Perhaps understandably, the Covid-19 pandemic has forced many other international stories off the news agenda. 

It is global, it is deadly and it is multi-faceted, raising all sorts of questions, not just about how we respond to the initial crisis, but about the way we organise our societies and the way we run our affairs. 

Some major international problems have been pushed to the sidelines since the outbreak of the crisis and it may now be too late to deal with them. Others have been made much more intractable. And some governments are seeking to use the distraction of the Covid-19 pandemic to pursue long-held ambitions. 

Here are five issues that we should be keeping an eye on in the weeks and months ahead. 

The new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New Start, that limits the long-range nuclear arsenals with which the US and Russia threaten each other, expires in early February next year. Time is getting short if it is to be renewed. This is the last of the great arms control agreements inherited from the Cold War which still survives.

Without it, there are real fears that the absence of constraints and the lack of transparency could result in a new nuclear arms race. The fact that esoteric weapons like amazingly fast hypersonic missiles are being developed gives this threat of a new arms race an added danger. 

Russia seems willing to renew the agreement, which would be simple in procedural terms. The Trump administration, though, seems determined to abandon the New Start treaty unless it can expand it to bring China on board. There is absolutely no interest in Beijing in joining the regime. And it is now far too late to draft a comprehensive new document anyway. 

• What will emerge when post-WW2 order ends?

So, unless there is a late change of heart in Washington, or a new administration, the New Start treaty looks as though it could be history.

The row over the US withdrawal from the JCPOA agreement that seeks to limit Iran's nuclear activities is just about to get a good deal worse. 

Currently there is a wide-ranging United Nations embargo that prevents countries from selling various kinds of advanced weaponry to Tehran. But under the UN resolution that backed the nuclear deal, this arms embargo is due to expire on 18 October this year. Iran's President Hassan Rouhani has already warned that if the US succeeds in its desire to have the embargo renewed, then there will be "grave consequences". 

However, there is little chance of Russia agreeing to an extended arms embargo. In which case Mr Trump wants the Europeans to invoke a mechanism in the nuclear deal that restores much more widespread economic sanctions against Iran (the very sanctions that were largely lifted in the wake of the agreement).

Mr Trump's gambit is to say the least extraordinary. The US walked away from the JCPOA and has since sought to ramp up pressure on Tehran. Iran has breached many of the agreement's terms, but not necessarily in ways which are irreversible. 

Now though the administration seems to be saying that Iran should stick to the deal that the US has abandoned or face renewed sanctions. It is an effort by the Trump Administration, as one senior former Obama-era official noted, "to have its cake and eat it". 

• Iran nuclear deal: Dead or just dying?

Relations between the US and Iran will get even worse and existing tensions between the US and its key European allies will be exacerbated. And it is not as if the arms embargo has significantly changed Iran's regional behaviour nor its ability to arms its proxies. 

Israel's long-running serial election campaign has come to an end with the embattled Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu retaining his post, at least for a period, after a power sharing deal with one of the main opposition parties. 

Despite the legal cases that are pending against him - indeed, possibly in part because of them - Mr Netanyahu is proposing a controversial nationalist agenda which includes a desire to annex areas of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, effectively making them a permanent part of Israel.

Arguably, this would end once and for all any chance of a "two-state solution" - despite provisions for one in Donald Trump's peace plan - that has been the waning hope of many who want to see a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians. 

• Can the Jewish settlement issue be resolved?

The Palestinians themselves are already crying foul and several governments in Europe and elsewhere are urging caution, in some cases talking about potential sanctions if this policy goes ahead. As ever, the Trump administration's position will be crucial. Will it effectively give a green light for the move or will it counsel constraint? 

It certainly appears that Mr Netanyahu has been emboldened by President Trump's decisions to back Israel's annexation of the occupied Syrian Golan Heights and to move the US embassy to Jerusalem. The current US position is ambiguous, with suggestions that it will make its support of annexation in areas of the West Bank conditional on Israel agreeing to negotiate over a Palestinian state.

Some analysts believe that having used the issue of annexation to mobilise nationalist support during the election season, Mr Netanyahu may find some way to back down. Maybe the Americans will help, since there is no way hard-line Israeli nationalists want to see any kind of Palestinian state. 

But it's going to be a bumpy period ahead. 

It's a term that so many of us have almost forgotten. 

But the clock is ticking: the transition period following Britain's departure from the European Union ends on 31 December. Talks on the terms of their future relationship have begun in a tentative way, but there is no indication that Prime Minister Boris Johnson's government is even contemplating any delay or extension to the transitional phase.

However, the pandemic has changed the whole context of Brexit, not least by precipitating an economic slump that it could take years to recover from. There seems little appetite in Britain to revive the old debate. Time is anyway short.

While the EU's initial response to the Covid-19 crisis did not present it in an especially favourable light, it has to some extent rallied. It is not going away. And Britain's own handling of the crisis has been no great example either. 

• UK-EU trade talks: A simple guide

Britain's departure from the EU is going to strain both sides. Maybe it will produce a more consensual approach to guide their future relationship. But battered by an economic recession and making its way in a much less hospitable world, key economic and diplomatic decisions - how far to back the Americans? How far to stand up to China? - are going to play out for the UK in a much harsher light. 

The global response to the pandemic is in a sense a testing ground for the international community's capacity to deal with the biggest and most complex international challenge of all - climate change. 

In terms of co-operation, the Covid-19 experience so far yields a very mixed report. And the tensions that are likely to persist in the post-pandemic world will complicate things greatly. 

Getting the "process" of climate change back on track is one thing - crucial meetings, like the UN's Cop26 climate conference that was to have been held in Glasgow in November, have been postponed until next year. 

But the question that remains is how will the international mind-set have changed? Will there be a renewed sense of urgency and purpose? And how far will the new global order allow for rapid progress on this hugely complex issue?

Read more:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-52630346

Trillions of dollars of market value could go up in smoke due to climate change.

The damage hits the global economy in multiple ways. The first is the most obvious. Physical damage from more powerful natural disasters is on the rise. 2017 and 2018 were the costliest back-to-back years for economic losses related to natural disasters, according to risk and reinsurance firm Aon.

But the danger grows worse when the physical damage starts to reprice portions of entire asset classes. One glaring example is the real estate market along coastlines, which will see both physical damage and a dramatic repricing as the threat becomes increasingly clear. That happens through a variety of mechanisms – people move away, zoning ordinances restrict building, insurance companies withdraw support, investors withdraw capital, etc.

If sea levels rise by 6 feet by 2100, an estimated $900 billion in US homes “would be literally – and in turn financially – underwater,” the Center for American Progress (CAP) wrote in a November report.

The end result is the sector becomes worth a fraction of what it once was. And this is just one aspect of climate change affecting just one particular sector.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/business/475559-next-financial-meltdown-trigger/

Putin’s Call for a New System and the 1944 Battle of Bretton Woods: Lessons for Victory Day

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May 10, 2020

By Matthew Ehret for The Saker Blog

As today’s world teeters on the brink of a financial collapse greater than anything the world experienced in either 1923 Weimar or the 1929 Great depression, a serious discussion has been initiated by leaders of Russia and China regarding the terms of the new system which must inevitably replace the currently dying neo-liberal order. Most recently, Vladimir Putin re-initiated his January 16, 2020 call for a new emergency economic conference to deal with the looming disaster based upon a live session with representatives of the five nuclear powers of the UN Security Council.

While Putin’s commitment for this new system is premised upon multi-polar principles of cooperation and respect of national sovereignty, the financial oligarchy and broader deep state structures infesting the western nations who have initiated this crisis over the course of decades of globalization have called for their own version of a new system. This new system as we have seen promoted by the likes of the Bank of England and leading technocrats over the past year, is based upon an anti-Nation State, unipolar system which typically goes by the term “Green New Deal”. In other words, this is a system ruled by a technocratic elite managing the reduction of world population through the monetization of carbon reduction practices under a Global Government.

No matter how you look at it, a new system will be created out of the ashes of the currently dying world order. The question is only: Will it benefit the oligarchy or the people?

In order to inform the necessary decision making going into this emergency conference, it is useful to revisit the last such emergency conference that defined the terms of a world economic architecture in July 1944 so that similar mistakes that were then made by anti-imperialist forces are not made once more.

What Was the Bretton Woods?

As it was becoming apparent that the war would be soon drawing to a close, a major fight broke out during a two week conference in Bretton Woods New Hampshire where representative of 44 nations convened to establish the terms of the new post-war system. The question was: Would this new system be governed by those British Imperial principles similar to those that had dominated the world before the war began or would they be shaped by a community of sovereign nation states?

On the one side, figures allied to American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s vision for an anti-Imperial world order lined up behind FDR’s champion Harry Dexter White while those powerful forces committed to maintaining the structures of a bankers’ dictatorship (Britain was always primarily a banker’s empire) lined up behind the figure of John Maynard Keynes[1].

John Maynard Keynes was a leading Fabian Society controller and treasurer of the British Eugenics Association (which served as a model for Hitler’s Eugenics protocols before and during the war). During the Bretton Woods Conference, Keynes pushed hard for the new system to be premised upon a one world currency controlled entirely by the Bank of England known as the Bancor. He proposed a global bank called the Clearing Union to be controlled by the Bank of England which would use the Bancor (exchangeable with national currencies) and serve as unit of account to measure trade surpluses or deficits under the mathematical mandate of maintaining “equilibrium” of the system.

Harry Dexter White on the other hand fought relentlessly to keep the City of London out of the drivers’ seat of global finance and instead defended the institution of national sovereignty and sovereign currencies based on long term scientific and technological growth. Although White and FDR demanded that U.S. dollars become the reserve currency in the new world system of fixed exchange rates, it was not done to create a “new American Empire” as most modern analysts have assumed, but rather was designed to use America’s status as the strongest productive global power to ensure an anti-speculative stability among international currencies which entirely lacked stability in the wake of WWII.

Their fight for fixed exchange rates and principles of “parity pricing” were designed by FDR and White strictly around the need to abolish the forms of chaotic flux of the un-regulated markets which made speculation rampant under British Free Trade and destroyed the capacity to think and plan for the sort of long term development needed to modernize nation states. Theirs was not a drive for “mathematical equilibrium” but rather a drive to “end poverty” through REAL physical economic growth of colonies who would thereby win real economic independence.

As figures like Henry Wallace (FDR’s loyal Vice President and 1948 3rd party candidate), Representative William Wilkie (FDR’s republican lieutenant and New Dealer), and Dexter White all advocated repeatedly, the mechanisms of the World Bank, IMF, and United Nations were meant to become drivers of an internationalization of the New Deal which transformed America from a backwater cesspool in 1932 to becoming a modern advanced manufacturing powerhouse 12 years later. All of these Interntional New Dealers were loud advocates of US-Russia –China leadership in the post war world which is a forgotten fact of paramount importance.

In his 1944 book Our Job in the Pacific, Wallace said: “It is vital to the United States, it is vital to China and it is vital to Russia that there be peaceful and friendly relations between China and Russia, China and America and Russia and America. China and Russia Complement and supplement each other on the continent of Asia and the two together complement and supplement America’s position in the Pacific.”

Contradicting the mythos that FDR was a Keynesian, FDR’s assistant Francis Perkins recorded the 1934 interaction between the two men when Roosevelt told her: “I saw your friend Keynes. He left a whole rigmarole of figures. He must be a mathematician rather than a political economist.” In response Keynes, who was then trying to coopt the intellectual narrative of the New Deal stated he had “supposed the President was more literate, economically speaking.”

In his 1936 German edition of his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Keynes wrote: “For I confess that much of the following book is illustrated and expounded mainly with reference to the conditions existing in the Anglo Saxon countries. Nevertheless, the theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state.”

While Keynes represented the “soft imperialism” for the “left” of Britain’s intelligentsia, Churchill represented the hard unapologetic imperialism of the Old, less sophisticated empire that preferred the heavy fisted use of brute force to subdue the savages. Both however were unapologetic racists and fascists (Churchill even wrote admiringly of Mussolini’s black shirts) and both represented the most vile practices of British Imperialism.

FDR’s Forgotten Anti-Colonial Vision Revited

FDR’s battle with Churchill on the matter of empire is better known than his differences with Keynes whom he only met on a few occasions. This well documented clash was best illustrated in his son/assistant Elliot Roosevelt’s book As He Saw It (1946) who quoted his father:

“I’ve tried to make it clear … that while we’re [Britain’s] allies and in it to victory by their side, they must never get the idea that we’re in it just to help them hang on to their archaic, medieval empire ideas … I hope they realize they’re not senior partner; that we are not going to sit by and watch their system stultify the growth of every country in Asia and half the countries in Europe to boot.”

FDR continued: “The colonial system means war. Exploit the resources of an India, a Burma, a Java; take all the wealth out of these countries, but never put anything back into them, things like education, decent standards of living, minimum health requirements–all you’re doing is storing up the kind of trouble that leads to war. All you’re doing is negating the value of any kind of organizational structure for peace before it begins.”

Writing from Washington in a hysteria to Churchill, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden said that Roosevelt ”contemplates the dismantling of the British and Dutch empires.”

Unfortunately for the world, FDR died on April 12, 1945. A coup within the Democratic establishment, then replete with Fabians and Rhodes Scholars, had already ensured that Henry Wallace would lose the 1944 Vice Presidency in favor of Anglophile Wall Street Stooge Harry Truman. Truman was quick to reverse all of FDR’s intentions, cleansing American intelligence of all remaining patriots with the shutdown of the OSS and creation of the CIA, the launching of un-necessary nuclear bombs on Japan and establishment of the Anglo-American special relationship. Truman’s embrace of Churchill’s New World Order destroyed the positive relationship with Russia and China which FDR, White and Wallace sought and soon America had become Britain’s dumb giant.

The Post 1945 Takeover of the Modern Deep State

FDR warned his son before his death of his understanding of the British takeover of American foreign policy, but still could not reverse this agenda. His son recounted his father’s ominous insight:

“You know, any number of times the men in the State Department have tried to conceal messages to me, delay them, hold them up somehow, just because some of those career diplomats over there aren’t in accord with what they know I think. They should be working for Winston. As a matter of fact, a lot of the time, they are [working for Churchill]. Stop to think of ’em: any number of ’em are convinced that the way for America to conduct its foreign policy is to find out what the British are doing and then copy that!” I was told… six years ago, to clean out that State Department. It’s like the British Foreign Office….”

Before being fired from Truman’s cabinet for his advocacy of US-Russia friendship during the Cold War, Wallace stated: “American fascism” which has come to be known in recent years as the Deep State. “Fascism in the postwar inevitably will push steadily for Anglo-Saxon imperialism and eventually for war with Russia. Already American fascists are talking and writing about this conflict and using it as an excuse for their internal hatreds and intolerances toward certain races, creeds and classes.”

In his 1946 Soviet Asia Mission, Wallace said “Before the blood of our boys is scarcely dry on the field of battle, these enemies of peace try to lay the foundation for World War III. These people must not succeed in their foul enterprise. We must offset their poison by following the policies of Roosevelt in cultivating the friendship of Russia in peace as well as in war.”

Indeed this is exactly what occurred. Dexter White’s three year run as head of the International Monetary Fund was clouded by his constant attacks as being a Soviet stooge which haunted him until the day he died in 1948 after a grueling inquisition session at the House of Un-American Activities. White had previously been supporting the election of his friend Wallace for the presidency alongside fellow patriots Paul Robeson and Albert Einstein.

Today the world has captured a second chance to revive the FDR’s dream of an anti-colonial world. In the 21st century, this great dream has taken the form of the New Silk Road, led by Russia and China (and joined by a growing chorus of nations yearning to exit the invisible cage of colonialism).

If western nations wish to survive the oncoming collapse, then they would do well to heed Putin’s call for a New International system, join the BRI, and reject the Keynesian technocrats advocating a false “New Bretton Woods” and “Green New Deal”.

Matthew Ehret is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review , a BRI Expert on Tactical talk, is regular author with Strategic Culture, the Duran and Fort Russ and has authored 3 volumes of ‘Untold History of Canada’ book series. In 2019 he co-founded the Montreal-based Rising Tide Foundation and can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

You may be thinking “wait! Wasn’t FDR and his New Deal premised on Keynes’ theories??”

How could Keynes have represented an opposing force to FDR’s system if this is the case? This paradox only exists in the minds of many people today due to the success of the Fabian Society’s and Round Table Movement’s armada of revisionist historians who have consistently created a lying narrative of history to make it appear to future generations trying to learn from past mistakes that those figures like FDR who opposed empire were themselves following imperial principles. Another example of this sleight of hand can be seen by the sheer number of people who sincerely think themselves informed and yet believe that America’s 1776 revolution was driven by British Imperial philosophical thought stemming from Adam Smith, Bentham and John Locke. 

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http://thesaker.is/putins-call-for-a-new-system-and-the-1944-battle-of-b...

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Did COVID-19 stop a nuclear war in the world? The losses that the virus has claimed so far are insignificant compared to the lives that another world war would have claimed. The coronavirus stopped many productions. Air and oceans have become cleaner. Is it a blessing in disguise? Pravda.Ru editor-in-chief Inna Novikova talked about it in an interview with Andrei Fursov, Director of the Center for Russian Studies at the Institute for Fundamental and Applied Research at Moscow State University.

Many productions around the world have been stopped due to the coronavirus pandemic. Air and water in many polluted regions of China and India has become cleaner. What is going to happen with the labor market? Is everything going to go back to where it was or are there any global changes looming?”

“Clearly, we can not live as holy spirit. Some part of the industry may not recover completely, and this is real. The development of robotic technology suggests that unemployment is going to be one of the biggest problems of the 21st century. This is indeed a very serious social problem that we are going to face already in the near future. This problem will affect the European Union and China in the first place. In general, the whole world will be affected. 

“To make matters worse, there is a continent where the coronavirus epidemic can really cause serious consequences - this is Africa.

“In general, all the talking about the goal of the pandemic to cut global population is nothing but rubbish. Even if, God forbid, 50-70 million people are going to die because of the virus, the overpopulation problem is not going to be resolved. Africa may lose two to three million people as a result of the epidemic. However, this is not going to be a record number for Africa. During the second Congolese war, which lasted for seven years, about five million people were killed in central Africa. Such a huge number of casualties, but people do not talk about it, as if it was nothing.”

“Europe did not notice that?”

“Unbiased French demographers very cynically said that young people made the majority of those casualties – all those victims could have made their way to France or Germany some day. 

“That was major carnage indeed, but it did not cause the African population to decline. In the beginning of the XXI century, many were saying that world economy was on the brink of another world war. However, world wars do not occur spontaneously – one has to prepare them, and someone else has to pull the trigger. No one dared to claim responsibility for launching a new world war, because this is not a good thing to do in a world stuffed with nuclear weapons. 

"COVID-19 in many respects fulfilled the function of world wars. It became an easy substitute, but not in terms of the number of casualties – it became a substitute in terms of the measures that most countries of the world introduced because of the pandemic. After all, many of the implemented measures are commonplace only during the time of war.  This is very important. 

“I do hope that all this is going to end very soon. By the end of 2020, it will be possible to see how the world has changed and how it is going to change further as a result of those processes. It will become completely clear who wants to cut whom from the public pie.”

“Are relations within the European Union going to change after the pandemic?”

“The European Union was an artificial entity from the very beginning. It became even more artificial after it swallowed up Eastern Europe. The EU swallowed Eastern Europe, but failed to digest it. This is constipation in a way. De jure, the European Union will naturally remain. It has the central core - Germany, France and the north of Italy. All others will find themsevles in difficult conditions.”

Читайте больше на https://www.pravdareport.com/world/144569-covid_nuclear_war/

MEANWHILE:

“If Germany wants to diminish nuclear capability and weaken NATO, perhaps Poland – which pays its fair share, understands the risks, and is on NATO's eastern flank – could house the capabilities here,”Ambassador Georgette Mosbacher tweeted on Friday.

She was commenting on the statement by Rick Grenell, the US ambassador to Germany who is also the acting director of National Intelligence, issued on Thursday, urging the authorities in Berlin not to weaken NATO by seeking the removal of US nuclear weapons from their soil.

“The purpose of NATO’s nuclear share is to keep non-nuclear member states involved in the planning of NATO’s deterrence policy. Germany’s participation in nuclear share ensures that its voice matters,” Grenell wrote. “Will Germany bear this responsibility, or will it sit back and simply enjoy the economic benefits of security provided by its other allies?”

While Mosbacher’s quip may have been nothing more than an attempt to bolster Grenell’s argument, her replies were flooded by Poles eager for the nuclear redeployment to happen – albeit none of them representing official Warsaw, just yet.

Only a few voices cautioned against the idea, such as former US Marine and weapons inspector Scott Ritter telling Mosbacher she had “no sense of history” and calling her idea “one of the dumbest” in the world.

Mosbacher also made headlines in Moscow, where it was noted that moving the bombs to Poland would destroy the final vestiges of the Russia-NATO Founding Act, the 1997 treaty which declares that “NATO and Russia do not consider each other as adversaries.”

Admittedly, this sentiment has been repeatedly rejected by NATO itself, from the 1999 war against Yugoslavia intended to send Russia a message, to this week’s editorial by the alliance’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, citing “Russian aggression” to urge Berlin to keep US nukes.

This is not the first time that Mosbacher – a former cosmetics executive who entered diplomacy during the Obama administration and was sent to Warsaw by President Donald Trump in 2018 – has made headlines in Moscow. Back in January, she endorsed the Polish revision of WWII history that claimed Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union “colluded” to start the war by invading Poland. 

While it is unclear whether her tweet is an official State Department position, it would not be entirely out of line with the Trump administration’s aspirations to station US troops in Poland permanently, while dismantling nuclear treaties with Russia.

Last year, the US shredded the 1987 INF arms control treaty in Europe, and seems to be on track not to renew the last remaining nuclear pact with Moscow, the 2011 New Start, scheduled to expire next February.

If the US moves nuclear warheads to Poland, this could result in a rerun of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the Soviet Union reacted to US nuclear deployments in Turkey by sending its own missiles to Cuba. After a standoff that almost escalated into nuclear war, both Washington and Moscow stood down and pledged to withdraw their missiles.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/488836-us-nukes-poland-germany/

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Note after the nukes were MUTUALLY withdrawn, Kennedy got assassinated...

“Evil.” “Lunacy.” “Shameless.” “Sick and twisted.” China has hit back at U.S. criticism over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic with an outpouring of vitriol as acrid as anything seen in decades.

The bitter recriminations have plunged relations between China and the United States to a nadir, with warnings in both countries that the bad blood threatens to draw them into a new kind of Cold War.

A cycle of statements and actions is solidifying long-standing suspicions in Beijing that the United States and its allies are bent on stifling China’s rise as an economic, diplomatic and military power.

Hard-liners are calling on Beijing to be more defiant, emboldened by the Trump administration’s efforts to blame China for the mounting death toll in the United States. Moderates are warning that Beijing’s strident responses could backfire, isolating the country when it most needs export markets and diplomatic partners to revive its economy and regain international credibility.

The clash with the United States over the pandemic is fanning broader tensions on trade, technology, espionage and other fronts – disputes that could intensify as President Donald Trump makes his contest with Beijing a theme of his reelection campaign.

“We could cut off the whole relationship,” Trump said in an interview on Fox Business on Thursday.

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https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/world/us-news/trump-news/2020/05/17/coro...

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Time to hug someone — or a tree...