s consumer goods main manufacturer, and the only way the United States is capable to secure any market for its weapons is to retain Europe, NATO that is, as its main customer and vassal.
NATO will gladly (if not, color revolutions are a good tool for convincing those who have doubts) “buy” America’s weapons and “defense” of Europe…
… but America needs Europeans to believe that hordes of democracy-hating, only two-gender accepting, backward bearded Russian Ivans are ready to pounce to deny Europe her favorite values of a complete sexual depravity…
… her cities, also known as dirty multicultural cloacae…
…and declining economy for the reasons only Americans know…
So, to convince those 447 million EU’s residents that they need America’s protection and weapons, America needs Russia to get into the war in Ukraine.
And if it will end up with utter destruction, and it will if Russia really decides so, of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and, likely, Ukrainian statehood, so be it.
Americans never really cared how many aborigines die, as long as it works for the US bottom line.
Or, if one may, a condition of American condition…
… which is deteriorating steadily because not only the United States increasingly has very little of substance, that is of high value added, to sell to the world…
… but forming economic and military monster of Eurasia removes the United States from its (grossly exaggerated to start with), self-proclaimed status of global hegemon…
…to the status of, at best, one of the few big shots on the planet.
At worst, the United States is removed from Eurasia as a viable competitor and is relegated to a status of a regional power…
…still powerful relative to its continental neighbors…
…but not having a shot at this second number of 4.67 billion.
This is a big chunk of population and customers.
Now imagine if the United States loses EU.
Suddenly 4.67 billion become 4.67 billion + 447 million = 5.117 billion, it is 65% of Earth’s population.
It is a huge majority of world’s population and, most importantly, population much of which can pay for goods, unlike it is the case with gigantic population of Africa.
Moreover, this population is concentrated within a single continental mass which is insulated from the United States by two oceans.
The United States cannot allow this consolidation of the market to happen and the loss of Europe, Washington’s thinking goes, is tantamount to capitulation.
So, the United States must hold on to EU, or whatever it will become once EU inevitably collapses, and NATO remains the only tool to drive European weaklings into submission.
Making Russia obliterate Ukrainian Armed Forces is a perfect way to scare Europeans into abandoning any attempts to economically compete with the United States and deny them access to Russia’s energy.
Considering an extremely low level of Western scholarship in the field of practical geopolitics and its pseudo-scientific offspring—geoeconomics…
…which failed for the last 30 years to come up with even the fuzziest description of the emerging world…
… it doesn’t matter if the United States “retains” Europe or not anymore.
The reasons for the utter failure of those “academic” predictions and resulting policies are numerous but few of them are worth focusing on.
Europe is not anymore a crucial trade partner for Russia and mutual trade plummeted in the last few years. The trend will continue and it is not only due to America’s pressure, albeit that too, on EU but is a result of Russia steady change of both economic model and her reorientation towards Asia which is now largely complete. Russia simply doesn’t need anymore many goods she used to buy in the EU. The policy of import substitution on average is a success and Russia economically insulating herself from the West will continue.
A much-discussed pipeline of Nord Stream 2 is, actually, not a crucial economic project for Russia anymore. Russia can absorb losses if the project eventually sabotaged by the United States and its European poodles such as Poland, but for Germany, and EU in general, this sabotage will result in catastrophe, due to European greens’ suicidal energy policies which make European goods costs extremely energy-dependent. In realty, America’s attempts to sabotage Nord Stream 2 are primarily directed against EU in general, and Germany in particular, not against Russia per se.
The United States lost the arms race. America’s weapons acquisition process and military doctrine-mongering cannot be viewed anymore as a normal, that is logical and justified, process. While still being able to produce some state-of-the-art platforms and enablers, such as signal processing, combat computer and communications networks, recon assets, in terms of actual weapons the United States begins to lag behind Russia not just in years but in generations. As recent, February 2021, Congressional Budget Office report on missile defense admitted, the United States is defenseless against salvo of combination of new Russia’s cruise missiles and that there is nothing to stop them. There isn’t. US air defense systems lag behind Russian ones dramatically and the gap only grows with Russia’s S-500 getting into serial production and the latest S-350 already being deployed into the first line units.
The United States simply cannot develop modern supersonic anti-shipping missile and the US Navy is forced, incomprehensibly, to buy Norwegian Kongsberg Naval Strike Missile—an underwhelming subsonic missile which is no match for modern high supersonic and hypersonic strike weapons Russia deploys, and is not survivable in modern air defense and ECM environment.
Lastly, the intellectual level and the level of awareness of modern American elites is in a precipitous decline, which inevitably resulted in the embarrassment of America’s last elections, especially scandalous debate between two geriatric candidates in 2020, which paraded the US as Springeresque tawdry TV show. Resultant loss of a legitimacy and yet another confirmation of the America’s position as a non-agreement capable entity hardly serve as boosters for America’s already tarnished reputation as a big-mouth bully and its elites being uncultured and uneducated.
The United States already fails to meet a number criteria imperative for the status of superpower, among which a military one is crucial.
If some American military “strategists” still exercised a suicidal idea of fighting Russia conventionally in Ukraine in 2014, today in 2021 such an idea is downright mad, because the United States cannot win conventional war in Russia’s vicinity and any US force will be annihilated.
This leaves the United States only two options:
Indeed, believing its own propaganda, try to unleash mayhem in Ukraine, provoke Russia into a direct military operation and then introduce whatever the force US and NATO will muster into the theater of operations. Any such plan is bound to fail miserably because not only such a force will be annihilated but participating NATO nations will face the possibility of their military installations destroyed by stand-off weapons. That raises the possibility of US escalating to nuclear threshold which means that the United States may cease to exists as a country. This is an undesirable plan and majority of US policy makers, bar some severe cases of psychological Russophobic disorders which are numerous in the current Administration and America’s elites, understand what it means. So, while not completely impossible, a probability for such a plan being implemented is fairly low. Not to mention the fact that for the US to fight conventionally around Russia will require assembly of the force which will dwarf whatever was assembled for the First Gulf War. There, the United States had almost 6 months to do so.
So, what’s left realistically is to push Ukraine into the suicidal campaign with Russia being designated aggressor before even the first shots are fired. What the United States does not recognize is the fact that this unties Russia’s hands who already has an overwhelming escalation dominance not only over Ukraine, but whatever might be attempted in terms of “support” for irrational regime in Kiev. Russia has many options, the United States has one—it needs war in Donbass, which, Washington’s thinking goes, will allow to drive Europeans into submission, which allegedly should allow the United States to save her hegemonic status. It will not even if Europe is driven into submission.
United States today has the only one resource left which allows it to stay relevant—virtual reality of both money “printing” press and of the media propaganda which is increasingly ineffective.
One could hide America’s decrepit cities, mass riots, destruction of the education system, incompetence of political and military top echelons, suicidal social practices and breakdown of law and order, aggravated by huge lines to food banks for only so long.
Now it is in the open and even subjugation of Europe and, allegedly, opening Europe’s markets to those few items the United States can still provide for its clients there…
… does not change the fact that the United States as it exists today has no future with or without Europe…
…and that it still has to recon with China’s immense manufacturing capacity…
…and Russia’s advanced military might…
…which drive unification of the Eurasian market whether the United States unleashes war in Ukraine or not.
Even without EU this market dwarfs whatever the United States will be able to “salvage” in order to avoid relegation to a lower league.
It cannot stop a process which was ongoing for years now…
…once Russia, after, the bloody coup in Ukraine…
… understood that there is nobody to talk too in the combined West…
…which apart from losing its military and economic power…
… started to disintegrate from the inside due to Western societies becoming increasingly totalitarian…
…and unable to face the reality that we still live in the highly industrialized world which needs energy, industrial plant and weapons which will defend them.
Both China and Russia seem to accumulate all that and with it the fate of the United States is sealed.
Bill Clinton may have thought that he “charted the new course for a new economy” in 2000, too bad for him, and the US, the “new economy” turned out to be an old one.
What?
You didn’t think that jeans, smartphones and rocket engines grow on the trees, did you?
But let us go back to the collision of warships. Why would a diversity-admit junior officer open fire on China? Proximately, because he is frightened and panicky. A bit more remotely, because he has been told over and over and over that the Chinese are dangerous and aggressive and want to do terrible things, seldom specified. The military tells them this because you cannot prepare the troops for war by telling them that there is no reason for it.Why would a President allow a war, knowing (if in a lucid moment) that it would produce absolute unshirted havoc in the economy even if it didn’t go nuclear? He wouldn’t. That is, he wouldn’t all at once choose Armageddon. But he couldn’t afford to seem soft on China, not with the midterms looming, so he couldn’t back off. If in the ensuing shootout the Navy got trounced, he most assuredly couldn’t drop the matter, and would have to double down. So, of course, would the Chinese for the same sorts of reasons. Off to the races.Deeper in the forest of causation is that the pathologically aggressive, amoral, manipulative, and crafty tend to rise to power. We select as rulers those who are least fit to rule. In America this is often done a bit differently, with the unscrupulous and powerful choosing cardboard leaders whose strings they can pull. The effect is the same.Why would war seem reasonable? Because Americans have never seen one, and believe their forces to be invincible. If you think that you can’t lose a fight, why avoid one? And because those in comfortable circumstances know that a war in Asia would be fought by the lower economic classes, about whom they care nothing and don’t much like. American elites do not fight. Note the list of draft dodgers during Vietnam: Bush II, Cheney, Bolton, Trump, Biden.These men, knowing almost nothing of the military, war or, very likely, military history, are quickly hijacked mentally by the Pentagon. The firm handshake, the steely gaze, the clean shaven, confident, and patriotic warriors (if only via Powerpoint) are impressive to pols who…well, you know…haven’t done that. They project strength and realism, without necessarily having either. Listening to them, you can easily get a sense of being accepted into a special, manly club. They say that America has the most powerful, invincible, best trained, tra la, tra la, and if you haven’t been there it is easy to believe. The Chinese? A cakewalk. Iran? Coupla weeks.Another reason for easily blundering into a war poorly understood is the very low quality of American government. Congress and the President are chosen by popularity contests, not according to competence. A congressman who worked his way up the political ladder in Wheeling or Baton Rouge knows state politics. He is unlikely to know anything about the first Island Chain or what a terminally guided ballistic missile is. A friend in a position to know estimates that ninety percent of the Senate do not know where Myanmar is. No one without a grasp of geography has more than a child’s understanding of military, economic, or strategic reality. But they vote on these things.Sez I, we are well and truly screwed. But there is little we can do about it.
Conclusion
You all can believe what you want. I know full well what is going on. If China is surrounded by peaceful and successful trading partners, then China will be safe and secure from conflict, invasion or NGO-sponsored “color revolutions”. Like Switzerland, like Germany, like Italy, and like Finland are today. Its a belief in the win-win possibilities of long term planning, cooperation and leadership by merit.
And nations that make physical things, that provide physical services, and that partner for joint success for their peoples will invariably be more successful, and longer lasting than ones that retain their existence on supporting a small patricidal oligarchy leadership that makes nothing of substance, but trades in invisible vapor ideas, and numbers on large elaborate spreadsheets.
But, you know, the United States is ruled by idiots.
And no matter how much we can reason, we can pray, or we can justify our actions and ideas and thoughts, the wildcard of an insane morn like Mike Pompeo with his finger on the military operations is a serious and real danger….
…as opined by this commenter…
A. Daneon April 11, 2021 · at 9:24 am EST/EDTWhat will happen next?
In June, During the NATO exercise Defending Europe 21, the Ukro NAZIs or Turkish controlled head-choppers will launch a falls flag attack.
This could be a chemical weapon launched against Ukrainian soldiers, claiming that the attack was launched by the Donbass militia, and that the chemical weapon was supplied by Russia.
The western MSN will blame Russia for the aggression.
While Russia is busy defending itself against the unjust accusations from the so called international community, the NATO exercise will go live and invade Donbass, claimed as humanitarian intervention.
The only way this can be avoided is if the US really fears a nuclear attack on American soil.
As soon as the first falls flag attack occurs in Ukraine, Russia should launch a nuclear weapon on American soil.
A good target will be the HAARP facility located in desolate Alaska. The facility is operated by the private Global Elite, and hated world wide for its clandestine operations.
When the facility is reduced to rubble, and nuclear radiation is traveling the northern hemisphere via the Jet stream, the western MSN will go into hysteria, calling for a ceasefire.
Mass demonstrations against war and COVID Lock Down will quickly turn into Riots and civil war, devastating every major city in Europe and America.
If the NATO do not stop its invasion of Donbass by then:
Russia will send missiles against every NATO Command center located in Ukraine and Poland.
And then hell will break loose:
China will attack US Navy vessels in the South China Sea and invade Taiwan.
North Korea will attack South Korea.
Nationalist in Japan will attack US deployments in Japan.
The Philippines will attack US assets like Al Qaeda in the region and invade Indonesia.
The Taliban will attack US and NATO deployments in Afghanistan.
India will enter into war with Pakistan.
Iraq will attack the US deployment in Bagdad, and northern Iraq.
Iran will attack US-NATO vessels in the Gulf, ending all oil supply to the west.
Yemen will attack Saudi Arabia.
Somalia will attack all ships in the bay of Aden.
Egypt will close the Suez Canal.
Syria will launch an attack against Turkish troops in Northern Syria.
Russia will shoot down every Fighter jet and drone entering Syrian airspace.
Lebanon will attack Israeli forces in the Golan.
Hezbola will attack Israel from Gaza.
Libya will launch attacks against Turkish troops in Libya.
Armenia will launch major attack against Turkish forces in eastern Anatolia.
Greece will attack Turkish transgression of Greek airspace and Turkish vessels near Cyprus.
Civil war will erupt in the Balkan, Serbia will retake Kosovo, and enter war with Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Civil war will erupt in Spain, and Catalonia will secede from Madrid.
Paris will enter into chaos, and Macron will flee.
Al-Qaeda will launch a major attack on French troop in West Africa.
Venezuela will attack US navy vessels in the Caribbean sea.
Argentina will invade the Falkland Islands.
American Patriots will storm Washington for real. The National Guard protecting DC will defect.
CIA and FBI Agent will be hunted down by American Patriots. Many states will secede from the US.
Most western government will be forced to step down. The EU and NATO will disintegrate.
All Nordic Nations will enter into a Nordic defense Alliance.
As the American Fascist Empire collapses, the multi polar world will be reborn.
Do you want more?
I have more posts in my BRI sub-index within my China index…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
So the big questions are:
Can Russia deter the US by reacting below the threshold of an open military clash? My personal reply is that it is still possible but, sadly, this is becoming less and less likely with every passing day.
Does that mean that this conflict can turn into WWIII with nukes and all? My personal reply is that that this scenario is becoming more and more likely with every passing day.
Bottom line: thank you again, “Biden” -voting Dem doubleplusgoodthinkers! Thanks to you only 100+ days into the new admin we are back on the edge of a nuclear precipice! In the words of Putin “you did not listen to us then, listen to us now!”. But, of course you won’t. Nothing short of a nuclear mushroom will wake you up from your delusions… If that happens, only blame yourselves!
So these are my thoughts for the day.
Now I invite you to share yours!
Kind regards
The Saker
I once encountered a homeless man in California, near Stockton. He tried to sell me a discarded plastic model that he obviously found in a trash bin. He was scruffy, dirty, and unkempt. His hair was long and matted, and his clothes were unwashed and tattered.
We, my wife and I, were walking down the side of the road, and we were going to go under a road near this sort of walk-way viaduct. He was to our right, sitting on the raised pavement. He shouted at us, but not irritatingly so. He just wanted to get our attention. And he did just that.
Now this plastic model was (in it’s self interesting), it was a discarded model of an American world war II half-track personnel carrier. I would guess that about half the pieces were gone and missing. The rest were still attached to the sprues that held them.
He was very adamant about selling it to me. He said that he would give me a good price. Only $20 he said.Keep in mind that this was in the late 1980’s when plastic models could be bought for under $5.
He told me that it was going to become valuable. His reasoning was that it represented the fundamental makeup of God before Satan took over people’s mind through computer modems. Damn! Those pesky demon signals sent via telephone modem…
…!
After that encounter, I became convinced that everyone inside of California were about five bottles short of a six pack of beer. I actually wondered whether there was something in the water…
And while I continued to do business, work and live in California, I made it a point to get the heck out of there as soon as I could. I reasoned that if I could encounter such a fruit case, that there must be many others, and as such, I didn’t want to have anything to do with them, and the area.
This little event, that happened so very long ago, reminds me of America today.
Every now and then you come across these little glimmers of clarity. You are exposed to these little events, or encounters. They make you pause and think. And as such, they pretty much “spell it all out” to you “as plain as day”, that things are more than just a little amiss.
These events cause you to stop. To think. To make reappraisals.
The best analogy I’ve seen is they’re like a monkey with a hand grenade. You can’t reason with it and it’s dangerous.
One such “red flag” moment is “The Longer Telegram”.
Which brings me to this next article. Completely reprinted, and all credit to the author. It was edited to fit this venue.
By Martin Sieff. Written on April 1, 2021.
The Longer Telegram reflects the intellectual, moral and emotional bankruptcy of what passes for “thought” inside the Washington Beltway, Martin Sieff writes.
The now famous – and ludicrous – Atlantic Council “Longer Telegram” on China, unintentionally has made a global laughing stock of the Atlantic Council.
But it still deserves careful consideration as an example.
An example of the pathetic (and infantile) intellectual pretensions of Washington’s geo-political supposed “elite.”
And their ever-fresh infantile wonk need to be “tougher”, “bigger” and “better” than their childhood heroes such as George Kennan and George Marshall.
Francois-Marie Arouet – Voltaire – shredded the remaining pretensions of the thousand-year-obsolete Holy Roman Empire in his day (the 18th century Enlightenment) by pointing out that it was not Holy, nor Roman nor even an Empire.
Similarly, the “Longer Telegram” that purported to lay out a new US National Strategy towards China is not a telegram at all.
The title of course comes from George Kennan’s now revered (as secular American Scripture) “Long Telegram” of 1946 to Secretary of State James Byrnes. And as such, it was eagerly seized upon as the blueprint for the containment of the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War.
Kennan in fact condemned US global policies of confrontation, militarization and destruction of democracies around the world from the 1950s on as a travesty of what he had advocated. He lived long enough to condemn the US expansion of NATO throughout Central Europe in the 1990s as the greatest catastrophic US policy decision of the post Cold War world, as I heard him say in person.
But no matter.
The Atlantic Council…
…part of the heart and soul of the US neoconservative/neoliberal think tank foreign policy establishment in its age of infantile regression…
… must have its Pacifier or Baby Comforter to reassure itself that it will still Run the World (at least in its own imagination) half a century from now: And that is the purpose of the “Longer Telegram.”
For the Longer Telegram of course is not a telegram at all.
Telegrams are ludicrously obsolete in our modern high tech world of the 21st century. We Veteran Foreign Correspondents have never bothered to use them for 30 or 40 years or so.
The very Executive Summary of the Longer Telegram gives that aspect of the game away.
Since when has anyone ever heard of any telegram having an “Executive Summary”?
The entire point of telegrams for the 150 years of their practical existence from around 1840 to 1990 was that they were terse and succinct to save money on the cost and speed of transmission.
The Longer Telegram is not only not a Telegram: It is not terse or succinct at all.
It ponderously, pompously and slowly lays out a policy for a [1] generations-long [2] global-wide [3] confrontation with China.
With eventual aim of imploding China.
As well as destroying China’s unity, prosperity and industrial power.
Its ultimate aim in fact is to do what the British and French Empires…
That war unleashed a nightmare century of slavery, drug addiction enslavement, humiliation, misery, massacre and death on the Chinese people.
Chinese leaders are understandably enraged at “The Longer Telegram”.
Whose neocon/neolib authors coyly elected to remain anonymous.
Again childishly trying to echo Kennan’s initial anonymity as “X”.
A reminder of his later 1947 article on Soviet foreign policy published in “Foreign Affairs” magazine.
In fact, the 2021 Longer Telegram bears all the marks of a misshapen monster designed by committee.
However, Beijing should not fear the Longer Telegram for its most crucial and salient characteristic is that is delusional, worthless nonsense.
The global unified alliance of the United States and the nations of Europe and Asia against Big Bad China is never going to happen.
The United States in the Golden Age of Joe Biden (and Kamala Harris) is too chaotic, too confused, too divided and its leaders too ludicrous to ever bring it about.
The Longer Telegram is a misshaped Frankenstein baby born of the inbred Washington Deep State Establishment.
America’s insane 18 main (of course there are hundreds of others) so-called “intelligence ” agencies (an obvious oxymoron but let that pass) are embracing it.
So are the bipartisan performing baboons of Congress…
…and their multiple thousands of staffers…
…and so of course are the enormous defense contractor corporations from whom all greenback blessings ultimately flow.
Most revealing of all, the Longer Telegram reflects the intellectual, moral and emotional bankruptcy of what passes for “thought” inside the Washington Beltway.
The Beltway Establishment can no longer even manufacture any plausible new justifications, myths or downright lies…
Lies to con the American people into pouring out the remains of their rapidly disappearing and stolen wealth…
…and sending their precious children off for more to die and have their limbs blown off …
…in yet more decades of needless, meaningless global wars.
Instead, the rotting skeletons of arguments made in a different place…
… for a different world…
… three quarters of a century ago must be dusted off and pulled off their dust-covered shelves to be recycled …
Yes. recycled for the totally different circumstances of the 21st century world.
Since Washington, as I have previously pointed out, is now run by Liberal Zombies whose ideas really died 50 years ago.
Thererfore, it should be no surprise that the apologies for “ideas” and “strategies” they frantically reach out for should be pacifiers for babies and zombie ideas exhumed from their long-forgotten graves as well.
Ouch!
Is the greater public ever going to get a clear view of the difference behind the "rules based order" of the West (we own the money system and make the rules) and the negotiated International law based order?Posted by: psychohistorian | Apr 20 2021 17:05 utc | 4
So yeah. Washington DC has embraced a make lots-and-lots of war mentality. The entire Washington bureaucratic machine is gearing up for a nice long… generations long… conflict. And they are “chomping at the bit” to make it happen. They want it to happen to China. But they will accept a war with Russia. And they want it to happen soon.
Are they crazy or what?
The globe is changing, and what does America want to do?
They want to press the “reset button”, throw the world into chaos, and then use the enormous American military to “straighten things out” so that America will emerge from a global conflict as the sole remaining super-power.
This belief that it is possible is borne out of ignorance, wishful thinking, and decades of echo-chamber activities. It WILL NOT end up well.
Check out this article. All credit to the author. Reprinted as found and edited to fit this venue.
US diplomat George F. Kennan wrote a “Long Telegram” from Moscow in February 1946, which was the basis for the US containment strategy toward the former Soviet Union during the Cold War. Now in 2021, the Washington-based think tank Atlantic Council released “The Longer Telegram” to suggest a “new American China strategy” which is full of Cold War mentality and smearing of China.
“The Longer Telegram” was written by “Anonymous,” or “a former senior government official with deep expertise and experience dealing with China.”
The report can be regarded as the remnants of the Trump administration trying to seek confrontation with China. The core ideas of the report are in line with the Trump administration’s China policy.
However, it is very inappropriate to release it anonymously.
Chinese people, the Communist Party of China (CPC) and Chinese leaders share common interests.
The US attempt to separate Chinese people from the CPC is doomed to fail.
If the US wants to justify itself by attacking Chinese leaders, it would be harming Chinese people’s interests as well. In the end, the US’ overall interests will be harmed.
The anonymous report’s core ideology and methods are seriously misleading.
The author, whoever he or she is, lacks a deep understanding of China’s current situation. Such people claim to be “China experts,” but they lack an understanding of China’s national conditions.
They can only talk about China through imagination.
The report’s policy recommendations are obviously distorted.
US anti-China forces are still instigating a new Cold War and ideological confrontation, trying their best to contain China as well as to engage in a “color revolution” against China.
Is the US trying to take external intervention measures to shake the CPC’s rule and change China’s political system? This would be exactly “self-defeating.” A “color revolution” against China would never succeed.
The Atlantic Council is an establishment think tank, but it has proposed an outdated cliché.
Some of the US elites have realized the previous US policy toward China was not successful, and they may want to make some adjustments.
However, they are like a drowning man desperately clutching at a straw.
They have completely misunderstood the current major interests of the US.
They also failed to learn from the failure of the US’ China policy in history.
This is a tragedy.
What is surprising is that there is a market even for such a “new American China strategy.”
This shows the extent to which the US policy circle has been poisoned.
The report is a collection of lies.
It is against the times.
The fact is that Chinese people share common interests with the CPC and Chinese leaders.
From a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society to the second largest economy today, which achievement was not reached under the leadership of the CPC?
Can the US achieve poverty alleviation the way China did?
Without the decision of the CPC and Chinese leaders as well as Chinese people’s support, how can China perform outstandingly in the COVID-19 fight?
The improvement of Chinese people’s lives and the promotion of China’s international status are due to the CPC’s leadership.
This is generally accepted by the Chinese people, but is also exactly what Westerners cannot understand.
For another example, during the financial crisis, China’s 4-trillion-yuan stimulus package was also due to Chinese leaders’ decision. The US cannot understand why China has the ability to make such a bold move. Neither can the US understand the unity between Chinese people, the CPC and Chinese leaders.
If these American political elites can make an objective comparison between China and the US with a rational and balanced mind-set, they would understand that ordinary Chinese people share common interests with the CPC and the country’s leaders.
In the US, however, this is not the case.
The interests of American leaders and people are not always consistent. We hope the Biden administration can formulate a relatively healthy overall foreign policy, instead of being led by the distortion and misjudgement of the report’s anonymous author.
The report attacked the CPC, but it has no right to do so.
Just take a look at Trump during the COVID-19 fight – where did he lead the US to?
Thus, many US political elites have a malicious starting point and intent.
They hope China will eventually be thrown into chaos.
And this is exactly what the Chinese people will never agree to.
Many American political elites’ mentality is still stuck in the so-called threat of Communism.
This is very unhealthy.
The world has long entered the 21st century and they should not stay in ideological opposition as it is a stupid, dangerous and short-sighted behavior.
These people have completely misread the times and China.
Opinions like “The Longer Telegram” will completely ruin the positive and constructive hopes of the new US administration’s China policy and overall global policies.
Yet, the “Longer Telegram” is the American policy paper.
Yes. It is the De Facto policy of the Untied States against China today. And as such it is provocative and dangerous. For it establishes the ideas that…
The Chinese province of 台湾 is an American protectorate.
That China has no authority over it’s city of 香港城市.
That America can send military troops, NGO’s and “humanitarian aid” to the Chinese province of 新疆.
That sponsoring a “color revolution” in the Chinese province of 西藏 will not have consequences.
American military warships, battle carriers, and nuclear armed aircraft can travel freely along the Chinese coast, and it will not be provocative.
Like I have said before…
What kind of Kool Aide are these morons in Washington DC drinking? Do they actually think that the rest of the world would ACCEPT this nasty, disgusting and belligerent attitude?
The Biden Administration is committed to accelerating the worst elements of the “hard imperial” practices of military encirclement of China while also advancing the “soft imperial” practices, Matt Ehret writes.
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Going into the March 18 diplomatic talks between U.S. and Chinese delegates to discuss the long-term strategic interests of the two nations, China projected a largely positive hope …
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…that the days of military aggression, trade wars, sanctions and interference into China’s affairs which characterized much of the past 8 years…
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…might finally be coming to an end.
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They had some reason to make their hopeful assumptions.
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After all, the U.S. State Department press releases announced that the meetings would …
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“highlight cooperation that promotes peace, security and cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region and around the world.”
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And so, the Chinese certainly hoped that the sanctions imposed under Trump’s watch might be rolled back by the new administration.
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And that the new team might respect China’s sovereign right to pursue its economic interests.
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All without being seen as an opponent to the decaying western empire.
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They have understandably gotten quite tired of dealing with the constant unipolar intimidation…
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…as has been so common since Obama’s Asia Pivot was first announced in 2012.
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In response to the pressure of a dying empire attempting to insecurely impose its will on a growing nation which will soon find itself as the economic leader of the world…
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China has responded consistently with class and restraint calling for cooperation and dialogue.
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At various times over recent years, China has offered the USA and other western nations (desperately in need of real economic development), opportunities to cooperate…
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…on the Belt and Road Initiative,
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…space research
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… and other sectors of win-win cooperation citing these domains as being inclusive of all and beneficial to all participants.
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The fact that the Chinese have made these offers isn’t surprising.
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The USA is economically bankrupt.
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It is sitting upon a derivatives-fueled hyperinflationary bubble ripe to blow.
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America is devoid of any significant manufacturing capacities it once enjoyed.
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And it is militarily over-extended beyond belief.
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So it isn’t as if cooperating on the BRI isn’t in the interests of the USA… as a sovereign nation.
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But the USA isn’t really a sovereign nation state these days.
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It’s something else.
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This sad fact slapped the Chinese delegation across the face.
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The moment U.S. representatives Anthony Blinken and Andrew Sullivan opened their mouths during the keynote remarks and spewed nothing but belligerent poison at their Asian counterparts.
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Blinken began his condescending chastisements of China’s disruptive influence to “international rules-based order”.
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He condemned China for its alleged cyber-attacks.
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Read about how the CIA is able to fake the origin of malware and cyber attacks in the Snowden Vault 7 Release. HERE.
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As well as the apparently vicious treatment of Uyghurs…
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… Hong Kong…
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… Tibetans….
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…and Taiwan.
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Sullivan followed suit promoting the importance of the anti-Chinese “Quad” (often dubbed the “NATO of the Pacific) …
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… and then virtue signaled “American ingenuity” and leadership.
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Virtue signaling is the conspicuous communication of moral values and gooddeeds. The term has negative connotations as it is commonly used to denote virtuousactions and statements are motivated by a desire for social status and self-satisfaction. Virtual signaling is often used as a form of persuasion.-12 Examples of Virtue Signaling - Simplicable
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Using the best newspeak available to an American diplomat these days, Blinken condemned the “might makes right” outlook which has caused so much injustice over the years and which apparently guides China thinking, saying:
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“The alternative to a rules-based order is a world in which might makes right and winners take all, and that would be a far more violent and unstable world for all of us.”
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Of course, one might be confused by this claim since China has only one foreign military base in Djibouti.
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And has started no new wars in generations…
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As well as has lifted nearly a billion people out of poverty…
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… but that’s only because you don’t receive quality CIA briefings like Blinken and Sullivan do.
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Yang Jiechi and Wang Yi’s responses provided a sobering sledgehammer of reality…
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…as both statesmen took the opportunity to spend 42 minutes laying out in stark terms the scale of hypocritical poison in extolling democracy abroad while not being able to win the support of its own population citing BLM.
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Jiechi also contrasted the USA’s obsessive use of regime changes and wars across the world in defense of the Washington-run “rules based order” …
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…with China’s track record in [1] ending extreme poverty, [2] winning the support of its citizens and [3] building great infrastructure projects abroad.
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Calling out the disingenuous intention behind the U.S. delegation’s organization of the talks, Jiechi stated:
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“isn’t this the intention of the United States – judging from what, or the way that you have made your opening remarks – that it wants to speak to China in a condescending way from a position of strength?
So was this carefully all planned and was it carefully orchestrated with all the preparations in place?
Is that the way that you had hoped to conduct this dialogue?
Well, I think we thought too well of the United States.
We thought that the U.S. side will follow the necessary diplomatic protocols.”
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Jiechi continued:
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“So let me say here that, in front of the Chinese side, the United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength.
The U.S. side was not even qualified to say such things even 20 years or 30 years back, because this is not the way to deal with the Chinese people.
If the United States wants to deal properly with the Chinese side, then let’s follow the necessary protocols and do things the right way.”
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In the ensuing days of meetings, it should not come as a surprise that very little in the way of serious conflict resolution occurred.
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In fact, the only solid points of agreement which the U.S. side would permit involved two joint protocols.
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Protocols that fall perfectly into alignment with the Malthusian closed system objectives of the Great Reset agenda attempting to reign in a post-nation state world order in the wake of the oncoming economic meltdown.
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These included 1) a joint program to coordinate more closely on fighting global warming via green finance and green energy grids and 2) coordinating on COVID-19 vaccination programs.
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Nothing which China is doing that relates to [1] actual scientific and [2] technological growth, [3] long term conditionality-free banking or [4] poverty extermination was permitted by the U.S.-side for reasons which should be obvious to the informed reader by now.
.
While Blinken did announce in the post-conference press release that space cooperation between the two powers was discussed…
.
… it is a fact as true as gravity that the imperial technocrats running the Biden White House are so ideologically opposed to the sort of open-system programs which space cooperation creates that Blinken’s remarks are sure to remain dead words.
.
What is clear coming out of the Alaska meeting is that the Biden Administration is committed to accelerating the worst elements of the “hard imperial” practices of military encirclement of China…
.
…while building up the QUAD military alliance on the one hand…
.
…while also advancing the “soft imperial” practices of pulling China into unbreakable de-carbonization treaties and medical health regimes controlled by supranational technocrats on behalf of the Anglo-American oligarchy.
Shortly after Mr.Biden characterizing Mr.Putin as a killer and more, Mr.Putin invited Biden for a public and live online discussion, saying that it would be beneficial for both the N.American as well as the Russian people.
This morning we find this bluntly devastating shot across the bows from the Russian Foreign Affairs ministry.
The final sentence, not included in the image, reads as follows: “Responsibility for this lies entirely with the United States.”
Setting this in context, the contrast between Mr.Lavov’s ongoing visit to China, and the so-called ‘strategic’ meeting between the United States and China at the end of last week, cannot be more stark.
At the very same time, Mr.Putin and Mr Shoigu are taking the air on the Taiga in Siberia. I wonder if the western governments have figured out why now?
“ Vladimir #Putin is spending the weekend in #Siberia. The President together with Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu enjoys walking in the #taiga forest and riding an all-terrain vehicle. Also, Sergei Shoigu showed the President his workshop.”
In the next few hours we will receive Mr.Lavrov’s translated speeches from his China visit. Some of it is already published.
Take a look at what Mr.Lavrov described as ‘dynamic cooperation“:
“We regard the new era of Russian-Chinese relations, which you have mentioned, primarily in the context of the broader situation on the international stage.
It is undergoing a very deep transformation and the strengthening of the new centres of economic growth, financial might and political influence.
Regrettably, the objective trend for a rise of a truly multipolar democratic world is being hindered by some Western countries led by the United States...
... which would like to preserve their domination of the global economy and international politics at all costs and to force their will and their demands on each and all.
In response to this, Russia and China are promoting a constructive unification agenda.
We want the architecture of international relations to be fair, democratic, capable of ensuring stability and based on broad interaction of states and their integration associations, just as we are doing together with our Chinese friends by promoting integration in Eurasia.China is a truly strategic partner and a like-minded country for us.
Our cooperation on the international stage is having a stabilizing effect on the global and regional situation.
Russia believes that our dialogue with China based on trust and mutual respect should provide an example for other countries, including those that are trying to develop ties with Russia and China on different principles that are not based on equality.
This is not acceptable to us or our Chinese friends.
We will continue developing our foreign policy constructively and flexibly, showing readiness for compromise but exclusively on the basis of mutual respect and a balance of interests.”
There is however a twist in this lovely tale and it is the one of economic influence and we know now which direction both Russia and China (and a host of other countries) will take in the short term.
They will remove the sanctions weapon from the hands of the United States including Europe.
Let’s take a look at a few more of Mr.Lavrov’s comments.
“The US sanctions risks need to be alleviated by switching to alternative currencies and moving away from using the dollar, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.”
“The minister said the US is aiming to limit the technological development of Russia and China, so the two countries need to strengthen their independence.”
“According to the Russian Foreign Minister, the US and other western countries are no longer capable of using classical diplomacy and only resort to one tool on the international arena: sanctions.”“We must form the widest possible coalition of countries that will fundamentally oppose this illegal practice,” the Russian Foreign Minister concluded.”
As geopolitical watchers and analysts, we’re always looking for the signals that frequently just go up in smoke. This time however the signals from Russia and China are not going up in smoke but being presented in pictures in photo essays, and in clear language.
From the last few days we can learn a few things:
China and Russia are friends and will remain friends and will work together where their interests coalesce. Their interests coalesce right here in Lavrov’s words: “….. architecture of international relations to be fair, democratic, capable of ensuring stability and based on broad interaction of states.” If that statement confuses you, in short, it means right across our world.
Sanctions will be removed as a weapon.
The petrodollar is on its last legs.
The clock for the final battle is ringing. The only weapons remaining that will be allowed to the failing hegemon will be NATO (which, according to many of our serious analysts, is a paper tiger) and the ability to use nuclear and conventional weapons. I will not comment on that as I am not qualified in the field.
The ability of the current and failing hegemon to do damage economically, is being curtailed. We can look forward to a different economic reset, with countries taking their power back using their own currencies and other alternatives. (This is not the reset from the WEF). Then we will see what happens to the sphere of weapons because they may become a last resort.
On a humorous note, it looks like the Russian Foreign Affairs ministry has resorted to photos with captions, hoping they can reach the failing hegemon with pictures, because there is such a great problem to reach them with diplomatic words. The growth of the adult coloring book industry in the West may have been the deciding factor lol.
It is fascinating to compare the recent Biden comments to President Putin and Putin’s response, to what is happening in Alaska between the US and China.
It cannot be a coincidence that the messaging from both Russia and China, is the same. And it is clearly, deal with us on fair terms or Go Pound Sand.
There is a seeming coordination of messaging.
If you consider President Putin’s comments translated in this video, you will hear Putin say with nuance of course, that the US was founded first in an experience of direct genocide on Indian tribes and then they continued with a cruel period of slavery.
He says that to this day these early formative experiences accompany the zeitgeist, both internal and external, of the United States.
Mr.Putin goes further to say that the US is the only country that ever attacked another with nuclear weapons, citing Japan being a non-nuclear state.
He calls it clearly an extermination of a local population that had no military sense.
Mr Putin ends with saying that the US will have to deal with Russia and Russia will only deal in those aspects that have benefit for Russia herself, and the US will have to reckon with it.
Subtext:
You have no moral standing in the world any longer.
Your history is brutal.
You are still operating in this brutal historical context.
Go pound sand as this will not be allowed any longer.
From the Chinese side, after Blinken tried the usual litany of US complaints against China (cyber attacks, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Taiwan, and China is threatening global stability), Yang Jiechi for a whole 15 minutes called the US racists at home and warmongers abroad.
He said in front of the Chinese side, the US side is not qualified to speak to China from a position of strength.
He told in no uncertain terms that the US actions harm the interests of the peoples of the two countries as well as world stability and development and “should not be continued.”
The U.S. side made unreasonable accusations, which was not in line with diplomatic protocol, therefore China made the required response.
There is no acceptance of the newly minted ‘rules-based international order’ among the Chinese diplomats.
Subtext:
You should not be allowed to continue with your meddling.
This is because you have no more moral standing.
This is in the eyes of anyone.
Your purported ‘strength’ is dissipating in your hypocrisy.
An interesting issue of course, that went mainly under the radar, is that at the moment that the Chinese/US so-called ‘strategic’ discussion started in Alaska, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced that Mr Lavrov will be visiting China, specifically their delegates to the Alaska meeting, the Chinese diplomats Yang Jiechi and Wang Yi, a day or two after conclusion of the meetings.
This short sitrep should convince you that the AngloZionist empire is being told in no uncertain terms to get on with pounding sand to dig the imperial grave with evidence that this message is being coordinated.
It is a message from Russia and from China simultaneously.
Shortly after penning this short piece, some commentators are already noticing that the empire is now going to have to deal with ‘sledgehammer diplomacy’.
They have established a firm foundation for an alternative system which is open for anyone to join and which respects all participating nations.
China and Russia have made it absolutely clear that they recognize the sad fact that…
…the oligarchy in firm control of the western alliance…
…is adamantly intent on burning all possible diplomatic avenues of cooperation and dialogue…
…as the Hindenburg of the western financial system continues to careen towards a fiery oblivion.
It didn’t take long for the behaviorist zombies and NATO-philes managing the recent U.S. color revolution to undo any remnant of hope that some form of sane foreign policy might emerge from the U.S. establishment.
All hope is gone.
Nothing could be worse than the neocons running much of Trump’s foreign policy thought many of the leading members of both Chinese and Russian intelligentsias in recent months.
However, with the recent barrage of sanctions launched upon both Russia and China this week…
…in coordinated fashion by Canada, the USA and EU…
… preceded by accusations by America’s leading geriatric hologram that Putin is a soulless killer…
… it has become clear that unless a great systemic change occurs in the west, there is no hope for dialogue or cooperation.
This was made absolutely clear in the malicious ambush set up by the U.S. State Department which attempted to publicly attack and shame the Chinese in Alaska on March 18.
The fact that the results of the March 23 meeting between Foreign Ministers Sergei Lavrov and Wang Yi in the South China Guanxi Zhuang Autonomous Region resulted in a renewed joint statement on Global Governance should come as no surprise.
Calling for a tightened bond of brotherhood between the two nations, Yi stated that Russia and China must
“act as guarantors of justice in international affairs”
and stated that
“China is ready to promote the international system established by the United Nations, protect the world order based on international law and abide by universal values such as peace, development, justice, democracy, equality and freedom.”
While the Five Eyes and other NATO-phile lap dogs of war sing the praises of the “rules-based order”…
… China and Russia have made the point repeatedly this week that the only international order they will adhere to…
…is the one that involves all nations and not merely the handful of imperial hypocrites among the Trans Atlantic pushing for a unilateral world government.
While these same self-righteous unipolarists self-adulate each other in their echo chambers…
… the victims of IMF-World Bank debt slavery…
… humanitarian bombings…
… drone assassinations…
… CIA-MI6 run regime changes…
… and color revolutionary conspiracies directed ultimately at Russia and China look hopefully towards the multipolar alliance as the only pathway to a future worth living in.
While praise for the UN Charter has confused some who naively believe the world body itself to have been the product of the unipolar world government agenda 76 years ago…
… there is a more nuanced reality to be discovered.
When one actually takes the time to read the charter and study the battles waged during the time of the UN’s creation, it becomes clear that the leaders of Russia and China know exactly what they are doing.
The UN charter which they defend firmly establishes respect for the sovereign of each nation state as a primary objective of the world organization…
…and grants members of the Security Council on whose body both Russia and China sit, power to veto any military decision.
Additionally, the charter mandates economic justice for all and mutual interest as primary goals of the organization.
All of these things stand in direct opposition to the sort of thinking coming out of the dystopic minds of Davos luminaries and “rules-based orderists” trying to manage the new world order today like gods of Olympus.
This during the meeting, Lavrov and Yi added the important component of economic liberation from the U.S. dollar hegemony…
…to the discussion…
…and made scientific and technological cooperation the driving force…
…of the new economic/security system that needs to be brought online in short order.
On these points Lavrov stated:
“In addition to strengthening cooperation under the UN framework on the immediate end to unilateral coercive measures, China and Russia should also take the opportunity to enhance their scientific and technological innovation and improve their national strength in response to the sanction.”
Lavrov alluded to the necessary new financial architecture that needs to arise out of the multipolar alliance by
“promoting settlement by local and other international currencies that can replace the U.S. dollar so as to gradually move away from the western controlled payment system”.
This last point reflects a process that has already been well underway for some years…
…implicitly as both Russia and China have begun managing their payment systems increasingly outside of the U.S.-controlled SWIFT system…
In his speech, Lavrov made the point that today China has become Russia’s largest trading partner, and after the Power of Siberia is completed, Russia will become the #1 supplier of energy to China.
As of 2020, $107 billion of trade occurred between the two nations with 25% of that total occurring in local currencies.
This is a huge step up from the mere 2% in 2014-16.
While the western governments are locked under the control of a Malthusian-minded priesthood ideologically committed to the deconstruction of civilization under a green financial dictatorship, the China-Russian alliance is founded upon sturdier stuff.
Premising their self-interest not upon the projection of power, and intimidation of the weak…
… China and Russia have recognized that the only pathway to a viable future is located in the power of creation (aka: breaking free of zero-sum thinking).
The leaders of these nations know that if resource scarcity press upon the potential to sustain the lives of people…
… it is better to inspire creative ideas, and unleash new discoveries under a dynamic of scientific progress…
…rather than cut down the population to adapt to those limits which computer models attest is our carrying capacity.
Already both Russia and China have established a firm foundation for an alternative system which is open for anyone to join…
…and which respects the developmental pathways, political systems and cultures of all diverse participating nations.
This harmony of the parts with the greater good of the whole is possible because the practice is founded upon a discoverable principle of Natural Law.
A law which has found the human species in a living universe where both freedom, law and duty all co-exist.
This coherence of the whole and the parts once animated the minds of statesmen of the west who authored such foundational documents as the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), Declaration of Independence (1776), the U.S. Constitution (1787) and UN Charter (1945).
This principle of statecraft was invoked by such great men as Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Charles DeGaulle and John Kennedy (to name a few) who each in their own way defended the General Welfare…
…while simultaneously upholding the unalienable rights of the individual to the chagrin of the financier oligarchy.
These men did this via the use of strong federal power to [1] build great projects, [2] regulate private finance all while [3] amplifying the power of private enterprise and [4] individual rights of each citizen.
Before the bipolar days of the Cold War brainwashed the majority of citizens into believing they had to plug themselves into either a “communist” or “free market capitalist” cage, this system was known around the world as “The American System of Political Economy”.
Sadly, this pre-condition for human survival has long been forgotten in the west.
It is now Russia and China who are leading the “guarantors of justice in world affairs”…
…as both nations have united in co-constructing the first lunar base together,
…advance asteroid defense systems (which deal with an actual threat to our planet unlike those fake crises advocated by fear mongers at Davos and London),
…and are working on overtime to extend the New Silk Road across Africa, Asia, Latin America …
…as well as the Arctic in the form of the Polar Silk Road.
Whether or not the west is capable of rediscoveries its lost better traditions at this late date remains to be seen.
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Things are maturing and advancing steadily on plan. And like I have repeatedly stated, the events will not be reported. Or, if they are, they will not be well reported, or reported in context. Well, here at MM you are going to get a real situation report, a “Sit Rep”. No need to panic. Just be aware.
“The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium, midway through the Oh-Oh decade. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood.
Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate.
Political and economic trust will implode.
Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation and empire.
The very survival of the nation will feel at stake.
Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.”
– Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning
The Fourth Turning
I read The Fourth Turning a while ago. I was astounded in their uncannily accurate assessment of American history based upon generational configurations which recur on eighty-year cycles, a long human life.
Strauss and Howe wrote the book in 1997 and used their generational theory to predict the Crisis that would begin in the mid-2000’s and come to an indeterminate climax in the mid-2020’s.
Strauss & Howe identified the core elements of this Crisis as debt, civic decay, and global disorder. No one can argue the severe distress engulfing the nation and the world traces its origins to these core elements, with the catalyst for this Crisis being the 2008 central banker manufactured financial collapse.
Nothing has been normal since 2008.
And 2008’s epic implosion was driven by the disastrous financial, political and military decisions implemented by the puppets of the Deep State from 2000 onward, with the Federal Reserve obligingly creating bubble after bubble as the “solution” to the previous bubble.
And now we are here again, in the midst of the greatest bubble in the history of mankind.
A bubble of willful ignorance.
The obliviousness of most Americans to the danger awaiting them is akin to the day before Fort Sumpter was bombed…
… the day before Pearl Harbor was attacked…
… or the dinosaurs unaware of a giant meteor rushing towards the planet and about to transform their future in a challenging way.
Real hardship has beset the land.
With the notable exception of the 0.1% who rule…
…or Deep State lackeys and toadies who are being rewarded for propagating mistruths, outright lies, fear, and propaganda on behalf of their oligarch benefactors.
These apparatchiks mainly consist of corrupt politicians, central bank lackeys, mainstream media hacks, neocon warmongers, surveillance state traitors, and big pharma captured health “experts”.
All of whom are driving the world towards the “great reset”.
The severe distress does involve class, race, nation and empire, but most of the distress has been artificially created by those pulling the strings – Bernays’ invisible government manipulating the masses.
The four years of the Trump administration set the stage for the rumblings that we hear today.
All over the world, the death shudders of a dying empire can be heard.
It advances towards us, like that of a deadly avalanche crashing down a mountainside towards an unsuspecting village below.
America is in deep trouble
Harvard professor Laurence Kotlikoff has been a lone voice telling the truth about the true level of unfunded promises hidden in the CBO numbers.
The unfunded social welfare liabilities in excess of $200 trillion for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare are nothing but a massive future tax increase on younger and unborn generations. Kotlikoff explains what would be required to pay these obligations:
“To honor these obligations we could (a) raise all federal taxes, immediately and permanently, by 57%, (b) cut all federal spending, apart from interest on the debt, by 37%, immediately and permanently, or (c) do some combination of (a) and (b).”
Zero spending on health and social services?
Zero spending on the military?
It’s simply not going to happen.
The level of taxation and/or Federal Reserve created inflation necessary to honor these politician promises is too large to be considered feasible.
Therefore, these promises, made to get corrupt political hacks elected to public office, will be defaulted upon.
It’s all not going to happen.
Every legitimate valuation method used to assess stock market valuations for the last 100 years confirm the stock market being at least 100% overvalued.
There could not be a worse time for margin debt to also reach all-time highs.
The previous peaks in 2000 and 2007 preceded 50% collapses in stocks.
Consumer credit outstanding, despite the false media story-line of austerity, stands at $14.27 trillion in Q2 of 2020.1. I don’t know what it is today, one year later and after three “stimulus packages”, but it’s just got to be awful.
Feb 05, 2021 · Average consumer debt per capita is approximately $12,596 (total consumer debt as of September 2020/total US population as of September 30, 2020).
-2021 ConsumerDebtStatistics | LexingtonLaw
Indeed, it’s at an all-time high, as the Federal government took monopoly control of the student loan market in 2009.
(And proceeded to issue $600 billion of subprime loans to University of Phoenix wannabe graduates seeking degrees in Gender Studies.)
The Feds also used their five year control of Ally Financial (after their taxpayer bailout) to rejuvenate the subprime auto loan market…
…by doling out $35,000 seven year car loans to unemployed SNAP recipients.
After all everyone deserves to drive a brand new Cadillac Escalade.
The $250 billion increase in auto loan debt since 2009 has “created” the auto recovery. Loan delinquencies approaching 2009 levels will surely not cause a problem.
Right?
The level of local and state pension and healthcare unfunded liabilities to government workers exceeds $4 trillion.
State and local politicians would have to double real estate, sales, and income taxes in order to fund the gold plated benefits for state and local workers.
As government workers in Stockton, San Bernardino, Jefferson County and Detroit have experienced, these promises will be not be honored.
(Sigh.)
It’s all going down the drain
If you don’t feel the very survival of the nation hangs in the balance, then you are either delusional, willfully ignorant, or unwilling to recognize your own cognitive dissonance.
The next five to ten years will alter the course of history in a profound way.
Whether or not the outcome will be positive for average American citizens is very much in doubt.
At all levels, domestic and international, America is flailing about and it’s tremors, spasms and vomiting are noticed by all but the intentionally and willful blind.
I wish it were not so, but most human beings seem incapable of critical thought regarding how history follows a cyclical path due to human nature retaining its flaws, weaknesses, vulnerabilities and fortes throughout history.
We believe we have advanced because our inventions, discoveries, and technology, but the desire for wealth, power and control over others still consumes a sociopathic portion of mankind who tend to rise to the top through any means necessary.
As Huxley lamented in the 1950’s, technological progress has actually propelled mankind backwards in terms of its humanity and relationship with nature and other human beings.
The very technology we glorify as an example of our advancement is now being used by the totalitarians to imprison us Americans.
We're just victims of the telephone.
-Tin Lead Hat lyrics
And if that’s not bad enough…
…they demand the rest of the world to accept the chains and shackles that they have enslaved Americans with.
Accept or die!
This is unacceptable to the rest of the world
A "rule based" agreement is one that no longer follows the UN, and recognizes independence of nations with inherent sovereignty. No. Instead it demands that the United States is the leader of the world and that all other regions must bow to it in subservience.
It has happened slowly and methodically over decades as generation after generation have entered the government indoctrination centers (public schools) to be taught ignorance and obedience to the state.
This indoctrination has been reinforced by ceaseless propaganda injected into their brains by media conglomerates doing the bidding of the state.
The dystopian use of disinformation, false narratives, blatant lies and propaganda by the totalitarians constituting the Deep State, has aggravated the crisis situation that America finds itself in today.
An honest truth-seeking press with unbiased journalists would have uncovered this conspiracy and revealed the truthful facts to a concerned public.
Instead, a completely captured corporate media has turned a blind eye to the truth as they have acted as accomplices of the coup culprits.
Just as evil is the suppression of truth through censorship and keeping silent regarding the truth.
Huxley understood how totalitarian propagandists operated decades before the current batch of Silicon Valley authoritarians initiated their national truth repression scheme.
I’m amazed by the extreme level of ignorance exhibited by a vast swath of our population, as they glory in believing comforting mistruths which confirm their preordained belief structure.
They don’t know because they don’t want to know.
They are intoxicated by the endless stream of idiocy emanating from their iGadgets, as they willfully choose [1] ignorance over awareness, [2] servitude over freedom, and [3] captivity over liberty.
As Huxley predicted, the controlling oligarchy has used technology to convince people to love their servitude.
Meanwhile, the sheeple unthinkingly believe what they are told by their government and media mouthpieces.
5G causes cancer.
China is evil.
GMO’s are good.
The SPA killer was not a racist.
Trump is going to build a wall.
Hillary is going to jail.
Jeff Sessions is playing 54D chess.
Elections are not rigged.
Taxes are good for the economy.
Peeing in a cup to get a job is modern and useful.
Everyone must pay taxes, and American taxes are the lowest in the world.
Meanwhile, the sheeple blind to their manipulation , go on doing the bidding of the government and oligarchs who control the government.
The goal of the ruling class is to keep people from thinking,.
And therefore most Americans willingly oblige because thinking is hard and the uncomfortable truths are too much to bear for the satiated masses.
But there is a minority who want the truth and are willing and able to deal with the consequences. They realize facts don’t cease to exist because we ignore them. Facts don’t care about your beliefs or feelings.
Facts lead you to the truth.
And the immense coverup of facts boggles the mind of every critical thinking person on the planet.
So let’s look at the “facts” and the truths regarding the Fourth Turning.
“The Grey Champion”
Based on the Fourth Turning generational theory, there is no doubt Donald Trump was the prophet-generation Grey-Champion.
The term Grey Champion does not mean they are a great, noble, humane person. Ben Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were not nice guys. They did whatever they thought necessary to achieve their means during our previous three Fourth Turnings. Millions of Americans hated Lincoln and Roosevelt, just as tens of millions hate Trump.
The Grey Champion’s appearance marks the arrival of a moment of “darkness, and adversity, and peril,” as the violent turmoil climax of the Fourth Turning approaches.
Trump and Pence are from the Prophet (Boomer) Generation, while Biden is from the Silent Generation and Harris is Generation X.
Trump is the lightning rod for a clash that must take place to sweep away the existing corrupted social order and replace it with something new.
And he was swept away…
Every four years we hear the same pablum about this being the most important election of our lifetime. It didn’t matter who won the election, the Deep State, Military Industrial Complex, Wall Street controlled Federal Reserve, Big Business, Big Pharma, Big Media, Silicon Valley Titans, and Billionaires like Soros, Bloomberg and Gates are still running the show.
One man has extraordinarily little chance of confronting these wealthy power-hungry sociopaths and winning.
And thus we see Biden and his cronies follow Trump and his cronies road-map for America.
Sorry to say.
The PTB has successfully convinced a willfully ignorant populace to love their servitude and acquiesce to allowing them unfettered control over their lives.
However, the tyrannical lockdowns, martial law like mandates from bureaucrats, compulsory masking as a requirement to be accepted in society, and the dehumanizing of our daily lives has created a Resistance, peaceful thus far, who are enraged by what is happening.
Domestic turmoil and dangerous International actions
If you read the Alt-Right or the Alt-Left there is little mention about the international chaos that America has created. It’s mostly a regurgitation of the anti-China, or anti-Russia, or anti-Iran narratives.
It’s not a balanced and accurate appraisal of the shit-storm that America has created.
Here’s a typical example from an Alt-Right website. Obviously the author has never visited China. Because his statements are simple regurgitation of the PTB narratives about China and so outlandish that real Chinese expats do more than shake our heads in disbelief, we actually laugh at him!
Check out this nonsense…
China, which has been the driving world economic force for the last decade, is in a precarious position.
They have been the slave labor manufacturer to the world as the worldwide debt fueled consumption orgy reached its 2008 climax.
Their level of Keynesian mal-investment since 2008 makes Obama, Bernanke, and Yellen look like pikers.
The level of corruption, deception, wealth inequality, pollution, censorship and phony economic data has been done on a majestic scale.
It is now unraveling in a slow motion crash as the global recession has crushed their industrial output and is rapidly deflating their real estate bubble. The 52 million unoccupied housing units in China may not turn out to be great investments after all.
The absurdity of Chinese economic reports makes the BLS look highly accurate and upstanding.
Their reported GDP of 7.4% was their slowest in 24 years, but the real figure is closer to 4%.
The proof of the dramatic slowing in Chinese growth is the collapse in oil prices, copper prices, iron ore prices, and the Baltic Dry Index.
The index measures world trade and has crashed to its lowest level ever. The potential for social unrest when their mal-investment debt bubbles implode will be great.
-Conspiracy Analysist
Like I said, it’s a regurgitation of the American PTB narrative.
And all FALSE.
And all LIES.
And sheeple believe it, because it makes their pathetic lives seem better.
They aren’t.
And you know Americans believe this, and since they believe everything the PTB tells them to believe, they will also go along with this John Bolton statement…
“A by-no-means-comprehensive list of Beijing’s transgressions that require U.S. attention would include: meddling, blatant and subtle, with U.S. public opinion;
Sure…
We can just tell how successful that interference has been right? How many Americans believe that China is doing better than the United States, eh?
Or check out this line that sheeple can repeat in their sleep…
"...and genocide against Uyghurs"
Gosh, the Chinese must be so fucking incompetent. After all the Uyghur population has grown by a factor of ten times plus over the last few years. Pretty hard to have a genocide where the population increases…
All the Chinese just can’t do anything right!
</sarcasm>
Just sheeple repeating what they have read. Not what they have experienced first hand. Just what they have read about fourth-hand.
Remember boys and girls, the definition of what a sheeple is.
Sheeple is a person who is very emotional about something they read about, not by something that they have personally experienced first-hand, up front, and personal.
Yuppur. Any day now… China is going to collapse. It’s just like the USA only far, far worse…
Sure….
I read all about it on FOX, Rush Limbaugh, the NYPost, CNN, and Alex Jones. So it must be the truth!
Look at China crumble before our very eyes!
Just Look!
According to the American media, China is going to collapse any day now. Communism will show it’s ugly face, and the Chinese people will rise up and yearn for “democracy” and the superior “American way of life!”. Do not hold your breath.
Sure…
It’s falling apart. People are starving, and they are rising up demanding “democracy” and Pepe the frog! And singing the Star Bangled Banner and American flags. They so desperately yearn for the American way of life!
Look at them!
According to the American media, China is going to collapse any day now. Communism will show it’s ugly face, and the Chinese people will rise up and yearn for “democracy” and the superior “American way of life!”. Do not hold your breath.
Sure…
Look at all those impoverished and miserable people!
According to the American media, China is going to collapse any day now. Communism will show it’s ugly face, and the Chinese people will rise up and yearn for “democracy” and the superior “American way of life!”. Do not hold your breath.
Sure…
China is terribly polluted, dirty, grimy, full of disease and germs. Terrible, terrible germs! Only a moron would want to live in that shit-hole!
According to the American media, China is going to collapse any day now. Communism will show it’s ugly face, and the Chinese people will rise up and yearn for “democracy” and the superior “American way of life!”. Do not hold your breath.
Sure…
America needs to put some “boots on the ground” and liberate the poor misguided and brainwashed Chinese. The government must be destroyed because after all, America loves the Chinese, it’s the government that it hates!
Right?
According to the American media, China is going to collapse any day now. Communism will show it’s ugly face, and the Chinese people will rise up and yearn for “democracy” and the superior “American way of life!”. Do not hold your breath.
Sure…
</sarcasm>
Ugh!
This is true in what ever form that the PTB controlled government is pushing at the moment. Whether it is COVID, or 5G, or Huawei, or Tiktok, it’s all a echo of what the government wants the sheeple to repeat.
And the sheeple does repeat it, with the worst offenders being those who read the alt-right outlets.
But it doesn’t really matter.
What we do know is Fourth Turnings always accelerate and intensify towards a bloody finale, with clear winners and losers.
There will be clear winners.
There will be clear losers.
Unconditional surrender will be demanded by those maintaining the upper hand. As was clearly articulated in the March 2021 Alaska meeting between the USA and China.
Whether this coming conflict remains domestic or spreads internationally, the “advancements” in the technology of destruction will endanger every human being on the planet.
You cannot escape the impact of Fourth Turnings, only survive and/or do your part in helping achieve a positive outcome.
There is no predetermined ending.
“The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule.
If there is a war, it is likely to be one of maximum risk and effort – in other words, a total war.
Every Fourth Turning has registered an upward ratchet in the technology of destruction, and in mankind’s willingness to use it.”
– Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning
When pondering the possible outcomes of this Fourth Turning, we tend to be drawn towards the negative, because a positive outcome seems so unlikely given the current animosity roiling the country.
If you step back and realize all the hate and conflict is being engineered and coordinated by a ruling class of powerful rich men, then average Americans could organize a new paradigm that honors the original intent of the U.S. Constitution, allowing citizens the liberty and freedom to create voluntary associations based upon common interests at a local level.
The ruling oligarchs find this unacceptable, so this freedom must be wrested away from them by any means necessary.
There is a civil war already underway, but only one side is fighting…
… the billionaire class who not only don’t want to relinquish some power, but want total control over every aspect of our lives. It appears that this action will turn this one-sided silent war into a hot war on both the domestic and international fronts.
The Enemy.
Everyone is fighting
The American Empire is clearly in rapid decline and may not survive the trials and tribulations over the coming decade.
The Fourth Turning is not a prophecy, but should be taken as a warning and call to action. Sitting this out and hoping for the best will not help achieve a positive outcome.
Tragedy or triumph – the choices we make will matter.
The climax of this Fourth Turning may be a few years off, but the battle for the soul of America has already engaged.
“History offers no guarantees.
Obviously, things could go horribly wrong – the possibilities ranging from a nuclear exchange to incurable plagues, from terrorist anarchy to high-tech dictatorship.
We should not assume that Providence will always exempt our nation from the irreversible tragedies that have overtaken so many others: not just temporary hardship, but debasement and total ruin.
Losing in the next Fourth Turning could mean something incomparably worse.
It could mean a lasting defeat from which our national innocence – perhaps even our nation – might never recover.”
– Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning
Internationally speaking…
We have yet to see how long it will be before the Biden administration realizes its few victories will be unaffordably Pyrrhic.
Indeed, as simple as merely not responding to American provocation the Chinese/Russian partnership will emerge as the victors.
America is truly fucked.
Halford Mackinder’s century-old vision of a Eurasian superstate, based between the Volga and the Yangtse, is becoming reality.
Deal with it.
Embrace it.
Commentators usually fail to understand why; it is not due to military superiority, but down to simple economics.
While the US economy suffers a post-lockdown inflationary outcome and an existential crisis for the dollar, China’s economy will boom on the back of increasing domestic consumption.
This is an official Chinese government objective.
Meanwhile it is increasing exports, the consequence of America’s stimulation of consumer demand and a soaring budget deficit.
For America, it’s a lose – lose.
The Chinese-Russian partnership already dominates or controls Mackinder’s World Island, defined as Eurasia and all Africa.
South-east Asian nations notionally in the US’s sphere of influence are firmly tied to the partnership’s economy.
And the overland and sea silk roads similarly bind the EU and the Indian and Western Pacific Oceans’ states respectively.
Combined, it amounts to over half the world’s population no longer sharing the economic and currency interests of 328 million Americans.
Imagine that!
We are now equipped to ask an important question: the US status quo, with its dollar hegemony is seen by the new Biden administration as an unchallengeable right, and its position as the world’s hegemon is vital for… .
…what?
What it is “vital” for?
The benefit of the world, or the benefit of the US at the world’s expense?
Hum?
To answer this, we must consider it from the point of view of the US military and intelligence complex.
The problem facing us is that the Pentagon became fully institutionalised in managing America’s external security following the second world war.
When the Soviets extended their sphere of influence into the three great undeveloped continents, Asia, Africa and South America, there was a case for defending capitalism and freedom — or at least freedom in an American sense by keeping minor nations on side.
This was done by fair means and often foul for expediency’s sake.
But the fall of the Berlin Wall and the death of Mao Zedong made the American military and intelligence functions largely superfluous, other than matters more directly related to national defense.
But it is in the nature of government departments and their private sector contractors to do everything in their power to retain both influence and budgets, and the argument that new threats will arise is always hard for politicians to resist….
…especially for a military empire.
And what do the statists in a government department do when they have secured their survival?
Their retention of power without real purpose descends into alternative military objectives. And from the first Bush president, they were all firmly on-message.
As we see today with the American military empire.
President Trump was the first president for some time not to start military engagements abroad. His attempts to wind down foreign operations were strongly resisted by defense and intelligence services.
And his efforts to obtain a détente with North Korea were met with disdain — even horror at Langley.
But war-monger he did.
And he left a legacy of the most comprehensive non-hot-war attacks in history.
From the hybrid-wars, to carpet bombing livestock to produce famines inside of China, he was relentless.
And while no one WANTS to talk about the sorry truth, COVID-19 is an American bio-weapons attack upon China.
No.
Not the “inoculation strain” COVID-19A that all the “news” is hyping about. But the strain that was unleashed on China, Iran, North Korea and Russia; the lethal strain, the COVID-19B.
Whatever the truth in these matters, it is highly unlikely that the power conferred by the ability to initiate unchallengeable cover-ups, information management, subversion of foreign states and secret intelligence operations is not abused.
They are.
That’s a fact jack.
And we can see this through the proliferation and traction of “conspiracy theories”. Now, mostly and falsely attributed in their origin to Russian cyber-attacks and disinformation.
It’s all a consequence of one’s own government continually bending the truth to the point where large sections of the population begin to believe it is its own government’s propaganda.
We call them “sheeple.”
And no one is immune. Event the most vehement Alt-Right or alt-left media, who believes that they are independent thinkers, regurgitate the narratives pumped out for them to consume.
This brings us to the change in administration.
As a senator, Biden had interests in foreign affairs dating back to the late 1970s and was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1997 and subsequently became its chairman.
As such a long-standing politician in this field it is almost certain that the Pentagon establishment regards Biden as a safe pair of hands; in other words, a president who is likely to support Langley’s role in setting geopolitical and defence priorities.
Surely, for them this is a welcome change from the off-message President Trump.
Policies to contain the Russian threat
Despite the Navalny affair, Putin is still unchallengeable as Russian leader, having emerged from the post-Soviet turmoil where chaos and organized crime were the order of the day.
No western leader has had such a tough political background and Putin is a survivor, a strongman firmly in control.
Vladimir Putin
This matters for America and NATO with respect to policies in Ukraine, the Caucasus, Syria, Iran and Turkey.
Any attempt by America to complete unfinished business in Ukraine (a triparty scrap involving Russia, Germany/EU and the US over the Nord Stream pipelines depriving Ukraine of transition revenues is already brewing) is likely to lead to confrontations with Russia on the ground.
And Russia signed a military cooperation pact with Iran in 2015.
Like a cat with a mouse, Putin is playing with Turkey, interested in laying pipelines to southern Europe, and getting it to drift out of NATO. Russia’s interest in Syria is to keep it out of America’s sphere of influence, which with Turkey’s help it has managed to do.
For some time, military analysts have been telling us that we are now in a cyber war with Russia, accusing it of interfering in elections and promoting conspiracy theories …
… with the US presidential election last November being the most recent assertion.
As with all these allegations there is no proof offered, just statements from government sources which have a track record of being economical with the truth.
Erp. They lie.
Whatever the truth may be, cyber wars are closely intertwined with propaganda.
Attacks on Russia since the millennium have been by disrupting dollar payments, and less importantly, by sanctioning individuals close to Putin.
The monetary threat was originally justified by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, leading to the collapse of the rouble and a hike in interest rates.
The new cold war had taken a financial turn. Russia’s response was to reduce the economy’s dependence on dollars as much as possible, with the central bank selling dollar reserves and adding gold in their place.
It also set up a new payments system to reduce its dependence on the SWIFT interbank payments system.
Russia has survived all financial attacks and is now better insulated against them for the future.
One-zero for the Russians.
But the cost has been hidden, with western investment restricted to being mainly from the EU (particularly directed at the oil and gas industries).
For these and other reasons being pushed by the United States, Russia has turned to China as both a partner and an economic protector. In return, Russia is resource-rich, an energy provider, and therefore of great value to China.
Not to mention militarily, as the demands made by the United States in Alaska clearly pointed to.
The Russian and Chinese geopolitical partnership
One of the first persons to identify the geopolitical importance of Russia’s resources was Halford Mackinder in a paper for the Royal Geographical Society in 1904. He later developed it into his Heartland theory.
Mackinder argued that control of the Heartland, which stretched from the Volga to the Yangtze, would control the “World-Island”, which was his term for all Europe, Asia and Africa. Over a century later, Mackinder’s theory resonates with the two leading nations behind the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) is a permanent intergovernmental international organisation, the creation of which was announced on 15 June 2001 in Shanghai (China) by the Republic of Kazakhstan, the People's Republic of China, the Kyrgyz Republic, the Russian Federation, the Republic of Tajikistan, and theRepublic of Uzbekistan.
-About SCO | SCO
The underlying point is that North and South America, Britain, Japan and Australasia in the final analysis are peripheral and less important than Mackinder’s World-Island.
And he was correct.
There was a time when British and then American primacy outweighed its importance, but this may no longer be true.
If Mackinder’s vision is valid about the overriding importance of undeveloped resources, Russia is positioned to become with China the most powerful national partnership on earth.
It has happened.
And the BRI is facilitating this.
Which is why there is such a stink about the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang. Which is the gateway to the Belt and Road Initiative.
The SCO is the greatest challenge yet mounted to American economic power and technological supremacy.
And Russia and China are clearly determined to ditch the dollar. We don’t yet know what will replace it – officially. Though, the e-yuan has been implemented throughout China, and is taking over Asia as we speak.
However, the fact that the Russian central bank and nearly all the other central banks and governments in the SCO have been increasing their gold reserves for some time could be an important clue as to how the representatives of three billion Euro-Asians — almost half the world’s population — see the future of trans-Asian money.
In terms of GDP per capita the United States is a long way ahead of the field.
But…
GDP is an artificial measure of national wealth. When there becomes a stratification of society, and the riches 0.001% of the population have a stratospheric control of the finances, they skew the measurement beyond useful utility.
As well as the United States is also the most indebted at the national level.
The difference with the SCO is at the purchasing power parity level, making market prices of secondary importance.
While prices regionally vary considerably the costs of goods in the SCO are as an average considerably less than in the US and EU, so that on a PPP basis the SCO’s GDP is significantly greater than that of the US or the EU.
The inclusion of the EU is a post-Brexit nod to the fact that the EU can no longer be automatically regarded as being within the US sphere of influence.And certainly the United States leadership does not like this one bit.
The commercial ties to the SCO, with both energy reliance from Russia and silk road (BRI) rail terminals in various EU states are clearly the trade future for the EU.
The EU is advanced in its plans to bring national forces under its combined flag, which by giving them an EU identity can only loosen NATO ties with America.
While not an active threat to America’s power, one can envisage the EU sitting on the fence in an intensifying cold war.
The SCO started life in 2001 as a security partnership between Russia and China, incorporating the ‘stans to the east of the Caspian Sea. Born out an earlier organization, the Shanghai Five Group, it was set up to combat terrorism, separatism and extremism.
It is still a platform for joint military exercises, but none have taken place since 2007 and it has morphed into a loose economic partnership instead.
Since the founding Shanghai Five, the SCO now includes India and Pakistan.
Observer status includes Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran and Mongolia. These nations can attend SCO conferences, but their participation is very limited.
Dialogue partners include Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Turkey. These nations can participate actively in SCO conferences, and this status is seen as a preliminary to full membership.
Egypt and Syria have applied for observer status and Israel, Iraq and Saudi Arabia have applied to be dialog partners.
Apart from South East Asian nations, which are dominated by a Chinese diaspora anyway, SCO members and their influence covers almost all of Halford Mackinder’s World Island, with the exception of the European Union.
This is the reality that faces American hegemony; there are twenty-one nations across Asia in a non-American alliance, or on the cusp of joining it.
All the other European and Asian nations are within the SCO’s sphere of influence through trade, even if not politically affiliated.
It is getting more difficult to define the nations definitely in the US pocket, other than its five-eyes partners (Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand). This simple fact places severe limitations on US action against China, and to a lesser extent Russia.
…
Bet you didn’t know that.
It is an exaggeration to suggest that an attack on one member state is an attack on them all. Their cooperation is fundamentally economic rather than military; except…
… as stated above, the SCO’s original function remains to eliminate terrorism, separatism and extremism.
Indeed, India and Pakistan are at loggerheads over Kashmir, and China and India have border disputes in the Himalayas.
But attempts, by, say, the US to prize India away from the SCO is bound to generate wider issues, and perhaps a response, from the other members.
Who do you go with?
Other Nations around the world have a choice.
Broadly, it is to go with America, to go with China/Russia, or sit on the fence.
We have already concluded that the EU’s economic interests in the wake of Brexit are turning it into being a fence-sitter instead of continuing to be in the US sphere of influence. American cannot count on the WU to join in any partnership that opposes the unified Russian-Chinese-Iranian nexus.
Other nations all seem to have a seemingly insatiable demand for commodities and energy and infrastructure building. America is unable to provide this. Which means that local politicians have been bought through local prosperity and will stay bought. But if America offers more money in bales like in the past, these nations’ politicians will undoubtedly take it. As they have always done in the past.
But that is unlikely to lead to their political allegiance changing from being with China.
This form of American diplomacy was at its height in the fifties and sixties, and the US was able to outgun the Soviets and Chinese in providing “aid”, much of which was trousered by politicians.
This was particularly true of the oil money recycled by American banks into loans to South American governments in the late seventies.
The Chinese are not so careless with money: when they build a bridge on a Caribbean island, they are firmly hands-on providing money, management and some of the labor and local politicians are only rewarded with electoral kudos.
There are, therefore, fundamental differences between attempts to keep a country within a particular sphere of influence sixty years ago and today.
And there can be no doubt that the Chinese are winning the game.
America has no skills, no resources, and no abilities any longer. All America has are buckets of paper money that is rapidly losing value, and an enormous military war machine. It’s guns and money. Guns and money. Guns and money.
Guns and money.
Overland, across the China Sea and the Indian Ocean, the silk roads and associated projects are having a substantial impact on emerging nations in a way not seen before.
China has advanced Mackinder’s World Island concept by embracing most of Africa into its sphere of influence.
As well as the SCO’s control over Asia from Vladivostok to the Mediterranean, as the largest oil consumer China’s influence over the Middle East — which supplies little or no oil to the US — binds nations in that region into the SCO.
The contrast with America’s foreign policy under Trump could not have been greater.
America became autarkic, determined to repatriate production from abroad.
AutarkyAutarky is the characteristic of self-sufficiency, usually applied to societies, communities, states and their economic systems.
Autarky as an ideal or method has been embraced by a wide range of political ideologies and movements, especially left-wing ideologies like African socialism, mutualism, war communism, council communism, Communalism, Swadeshi, syndicalism and leftist populism, generally in an effort to build alternative economic structures or to control resources against structures a particular movement views as hostile.
Conservative, centrist and nationalist movements have also adopted autarky in an attempt to preserve part of an existing social order or to develop a particular industry.
Some fascist and far-right movements occasionally espoused autarky as a goal.-Wikipedia
It lacked a strategy to counter China’s rapidly growing spheres of influence.
Even the EU integrated major elements of its economy with China and Russia, and now that the US’s only five-eyes representative in the EU has left it, we can expect this integration to increase more rapidly.
Instead, Trump concentrated on attacking China, its technology and Hong Kong.
China faced tariffs, prompting her to respond partly in kind.
Meng Wanzhou, finance officer for Huawei, was detained in Vancouver on a US extradition request, on the pretext of payments involving Iran.
Her arrest was the start of a US campaign to exclude Huawei from G5 mobile contracts in the west, pressure that eventually led the UK to downgrade Huawei’s contracts.
It ended up uniting the five-eyes security partnership against China’s technology on a reds-under-the-bed argument: “Chinese technology embedded in western communications systems gives them the ability to spy on us.”
The UK’s GCHQ changed its position from there being no evidence of embedded spyware in Huawei equipment to it being vulnerable to being used for spying by the Chinese government.
Hong Kong
The build-up of riots against Hong Kong’s proposed extradition treaty with the Mainland started in 2019, supported and driven by anti-Chinese propaganda.
America finally emerged as China’s adversary, no longer just a trading partner worried by the trade imbalances.
And Hong Kong was the pressure point.
This had happened before, in 2014.
The Chinese leadership was certain the riots in Hong Kong at that time reflected the work of American intelligence agencies.
The following is an extract translated from a speech by Major-General Qiao Liang, a leading strategist for the Peoples’ Liberation Army, addressing the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee in 2015:
“Since the Diaoyu Islands conflict and the Huang-yan Island conflict, incidents have kept popping up around China, including the confrontation over China’s 981 oil rigs with Vietnam and Hong Kong’s “Occupy Central” event.
"Can they still be viewed as simply accidental?“I accompanied General Liu Yazhou, the Political Commissar of the National Defence University, to visit Hong Kong in May 2014. At that time, we heard that the “Occupy Central” movement was being planned and could take place by end of the month. However, it didn’t happen in May, June, July, or August.“What happened? What were they waiting for?“Let’s look at another timetable: the U.S. Federal Reserve’s exit from the Quantitative Easing (QE) policy. The U.S. said it would stop QE at the beginning of 2014. But it stayed with the QE policy in April, May, June, July, and August. As long as it was in QE, it kept overprinting dollars, and the dollar‘s price couldn’t go up. Thus, Hong Kong’s “Occupy Central” should not happen either.“At the end of September, the Federal Reserve announced the U.S. would exit from QE. The dollar started going up. Then Hong Kong’s “Occupy Central” broke out in early October.“Actually, the Diaoyu Islands, Huang-yan Island, the 981 rigs, and Hong Kong’s “Occupy Central” movement were all bombs. The successful explosion of any one of them would lead to a regional crisis or a worsened investment environment around China. That would force the withdrawal of a large amount of investment from this region, which would then return to the U.S.”
That America organized discontent anew in Hong Kong is still China’s view today.
It’s hard to dispute, as all of Hong Kong is wired with 5G and video. And the videos of American diplomats, and UK NGOS’ training the rioters, and supervising the destruction, and making agreements with the key leaders have been well publicized throughout Asia.
Not in America.
Of course.
Clearly, the Chinese believe America covertly managed “Occupy Central” and therefore were at it again.
Apart from what their spies told them, the protests were too well organized and planned to be spontaneous. This time, the attack appeared to have a better chance of success. The plan was coordinated with American pressure on Hong Kong’s dollar peg in an attempt to destabilize it, principally through the threat to extend tariffs against China to Hong Kong.
This second attempt to collapse Hong Kong was therefore more serious.
Hong Kong is critical, because it is the channel for foreign investment portfolio flows into China.
This was important to the Americans, because the US Treasury could not afford to see global portfolio flows attracted into China at a time when they were needed to invest in increasing quantities of US Treasury stock.
Understand that, and you will have grasped a large part of the urgency behind America’s attempt to destabilize Hong Kong.
Qiao Liang makes this point elsewhere in his aforementioned speech, claiming American tactics are the consequence of the ending of Bretton Woods:
“Without the restriction of gold, the US can print dollars at will.
If they keep a large amount of dollars inside the US, it will certainly create inflation.
If they export dollars to the world, the whole world is helping the US deal with its inflation.
That’s why inflation is not high in the US.”
While one can take some minor issues with his simplistic analysis, that is not the point.
What matters is what the Chinese believe.
It was after that second attempt by America to destabilize Hong Kong that the Chinese concluded they must take direct control of the region, isolate and remove the NGO’s and CIA agents involved in this effort, and secure the region to prevent any future disruptions.
China makes mistakes too
China’s strategy in dealing with America has generally been to be slow to respond, and never to provoke. This accords with Sun Tzu’s The Art of War on tactical dispositions:
“To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.”
Generally, China’s strategy has been to refuse to be provoked.
A possible exception has been Hong Kong, where it was decided it was more important to secure the island against further attack, overriding the terms of the treaty with the UK.
But its greatest mistake was in imposing trade tariffs in a tit-for-tat response to US tariffs.
Economic factors
Before the pandemic and with America targeting Chinese exports, China’s leadership introduced policies to encourage domestic consumption.
For this to work required a drop in the savings rate.
In fact, it has been falling since 2010, when according to the World Bank it peaked at 51% of GDP, to just under 44% in 2019.
It was the difference between Chinese and American savings rates which was the driving factor behind their mutual trade imbalance.
China recognizes that it must move on from an export-driven economic model.
But while the American and other welfare-driven economies are running mounting budget deficits, China will continue to have a growing trade surplus.
While this will continue to be a problem for the Americans, without imported goods from China product shortages would simply fuel higher prices on top of unprecedented monetary expansion.
This is the reality behind the cold war for the next few years.
Unfortunately, being highly Keynesian the new Biden administration is unlikely to accept the twin deficits argument and will think that it can still call the shots on trade without cutting its own spending. But the above showed US government debt to GDP is already over $28 trillion and on Biden’s infrastructure and greening plans alone will likely rise significantly further by this fiscal year.
The combination of increasing consumer demand while exports to America boom gives China a window of economic expansion only enjoyed by its Asian neighbors.
The contrast between China’s prospects can hardly be greater than those for America.
The economics alone militate strongly against the US pursuing a geopolitical objective other than quietly backing off.
But senior US personnel are still acting as if the Chinese should kowtow to America, as evidenced in the proceedings in Alaska in March 2021.
The Chinese were robust and will have calculated their position as strong.
Sun Tzu again:
“Therefore the clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy but does not allow the enemy’s will to be imposed on him”.
What we are facing
The Biden presidency faces significant challenges in the ongoing cold war and America is unlikely to retain its hegemonic status.
During Trump’s presidency, attempts to curtail China’s trade and technological development did not succeed.
Instead it has brought China, Russia and Iran together, as well as emboldened both China and Russia to stand firm and as much as possible to do without America and its dollar.
The American senior advisors are, or should be, acutely aware of the debt and inflation traps facing the US and also the EU.
Following the Fed’s policies of accelerated monetary expansion announced last March, China increased her purchases of commodities and raw materials, in effect signalling she prefers them to dollar liquidity.
As a policy, it is likely to be extended further, given China’s existing stockpile of dollars and dollar-denominated debt.
Her dilemma is not just the fragile state of the US economy, but that of the EU which on any dispassionate analysis is a state failing economically and politically as well.
China will not want to be blamed for triggering a series of events which will get everyone reaching out for their forgotten copy of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom.
F.A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom is a true classic on political philosophy. Anyone keen on this field and in the practice of policy will be remiss to by-pass this magnum opus.Hayek is characteristically brilliant in his rendition of an Idea: he can easily walk you through the intricacies of logical and theoretical argument for a case yet combine it masterfully with practical examples in economics and history. He is balanced, impartial and frank.For classical liberals, this is a timeless jewel worthy of Locke, Acton, Tocqueville et al.Simply a masterpiece.
-Amazon
As events take their course, the risk of a dollar collapse and a matching crisis in the euro, though for different reasons, increases.
For Mackinder’s heartland theory to be proved and for the Russian and Chinese partnership to be in control of it, a mega-crisis facing the profligate money-printers must happen.
All history and a priori economic theory confirm it will happen.
The SCO’s Plan B will be a continuance of Plan A, hatched out of the Shanghai Five Group, making the World Island a self-contained unit not dependent on the peripherals — principally, the five eyes.
The Five EyesThe Five Eyes is an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and theUnited States. These countries are parties to the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence.
-Wikipedia
For money, China, Russia and the rest of Asia must give up western ways with unbacked state currencies.
Between them they have enough state-owned declared and undeclared gold to back the yuan, and the rouble.
Give these two currencies free convertibility into gold, and they will be accepted everywhere, so their old cold war enemies can trade their way back to prosperity.
The US has, or says it has, enough gold to put a failing dollar back on a gold standard, but for it to be credible it must [1] radically cut spending, [2] cut back its geopolitical ambitions, and [3] return its budget into balance.
All highly unlikely.
With luck, that is how the new cold war ends.
But don’t hold your breath.
America, and the rest of the nations that it is dragging along with it, are barrelling down towards a great and grand catastrophe.
Situation Report
The election of 2020 did nothing to change the leadership in Washington DC. They are just puppets for their handlers the oligarchy. While Biden is calmer and has swave, compared to Donald Trump, he is continuing all the polices that his predecessor implemented.
The election made no functional difference in anything.
You can read what ever you want in this realization, but I read it as exactly what it is. “Democracy” is dead. Voting whether actual, or corrupted, makes absolutely no difference in how the nation is run, governed or managed.
This knowledge, by itself is significant. It is one of those check boxes that you have on a sheet of paper when you get ready for a big event, gala or preparation for disaster.
I could go down the long list of alarm bells, flashing lights, elements of growing discontent all of which every single American is viewing in real time. These clamorous alarms have been banging away for decades, but their loudness has become so commonplace that most Americans just accept them as the “new reality”, and assume that things will just worsen in a gradual series of stages…
…not a big thunderous crash.
I beg to differ.
For there are things that most Americans have zero understanding of. And is the state of affairs outside the shores of the Untied States. And what passes for “American news” is anything but actual intel. Americans haven’t a clue as to what is going on “outside”.
Things are building up.
America, the large thrashing out of control elephant, is rampaging about and the rest of the world has armed themselves with tranquilizer guns, large nets, and heavy cages.
Russia, China and Iran are one solid block. They are now a close national entity. Surrounding these nations are allied nations. All working in their best interests, but will align with their large neighbors the sino-block.
Europe wants to sit on the fence, but the USA (through the five eyes) wants them to be pulled into the “us vs. them” USA against the world “rules based order”. They are not budging. Just trying to be as neutral as possible.
What is apparently happening is the isolation of the United States from the rest of the globe internationally.
USA/Canada plus the islands of UK, Australia, and NZ.
What we are watching (on the international scene) is the Asian block… the Sino-block … are holding off as long as possible in putting the thrashing elephant down. But they realize that doing so is a last resort. They do not want to do so, as there will be a backlash on the world.
America, the thrashing elephant has no idea how little it knows, is capable of, and what danger it is in. It is delusional.
…
I could get into the specific details like the strange blockage of all shipping in the Suez Canal, the Beirut explosion, the propaganda narratives, the Coronavirus, etc, etc…
These are just elements of a large game of chess that America is playing…
The timeline that they set up is still in play, though the attacks on China (that were planned) did not happen.
No starvation via bio-weapon carpet bombing of livestock.
No suppression of trade via propaganda and sanctions.
No incited revolutions in Hong Kong.
No unrest in Tibet, Xingjiang.
No “incident” in the South China Sea
None of that happened, and the attempt at war in the 2019 – 2020 time frame failed.
But we knew that that was would would happen.
Firstly, because China is not what the American (and Western media) thinks it is, and secondly because the date fro the crisis event has not yet hit.
If you can believe this; we are just building up to the event. There is still a couple of years to go yet.
The danger period is approaching; 2023 through 2026, centered around 2025.
Hold on to your britches boys and girls. Dicy times are a coming.
Taking note of “The Fourth Turning” and the Strauss and Howe generational theory of predictive behavior in America, we note that they predicted a Crisis Catalyst in 2005 and a Climax in 2020.
If the Crisis catalyst comes on schedule, around the year 2005, then the climax will be due around 2020, the resolution around 2026. What will America be like as it exits the Fourth Turning? History offers no guarantees. Obviously, things could go horribly wrong—the possibilities ranging from a nuclear exchange to incurable plagues, from terrorist anarchy to high-tech dictatorship. We should not assume that Providence will always exempt our nation from the irreversible tragedies that have overtaken so many others: not just temporary hardship, but debasement and total ruin. Since Vietnam, many Americans suppose they know what it means to lose a war. Losing in the next Fourth Turning, however, could mean something incomparably worse. It could mean a lasting defeat from which our national innocence—and perhaps even our nation—might never recover. As many Americans know from their own ancestral backgrounds, history provides numerous examples of societies that have been wiped off the map, ground into submission, or beaten so badly they revert to barbarism.
Indeed, the dates are close but seem to be off by a few years.
In our case, it appears that the “Crisis catalyst” did not occur in 2005 as predicted. It occurred in 2008 with the Wall Street “too big to fail” debacle.
That is three years later.
What does Mr. Howe say?
Below is a brief essay originally published on 3/11/19 by Neil Howe discussing the typical progression of each “Turning”. It remains more relevant than ever amidst our current zeitgeist. It was written nearly a year before 2020 showed it’s ugly, ugly face.
NH: We live in a tumultuous time in American history.
The 2008 financial crisis and all its hardships, was the catalyst that tipped us into this age of uncertainty. It marked the start of a generation-long era of secular upheaval that will continue to run its course over the next decade or so. This is the generational theory I laid out in “The Fourth Turning,” a book I co-authored with William Strauss in 1997.
The Fourth Turning explains the rise of a figure like President Trump. In Trump’s Inauguration Day speech, he painted a bleak picture of “American carnage,” of “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation” with “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities.”
Looking abroad, it’s unclear whether America will turn inward and fall prey to nativism or maintain it’s nearly seventy year role as leader of the Free World. Other countries are becoming similarly insular. Britain voted to exit the European Union and we’ve heard anti-E.U. rumblings echoed throughout Europe from France to the Netherlands.
Other nations and peoples around the world are looking to either fill the vacuum in global leadership or exploit it to advance their own ambitions. We’ve seen the thunderous rise of Chinese economic clout, the calculating geopolitical maneuvering of a resurgent Russia, and the barbarous chaos wrought by the so-called Islamic State.
In many ways, this era of uncertainty follows the natural order of things. Like Nature’s four seasons, the cycles of history follow a natural rhythm or pattern. Over the past five centuries, Anglo-American society has entered a new era – a new turning – every two decades or so.
At the start of each turning, people change how they feel about themselves, the culture, the nation, and the future. Turnings come in cycles of four. Each cycle spans the length of a long human life, roughly eighty to one hundred years, or a unit of time the ancients called the saeculum.
The First Turning is called a High.
This is an era when institutions are strong and individualism is weak. Society is confident about where it wants to go collectively, even if those outside the majoritarian center feel stifled by the conformity.
America’s most recent First Turning was the post-World War II American High, beginning in 1946 and ending with the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963, a key lifecycle marker for today’s older Americans.
The Second Turningis an Awakening.
This is an era when institutions are attacked in the name of personal and spiritual autonomy. Just when society is reaching its high tide of public progress, people suddenly tire of social discipline and want to recapture a sense of personal authenticity. Young activists and spiritualists look back at the previous High as an era of cultural poverty.
America’s most recent Awakening was the “Consciousness Revolution,” which spanned from the campus and inner-city revolts of the mid 1960s to the tax revolts of the early ‘80s.
The Third Turning is an Unravelling.
The mood of this era is in many ways the opposite of a High. Institutions are weak and distrusted, while individualism is strong and flourishing. Highs follow Crises, which teach the lesson that society must coalesce and build. Unravelings follow Awakenings, which teach the lesson that society must atomize and enjoy.
America’s most recent Unraveling was the Long Boom and Culture Wars, beginning in the early 1980s and probably ending in 2008. The era opened with triumphant “Morning in America” individualism and drifted toward a pervasive distrust of institutions and leaders, an edgy popular culture, and the splitting of national consensus into competing “values” camps.
And finally we enter the Fourth Turning, which is a Crisis.
This is an era in which America’s institutional life is torn down and rebuilt from the ground up—always in response to a perceived threat to the nation’s very survival. Civic authority revives, cultural expression finds a community purpose, and people begin to locate themselves as members of a larger group.
In every instance, Fourth Turnings have eventually become new “founding moments” in America’s history, refreshing and redefining the national identity. Currently, this period began in 2008, with the Global Financial Crisis and the deepening of the War on Terror, and will extend to around 2030.
If the past is any prelude to what is to come, as we contend, consider the prior Fourth Turning which was kicked off by the stock market crash of 1929 and climaxed with World War II.
Just as a Second Turning reshapes our inner world (of values, culture and religion), a Fourth Turning reshapes our outer world (of politics, economy and empire).
To be clear, the road ahead for America will be rough. But I take comfort in the idea that history cycles back and that the past offers us a guide to what we can expect in the future. Like Nature’s four seasons, the cycles of history follow a natural rhythm or pattern.
Make no mistake. Winter is coming. How mild or harsh it will be is anyone’s guess but the basic progression is as natural as counting down the days, weeks and months until Spring.
Exerpts from the book The Fourth Turning
In 1860-1861 southern states took the Lincoln victory as a de-facto proof that the North would increasingly seek to impose its will upon the south (they were right, but losing the war actually made it happen faster and more completely).
What people generally forget is that all states had large militias that were beholden ONLY to the states, and people had much more belief and legal adherence to the individual states, than now.
Terrorist actions do not start a war, because you cannot really go to war conventionally against terrorism. What happened in the 1860's is that state governments formed a new nation in rebellion.
Personally I don't think the Left or the Right, as a whole, have the balls to do this today. But I guess we'll see. Eventually the threats become real enough that it's hard to ignore them and just hope everything goes back to normal.
-Aerindel, SoJ_51 and Observer
This is straight from the book …
“Something happened to America at that time,” recalled U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye on V-J Day in 1995, the last of the 50-year commemoratives of World War II. “I’m not wise enough to know what it was. But it was the strange, strange power that our founding fathers experienced in those early, uncertain days. Let’s call it the spirit of America, a spirit that united and galvanized our people.” Inouye went on to reflect wistfully on an era when the nation considered no obstacle too big, no challenge too great, no goal too distant, no sacrifice too deep. A half-century later, that old spirit had long since dissipated, and nobody under age 70 remembered what it felt like. When Joe Dawson reenacted his D-Day parachute drop over Normandy, he said he did it “to show our country that there was a time when our nation moved forward as one unit.”
The Eternal Return
On the earthen floors of their rounded hogans, Navajo artists sift colored sand to depict the four seasons of life and time. Their ancestors have been doing this for centuries. They draw these sand circles in a counter-clockwise progression, one quadrant at a time, with decorative icons for the challenges of each age and season. When they near the end of the fourth season, they stop the circle, leaving a small gap just to the right of its top. This signifies the moment of death and rebirth, what the Hellenics called ekpyrosis. By Navajo custom, this moment can be provided (and the circle closed) only by God, never by mortal man. All the artist can do is rub out the painting, in reverse seasonal order, after which a new circle can be begun. Thus, in the Navajo tradition, does seasonal time stage its eternal return.
Like most traditional peoples, the Navaho accept not just the circularity of life, but also its perpetuity. Each generation knows its ancestors have drawn similar circles in the sand—and each expects its heirs to keep drawing them. The Navaho ritually reenact the past while anticipating the future. Thus do they transcend time.
Modern societies too often reject circles for straight lines between starts and finishes. Believers in linear progress, we feel the need to keep moving forward. The more we endeavor to defeat nature, the more profoundly we land at the mercy of its deeper rhythms. Unlike the Navajo, we cannot withstand the temptation to try closing the circle ourselves and in the manner of our own liking. Yet we cannot avoid history’s last quadrant. We cannot avoid the Fourth Turning, nor its ekpyrosis. Whether we welcome him or not, the Gray Champion will command our duty and sacrifice at a moment of Crisis. Whether we prepare wisely or not, we will complete the Millennial Saeculum. The epoch that began with V.J.-Day will reach a natural climax—and come to an end.
An end of what?
The next Fourth Turning could mark the end of man. It could be an omnicidal armageddon, destroying everything, leaving nothing. If mankind ever extinguishes itself, this will probably happen when its dominant civilization triggers a Fourth Turning that ends horribly. But this end, while possible, is not likely. Human life is not so easily extinguishable. One conceit of linear thinking is the confidence that we possess such godlike power that—at the mere push of a button—we can obliterate nature, destroy our own seed, and make ourselves the final generations of our species. Civilized (post-Neolithic) man has endured some 500 generations, prehistoric (fire-using) man perhaps 5,000 generations, Homo Erectus ten times that. For the next Fourth Turning to put an end to all this would require an extremely unlikely blend of social disaster, human malevolence, technological perfection, and bad luck. Only the worst pessimist can imagine that.
The Fourth Turning could mark the end of modernity. The Western saecular rhythm—which began in the mid-fifteenth century with the Renaissance—could come to an abrupt terminus. The seventh modern saeculum would be the last. This too could come from total war, terrible but not final. There could be a complete collapse of science, culture, politics, and society. The “Western Civilization” of Toynbee and the “Faustian Culture” of Spengler would come to the inexorable close their prophesiers foresaw. A new dark ages would settle in, until some new civilization could be cobbled together from the ruins. The cycle of generations would also end, replaced by an ancient cycle of tradition (and fixed social roles for each phase of life) that would not allow progress. As with an omnicide, such a dire result would probably happen only when a dominant nation (like today’s America) lets a Fourth Turning ekpyrosis engulf the planet. But this outcome is well within the reach of foreseeable technology and malevolence.
The Fourth Turning could spare modernity but mark the end of our nation. It could close the book on the political constitution, popular culture, and moral standing that the word America has come to signify. This nation has endured for three saecula; Rome lasted twelve, Etruria ten, the Soviet Union (perhaps) only one. Fourth Turnings are critical thresholds for national survival. Each of the last three American Crises produced moments of extreme danger: In the Revolution, the very birth of the republic hung by a threat in more than one battle. In the Civil War, the union barely survived a four-year slaughter that in its own time was regarded as the most horrible war in history. In World War II, the nation destroyed an enemy of democracy that for a time was winning; had the enemy won, America might have itself been destroyed. In all likelihood, the next Crisis will present the nation with a threat and a consequence on a similar scale.
Or the Fourth Turning could simply mark the end of the Millennial Saeculum. Mankind, modernity, and America would all persevere. Afterward, there would be a new mood, a new High, and a new saeculum. America would be reborn. But, reborn, it would not be the same.
The new saeculum could find America a worse place. As Paul Kennedy has warned, it might no longer be a “great power.” Its global stature might be eclipsed by foreign rivals. Its geography might be smaller, its culture less dominant, its military less effective, its government less democratic, its Constitution less inspiring. Emerging from its millennial chrysalis, it might evoke nothing like the hope and respect of its “American Century” forbear. Abroad, people of goodwill and civilized taste might perceive this society as a newly dangerous place. Or they might see it as decayed, antiquated, an Old New World less central to human progress than we now are. All this is plausible, and possible, in the natural turning of saecular time.
Alternatively, the new saeculum could find America, and the world, a much better place. Like England in the Reformation Saeculum, the Superpower America of the Millennial Saeculum might merely be a prelude to a higher plane of civilization. Its new civic life might more nearly resemble that “shining city on a hill” to which its colonial ancestors aspired. Its ecology might be freshly repaired and newly sustainable, its economy rejuvenated, its politics functional and fair, its media elevated in tone, its culture creative and uplifting, its gender and race relations improved, its commonalities embraced and differences accepted, its institutions free of the corruptions that today seem entrenched beyond correction. People might enjoy new realms of personal, family, community, and national fulfillment. America’s borders might be redrawn around an altered but more cogent geography of public community. Its influence on world peace could be more potent, on world culture more uplifting. All this is achievable as well.
Conclusion
2020 was not the Climax; the Crisis of the Forth Turning in America. That still lies ahead of us.
I hope it never comes to this. In lieu, I can see the Balkinization of the country take place, sides would move to designated areas and set up permanent camp. There may be 2, 3 or more countries within the US before the dust settles.
-Survivalist Boards
A climax is a major event. It is typically marked by full-scale discord and absolute totality of full-scale war. That did not occur in 2020. That is not occurring now. 2020 was marked by a “pandemic”. Most Americans (through their media) believe that either [1] it is a hoax, or [2] it is a new strain of flu that is sweeping the globe. It is neither. It is a bio-weapon attack on China by the neocon Trump administration gone terribly wrong.
Xi Peng and Putin do not get their intel from Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, and CNN. They get it from their Intel divisions. And both nations have a full picture of what is going on, has gone on and will go on further.
Both nations (China and Russia) filed a formal complaint against the United States for launching this bio-weapon (and all the others that it launched in late 2020). And while Americans ignored this complaint, pretending that it is meaningless, it did do something. It marked the start of Russia and China teaming up militarily against the United States.
…
United States. (With the UK, Canada, Israel, and Australia.) Today there is isolated America. Confused. Arrogant. Thrashing and moaning. Demanding all sorts of things.
The Rest of the World. And the rest of the world, lead by Russia, and China, that are very carefully and very precisely planning to stop all this nonsense once and for all.
Adjusting the dates
“It seems I always underestimate the ability of sociopathic central bankers and their willingness to destroy the lives of hundreds of millions to benefit their oligarch masters. I always underestimate the rampant corruption that permeates Washington DC and the executive suites in mega-corporations across the land. And I always overestimate the intelligence, civic mindedness, and ability to understand math of the ignorant masses that pass for citizens in this country. It seems that issuing trillions of new debt to pay off trillions of bad debt, government sanctioned accounting fraud, mainstream media propaganda, government data manipulation and a populace blinded by mass delusion can stave off the inevitable consequences of an unsustainable economic system.”
-The Burning Platform
Adjusting the Strauss and Howe dates to account for the delay in the catalyst, messes things up a bit. They predicted…
There is a nice graphic that I composed for your purposes of planning out the next few years. I hope that it is helpful. Adding three years, gives us…
“Crisis catalyst” in 2008.
Climax in 2023.
Resolution in 2029.
.
Of course, you could argue the 2020 was the “climax” simply because it was one Hell of a shitty year. But you all know, it was a shitty year for everyone on the globe. Not just Americans. I argue that it was just foreplay for bigger stuff to come.
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In the first 100 days of the Biden Presidency, the international world awaited to see how the new administration would handle itself. Many remained hopeful. Certainly Mr. Biden, a seasoned diplomat, and a member of the “dove” (political) party would soften the anti-China attacks, and reach-out to China and the world. The Alaska meeting, would thus lay out a foundation of what the international community would be able to expect in United States and China affairs in the next few years.
This is what China was expecting…
"We hope that through the dialogue, the two sides can focus on cooperation, manage differences and promote the healthy and stable development of China-U.S. relations in accordance with the spirit of the conversation between the two heads of state."
And the actual meeting was stunning.
It really was.
When the meeting opened up, the American “negotiation” team came out with fists slinging making all sorts of demands. No time for pleasantries. The American team immediately began telling China how to handle it’s internal domestic matters, manage it’s territories, and govern it’s cities. It told them that it must obey the “US-Led rule of law” instead of UN conventions. It did not offer help, assistance, or propose ideas of joint cooperation. The opening statements made by the American delegation were a long list of demands, complaints, and accusations.
Then after that first volley was fired, A delegation member added…
“Of course, we only want peace, no one wants war”.
Which in "bully speak" is actually translated as...
"Obey our demands or we will plummet you into a bloody pulp".
Then when it was time for the Chinese to respond, they politely told the American delegation to go to Hell.
When the Chinese delegation arrived in Alaska, their hearts were chilled by the biting cold, but even more by the reception from their American hosts. Blinken and his State Department may felt quite proud of their efforts to isolate and embarrass China ahead of the meeting in Anchorage.
But after facing insult after insult, the Chinese delegation stood up and said "No!" to Western condescension and bullying.
The U.S. had better get used to it.
-CGTN
American reporting
Of course, the United States media is a little confused by this. The Conservative Hard-Right and neocon websites are all so proud that “America is staying tough on China”, and the mainstream media is reporting that the meeting did not go well, but that is expected as the Chinese were so demanding…
Here’s a pro-America article that is accusing China of being arrogant. When the obvious arrogance comes from the United States.
No lunch. Cold instant noodles for lunch.
Demanding China allow American NGO’s in Xinjiang.
Demanding that the US dictate how Hong Kong be governed.
Demanding how China handles it’s state of Taiwan.
Demanding how China handles it’s state of Tibet.
Demanding how, who, and what China does on the international scene.
While the title is spot-on, the content must have been written before the meeting. It seemed like some kind of “boiler plate” text, and did not match up with the title nor the actual events which transpired.
The article is certainly pro-America with statements such as…
“They (the Chinese) came to dictate.
China’s arrogant and insecure leaders are at their most dangerous.
Deterrence is failing.
Biden’s most urgent task is to reestablish it.”
Which is nonsense.
China told them to FUCK OFF and mind their own business. China follows the International rule of law as determined by the UN, not the biggest thug on the block. And that they were aghast at the rudeness, the arrogance, and the sheer demanding tone set forth by the American delegation.
This article was so brief and devoid of facts, I have more characters on my mail box address than the content of this “article“.
Here’s some links to more American based articles all parroting the idea that the negotiations were “contentious and rocky”. All the articles in the American media parrot this predetermined narrative…
It’s not just this, but this same week Biden directly insulted the President of Russia a “Killer”. And thus, within the span of one week, the United States has collectively and intentionally insulted the two other major nations. This does not bode well.
I can tell you that the rest of the world is actually horrified, and if you read what they have to say, you will get a better idea about what is actually going on. Lord help us.
Comments from the rest of the world
These comments are very insightful.
They provide a vision of how America is viewed in the world today, and what people (outside of the American media echo chamber) think. If for anything else, it will give you, the MM reader, and idea of the size and scope of the monster that America has turned into.
Here’s the comments…
The Chinese emphasis on most of the world rejecting a US-directed 'rules-based order' ...
...instead of honoring the UN Charter and settled international law ...
...is of supreme importance and must be re-emphasized ad nauseum.
What a bunch of amateurish megalomaniac idiots.
It was an exhibition of a total lack of tact, self-perception, decency or any equilibrium.
The Chinese's confident offensive resulted in a rapid emotional dive from a state of megalomaniac bravado to shaky self-confidence.
In comparison they made even Trump look like a cultivated gentleman.
To translate from Orwellian Western Newspeak to English:
'Rules-based order' means
'Our rules for you,
that we don't have to follow,
and can change anytime we like.'
'International order' means
'Western-ruled-world order.'
'International community' means
the US-led Western community and vassal states.
(The Western media spouts this all the time.)
'Rules-based' is the modern day incarnation of Americans/British throwing around the phrase 'treaty', 'treaty-based' in colonial days.
Different words, same con.
And of course the Chinese have a few things to say…
Such as
From surrendering to Western powers in 1901, to telling the US in 2021 it doesn't have the qualification to speak to China “from a position of strength”
China needs to convey in a language that US understands.
Straight Forward, Up to the Point, Right at their Faces.
The construct of their brains cannot understand any other ways, Least Not the Diplomatic 'Soft' & Amicable Styles of Communications.
They perceive those to be Weak.
And then we have more Western comments…
USA provided a transcript of both US Govt & China Govt speakers.
I thought this a little unusual, as foreign miminstries like to publish their own transcripts so that they control the authentic translation of their words, free from the opposing parties editing or mis-translation.
"cutthroat competition" may be an arguably alternative translation of "strangle" in the China readout "those who seek to strangle China will suffer in the end."
I was waiting for the China verbatim translation to check the fidelity of the USA translation.
https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjdt_665385/wshd_665389/t1862641.shtmlhttps://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjdt_665385/wshd_665389/t1862643.shtml
But there is only an unquoted report, which is the meeting, but without quotation marks to distinguish between the authors voice and the Officials voice.
Verbatim would be better.
Maybe the USA had reciprocal concerns about the verbatim accuracy of the China transcript.
But its on video anyway, so???
Posted by: powerandpeople | Mar 19 2021 19:37 utc | 7
Toothless sabre rattling is about all the USA has left.
A bunch of old men with a world view from the 1950s whose own virility is long gone is not going to come to an epiphany about their encroaching impotence. The Establishment has no other choice, absent common sense and critical thinking, but to double-down on arrogant self-righteousness bred by sophomoric jingoism that defines 'shallow.'
Empire is crumbling before our eyes. The question is will it take the rest of the world with it as it falls into its own footprint.
Footage of China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi lashing out at U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Anchorage, Alaska, was played repeatedly by China’s state-backed media at home.
“China has Chinese-style democracy,” Yang said, not mincing words in his first encounter with the U.S. President Joe Biden’s team.
“Many people within the United States actually have little confidence in the democracy of the United States, and they have various views regarding the government of the United States.”
The Communist Party Politburo member assailed the U.S., feeding fiery words to the news corps of both countries.
And I really love this next comment. It pretty much sums up my thinking…
Perhaps one of the more predictable mistakes the US will commit next, is misinterpret the stern warnings of the past few days by Russia, China and even NK, as evidence the new Biden/Blinken regime is less feared or respected than the Trump/Pompeo one.
I suspect a more accurate interpretation would be...
"ok, you had the crazy guy for 4 years and we cut you some slack, hoping once the grown ups were back we could reason as adults, but if you're gonna carry on with the same attitude, basically, Democrat or Republican, you can all summarily go fuck yourselves".
Particularly at the end of the term, the Obama regime was already being met by a very hostile China and Russia, well before Trump took over with his less than diplomatic style (or lack thereof). Anyone recall the airport security debacle with China during Obama's last weeks?
Which compares the Alaskan meeting of 2021 with the meeting of 1901 which allowed the Western nations to rape, pillage, and destroy China for decades. Perhaps this picture might be a better illustration…
And FOX news reported on the event
It was of course very pro-America. Leading to this comment…
How our interaction w/China was reported FOX did a full throated, fake narrative just to suit their pro-Trump agenda. When they quoted, 'you cannot talk to us from a position of strength' they made is sound like the Chinese were scoffing at Blinken's weakness rather than his moral turpitude. They made it sound like Blinken surrendering to his Chinese overlords, squandering the strong hand the Trump gave him.
In FOX land, all that matters is that you come up with a great sounding argument. The truthfulness of that arguments is not relevant.
Posted by: Christian J. Chuba | Mar 19 2021 19:55 utc | 14
This is how things look to the rest of the world…
The USA's situation is very dire indeed. The Americans are resorting more and more to "Hail Mary" moves to keep their hegemonic position.
And even then they're blundering.
I would not be surprised at all if they start to straight out have to falsify diplomatic transcripts in order to try to create something favorable to them.
Related to US-China tensions, if anyone likes documentary shows, CNA (Channel News Asia, a broadcaster out of Singapore) has a good four-part documentary released in January 2021 called "When Titans Clash", about the US-China trade/tech tensions, that I would recommend. (I watched the first two yesterday and will watch the other two this weekend.)
Each of the 4 parts is about 48 minutes long and available for watching on YouTube and CNA's website too.
When Titans Clash - part 1 of 4 - Pride & Shame - The Roots of US-China Tensions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL2gBUxblO8
When Titans Clash - part 2 of 4 - The Real Losers of the US-China Trade War
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mYrWYSTW28
When Titans Clash - part 3 of 4 - A US-China Tech War - The True Costs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8XnLW26bmg
When Titans Clash - part 4 of 4 - US or China - Will Southeast Asia Have to Pick a Side
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ8A5jiGICM
Touches on some of the things ak74 mentioned in his comment on the other thread: outsourcing, deindustrialization, the US dollar as reserve currency, etc.
It's from Pearl Forss who was also involved in CNA's 2015-2019 series "The New Silk Road", about China's BRI, that I can recommend as well.
Posted by: Canadian Cents | Mar 19 2021 20:07 utc | 19
And Scott Addams has a thing to say…
And from Northern Europe…
The world appreciates that Russia and China give the US Regime a sublime verbal spanking.
Blinken is Secretary of State for USA, head of the US State Department.
He mentioned in his nomination hearing, & makes allusion in this meeting with China, to a genocide in Xinjiang.
Foreign Affairs magazine article reports US State Department legal office saying they have no evidence for a genocide in Xinjiang.
Is Blinken in touch with his department?
Posted by: dave constable | Mar 19 2021 20:22 utc | 27
same deal as @ 26 dave constable notes too... accusing others of genocide when you have been the main merchant of death on the planet the past 40 or more years doesn't stand.. if anyone is the killer here it is the usa, so the irony isn't lost on everyone..
In my opinion, the Chinese representatives gave a good answer to the American side, although this answer will obviously not be heard.
The Americans have completely lost the culture of negotiation. If there are no elementary human manners, then what kind of agreements can we talk about?
A sad picture. And dangerous. A madman with nuclear weapons (and chemical weapons, by the way) is not the best option for a reliable negotiating partner.
b Posted:
“The alternative to a rules-based order is a world in which might makes right and winner takes all and that would be a far more violent and unstable world,” Blinken said.
The 'rules based order' means 'do what we say' and is of course unacceptable. Here is how the Chinese replied:
What China and the international community follow or uphold is the United Nations-centered international system and the international order underpinned by international law, not what is advocated by a small number of countries of the so-called “rules-based” international order.
Say it to uncle Sam. Say it every time they meet. The bankruptcy of the "rules based order" gang of five or six is a failure.
For all its appalling faults the UN and established international courts are the place to go. Suck it up uncle Sam.
Posted by: uncle tungsten | Mar 19 2021 20:59 utc | 35
And from my email
I am so happy 😊 China tell the oppressor to piss off.
Attached short video with English translation: China tell US you are not qualify to tell us you want to talk to us with strength. 20 to 30 years ago, you already not qualify…
“The alternative to a rules-based order is a world in which might makes right and winner takes all and that would be a far more violent and unstable world,” Blinken said.
LOL.
You really have to wonder if the Americans believe their own bullshit about their hollowed "Rules Based International Order"?
The violent and unstable world is ALREADY here thanks to ... this very same American "Rules" Based Order.
Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Serbia, Somalia--these are just a few of the countries America has either invaded, bombed, or supported moderate jihadi Head-Choppers against to destabilize in the past generation.
Two decades of US “war on terror” responsible for displacing at least 37 million people and killing up to 12 million
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/09/cost-s09.html?view=print
This is interesting.
Apparently both the Russians and the Chinese have concluded that Biden intends to use "CornPop" faux-macho posturing as his foreign policy, and they have both decided that "fuck that, let's nip this in the bud".
Because it looks like they have decided they have had a gut-full of US "exceptionalism" and are quite determined to say so.
To anyone, but especially to the Americans.
Going to be a lot of very confused people at Foggy Bottom. They may never have experienced this degree of contempt before.
Posted by: Yeah, Right | Mar 19 2021 22:08 utc | 46
I about fell on the floor when I read Blinken's words, my first thought being "this klutz has zero knowledge of history since 1588 and just admitted as much.
In China, Blinken would never achieve any position of power.
The decadence of the Outlaw US Empire's government is like so many prions turning brain tissue into a swiss-cheese-like mass and then boasting about how finely tuned are its cognitive abilities. And when Harris is installed, we'll have a genuine novice in charge--The Blind leading the Blind.
It's no wonder the Chinese sought an audience with Lavrov ASAP.
Yes. The meeting went so bad that the already tight China-Russia relationship was strengthened. I am sure that certain actions, policies and activities were on hold pending he result of these “talks”. But the American actions were so appalling that China and Russia have decided that more forceful means of persuasion are necessary.
Contrived moulded whatever the case I leave this excerpt. I feel it hits the head.
Here's what journalist Joe Bageant wrote in 2007:
Much of the ongoing battle for America's soul is about healing the souls of these Americans and rousing them from the stupefying glut of commodity and spectacle.
It is about making sure that they—and we—refuse to accept torture as the act of "heroes" and babies deformed by depleted uranium as the "price of freedom."
Caught up in the great self-referential hologram of imperial America, force-fed goods and hubris like fattened steers, working people like World Championship Wrestling and Confederate flags and flat-screen televisions and the idea of an American empire.
("American Empire! I like the sound of that!" they think to themselves, without even the slightest idea what it means historically.)
"The people" doing our hardest work and fighting our wars are not altruistic and probably never were.
They don't give a rat's bunghole about the world's poor or the planet or animals or anything else. Not really.
"The people" like cheap gas.
They like chasing post-Thanksgiving Day Christmas sales.
And if fascism comes, they will like that too if the cost of gas isn't too high and Comcast comes through with a twenty-four-hour NFL channel.
That is the American hologram.
That is the peculiar illusion we live within, the illusion that holds us together, makes us alike, yet tells each of us we are unique.
And it will remain in force until the whole shiteree comes down around our heads.
Working people do not deny reality.
They create it from the depths of their perverse ignorance, even as the so-called left speaks in non sequiturs and wonders why it cannot gain any political traction.
Meanwhile, for the people, it is football and NASCAR and a republic free from married queers and trigger locks on guns.
That's what they voted for—an armed and moral republic.
And that's what we get when we stand by and watch the humanity get hammered out of our fellow citizens, letting them be worked cheap and farmed like a human crop for profit.
Genuine moral values have jack to do with politics.
But in an obsessively religious nation, values remain the most effective smoke screen for larceny by the rich and hatred and fear by the rest.
What Christians and so many quiet, ordinary Americans were voting for in the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 was fear of human beings culturally unlike themselves, particularly gays and lesbians and Muslims and other non-Christians.
That's why in eleven states Republicans got constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage on the ballot.
In nine of them the bill passed easily.
It was always about fearing and, in the worst cases, hating "the other."
Being a southerner, I have hated in my lifetime.
I can remember schoolyard discussions of supposed "nigger knifing" of white boys at night and such.
And like most people over fifty, it shows in my face, because by that age we have the faces we deserve.
Likewise I have seen hate in others and know it when I see it.
I am seeing more of it now than ever before in my lifetime, which is saying something considering that I grew up down here during the Jim Crow era.
Fanned and nurtured by neoconservative elements, the hate is every bit equal to the kind I saw in my people during those violent years.
Irrational. Deeply rooted. Based on inchoate fears.
The fear is particularly prevalent in the middle and upper-middle classes here, the very ones most openly vehement about being against using the words nigger and fuck.
They are what passes for educated people in a place like Winchester.
You can smell their fear.
Fear of losing their advantages and money.
Fear there won't be enough time to grab and stash enough geet to keep themselves and their offspring in Chardonnay and farting through silk for the next fifty years.
So they keep the lie machinery and the smoke generators cranking full blast as long as possible, hoping to elect another one of their own kind to the White House—Democratic or Republican, it doesn't matter so long as they keep the scam going.
The Laurita Barrs speak in knowing, authoritative tones, and the inwardly fearful house painter and single-mom forklift driver listen and nod.
Why take a chance on voting for a party that would let homos be scout masters?
(Dear Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War, chapter 2)
Well, the US is obviously in a deep crisis: riots all over the place, the southern border is a mess, and the government even needs the national guard to protect itself from the people.
Under the circumstances, one should expect the establishment to act hysterically. It's just a symptom.
Posted by: Mao Cheng Ji | Mar 19 2021 22:32 utc | 53
The madness of the Outlaw Empire is not about to shrink from bringing down the curtain on the human race, if that's what it takes to see their power of command obeyed.
The US, as it is today, doesn't respect any nation's sovereignty and is mostly indifferent to allies and foes alike.
The regime considers itself the only sovereign worthy of such title on earth; and expects to be allowed to run the table at its pleasure, or else it will supervise the burning down of the house.
Biden meanders about, not even possessed of his right mind, holding on to the delusions and lies of several presidents who lately came before him; and he is just the man to keep all the fires of destruction burning, while the torture of innocence is unceasing, and as the arrogant demands made against other countries become more absurd. What else is more obvious?
These are the things we have seen foreshadowed before and after 9/11.
As long ago as the 80s Reagan was told about the reality of nuclear winter.
In A Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut described how scientists explained to G.W. Bush that a nuclear exchange of even a moderate duration and size, could still depopulate the earth of most of its people.
The Bush Administration, toying with the idea of deploying baby nukes, for strategic exigency, short of total war, went with "guesswork" rather than prudent scientific advice.
It was their best guess that the circumspect, abbreviated use of nukes wouldn't destroy humanity itself, or cause ice age conditions, or bring about global starvation.
Re Sadde @3 "What a bunch of amateurish megalomaniac idiots. It was an exhibition of a total lack of tact, self-perception, decency or any equilibrium."
Seems like just the other day I was reading the same description about Pompeo lol. And yet somehow this is much worse, as we have a clearly demented, recently installed "president" who can't make it up a flight of stairs or give a press conference, who has the nuclear football following him around 24/.7.
Been nice knowing y'all.
Well Russia has been very seriously preparing for total war for some years now, and China too has caught that drift and begun to do the same.
By comparison, the US is ready for aggravation, but nothing beyond that.
The US has no capability for war.
How then, for the free nations of the world to defeat the US?
One could surmise that the best way would be to force the US to accept defeat.
Iran already showed the way.
The lesson is not that hard to understand, although the tactics are obviously more complex.
Who will punch the bully?
Because we all know that this is what causes the bully to slink away, and to behave a little better.
It begins with words, because that's what the US likes to fight with, treating then merely as weapons, treating them with contempt.
And now words of contempt itself, as Yeah Right @45 points out, are being driven forward like a moving wall against the US.
First come the words. Next will come...
...whatever will come, but it is a certainty that the Russia/China team has every contingency war-gamed.
As Piotr Berman points out in the previous thread, the US neurotic dynamic is to escalate blindly until it achieves control.
This is the dynamic that must be defeated.
Obviously, this will involve situations in which the US has nothing left to escalate with (situations that don't allow the nuke specter)...
...at which point, the US has to slink away - under cover of words of bluster, to be sure, to salve the ego, but slink away even so.
And a few more of these lessons of defeat will re-train that ego, over time, lessons carefully administered, and all watched over by armies of loving grace.
Blenkin and co just got thoroughly washed in a Chinese laundry, washed clean dried and starched, ready to put on their fully cleaned washed self's for taste of some Russian pastries.
Soon after on the coming Iranian 13th day of the new year (thirteenth out) they can go for an Iranian picnic for taste of gourmet delicious Persian soup (Ash).
I really enjoyed the Chinese exchange with shining city on hill guys, Happy Iranian new year and New century (1400) to you all, MOA and b.
Suffice it to say, I love the Chinese (and they highly cultured ways etc) when they talk and act like this to the barbarians aka the Americans.
Everything the Chinese FM said was correct, and spot on.
Blinken and Bush are as boorish and rude, perhaps even more condescending than Pompeo and Trump - But it is hard to choose between the lesser of two American evils
Posted by: michaelj72 | Mar 19 2021 23:14 utc | 60
The editors at Strategic-Culturesee it this way:
"In a desperate bid to thwart the strategic partnership between Russia and Europe, Washington is resorting to ever-more frantic threats of sanctions and other disruptive measures.
Biden is playing the personal insult card in a gambit for blowing up bilateral relations with Russia as a way to sabotage Nord Stream 2.
"It’s a pathetic move, one that actually speaks more of America’s historic enfeeblement rather than pretensions of power. Russia would do well to stay calm and let the Americans make fools of themselves."
It seems Russia's doing just that--attending to the vital business of developing its nation and peoples. Russia's geared for numerous patriotic celebrations throughout the year, and Biden's comments were made on the eve of Crimean reunification with Russia, which only served to cement Russians closer and hold Putin in even greater esteem. Talk about an Own Goal!
Outlaw US Empire Nord Stream policy is close to being the same as literally torpedoing it, making it an act of war against the EU and Russia. Somehow, I don't think Blinken understands that fundamental fact.
The fact that Blinken has to read what he supposedly thinks, compared with the Chinese representatives and diplomats like Lavrov, Zakarov, and even Putin who know their thoughts without someone else writing their script.
Same as all the MSM. They all appear to get their news sent to them in writing and maybe a few fluff up the news but they know what the agenda is.
So in just a matter of weeks, the US just antagonized both Russia and China.
This seems a surprise to me, US is getting very bold, I thought they would be more active but subversive, but this is just straight up insulting your opponents.
I'm in the middle of Armstrong's essay and am at the first reference to Kagan's vision:
"What should that role be? Benevolent global hegemony. Having defeated the 'evil empire,' the United States enjoys strategic and ideological predominance. The first objective of U.S. foreign policy should be to preserve and enhance that predominance by strengthening America’s security, supporting its friends, advancing its interests, and standing up for its principles around the world.'
It's absolutely clear that Kagan has no clue as to the reality of what is actually the objective of the Neoliberal Parasites running the Outlaw US Empire; for aside from "advancing its interests," the Parasites have zero motivation to do any of that.
As their sole ambition/goal is to vacuum up all the wealth they can and leave a shell just as they planned and failed with Russia, but have succeeded elsewhere.
And as for principles, the reality is it has none, nor does it have any friends, just vassals and victims.
This analogy by Armstrong's excellent:
"The U.S. is sitting on a dragon and it daren’t get off or the dragon will kill it. But because it can’t kill the dragon, it must sit on it forever: no escape. And dragon’s eggs are hatching out all around: think how much bigger the Russian, Chinese and Iranian dragons are today than they were a quarter-century ago when Kagan & Co so confidently started PNAC; think how bigger they’ll be in another....
"But the more sanctions, the stronger Russia gets: as an analogy, think of sanctions on Russia as similar to the over-use of antibiotics – Russia is becoming immune."
And tying it all up is this excellent summation:
"Has there ever been a subject on which people have been so wrong for so long as Russia? How many times have they said Putin’s finished? Remember when cheese was going to bring him down? Always a terminal economic crisis. A year ago they were sure COVID would do it. A U.S. general is in Ukraine and Kiev’s heavy weapons are moving east but, no, it’s Putin who, for ego reasons – and his “failing” economy – wants the war. Why do they keep doing it? Well, it’s easy money – Putin (did we tell you he was in the KGB?) wants to expand Russia and rule forever; therefore, he’s about to invade somebody. He doesn’t, no problem, our timely warning scared him off; we’ll change the date and regurgitate it next year. In the meantime his despotic rule trembles because of some-triviality-of-the-moment. These pieces write themselves: the anti-Russia business is the easiest scam ever. And there’s the difficulty of admitting you’re wrong: how can somebody like Kagan, such a triumphantasiser back then, admit that it’s all turned to dust and worse, turned to dust because they took his advice? Much better to press on – it’s not as if anybody in the lügenpresse will call him out or deny him space. Finally, these people are locked in psychological projection: because they can only envisage military expansion, they assume the other guy is equally obsessed and so they must expand to counter his expansion. They suspect everybody of suspecting them. Their hostility sees hostility everywhere. Their belligerence finds belligerence. The hyperpower is forever compelled to respond to lesser powers. They look outside, see themselves and fear; in their mental universe the USA is arrogantly strong and fearfully weak at the same time."The Walking Dead is finally becoming a metaphor for the Outlaw US Empire, its policies, and what it terms values--which aren't values but vices. But TWD was fiction and was thus capable of reforming itself. The Empire's goals and polices are essentially the same as in 1940 and even further back to 1913, and haven't changed very much, being just as illegal and immoral then as now. What's different are the "Dragons" which didn't exist in 1918 or 1944, and the Parasites have almost total control that's finally seeing domestic pushback.
Here's Sputnik's initial report on the Alaska meet. Not much reference to commerce. Here's an excerpt:
"Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, who accompanied Yang to the talks, told CGTN that their side had made clear to the Americans that China takes its sovereignty very seriously and warned them not to 'underestimate China's determination to defend its territory, to defend its people, and maintain its righteous interests.'
"Washington has criticized China's security policies in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, where Western-backed separatist forces have created chronic unrest, as well as its longstanding claim to rule Taiwan, an autonomous island ruled by the Republic of China that lost the civil war in mainland China in 1949, when the socialist People's Republic of China was formed.
The US technically recognizes Beijing's claim to be the sole legitimate representative of China, but in reality is the primary backer of the Taiwanese government.
Beijing says all of these are internal matters and not of Washington's concern."
Very little's reported of the Outlaw US Empire's response. This little bit doesn't bode well:
"US State Department officials noted they did not see the Alaska summit as the beginning of a new mechanism or dialogue."
I see that as a confession that they aren't agreement capable since they can't even continue a dialogue.
i've been a reader of moa for quite a few years now, but never contributed to the forum. mostly because after a while i found what i wanted to say anyway, and why pile on?
i really enjoy the civility of the forum, and it's internationality.
And of course b's insights. as a german myself I share many points of view with him in matters i have knowledge in, or think that i do. for example i think that trump sure might be seen as a desaster by many, but it was a gift to europe, and germany in particular, because he openend the eyes of many, many people here who for decades thought murrica is our friend, our big brother, who will always protect us from the evil of the world - namely communism, russia and lately china.
a majority of the people here, as well as in the rest of the so called "western world" have been brainwashed for about 7 decades to think that way, even when america committed the most obvious, heinous, horrible crimes against humanity and our civilization as a whole. there was always a spin, "human rights", "democracy", "free trade" and so on, values that had to be "defended" - when in reality it was always an offensive aggression or even a "pre-emptive strike".
people just swallowed what the media fed them and went on with their daily chores.
trump changed that, suddenly the ugly side of the empire became visible, and i will always be grateful for that. because now it cannot be hidden anymore.
it wasn't just the unruly behaviour of a "new rich" and uneducated bully who accidentally became president. politically, the general attitude was always the same, trump only worded it much more obvious, making it harder for politicians and media to spin.
that's why our politicians and media (for the most part fed by trans-atlantic "think tanks") hated him almost more than americans themselves - he made their lies obvious and transparent.
if it wasn't so sad, it sometimes was almost funny to see them squirm, having to explain why our friend and protector suddenly became so selfish and hostile.
All of them welcomed of course the new harris administration, being so progressive, just and friendly again - only to witness a change of paradigm they probably didn't even think trump was capable of, or willing to: i think in later years, this week will mark the "official" beginning of the new cold war era.
This behaviour against Russia and China was not a slap, but a punch in the face and will NEVER be forgiven nor forgotten.
The only question for europe is: does it finally have the balls to emancipate and stand up against the bully? or will it submit and become a collateral damage of it's downfall?
in form of a nuclear wasteland maybe? i think that nord stream II is a turning point.
if Germany caves in here, there's little hope to get rid of the leash for it and the whole of Europe. if it stands tall, Europe might become a buffer instead of a frontline. knowing and seeing our politicians, i'd say it doesn't look good.
@Posted by: Grieved | Mar 19 2021 23:05 utc | 55:
...., the US neurotic dynamic is to escalate blindly until it achieves control. This is the dynamic that must be defeated.
Yes that's problem all right, but can you ever defeat that dynamic given that the gorilla owns 10,000 nukes and has no moral qualms whatsoever of using them? Until a near perfect anti-nuke defense system is developed I surmise the world would just have to live with, and get used to, the juvenile antics of King Kong because it has stated time and again it would escalate all the way up to using its nukes, because that's what they are for according to a former Sec. of State.
I'm a pessimist on this issue. I'm afraid we'll just have to endure and live with a wild beast for a while to come.
Posted by: Oriental Voice | Mar 20 2021 0:35 utc | 76
The Alaska talks have ended and the Global Times Editor writes:
"China and the US are two major world powers. No matter how many disputes they have, the two countries should not impulsively break their relations. Coexistence and cooperation are the only options for China and the US. Whether we like it or not, the two countries should learn to patiently explore mutual compromises and pursue strategic win-win cooperation." [My Emphasis]
The big question: Does the Outlaw US Empire possess enough wisdom to act in that manner.
Russia is a classical construct with more than 1000 years of history and culture. These are part and parcel of what Russia is and who her people are....
The USA on the other hand, has never coalesced into a cultural entity.... Most of US culture was created by advertizers during the post WWII period..... The rock & roll generation... hippies.... etc.
A state based upon a covenant between itself and God... mediated by orthodox christianity... is totally foreign to Steve and most US denizens...
But it exists.... Ditto for China... now 5000 years young.... the embodiment of confucianism... meritocracy...
All foreign to Steve and Blinken and Biden....
INDY
so here is the white house press briefing for today on this thread topic - Department Press Briefing – March 19, 2021
here is the segment on china-usa meeting.. interestingly our prime minister trudeau mention the issue of the 2 michaels held in china and the phrase something to the effect "china must adhere to the 'rule based law' b.s. was at the top of his words in the radio when i was in the car earlier..
"QUESTION: (Inaudible) Alaska, if you’re able to talk about that. Obviously, there’s been a lot of reporting since yesterday about how sort of tense the initial encounter was. And there’s been discussions of – I think both sides have accused the other of breaking protocol in those initial exchanges. But I wonder if – does the State Department – based on the tone of that first meeting, does that give you any concern for the future of the relationship with China and the possibility of reaching some agreements or getting some achievables out of these meetings? Thank you.
MS PORTER: Thank you for your question, Simon, and just as a response to that, of course, as you know, Secretary Blinken and NSA Sullivan had their first meetings with Director Yang Jiechi and State Councilor Wang Yi, and of course, are in sessions this morning. And these were serious discussions. Again, I’ll just reiterate something that NSA Sullivan said. And of course, to your point about it, the – being contentious or not, again, we – he said we don’t see conflict, but of course, welcome stiff competition.
Again, this was a single meeting, and again, we know that sometimes these diplomatic presentations can be exaggerated or maybe even aimed at a domestic audience, but we’re not letting the theatrics from the other side stop us from doing what we were intending to do in Alaska, which is lay out our principles as well as our expectations and have these tough conversations early that we need to have with the PRC.
Let’s go to the line of Edward Keenan.
QUESTION: (Inaudible) of the Alaska meetings, the two Michaels, Kovrig and – the two Canadian Michaels who are being held as political prisoners in China, widely perceived as leverage against the United States, who are going to trial now as these meetings take place. Secretary Blinken and President Biden expressed their desire to see those two Michaels released when they met with the Canadian prime minister recently. I wonder to what extent those cases are up for discussion in Alaska right now, and if so, like, to what extent and how?
MS PORTER: Well, let me start off by saying that the United States continues to publicly call on the PRC to end the arbitrary and unacceptable detentions of the Canadians citizens Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig. And again, the United States is deeply concerned by the PRC’s decision to hold a closed-court hearing with the Canadian citizens. Obviously, no one from – no diplomat from Canada or the U.S. were involved in that. And we’re also deeply alarmed by a report that the PRC will commence the trial of Canadian citizen Michael Kovrig on March 22nd and we renew our call for PRC authorities to attend this trial.
We’ll always just reiterate that we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Canada in calling for their immediate release, and we also continue to condemn their lack of minimum procedural protections during their two-year arbitrary detention."
The Americans have completely lost the culture of negotiation. If there are no elementary human manners, then what kind of agreements can we talk about? A sad picture. And dangerous. A madman with nuclear weapons (and chemical weapons, by the way) is not the best option for a reliable negotiating partner.
alaff | Mar 19 2021 20:44 utc | 32:
And Bio-weapons.
I suspect Blinken/Sullivan/Biden need to show that they are "tough" to the Chinese in public because otherwise, they will be roasted by the 78 millions Trump supporters for being "weak" to China compared with Trump. Behind the close door, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi characterized the talks to be NOT "very tense." I believe Biden actually is quite keen to get some "achievements" from the Chinese side, probably not realistically in this meeting, but hopefully in the near future.
Ha, but the weather is cold, the hotel is shoddy, and the Chinese delegate had to have instant noodle for lunch - that sounds like a very low budget “Hongmen Banquet” by the Americans. Maybe they are still waiting for their 1.9 trillion stimulus check?
trump changed that, suddenly the ugly side of the empire became visible
I've heard this about Trump a lot, but I've always wondered why Trump was the ultimate catalyst for this epiphany. You would think that the Iraq War should have been that watershed moment, or even Libya (and perhaps they were for many, like me). I suppose from the perspective of inter-imperialist relations in the first world, a lack of decorum of the level of Trump's is more anomalous and egregious than the imposition of death and destruction of people in the global south.
Mr. Id
Truly dreadful but very likely true portrait of America and not only the South; of which not much has remained after the mass migrations from the North in these past 40 years.
My personal observations have been consistent with your in the interior of the United States, the Judeo-Christians have become meaner and more bigoted and more racist. They are aggressive with an in-your-face attitude. They hate, and they hate Catholics, Muslims, and especially Iranians.
A wealthy preacher was recently asked why always flew in a private jet. He answered that he saw so much hatred on the face of fellow passengers that he could no longer endure it. Others laughed at him, but I believed him.
The late Carl Gustav Jung once observed that he knew World War II was coming because he could see Wotan in every German.
As I wrote to Mr. Kooshy, America could have been the Love of all nations of the world, their second home. But the leaders of Judeo-Christian, such as the late John Hay or the late Theodore Roosvelt, went after Imperial America chimera and their folksy plebs after Second Coming and Palestine. This project of 150 years has now failed.
I think that the presidency of Mr. Trump revealed the ugly side of the United States; suddenly the gilded papier marche of America, carefully created by the best propaganda techniques over 70 years, was shredded and USA was revealed to be a country just like so many others.
It is up to American people, Judeo-Christians as well as others, to address the deep deep social problems of the United States.
Rape camps in Yugo, rape camps in Libya, rape camps in Xinjiang.....Somebody sure have certain fetishism for sex and violence.
One from the archive,
That 'humanitarian intervention in Sudan'
Indeed, the Darfur crisis is following a pattern which is so well-worn now that it has almost become routine. Saturation reporting from a crisis region; emergency calls for help broadcast on the electronic media (such as the one recently on the BBC Radio 4 flagship ‘Today’ programme); televised pictures of refugees; lurid stories of “mass rapes”, which are surely designed to titillate as much to provoke outrage; reproachful evocations of the Rwandan genocide; demands that something must be done (”How can we stand idly by?”, etc.); editorials in the Daily Telegraph calling for a return to the days of Rudyard Kipling's benevolent imperialism[6]; and, finally, the announcement that plans are indeed being drawn up for an intervention.
……………..
Intervention will allow Western forces to control an oil rich region, and perhaps to expel the present holders of concessions. The fact that the biggest of these is China, and that America’s other foreign adventures also seem to have as their goal the control of energy supplies to that strategic rival, only adds further piquancy to what is, otherwise, an all too banal case of modern imperialistic meddling.
Many great observations tonight, but all, beg the question; How do we change a nation state that has so thoroughly morphed into an advertising and marketing phony, aided and abetted by so many deluded morons?
I don’t know if the title will match up with the content. I cannot access the content here. But the truth remains everyone should have humility when entering in diplomatic negotiations. Arrogance has no place there.
.
And this…
All this nonsense about Xinjiang is being exposed for what it actually is… a convenient fiction.
.
And this…
Of course, the USA “media” will translate this as arrogance. But what is China supposed to do after a seven minute tirade demanding China to do certain things or else experience a hot war…
.
And he is correct.
On the global scene, America is the weak nation.
And this…
Yeah, after the terrible behavior of the United States “diplomats” we have a major “pile on” against America…
…the American narrative is that the BRI is bad and will result in a “debt trap”. So says the 20 trillion dollar debt nation.
.
Roderrick
Here’s a post from Roderick…
US took to Alaska the same attitude as it has had for 250 years.
That must change.
We imposed democracy and capitalism on other nations, only to learn that many cultures simply could not find those a successful replacement for what they had for centuries. Even following the USSR, people wanted the old ways back, feeling their safety net had been taken from them and billionaire oligarchs had looted state assets.
We have corrupted democracy and capitalism, both have become ugly in the rebellion and corruption that have permeated our nation like cancer. Consequently we no longer have anything worthwhile to ‘sell’ or impose.
But more importantly, our self-assigned charter as the world policeman, only creating more problems by every war since WWII, has created a world that reviles us, indeed more and more nations view us as their enemy, even as they are getting stronger by the day.
Humility rather than hubris. That is the only means for America to survive long-term. Get along, stop invading, stop threatening, stop harming other nations economically. If we cannot change, a global coalition will finally have had enough of their increasingly common enemy.
And within China…
Well the response to the Alaskan negotiations and the arrogance of the American delegation was quick. Already there are tee-shirts, and iPhone cases being made.
And here’s some more pictures. It’s all over China, now.
Was asked by Maria Siow at #scmp for his take on the Alaska meetings. His responses:
Genuine frustration and posturing by both sides... both countries have compelling reasons to improve relations... We won’t see a lot of movement on more contentious issues in in the next few weeks, but the groundwork will be laid in this meeting, quietly, for resolving the trade war, drawing clearer lines on tech competition, and a mutual understanding if not respect for each others redlines... Don’t be too distracted by the tough talk. China’s two top foreign policy officials wouldn’t be in Alaska if positive prospects were unlikely. They don’t walk into traps.
Biden appears to have confirmed what many already suspected: that Allies have some key concerns with China, all hope the US can help resolve these and provide security guarantees, but none want to see relations worsen or follow Washington into an aggressive containment strategy. I’m optimistic that we’ll see tensions relax on multiple fronts, but it will depend in part on whether Washington will better discipline itself on Taiwan and likewise better discipline Taiwan, as was often the case before Trump, and whether Beijing will find an acceptable way forward through this as well. Taiwan is really the stickiest issue to work through.
China pretty much stated that the USA has no say what so ever on how China deals with it’s domestic issues, and to FUCK OFF regarding them. If the USA pushes on these issues they will cross a “red line” which is very dangerous…
China will not change it’s government structure.
The U.S. brags about its democracy, even though its policy is most frequently dictated by the bureaucrats and the bureaucratic system. Congress struggles with basic tasks such as keeping the government funded and running. The U.S. is in a new gilded age, where selling digital kittens for millions of dollars is mistaken for innovation. Its politics are stalemated, its institutions are brittle, and its wealth is funneled to a small circle of elites.
-CGTN
Stop demanding that China adopt the American way of governance. American government, and leadership is an abject failure. It is insanity to expect a prosperous, growing, and successful nation to adopt the failed policies that characterize America.
In the statement, the Chinese side emphasized that the ruling position of the Communist Party of China (CPC) is a choice of history and the people's choice, and the development of China is inseparable from CPC's leadership.
The ruling position of the CPC and the security of the system is "an intangible red line" and "must not be compromised," the statement highlighted.
It added that the socialist system with Chinese characteristics is the system most in line with China's national conditions and the "code" for China's development, and stated that China's development goal is to achieve the "two centenary" goals and the Chinese Dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation through hard work.
And this translation from the Chinese is most certainly a “bitch slap”…
China's reply to US at Alaska meeting:
You have your type of democracy. we have our type of democracy.
We lifted millions if not all of our population out of poverty. You created millions of unemployed and homeless.
We controlled and eradicated Covid. You let Covid devastate you.
Your infrastructures are at least 30 to 40 years old.
We build and provide cheap and affordable housing for the people. You build houses but the economic situation that you are in now resulted in more foreclosures (people giving up) than people buying.
We don't have homeless people sleeping in the street. You have plenty sleeping all over the place.
Our people have sufficient good food to eat. You too have food but the people have no money to buy food and have to rely on Govt Food stamps to pay for their food.
We have very little crime rate. You have one of the highest crime rate in the world which keeps your police very busy.
We have affordable health insurance and health care. Your health care is so out of reach such that the average household could not afford to fall sick.
Our people are united behind us. Your people are divided behind you.
Our democratic systems are quite different. Ours can deliver the goods. Yours make you indebted.
Why must you make us follow your way of running the country?
China’s human rights, not an excuse for interference
Using the excuse of “human rights” has long been the methodology for interference in the affairs of other nations. China will not allow it, nor tolerate it.
"China will not impose its democratic system and values on other countries, while firmly safeguarding its own political system and values, and opposes accusing and discrediting China and interfering in China's internal affairs under the guise of human rights issues," according to the statement.
China also pointed out that it has no intention to interfere in America's political system or to challenge and replace U.S. position and its influence. It called on the U.S. side to properly view China's political system, its development path, national strategies as well as its influence worldwide.
Commitment to independent foreign policy of peace
Both America and China said that they were committed to “peace”. But how and when they said it differed.
The American delegation produced a long line of demands on China’s internal affairs, and followed up with the demand that China obey “the US-Led rule-of-law” instead of the UN charter. Then immediately afterwards, said “of course the US is committed to peace and wants to avoid war”.
China stated…
In the statement, the Chinese side reiterated that its commitment to an independent foreign policy of peace, insist on independence, uphold peaceful development, uphold win-win cooperation, uphold multilateralism, uphold fairness and justice, and continue to promote the building of a community with a shared future for mankind
"We firmly defend national sovereignty and national dignity, and we firmly oppose other countries' accusations on China's internal affairs," it claimed, reiterating that China adheres to the path of peaceful development.
Support for ‘true multilateralism’
America wants to ignore the UN. Instead it has a “US-Led Rule-of-law” that they expect China to obey.
China and the world follows the dictates of the UN. America wants to have a US-Led “rules-based” order upon the rules that the United States make. This is not acceptable to China, (and Russia).
China also highlighted multilateralism in the statement by regarding it as an "important cornerstone of the current international system."
According to China, true multilateralism should adhere to the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, respect the basic norms of international relations, respect the sovereignty of all countries in the world, respect the diversity of civilizations, and work for the democratization of international relations.
"We are willing to work with the United States to maintain true multilateralism in the multilateral mechanism such as the United Nations and provide the international community with more and better international public products," said the statement.
China, U.S. need cooperation not confrontation
America came into the negotiations on a strategy of “zero sum”, meaning do things as I dictate, or face the consequences. While China was looking forward to a “win – win” outcome.
Regarding relationship between China and the U.S., the Chinese side stated that the essence of Sino-U.S. relations is mutual benefit and win-win, rather than a zero-sum game.
"Neither China nor the United States can bear the consequences of conflict and confrontation," the statement warned, calling on the two sides to "trust each other instead of suspicion, understand each other instead of accusing each other, and cooperate with each other instead of dismantling, so as to ensure that both sides focus on handling their domestic priorities and achieving their respective development goals."
The statement stressed that China's policy on U.S., with a high degree of stability and continuity, is committed to "achieving non-conflict, non-confrontation, mutual respect, and win-win cooperation with the U.S."
It called on the two sides to keep communication channels open, resume normal dialogue and exchange mechanisms, carry out mutually beneficial cooperation, so as to properly manage differences, and avoid misunderstandings and misjudgments.
No compromise on Taiwan question
This is a major “red line” and will result in military conflict if it is crossed.
Calling the Taiwan question core to China's interests and a matter of China's sovereignty and territorial integrity, China reiterated that there is no compromise in this regard.
No rights to interfere in China’s Hong Kong affairs
How can one engage in cooperation for example, if America is obsessed with interfering in China's national sovereignty and territorial integrity?
Sure the U.S. has its "principles" - but this must be done in a fair, pragmatic and reconciliatory way as opposed to, for example, whipping up unrest in Hong Kong, clinging onto the "genocide" rhetoric on Xinjiang, or promoting tensions in the Taiwan Straits.
How China conducts its internal policies is its business, nobody else's.
-CGTN
This is a major “red line” and will result in military conflict if it is crossed.
Regarding the recent decisions made by China's top legislature, the National People's Congress, on the improvement of electoral system in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), the Chinese delegation said the U.S. should respect the decision and follow the international law and basic norms of international relations.
"It is the central government's task to improve the electoral system of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. How to design, develop and improve the electoral system is China's internal affairs. No foreign government, organization or individual has the right to interfere," read the statement.
‘Xinjiang genocide’ claim: ‘Biggest lie of the century’
America needs to interrupt the BRI. And key to that is Xinjiang. China says that this lie of “concentration camps” and ‘Genocide” is simply not true and must end. But it will not. America is planning on military intervention into the Chinese territory and are moving forces in Afghanistan concurrently.
China also dismissed the claim that there is genocide in China's Xinjiang, calling it "the biggest lie of the century."
The delegation said the door of Xinjiang is wide open to the world. It welcomed exchanges with the U.S. side on the basis of mutual respect while stressed that China will not accept any investigation in Xinjiang based on the presumption of guilt by those who are biased, condescending and want to lecture China.
It is hoped that the U.S. side can respect facts, call off attacks against and smearing of China's Xinjiang policy, and abandon double standards on anti-terrorism, it added.
Tibet ‘part of China,’ ‘Dalai Lama has long engaged in anti-China separatist activities’
Again. This is a major “red line” and will result in military conflict if it is crossed.
China also pointed out that the 14th Dalai Lama is a political exile who has long engaged in anti-China separatist activities under the guise of religion.
"It is hoped that the U.S. will abide by its commitment to recognize Tibet as part of China and not support 'Tibet independence,' handle Tibet-related issues carefully and properly, lift sanctions on relevant Chinese officials, and stop using Tibet-related issues to interfere in China's internal affairs," it stated.
It's a strange truth that during the two-day sit-down, the director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the CPC Central Committee Yang Jiechi and Foreign Minister Wang Yi did just that. They wasted no time in highlighting the importance of "mutual respect" and the avoidance of harmful extremes in addressing bilateral relations and structural disparities.
Perhaps the Chinese diplomats did not want to be disrespected and misunderstood. But they soon found out their U.S. counterparts, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, were from another universe with their own brands of isolation. They seemed out of touch with reality to acknowledge the existence of differences, and to find the safety of the middle ground to resolve them amicably, rather than go for the imbalance of the extremes in the hope to validate America's shell games in East Asia and the Western Pacific.
The senior American diplomats walked into the meeting ostensibly from a position of self-righteousness and strength, absolutely unprepared and reluctant to drop the interventionist claims and instincts, to discuss the delicate process of resetting the pivotal relationship, and to compartmentalize and contain the structural differences.
From this perspective, the downfall of their hopeless quest to enforce their interventionist worldview in the testy exchange is found in this...
...in the wrong message that China ought to be confronted and contained, and that accommodation, mutual coexistence, or even extensive cooperation on matters of mutual interest must be ruled out...
... (that is) until China respects "the U.S.-led rules-based international order."
The Biden administration has displayed initial deluded and antiquated thinking when it comes to foreign policy.
After the four-year interregnum of Donald Trump’s “Cirque du Stupide,” America’s foreign diplomacy should be undergoing a total facelift.
Returning to the stodgy “business as usual” foreign policy of the past is not the answer.
As the Biden administration began to nestle into office, there was a familiar refrain in press releases from the Department of State, otherwise known as “Foggy Bottom.”
These included such old ditties as “The Secretary and the Foreign Minister discussed ways to strengthen cooperation with allies and partners to address the [blah . . . blah . . . blah].”
…
The Biden administration has displayed initial deluded and antiquated thinking when it comes to foreign policy.
It should be remembered that Biden’s Senate career began when Mao Zedong was still in charge in China, a war with the U.S. as a main participant continued to rage in Southeast Asia, a country called the United Arab Republic was the center of political activity in the Middle East, white rule and apartheid was the name of the game in southern Africa, and right-wing dictatorships ruled throughout Latin America.
Those who live in the past will never be prepared to face the future.
“Very frank. It was the first high-level meeting between members of the Biden administration and their Chinese counterparts. To say that it was a public relations disaster for the US is to understate the case.”
“Blinken and his sidekick, Jake Sullivan, a Hillary Clinton factotum who is now national security adviser, sat down to read China the riot act. It was not a success.”
“The United States, said Yang, in one of the most dismissive diplomatic rejoinders I have ever heard, does not have the ‘qualifications’ to address China ‘from a position of strength’. F, my dear Blinken, you.”
“Joe Biden has been in office for just two months. Has any US president had such a disastrous opening chapter on the world stage? None that I can recall.”
We learnt two things from the China-US high-level dialogue held in Alaska last week.
The first was from the session at the beginning when the media were present. This would normally be conducted in a polite and somewhat anodyne fashion dressed up in diplomatic nicety. It could not have been more different. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan commenced the proceedings and made some sharp criticisms of China. In response, Yang Jiechi, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and director of the Office of the Central Leading Group for Foreign Affairs, gave a bravura performance. Far from pulling his punches or couching his words in diplomatic language, he let his American counterparts have it with both barrels, challenging not just the US position but its very legitimacy. And all this before the world's media.
Let me quote some of his choice barbs: "When I entered this room, I should have reminded the US side of paying attention to its tone." "The US is not qualified to say it wants to speak to China from a position of strength." "China and the international community…uphold the UN-centered international order…not what is advocated by a small number of countries of the so-called 'rules-based' international order." "On human rights, we do hope the US will do better on human rights. The challenges facing the US in human rights are deep-seated. They did not just emerge over the past four years, such as Black Lives Matter." "On cyber-attacks, let me say that whether it's the ability to launch cyber-attacks or the technologies that could be deployed, the US is the champion." "The US does not represent international opinion and neither does the Western world."
While delivering these shots, Yang spoke with passion but never raised his voice. There were no cheap jibes. He occupied the high ground in the argument and left the Americans bewildered and belittled.
This is not normally the Chinese manner on such occasions. It is a sign that something has changed. There is a new sense of confidence on the part of the Chinese. That they are - or can - win the argument. That they are at least the equals of America. That they speak from a position of strength and America from a position of weakness. That history is on their side. It feels like the diplomatic equivalent of moving from "keeping a low profile" to "striving for achievement," or from being a relative spectator in the global system to becoming a major architect. The Americans have hitherto always thought of themselves as running the show; the shock visible in the body language of Blinken and Sullivan was the realization, conscious or unconscious, that this was no longer the case. The same was apparent in the Western media. The BBC, for example, invariably critical of China, reported it with an unfamiliar neutrality, as if stunned by the role reversal.
The second thing we found out from the dialogue (albeit already evident from the signals emanating from the White House), was that there will be no return to the status quo ante. That Biden is desperately anxious to appear as hostile to China as Trump was before him. The underlying forces at work here are very deep. America is in the process of coming to the painful realization that China is now its equal. But it cannot bring itself to accept or acquiesce in what is already an historical reality. That is why there can be no return to 1972 (Mao-Nixon Accord) or 1979 (US recognition of China). The relationship that prevailed then between China and the US was entirely different: the US was the giant, China a minnow. That was the basis of the US-China relationship for 45 years from 1972 until Trump torpedoed it in 2017, even though, of course, by the end China's rise was already undermining America's assumptions about the relationship. The realization that China was on the verge of overtaking the US economically, that China enjoyed a huge global presence, that it was already in effect its equal, came as an enormous shock to the American psyche and body politic.
Addicted to its hubris, it failed to see the blatantly obvious coming. As there can be no return to the past, the China-US relationship, so crucial to both and to the whole world, will have to be rethought on an entirely new basis, namely one of mutuality and equality. The problem is that the US is very far from thinking like this. How America needs for these times a giant like Henry Kissinger: someone who understands - and admires - China in a very profound way.
For the time being we must think in more mundane ways. Cooperation will be confined to the foothills, it will be a case of issue by issue, a bit here and a bit there, rebuilding contacts and communications between the two countries, ending as best can be done the toxicity and wanton destruction wrought by Donald Trump. Even this will not be easy but it ought, at a pinch, to be possible, with climate change offering the most important challenge and opportunity. For without cooperation between the two countries, climate change will imperil the very future of the planet and humanity.
China's representatives easily demolish the mountains of lies built by the US and its vassals, as part of their hybrid war on all independent nations, but now chiefly aimed at China and Russia, designated by the US hegemon, behind the pretext of "national security", as America's chief global "rivals". Truth weakens and eventually destroys imperialism, that's why it is now completely banned throughout the Western establishment media. Observe the barely repressed tone of exasperation in China's spokesperson. It's clear Beijing and Moscow have had just about enough of Western harassment, imperialist hostility, bad faith and hypocrisy. March 2021 clearly marks a turning point in international relations.
...
"China's position on the Meng Wanzhou case is very clear. This is nothing short of a political incident in which Canada played a very disgraceful role as an accomplice. We urge the Canadian side to immediately release Ms. Meng Wanzhou, who has been arbitrarily and unreasonably detained by the Canadian side, and ensure her early and safe return to China..."
Leaders, politicians and diplomats that have wisdom and serve their people will not pursue the so-called “alliance of democracies”. Many countries in the region want to see a sound and steady China-US relationship. Working together for a better life is democracy in real sense.
According to #US media, in 2016, a #Uyghur couple went to Italy with 3 children, leaving another 4 in #Xinjiang. If there's "forced sterilization" and "genocide" in Xinjiang as some in the west claim, how come this Uyghur couple have 7 children?
The #US, #UK and #Canada together account for only 5.7% of the world's population. Even if #EU is added, that will be about 11%. They cannot represent the international community.
#Democracy comes about when power belongs to people. There is no unified model for democracy. Sovereign states should be respected in their independent choose of development path. No one has the right to meddle in their internal affairs under the guise of "democracy".
I wonder in what way the west's democracy is superior. Amid #COVID19, the world's richest nations watch hundreds of thousands of their people die. Is this #democracy? While western politicians are busy wooing their party voters, the Chinese government serves all wholeheartedly.
In Guilin, FM Wang Yi & FM #Lavrov issued a joint statement that shed light on what is real human rights, democracy, international order & multilateralism. #China & #Russia will jointly and resolutely defend international justice & fairness.
China & Russia, with great sense of commitment & responsibility as major countries in the world & permanent members of the #UNSC, will give strong backing to each other on issues of core interests as important partners & play an underpinning role in international affairs.
In 40 years, the #Uyghur population has grown from 5.5 million to 12.8 million. The fact that #Xinjiang residents of various ethnic groups enjoy stability, security, development and progress, makes it one of the most successful human rights stories.
Some in the #US, #UK, #Canada and #EU clearly don't want to acknowledge the real facts about #Xinjiang & don't care about the truth, but hold on to accusations based on lies & false information. They just do not want to see #China's success, development and better livelihood.
What the #US, #UK, #Canada and #EU have done is utter denigration and offense to the reputation and dignity of the #Chinese people, blatant interference of China's internal affairs, and grave violation of China's sovereignty and security interests.
The #US and #UK used some test tube of washing powder and a staged video as evidence to launch wars against sovereign countries such as #Iraq and #Syria, leaving numerous death and displacement. Shouldn't they be sanctioned?
#France, #UK and #EU launched a war in #Libya, leading to regional turbulence & grave migrant and refugee issues. Shouldn't they be held accountable?
Tens of hundreds of people died of #COVID19 because these most developed countries are indifferent to their people's rights to life and health. They hoard #vaccines far in excess of their population's needs, leaving developing countries struggling with insufficient vaccines.
How can people enjoy rights if they lost their lives? Some in the west talk a lot about #humanrights, but who and what right on earth are they protecting? In what way are they respecting and protecting human rights.
#China is not what it was 120 years ago, when foreign powers could force open its door with guns. Certain colluding individuals in politics, academics and media should think twice if they think they could make wanton smears with impunity.
The west shall entertain no illusion as regards #China's firm determination to defend national interests and dignity. It's a courtesy to reciprocate what we receive. They will have to pay a price for their ignorance and arrogance.
Chinese Government Statement
#China deplores and rejects the unilateral sanctions by #EU citing so-called #HumanRights issues in #Xinjiang.
This move is based on nothing but lies and disinformation, and will inevitably undermine China-EU relations.
To safeguard national sovereignty, security and development interest, #China will sanction #EU individuals and entities that have been spreading lies and disinformation at the cost of China's interests...
The #EU must drop its hypocritical double standards, and stop going further down the wrong path. Otherwise, it will be met with further resolute reactions.
https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/.../s2510_665401/t1863106.shtml
MM Comments
I had high hopes for the meeting. I was wrong.
Rather than improve relationships between the United States and China, the Alaskan meeting pretty much depicted America as an out of control bully that stated that it did not need to follow the UN and global governance standards. Instead it was the biggest, meanest and baddest thug on the block and laid out it’d demands on China.
It told China that “you will obey what we say or risk a hot war with us and our very powerful allies”.
While I am sure that most Americans would welcome this attitude, I found this arrogant, and very upsetting.
Reports are that immediately afterwards, China and Russia set up and held meetings.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
Vladimir #Putin is spending the weekend in #Siberia. The President together with Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu enjoys walking in the #taiga forest and riding an all-terrain vehicle. Also, Sergei Shoigu showed the President his workshop.”
Posted by: chet380 | Mar 19 2021 19:16 utc | 1