Top Left Link Buttons
  • English
  • German

Geopolitics updates

Category Archives

Russia’s Peskov: Crimea Not a Topic of Any Putin-Zelensky Meeting

Peskov Says Crimea Will Not Be the Topic of Any Putin-Zelensky Meeting

April 23 (EIRNS)–The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Crimea would not be on the agenda for any meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, as Crimea is not a Ukrainian matter. While a meeting between the two leaders is still on the agenda, there is as yet no venue. Zelensky proposed meeting Putin in the Donbas region of Ukraine. But Putin rejected the proposal and said that Zelensky should meet with the Donbas people, as Russia was not a party in that internal conflict in Ukraine. He suggested that Zelensky come to Moscow to meet to discuss bilateral relations, but Crimea is not on the table.


Hamilton, China, and LaRouche: Economic Development Is an Inalienable Right

Those familiar with the fifty-plus-year forecasting practice and record of economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche will perhaps recognize the deeper significance of the following statement, a significance probably unknown to the writer himself. In a London Guardian October 1 op-ed entitled “America faces supply-chain disruption and shortages. Here’s why,” author Matt Stoller says: “… what we’re experiencing is also the net result of decades of policy choices starting in the 1970s that emphasized consumer sovereignty over citizenship. The consolidation of power into the hands of private equity financiers and monopolists over the last four decades has left us uniquely unprepared to manage a supply shock. Our hyper-efficient globalized supply chain, once romanticized by men like Tom Friedman in The World Is Flat, is the problem. Like the financial system before the 2008 crash, this kind of economic order hides its fragility. It seems to work quite well, until it doesn’t.”

It is not enough to point out that what seems to be a sudden seizing up of the trans-Atlantic goods-distribution system is not the product of the Covid pandemic of the past 20 months, but something more “long-range.” History is never “objective” in that way. What was the agency that was at work here? Thirty-five years ago today, an “event” occurred that, if omitted from current history, renders it impossible to fully understand what is happening now.

THE PRICE FOR CHANGING HISTORY

Lyndon LaRouche, in 2004, in a report titled “The Night They Came to Kill Me” explained the true, “subjective” nature of that “objective” trans-Atlantic-wide economic devolution. “On October 6, 1986, a virtual army of more than four hundred armed personnel descended upon the town of Leesburg, Virginia, for a raid on the offices of EIR and its associates, and also deployed for another, darker mission. The premises at which I was residing at that time were surrounded by an armed force, while aircraft, armored vehicles, and other personnel waited for the order to move in shooting. Fortunately, the killing did not happen, because someone with higher authority than the Justice Department Criminal Division head William Weld, ordered the attack on me called off. The forces readied to move in on me, my wife, and a number of my associates, were pulled back in the morning……

“The 1973 campaign for my ‘elimination,’ the near-slaughter of Oct. 6-7, 1986, and the stubborn effort to exclude me from the debates now (in 2004), are each and all products of the same issue of my fight against the effort of certain liberal economists, and others, to put the world as a whole under the thumb of the policies of former Nazi Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht.

“The ultimate origin of these and related actions is not the U.S. Department of Justice, but a much higher authority than the U.S. government, the same assortment of Venetian-style international financier-oligarchical interests, and their associated law firms, which unleashed the wave of fascist dictatorships in continental Europe over the interval 1922-1945. The common feature of those international financier interests, then, back during 1922-1945, and today, is their present commitment to imposing Schachtian economics upon both the U.S.A. itself, and also on the world at large…

“The shift of the U.S. and British economies away from the U.S. ‘s leading role as the world’s greatest producer nation, toward a pro-Schachtian, ’post- industrial’ utopianism, was the hall- mark of the 1966-1968 Nixon campaign for the Presidency. The follies of this ‘post-industrial’ shift into wild-eyed monetarism, led the U.S. government to the point, that it must abandon its foolish post-Kennedy economic and cultural policies, or make exactly the choice I had warned that I feared they would make. Nixon’s decision of August 15, 1971 made the march in the direction of ruin and fascist-like dictatorship inevitable.”

Today, as in 1986 and 2004, there are two systems of choice before the world. There is the system of “Reesian choices,” named after the Tavistock Institute’s John Rawlings Rees, typified by the “development policies”—policies of financial looting—of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) toward the continent of Africa ever since the period after JFK’s assassination. Then there is the “American System” of “Hamiltonian” choices, of what has recently been called “win-win cooperation” by the nation of China. For example, when China’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Geng Shuang, recently told that body that the international community should “spare no effort in humanitarian assistance and post-disaster reconstruction” toward Haiti, he opened a “strategic flank in the mind,” that is a far more powerful idea than that of the self-doomed “Operation Orcus/Global Britain” military adventure hurtling to its strategic doom in the trans-Pacific theater.

COMPLETING HAMILTON’S UNFINISHED “HAITI MISSION”

The United States used to think that way. In 1861, the United States, under Abraham Lincoln, dispatched Ambassador Anson Burlingame as diplomatic emissary to a China then subjugated by the British Empire through the Second Opium War. Today, in 2021, China attempts to reach a United States whose leadership and institutional structure, as well as cultural institutions, have now also been subjugated, and largely devastated by the same “Opium War” method—though this time, not external force, but seduction through Winston Churchill’s “Empire of the Mind” was used. The United States was induced, through the Tavistock Institute and its Frankfurt School subsidiary, to destroy itself, to de-industrialize itself, to reject scientific progress itself, and, now, to depopulate itself. The just-announced proposal, however, for a joint, international mission to defend the sovereignty of the nation of Haiti from the international drug mafias that now subjugate it, by demonstrating, through construction of ports, rail, and power, including nuclear and thermonuclear power, that “economic development is a human right,” if accepted, can bring the United States itself back to its senses.

The LaRouche proposal for the emergency reconstruction of Haiti, introducing the higher-order concept of development corridors and an ” economic platform” into one of the poorest areas of the world, provides, as with Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s Afghanistan proposal, and especially if successfully advocated by a group of Americans representing the Committee for the Coincidence of Opposites, including those that hail from Haiti, a way for America to return to its previous Hamilton/Lincoln/Roosevelt outlook, that Frederick Douglass, America’s ambassador to Haiti, represented in his living person.

The uncorrected flaw in the American Revolution was, as all know, the inability to resolve the Africa chattel slavery matter at the beginning of the creaton of the nation, largely because of the influence of John Locke and his Royal Africa Company on the constitution of South Carolina, and other Southern states. But slavery was not the desired system, originally, even in the Southern colonies. Auguste Levasseur, Secretary to Lafayette, recounted in 1824:

“In about the year 1680, the General Assembly of the State of Virginia requested of the parent state that it finally put an end to this commerce in human flesh, infamous and unnecessary in the future, since now the population was numerous enough and active enough to cultivate a land that required only the lightest work to reward the tiller richly. Other Colonies repeated this cry of justice and philanthropy, but the parent country was callous and responded only by this atrocious resolution of Parliament: The importation of Slaves in America is too lucrative for the Colonies to be able to insist that England renounce it forever. This response was accompanied by threats to which it was necessary to succumb since they were in no condition to resist them. Nonetheless, the General Assembly renewed several times its demand….”

Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s support for the Haitian Revolution, and his co-authorship of Haiti’s Constitution, flowed from his notion of “Artificial labor” as expressed in his 1790 Report on the Subject of Manufactures. Is Thomas Jefferson’s then-opposition to Haiti’s self-government consistent with the now-present United States policy, itself opposite to that of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, of allowing, tolerating, and in effect aiding in the never-ending torture of that population, through refusing to take down the “Dope Inc.” financial oligarchy that dominates it as surely as did the slave-masters of 1791? China, which has, since the Bandung conference of 1955, and now even despite the fact that it is not diplomatically recognized by the government of Haiti, insisted that economic development is a human right for that nation. It has now posed to the entire international community that the same problem China has successfully tackled and solved internally—the eradication of poverty—be solved worldwide. The Global Development Initiative premiered by Xi Jinping at this United Nations session has now placed “economic development as a human right” on the world table. Executive Intelligence Review has answered the United Nations, and the world, by providing a policy orientation for the now-distracted United States. The plan for Haiti invokes, implicitly, FDR’s Four Freedoms, and, explicitly, LaRouche’s Four Economic Laws, to chart a way forward, not only for Haiti, not only for the Caribbean, but by means of eradicating poverty through economic cooperation, for “everywhere in the world.”

“YOUR DEATH WILL SAVE THE PLANET”

There is only one problem. The financial neo-Malthusians intend to use the illiterate argument that “natural law” is above human rights, to introduce what Fred Wills used to call “the doctrine of regrettable necessity” as the means to argue that billions will have to go away to save the planet. The bill is beginning to come in for this sophistry, in astronomical gas and electricity prices, hyperinflation, supply chain breakdowns, cuts in living standards, and drops in life expectancy that, while blamed on the coronavirus pandemic, preceded it. As stated by Klaus Schwab in the book Stakeholder Capitalism:” The same force that helps people escape from poverty and lead a decent life is the one that is destroying the livability of our planet for future generations. The emissions that lead to climate change are not just the result of a selfish generation of industrialists or western baby boomers. They are the consequence of the desire to create a better future for oneself.”

Except that Schwab isn’t actually referring in this passage to “western baby boomers,” but to both the Chinese policies for the development of African nations, and the desire of African nations to create a better future. As the Club of Rome’s Alexander King wrote: “The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.” Especially the “high birth rate” in Africa—too many African “carbon footprints.” So, regrettably, Africans must be reduced in their numbers, by any means necessary, in defense of natural law.

China’s calling the attention of the world to the crisis in Haiti at the United Nations, seen from the standpoint of the proposal in Executive Intelligence Review written by Richard Freeman and Cynthia Rush, places the United States in the position to choose, not the Tavistock choice method, but the “win-win” method which was always the essential characteristic of the American System which, as Henry Carey put it, “is the only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of elevating vehicle equalizing the condition of man throughout the world.”


Chas Freeman: Sanctions Are “Both Hypocritical and Counterproductive as Well as Cruel”

April 22, 2021 (EIRNS)–Chas Freeman, a former defense official and a career diplomat, serving as Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and Deputy Chief of Mission in both China and Thailand, responded to the call by Helga Zepp-LaRouche to stop the genocide in Syria and Yemen with the following statement on the role of sanctions in foreign policy: 

“I disagree with our abuse and overuse of sanctions on the grounds that they are ‘feel-good’ rather than results-oriented diplomacy, are ineffective unless they are part of a negotiation with a ‘yes-able’ proposal from those imposing them, create market distortions that rapidly establish vested interests in their perpetuation, injure innocent people but allow those in authority to maximize political power through control of patronage involving humanitarian exceptions, facilitate the scapegoating of those who impose them for entirely unconnected suffering of the populations they are supposed to aid, are an excuse for failing to address the ills they purport to punish effectively, and allow politicians to posture without doing anything effective about the problems they are condemning. In short, they are both hypocritical and counterproductive as well as cruel. Since their real objective is to satisfy domestic constituencies rather than accomplish anything in the countries they target, they always succeed. But they cause immense, needlless, and inhumane deprivation where they are imposed.

“I will look for an opportunity to make these points whenever I can. I am appalled by our complicity in the immiseration of Syrians and Yemenis and say so, when asked.”


Four Times More GI Suicides than Killed in Battle

Four Times More GI Suicides than Killed in Battle

Sep. 6 (EIRNS)–One of the more striking statistics compiled by the Watson Institute at Brown University on the costs of war is that, since 9/11, more than four times as many US soldiers and veterans have committed suicide than were killed in battle. There were 7,057 killed in battle, and 30,177 suicides, further demonstrating the horrendous toll on soldiers sent into senseless and illegal wars.

A Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) study in 2019 on suicides by active duty U.S. soldiers since 1840 shows that the lowest number of such suicides in the 20th Century were in 1944-45, the last two years of a horrendous, but just, war, at 5 per 100,000 service members. This increased to 18 per 100,000 in the last years of the Vietnam disaster, and set the record high of 29.7 per 100,000 in 2012 during the Iraq and Afghanistan endless wars, staying above 20 since then.  Full story here.


Suicide Watch: Day One of Biden’s Climate Summit

Suicide Watch: Day One of Biden’s Leaders Summit on Climate

April 22, 2021 (EIRNS)–Forty government heads of state and dozens of other leaders of institutions gathered (virtually) today to sing the praises of Joe Biden (“Joe” to many of them) for “bringing America back,” as most of them said — perhaps best expressed by the UK’s Alok Shama, the President of the COP 26 event planned for November in Glasgow: “We welcome America back into the fold,” clearly meaning the Malthusian death cult known as the British Empire. The meeting was chaired by climate fanatics Joe Biden, Antony Blinken and John Kerry.

There was a sharp distinction between the presentations of the leaders of the western world, and those of Russia, China, Mexico, South Africa, and some (but only some) other leaders from the Global South. While Biden, Macron, Merkel, Trudeau, Draghi, et al. described the so-called “climate crisis” as the greatest existential crisis facing mankind today, they emphasized that {all countries} must join in the suicide pact of eliminating fossil fuels and shutting down major portions of industry and agriculture to save Mother Earth from the non-existent danger of carbon dioxide. 

But the West no longer can dictate to the nations still guided by reason, rather than by Chicken Little’s screaming, ‘the sky is falling.’ 

Xi Jinping spoke poetically about the harmony and balance between man and nature, but added that it must follow a “people-centered approach,” focusing on those “longing for a better life.” We must follow the UN-centered multi-nationalism (i.e., not the artificial “rules-based order” made up by the imperial powers). Most importantly, he and many others emphasized the “common but differentiated responsibilities” between the advanced sector and the developing sector, insisting that the concerns of the developing countries must be accommodated. It is of note that climate czar John Kerry, speaking on Wednesday, called on China to give up its intention to allow coal-fired energy production to “peak” only in the 2030s. Xi did not obey, stating that they would continue producing coal-fired plants, as presented in the 14th Five Year Plan. That plan made clear that moving beyond coal depends on expanding nuclear and fusion power.

Vladimir Putin also insisted on UN-centered policies. He explained that Russia had reduced carbon emissions by half since the 1990s (like China, Russia has a serious real pollution problem, which they are resolving, with the side-effect of reducing carbon emissions). He said Russia is restructuring its energy and industrial sectors, focusing on nuclear power (he reminded the world that there are no carbon emissions from nuclear), as well as petro-gas and hydrogen. He noted that Russia’s ecosystem absorbs 2.5 billion tons of CO2 per year. He closed by insisting that global development must “not only be green, but also sustainable,” by fighting poverty and closing the gap between rich and poor. Nary a word about solar or wind.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) began by stating that Mexico had recently discovered three hydrocarbon deposits, all of which, he said, would be used to meet domestic demand. No longer, he said, would Mexico sell crude oil and import gasoline. Hydro plant turbines were being modernized to produce more electricity at less cost. Vast reforestation was taking place — 700 million trees, heading for a billion, and Mexico would help reforestation in the triangle countries to the south. He offered to advise the US on this successful program. He also called on the US to treat migrants as “exceptional people” who are willing to work hard, and who should have a path to citizenship if they desire. The State Department had warned AMLO in advance that the issue of migration should not be raised in the context of the environment — they are two totally different matters — but he did anyway. 

Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Gaston Browne, interestingly, barely mentioned climate, but focused on the financial disaster which, due to the pandemic, is striking countries like his dependent on tourism, and demanded that the nation’s debt must be forgiven or reorganized — it simply cannot be paid. He praised the fact that not only the US, but also China, were setting the pace on the climate issue. 

The session was ended by 19-year-old Xiye Bastida, a Mexican version of Greta Thunberg (who is from Fridays for the Future and was busy testifying at the US Congress), ranting and lecturing the evil white folk in the Global North who caused all the problems, and must now take direction from the brainwashed children. Blinken spent several minutes praising her as one of the “leaders of the future” who are dedicated to saving us from our folly. Xiye had been scheduled to speak in the session following AMLO’s, but she was moved up to provide a direct rejoinder to AMLO, and build her up as an international figure. One pro AMLO YouTube program, Antonio Villegas’s Guacamole News, reported on the incident: “Biden Ambushes AMLO at the Summit! They Create a Mexican Greta. She Already Attacked Him. From the Soros Group.” According to Villegas, Xiye insisted that the world has to recognize that we are at the end of the era of fossil fuels.  

The rest of the day included a session on Green Finance genocide with the normal suspects (Yellen, Georgieva, etc.), and another on Green Defense genocide (Sec. Austin, DNI Avril Haines, Sec. Ben Wallace, NATO’s Jens Stoltenberg, etc.). Climate is the center of all things, they all agreed, and the world must bow down or die. 

Friday is more of the same, ending with Michael Bloomberg and Bill Gates.


Bush-leaguers Warn U.S. Would Lose a War with China Over Taiwan

Bush-leaguers Warn U.S. Would Lose a War with China Over Taiwan

April 22, 2021 (EIRNS)–Two leading members of the CFR from the Bush administrations, Robert Blackwill and Philip Zelikow, have released a document under the title “The United States, China, and Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War,” calling for the U.S. to stand firmly behind Taiwan against “Chinese aggression,” but also warning that the U.S. can not win a war with China. The CFR blurb promoting the report quotes the report: “We do not think it is politically or militarily realistic to count on a U.S. military defeat of various kinds of Chinese assaults on Taiwan, uncoordinated with allies. Nor is it realistic to presume that, after such a frustrating clash, the United States would or should simply escalate to some sort of wide-scale war against China with comprehensive blockades or strikes against targets on the Chinese mainland.”

They state that Taiwan ”is becoming the most dangerous flash point in the world for a possible war that involves the United States, China, and probably other major powers.” They express a level of panic that the U.S. can no longer dictate global policy, and their proposals for U.S. actions show significant desperation. The U.S., they say, should: “affirm that it is not trying to change Taiwan’s status; work with its allies, especially Japan, to prepare new plans that could challenge Chinese military moves against Taiwan and help Taiwan defend itself, yet put the burden of widening a war on China; and visibly plan, beforehand, for the disruption and mobilization that could follow a wider war, but without assuming that such a war would or should escalate to the Chinese, Japanese, or American homelands.”

They conclude: “The horrendous global consequences of a war between the United States and China, most likely over Taiwan, should preoccupy the Biden team, beginning with the president.”


Indian Power Min. Singh: World Cannot Stop Africa from Developing

Indian Power Minister Insists, the World Cannot Stop Africa from Developing

April 7 (EIRNS)—The International Energy Agency (IEA) press release claiming a consensus reached at the March 31 IEA-COP26 Net Zero Summit on “accelerating clean energy transitions” is deceptive. While note was taken by some media of the words of warning given there by India’s Minister of Power, New and Renewable Energy Raj Kumar Singh, watching Singh’s presentation makes visible the fury building in developing countries against being told they have no right to develop.

Singh spoke for the continent of Africa, and he did so with such forcefulness that IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol began, politely but insistently, trying to cut him off halfway through his remarks.

True, Singh calmly reported the great advances India is making in building up the percentage of renewables in its energy mix, and his government’s agreement that the climate threat is real. But what followed was outrage that the developed world, which “has occupied almost 80% of the carbon space already,” now makes “pie in the sky” promises to get to net zero carbon emissions by some decades from now, while demanding developing countries cut their carbon emissions. Here his tone changed:

“Now, in order to give space for others to develop, you have to think of the whole continent of Africa! You have 800 million people in Africa who do not have access to electricity. It’s not about us. We will achieve whatever has to be achieved because we get investments. But it is about those countries…. They have to develop! That development will require more steel, in huge quantities; that development will require more cement, in huge quantities. They also want to build skyscrapers. They also want a high standard of living for their people. And you can’t stop it!…

“You have to give space to those countries, whose present per-capita consumption is less than one-fifth of the world’s consumption, whose present emissions are one-sixth of world emissions. You have to give them space to develop. You need to understand [here, he hit the table for emphasis] that if they consume more steel, they will make [emphasis* more steel; if they consume more cement, they will make [emphasis] more cement; if they consume more plastics, they will make [emphasis* more plastics—and all that is made with carbon.”

By then, Birol had stepped up his “thank you, thank you” interruptions, but Singh insisted on talking over him to make one last point: “you” insist that we go for carbon capture and storage, yet are these technologies proven? And they are very expensive!

India does not intend to sacrifice its own domestic energy supply, either. That same day, India’s Environment Ministry issued an order extending the compliance deadline for Indian coal-fired power plants to meet tougher emissions guidelines, by up to two more years. The measure was supported by the Power Ministry, because the costs of retrofitting emissions scrubbers on existing coal plants are prohibitive.


NATO and Ukraine Getting Ever Closer

NATO and Ukraine Getting Ever Closer

Apr. 6 (EIRNS) — Ukraine is not a member of NATO and therefore is not officially covered by Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty which defines an attack on one member as an attack on the alliance as a whole. NATO headquarters in Brussels nonetheless is tightening its relationship with Kiev. NATO’s Land Command, headquartered in Izmir, Turkey, announced on Twitter Monday, April 6, that it is adding Ukrainian representation to its staff. “DID YOU KNOW that Ukraine is the first partner nation to take part in the @NATO Response Force?” the headquarters said. “Ukraine is a valued partner of the Alliance & one of our six Enhanced Opportunity Partners. #LANDCOM currently has one Ukrainian officer serving in our headquarters.”

Also, US Air Force cargo planes have been spotted flying to and from Ukraine. UAWire reported yesterday that at least three US planes have been tracked flying into and landing in Ukraine, including a C-17 that landed in Lviv. According to a Ukrainian blogger, three flights were seen in the previous two days, one from the United States and two that took off from bases in Europe. While U.S. military transport aircraft are flying all over the world at any time, their presence in Ukraine is going to get more notice because of the current escalation of tensions with Russia. Questions will also be asked about what is the cargo they’re delivering. 

These moves are made maximally dangerous by their having followed Joe Biden’s provocative “Crimea is Ukraine” public statement two weeks ago.

The Ukrainian side, meanwhile, is claiming the Russian military has relocated elements of the 76th Guards air assault division, based in Pskov, to Crimea. The 112 Ukraine TV channel cites an outfit called the Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT) claiming that it tracked these troops’ movement by rail all the way from Pskov to Simferopol. CIT’s main source is apparently video posted on TikTok, which they say showed military equipment being loaded at a train station in the Pskov Oblast.

In the Donbas, the Ukrainian army claimed this morning that two more of its soldiers had been killed, apparently by snipers from the separatist side. At the same time, the Donetsk militia claimed that Ukrainian mortar fire hit a residential neighborhood on the outskirts of Donetsk city, reported by the Donetsk News Agency. The clear implication of the report is that the mortar fire is a violation of last summer’s cease fire agreement.


South Africans ‘Stand Up for Nuclear’ at Annual Rallies

Sept. 30 (EIRNS)—Despite the green psychosis that has overtaken South Africa, more than 400 South Africans participated in the annual “Stand Up for Nuclear” events on Sept. 18 in Pretoria and Cape Town, and at the proposed nuclear site, Thyspunt.

Despite demands from the international bankers that coal be abandoned—even while South Africa is overwhelmingly dependent on coal for generating electricity—South African public opinion about nuclear energy is still ambivalent, at best. “Stand Up for Nuclear South Africa” and related efforts intend to change that.

Participants in the Sept. 18 events included nuclear industry professionals, politicians, educators, and students.

The main event was a three-mile walk across the township of Atteridgeville in Pretoria to the Phatudi Comprehensive School, where Zizamele Mbambo, Deputy Director General of Nuclear in the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy, gave the keynote address.

On the streets, the activists—equipped with loudspeakers, banners and posters—demanded that government include nuclear in the green finance taxonomy. They engaged the surrounding communities on the merits of nuclear energy, including its huge potential to end load-shedding (power shut-offs, now 25% of the time) and reduce the cost of electricity.

The coordinator for Stand Up for Nuclear South Africa, Princess Mthombeni, told Executive Intelligence Review that “we are planning other initiatives such as the upcoming energy debate, as well as outreach programs that aim to engage communities and other stakeholders such as trade unions.”

Stand Up For Nuclear SA is a program of trade union NEHAWU’s Professionals Technical Committee, in collaboration with other organizations including South African Young Nuclear Professionals Society and Women in Nuclear South Africa. NEHAWU is the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union.

Stand Up for Nuclear is also held annually in more than 80 cities around the world, including New York, Seattle, Paris, and London; the number is growing. The South African organizers say that it has been led since 2016 by Environmental Progress, an American environmental movement led by Michael Schellenberger, to inform societies about the harmful effects of the indiscriminate expansion of renewable energy and the necessity of nuclear power.


Chas Freeman: Strong Warning on Deteriorating U.S.-China Relations

Chas Freeman Issues Strong Warning on Deteriorating U.S.-China Relations

April 21 (EIRNS)—Chas Freeman, a former Defense official and diplomat with extensive knowledge of China-U.S. relations, issued a strong warning to the U.S. on the deterioration of relations between the two superpowers in an April 15 speech to the University of Idaho. He noted: “China is now in some ways more connected internationally than the United States. It is the largest foreign trade partner of most of the world’s economies, including the world’s largest—the European Union (EU). Its preeminence in global trade and investment flows is growing. The 700,000 Chinese students now enrolled in degree programs abroad dwarf the less than 60,000 students from the United States doing the same. American universities still attract over one million foreign students annually but nearly half a million international students now opt to study in China. China’s role in global science and technological innovation is growing, while America’s is slipping.

On militarily matters, he says the U.S. “containment” of China in the past, especially regarding Taiwan, was based on an overwhelming advantage on the U.S. side. This containment prevented China from “effectively asserting ancient claims to islands in its near seas, while opening the way for other claimants to occupy them.” Now, however, “the Chinese military can now defend their country against any conceivable foreign attack. They also appear to be capable of taking Taiwan over American opposition—even if only at tremendous cost to themselves, Taiwan, and the United States.” The U.S. military presence in the region today, Freeman said, “has the effect of backing and bolstering Taiwan’s refusal to talk about—still less negotiate—a relationship with the rest of China that might meet the minimal requirements of Chinese nationalism and thereby perpetuate peace.” 

As to the U.S. rallying its “friends and allies” to join in opposing China, “it will discover that few of them share the all-out animus against China to which so many Americans have become committed….

On the BRI, Freeman makes the interesting point: “The Greeks invented the concept of a ‘Europe’ distinct from what they called ‘Asia.’ Chinese connectivity programs (the ‘Belt and Road’) are recreating a single ‘Eurasia.’ Many countries in that vast expanse see an increasingly wealthy and powerful China as an ineluctable part of their own future and prosperity. Some seem more worried about collateral damage from aggressive actions by the United States than about great Han chauvinism. Few find the injustices of contemporary Chinese authoritarianism attractive, but fewer still are inclined to bandwagon with the United States against China….”

He notes China’s major advances in science and education, compared to the U.S., which is in “chronic fiscal deficit, immobilized by political gridlock, and mired in never-ending wars that divert funds needed for domestic rejuvenation to preeminence in global science, technology, and education.” The foolish U.S. move of “excluding Beijing from international cooperation in space (has) led to an increasingly robust set of indigenous Chinese space-based capabilities, many of which are of military relevance.

On U.S. sanctions, he adds: “It is generating an active threat to the U.S. dollar’s seven-decade-long command of international trade settlement. Increased use of other currencies menaces both the efficacy of U.S. sanctions and the continued exemption of the American economy from balance of trade and payments constraints that affect other countries…. The domestic and foreign purchasers of U.S. government debt could conclude that it is backed by little more than ‘modern monetary theory’ and cease to buy it. This alone would end the ‘exorbitant privilege’ of the United States, deprive Washington of the ability to enforce unilateral sanctions, and make the American dominance of the Indo-Pacific economically unsustainable.” 

There is much more; a full transcript of Freeman’s speech is here.


Page 20 of 35First...192021...Last