Why America is a threat to the world

 

BY Salman Rafi Sheikh

 

In the past two decades (2001-2023) since the 9/11 attacks that killed 3,000 people in New York, US wars, both direct and indirect, have caused more than 4 million deaths worldwide. Without mincing words, this is a deadly scenario, where Washington has relied on war as its preferred means of executing foreign policy. Its unabated support for Israel and its continuing supply of weapons to Ukraine are yet another reminder of Washington’s frequent reliance on direct and indirect wars to accomplish its goals. This scenario is unlikely to change regardless of which president occupies the White House. While Donald Trump was seen to be against US war in Afghanistan and made a pact with the Taliban in 2020 to withdraw US forces, it was Donald Trump himself who initiated the ‘trade war’ on China, which Joe Biden has been following steadfastly since 2020.

In fact, Biden faithfully expanded the scope – and the lethality – of the ‘war’ on China. In 2023, the Biden administration made a new pact with the Philippines to build four new military bases in the country. There is only one objective: to encircle China. These four new bases are in addition to the five existing ones. The militaristic nature of the US ties with the Philippines is the hallmark of US foreign policy that threatens world peace more than anything else. In qualitative terms, the expansion of military bases in the Philippines is not different from the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to include Ukraine and thus encircle Russia. This push led to Russia’s military operation in Ukraine – a conflict that is now metamorphosing into a proxy and “jihadi” war on Russia. The militarization of the Philippines could be a prelude to an actual conflict with China, where these bases could become launchpads for the US proxies to wage their “jihad” on China in the South China Sea and even beyond.

But it is not China alone that is the target. The US has more than 750 military bases around the world in more than 80 countries – a number that can singularly explain the US war machine’s ability to kill millions around the world. To continue to retain this deadly ability, the US has recently “upgraded” its security pact with Japan too. While the pact will be announced on the Japanese leaders’ visit to Washington on April 10, reports indicate a major overhaul to the presence and operation of the US forces in Japan. This would also include a new task force attached to the US Pacific Fleet in Hawaii. The fleet’s four-star commander would spend more time in Japan than at present, and would have an enhanced support structure in the country. Over time, the task force, which would include different parts of the US military, would shift to Japan, thus complementing Washington’s encirclement of China.

Besides increasing its presence, Washington is also supporting Japan’s own transformation from a post-Second World War pacifist country to a military power in the region. Japan has recently announced that it will start exporting modern, including fifth-generation, fighter jets. The purpose is to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in the global security.

Who is the buyer? Many potential buyers happen to be countries – India, Germany, Vietnam, Australia – that are, in one way or the other, already are or will eventually join a US-led grand coalition against China.

Why is Japan changing? The key reason is the changing security environment and Tokyo’s threat perception. It has come to see China as a major threat. But this perception has been built by a continuous US projection of China as a typical “revisionist state” bent upon destroying the global order. Since China is the aggressor – even though China, unlike the US, has not aggressively started any war in the region – it makes sense for Japan to bolster its security and tie itself more closely to the US and its NATO allies.

A lot of this is happening during the Biden administration. Will this pattern change if Trump wins? It is highly unlikely. In fact, Trump might have a counterproductive effect that might accelerate the process of militarisation. Trump is known to have indicated on more than one occasion that he will push allies to spend more on defence. This is the first step towards greater militarisation, pushing US allies, both NATO and non-NATO, to increase their defence budgets. This will directly accelerate an arms race, and it will also create tensions around geographical flashpoints such as the South and East of China where China, itself threatened by Japanese build-up, will be forced to take countermeasures.

Donald Trump will be in office for four years only, but these four years could change the world massively. If allies continue to build up militarily in these four years, this will lock their policies on a pattern of militarization that might become too hard for them to change even if a Democrat returns to the White House in 2029. Therefore, it will ultimately become meaningless for allies – and US rivals – as to who wins or loses the US presidential elections. As far as America is concerned, the legacy of its policy – which is almost singularly driven by the imperative of protecting, at any cost, US global dominance – will leave the world not only a lot more militarized but also more prone to conflict. The only silver lining is the possibility of the world becoming truly multipolar as a result of the US allies’ military build-ups and reduced dependence on the US military support against rivals. This might give them significant space to follow autonomous foreign policy. Will this happen or not remains to be seen.

https://journal-neo.su/2024/04/05/why-america-is-a-threat-to-the-world/

 

 

it's time for being earnest.....

BY PEPE ESCOBAR

 

The Europeans will never be able to replicate the time-tested Hegemon money laundering machine

The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats tho’ unseen amongst us, -visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower.-
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening,-
Like clouds in starlight widely spread,-
Like memory of music fled,-
Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.
Shelley, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty

As the de facto North Atlantic Terror Organization celebrates its 75th birthday, taking Lord Ismay’s motto to ever soaring heights (“keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down”), that thick slab of Norwegian wood posing as Secretary-General came up with a merry “initiative” to create a 100 billion euro fund to weaponize Ukraine for the next five years.

Translation, regarding the crucial money front in the NATO-Russia clash: partial exit of the Hegemon – already obsessing with The Next Forever War, against China; enter the motley crew of ragged, de-industrialized European chihuahuas, all in deep debt and most mired in recession.

A few IQs over average room temperature at NATO’s HQ in Haren, in Brussels, had the temerity to wonder how to come up with such a fortune, as NATO has zero leverage to raise money among member states.

After all, the Europeans will never be able to replicate the time-tested Hegemon money laundering machine. For instance, assuming the White House-proposed $60 billion package to Ukraine would be approved by the U.S. Congress – and it won’t – no less than 64% of the total will never reach Kiev: it will be laundered within the industrial-military complex.

Yet it gets even more dystopic: Norwegian Wood, robotic stare, arms flailing, actually believes his proposed move will not imply a direct NATO military presence in Ukraine – or country 404; something that is already a fact on the ground for quite a while, irrespective of the warmongering hissy fits by Le Petit Roi in Paris (Peskov: “Russia-NATO relations have descended into direct confrontation”).

Now couple the Lethal Looney Tunes spectacle along the NATOstan front with the Hegemon’s aircraft carrier performance in West Asia, consistently taking its industrial-scale slaughter/starvation Genocide Project in Gaza to indescribable heights – the meticulously documented holocaust watched in contorted silence by the “leaders” of the Global North.

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese correctly summed it all up: the biblical psychopathology entity “intentionally killed the WCK workers so that donors would pull out and civilians in Gaza could continue to be starved quietly. Israel knows Western countries and most Arab countries won’t move a finger for the Palestinians.”

The “logic” behind the deliberate three tap strike on the clearly signed humanitarian convoy of famine-alleviating workers in Gaza was to eviscerate from the news an even more horrendous episode: the genocide-within-a-genocide of al-Shifa hospital, responsible for at least 30% of all health services in Gaza. Al-Shifa was bombed, incinerated and had over 400 civilians killed in cold blood, in several cases literally smashed by bulldozers, including medical doctors, patients and dozens of children.

Nearly simultaneously, the biblical psychopathology gang completely eviscerated the Vienna convention – something that even the historical Nazis never did – striking Iran’s consular mission/ambassador’s residence in Damascus.

This was a missile attack on a diplomatic mission, enjoying immunity, on the territory of a third country, against which the gang is not at war. And on top of it, killing General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force in Syria and Lebanon, his deputy Mohammad Hadi Hajizadeh, another five officers, and a total of 10 people.

Translation: an act of terror, against two sovereign states, Syria and Iran. Equivalent to the recent terror attack on Crocus City Hall in Moscow.

The inevitable question rings around all corners of the lands of the Global Majority: how can these de facto terrorists possibly get away with all this, over and over again?

The sinews of Liberal Totalitarianism

Four years ago, at the start of what I later qualified as the Raging Twenties, we were beginning to watch the consolidation of an intertwined series of concepts defining a new paradigm. We were becoming familiar with notions such as circuit breaker; negative feedback loop; state of exception; necropolitics; and hybrid neofascism.

As the decade marches on, our plight may at least have been alleviated by a twin glimmer of hope: the drive towards multipolarity, led by the Russia-China strategic partnership, with Iran playing a key part, and all that coupled with the total breakdown, live, of the “rules-based international order”.

Yet to affirm there will be a long and winding road ahead is the Mother of All Euphemisms.

So, to quote Bowie, the ultimate late, great aesthete: Where Are We Now? Let’s take this very sharp analysis by the always engaging Fabio Vighi at Cardiff University and tweak it a little further.

Anyone applying critical thinking to the world around us can feel the collapse of the system. It’s a closed system alright, easily definable as Liberal Totalitarianism. Cui bono? The 0.0001%.

Nothing ideological about that. Follow the money. The defining negative feedback loop is actually the debt loop. A criminally anti-social mechanism kept in place by – what else – a psychopathology, as acute as the one exhibited by the biblical genocidals in West Asia.

The Mechanism is enforced by a triad.

1. The transnational financial elite, the superstars of the 0.0001%.
2. Right beneath it, the politico-institutional layer, from the U.S. Congress to the European Commission (EC) in Brussels, as well as comprador elite “leaders” across the Global North and South.
3. The former “intelligentsia”, now essentially hacks for hire from media to academia.

This institutionalized hyper-mediatization of reality is (italics mine), in fact, The Mechanism.

It’s this mechanism that controlled the merging of the pre-fabricated “pandemic” – complete with hardcore social engineering sold as “humanitarian lockdowns” – into, once again, Forever Wars, from Project Genocide in Gaza to the Russophobia/cancel culture obsession inbuilt in Project Proxy War in Ukraine.

That’s the essence of Totalitarian Normality: the Project for Humanity by the appallingly mediocre, self-appointed Great Reset “elites” of the collective West.

Killing them softly with AI

A key vector of the whole mechanism is the direct, vicious interconnection between a tecno-military euphoria and the hyper-inflationary financial sector, now in thrall with AI.

Enter, for instance, AI models such as ‘Lavender’, tested on the ground in the Gaza killing field lab. Literally: artificial intelligence programming the extermination of humans. And it’s happening, in real time. Call it Project AI Genocide.

Another vector, already experimented, is inbuilt in the indirect assertion by toxic EC Medusa Ursula von der Lugen: essentially, the need to produce weapons as Covid vaccines.

That’s at the core of a plan to use funding of the EU by European taxpayers to “increase financing” of “joint contracts for weapons”. That’s an offspring of von der Lugen’s push to roll out Covid vaccines – a gigantic Pfizer-linked scam for which she is about to be investigated and arguably exposed by the EU’s Public Prosecutor Office. In her own words, addressing the proposed weapons scam: “We did this for vaccines and gas.”

Call it Weaponization of Social Engineering 2.0.

Amidst all the action in this vast corruption swamp, the Hegemon agenda remains quite blatant: to keep its – dwindling – predominantly thalassocratic, military hegemony, no matter what, as the basis for its financial hegemony; protect the U.S. dollar; and protect those unmeasurable, unpayable debts in U.S. dollars.

And that brings us to the tawdry economic model of turbo-capitalism, as sold by collective West media hacks: the debt loop, virtual money, borrowed non-stop to deal with “autocrat” Putin and “Russian aggression”. That’s a key by-product of Michael Hudson’s searing analysis of the FIRE (Finance-Insurance-Real Estate) syndrome.

Ouroboros intervenes: the serpent bites its own tail. Now the inherent folly of The Mechanism is inevitably leading casino capitalism to resort to barbarism. Undiluted savagery – of the Crocus City Hall kind and of the Project Gaza Genocide kind.

And that’s how The Mechanism engenders institutions – from Washington to Brussels to hubs across the Global North to genocidal Tel Aviv – stripped down to the status of psychotic killers, at the mercy of Big Finance/FIRE (oh, such fabulous seafront real estate opportunities available in “vacant” Gaza.)

How can we possibly escape such folly? Will we have the will and the discipline to follow Shelley’s vision and, in “this dim vast vale of tears”, summon the transcending Spirit of Beauty – and harmony, equanimity and justice?

Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation https://www.unz.com/pescobar/the-mechanism-how-the-order-based-on-made-up-rules-is-descending-into-savagery/ READ FROM TOP. it's time for being earnest.....