Search Results for: syria

Less than a year after the United States and the U.S.-backed Organization of American States (OAS) supported a violent military coup to overthrow the government of Bolivia, the Bolivian people have reelected the Movement for Socialism (MAS) and restored it to power. Continue reading →

Toward the end of Joe Biden’s October 15 town hall session, a Trump supporter asked Biden the only foreign policy question of the night. “So peace is breaking out all over the world,” the questioner claimed. “Our troops are coming home. Serbia is talking to Kosovo. And the Arabs and Israelis are talking peace, which I believe is a modern-day miracle, what’s going on. Does President Trump’s foreign policy deserve some credit?” Continue reading →

In the aftermath of the attacks on 9/11, the Bush administration invaded Iraq and tortured prisoners of war and terrorism suspects, in flagrant violation of the U.N. Charter and the Geneva Conventions. As a result, the United States lost standing among many of its traditional allies around the world. Continue reading →

As the signal-to-noise ratio decreases in the reporting of events surrounding the September 27 Azerbaijani assault on the Armenian-inhabited region of Nagorno-Karabakh, a much more surreptitious current has received virtually no reporting: Iran. Influential think tanks generate their well-crafted equivocation and prevarication, never really following the evidence and keeping readers cleverly occupied and furious at claims such as “there have been some reports of jihadists being recruited by and transported to the region by Turkey,” when it is not only clear they have been recruited, with videos of scores being slaughtered by Armenian forces and transcripts of radio transmissions in Arabic suspiciously ignored. Continue reading →

Americans are dealing with an upcoming general election, a pandemic that has killed over 200,000 of us, and corporate news media whose business model has degenerated to selling different versions of “The Trump Show” to their advertisers. So who has time to pay attention to a new war half way round the world? But with so much of the world afflicted by 20 years of U.S.-led wars and the resulting political, humanitarian and refugee crises, we can’t afford not to pay attention to the dangerous new outbreak of war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh. Continue reading →

If the Democrats manage to push Joe Biden over the finish line in November’s election, he will find himself presiding over a decadent, declining empire. He will either continue the policies that have led the American empire to decadence and decline, or seize the moment to move our nation into a new phase: a transition to a peaceful and sustainable post-imperial future. Continue reading →

“The Caucasus is Ground Zero in the New Cold War between the U.S. and Russia.”
Continue reading →

The release of a report by the U.S. Department of State’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), billed as the Donald Trump administration’s “dedicated center for countering foreign disinformation and propaganda, cites the Strategic Culture Foundation in Russia, Canada’s Global Research Center, and other online publications as “proxy sites” for Russian intelligence and the Russian Foreign Ministry. The State Department’s report is titled, “Pillars of Russia’s Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem” and it is not much different than the series of reports issued by the State Department’s “International Information Program” in the mid-2000s that were used to debase U.S. journalists and authors critical of the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney neo-conservative wars of choice. Those diatribes, like the recent one masquerading as a “special report,” were written on the U.S. taxpayers’ dime and represent a squandering of money. Continue reading →

The landmark Gilens & Page study in 2014, which was the first study anywhere to examine the data to determine scientifically whether or not a given government is a democracy or instead a dictatorship, studied the U.S. data, and found conclusively that it’s a dictatorship. The U.S. is controlled by its six or seven hundred billionaires (the study identified America’s ruling class as only “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests”, but the people who own the controlling interest in over 90% of that and hire their lobbyists and fund the careers of the winning politicians are simply America’s billionaires, the U.S. oligarchy or “aristocracy”). After that landmark 2014 study, other reports came forth, all adding further confirmation to its findings. Continue reading →

Tensions between the United States and China are rising as the U.S. election nears, with tit-for-tat consulate closures, new U.S. sanctions and no less than three U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups prowling the seas around China. But it is the United States that has initiated each new escalation in U.S.-China relations. China’s responses have been careful and proportionate, with Chinese officials such as Foreign Minister Wang Yi publicly asking the U.S. to step back from its brinkmanship to find common ground for diplomacy. Continue reading →

Are any of the grand brains in administration of Donald Trump—or possibly a future Joe Biden presidency—thinking systematically about the costs of containing China; i.e., waging a Cold War against a nation of 1.4 billion people or actually fomenting a hot conventional war in the Western Pacific? It’s madness made worse by the fact that Trump, Biden and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are using tired tropes reminiscent of the language of that was employed during the USA vs USSR Cold War that saturated the consciousness of the American people and its Western European comrades. Continue reading →

On July 12, 2020, fighting re-erupted between the ex-Soviet Republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan. However, this time an Azerbaijani Major General was killed, its Foreign Minister was fired, followed by a threat by the Azerbaijani Ministry of Defense to blow up Armenia’s nuclear power station. As the fog of war lifts, we can fill some of the puzzle pieces with better-established facts. Continue reading →

In an article in Foreign Affairs in March, titled “Why America Must Lead Again,” Joe Biden claimed that “the world doesn’t organize itself,” and promised to “put the U.S. back at the head of the table” among the nations of the world. But the premise that the world can only organize itself under the direction of the United States and Biden’s ambition to restore the U.S. to such a dominant position at this moment in history are out of touch with global reality. Continue reading →