"Our" Crisis du Jour Makes It Clear That The U.S. Government Is A Purchased Entity

PCR  |  US Representative Matt Gaetz  has courage and principles, for the most part good ones.  

It was Gaetz who had the courage and leadership ability to get rid of Rino McCarthy as Speaker of the House.

It is Gaetz who understands that hardly any member of Congress in either party represents Americans.  Instead, they represent the military/security complex’s power and profits, the profits of the pharmaceutical companies,  the profits of agri-business (ethanol for example), the profits of Wall Street, the profits of energy, timber, and mining, and so forth.  And especially, the US Congress represents the artificial state of Israel and all of Israel’s agendas.  

Indeed, Matt Gaetz himself cannot escape having to support an occupier of Palestinians’ land, claiming that it is Israel’s.  The fact that even a brave man like Matt Gaetz has to support an aggressor against a people abandoned by the “moral” West shows how captured the US government is at all levels by vested monied interests.

Gaetz along with the entirely of the US Congress and the President  are purchased by the billions of dollars that American taxpayers are forced to hand over to Israel each year. American taxpayers are forced to give Israel annually billions of dollars that are used to purchase our government. Israel, considered a rich country, does not need foreign aid, but any member of Congress who does not vote for  Israel’s billions finds in his next election a challenger financed by Israel’s billions  and himself a victim of Israel’s slander machine. The same thing happens if you vote against an excessive military/security budget or against the agendas of powerful organized interests.  A government whose election is financed by interest groups has to represent those interest groups.

So, obviously, the solution is not term limits on members of Congress.  The solution is to take the money that Congress gives Israel to buy our government out of politics along with the ability of corporations to purchase the US government, thanks to an  unconstitutional ruling of the  US Supreme Court that it is a “free speech right”  for corporations and foreign interests to purchase the US government for their own use. 

There you have it. The US government is a purchased entity. It has nothing whatsoever to do with American interests or protecting the interests of the American people.

What needs to be done?

Matt Gaetz, the conservatives and libertarians naively  think that term limits is the answer.  This is another of Americans’ insouciant mistakes. The real solution is to extend, not limit, the terms of members of Congress and to give Congress the police powers  on which Congress’ enemy–the executive branch–has a monopoly. The corrupt Justice Department can frame up and arrest  members of Congress, and Congress has no corresponding powers.

The founding fathers distrusted democracy because of their fear of ignorant mobs. For this reason they limited the terms of US Representatives to two years.    So US Representatives and Senators are turned into whores prostituting themselves for reelection money as soon as they are elected. It is never possible for Congress or the President to represent American’s interests.

This is because of money.  The solution is to take out of politics the ability of corporations, Israel, and foreign interests to purchase the services of the US Government, which as a result of interest group funding of election campaigns turns the US government into a whore.  The Founding Fathers should have lengthened the terms of Congress and the President, prohibited all outside money from financing election campaigns, and financed at taxpayer expense free speech forums for candidates to debate their differences.  They also made a mistake by creating a legislative body too large for a common interest to emerge. This failure of the Founding Fathers doomed America to the control of vested interests.  The Democrats when they limited the terms of committee chairmen eliminated legislative power centers that could stand up to the executive branch and thereby weakened Congress as an institution.

Your Stupid Smirk Won't Change The Fact...,

Best ever response to the Zionist propaganda line: ‘why don’t the neighbouring Arab countries want the Palestinians?’@normfinkelstein : ‘you’re smiling but your stupid smirk won’t change the fact the argument you used was used by Hitler to justify the extermination of the Jews’ pic.twitter.com/8UPuNB9pLh

— sheree (@tinyfleu) November 5, 2023

 

Between Gaza And Ukraine

globaltimes  |  The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is exacerbating. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has made four visits to Israel since October 7, but what he talked about was the US support for Israel instead of a ceasefire.

With each day that a ceasefire is delayed, Palestinians' animosity toward Israel deepens. It will definitely create a longer-term and more devastating disaster in the region already plagued by decades of war.

When the conflict between Palestine and Israel first broke out, China immediately expressed its stance, emphasizing that the top priority is to prevent a broader humanitarian disaster and that the fundamental way out is to implement the "two-state solution." On many occasions since then, China has repeatedly stressed the importance and urgency of returning to the "two-state solution."

However, the US and European countries have not actively responded to this call of conscience. Instead, they have been constrained by domestic politics and wavered, preventing major countries from  reaching an immediate consensus.

It was not until Israel's military operations in Gaza had caused tens of thousands of casualties, including scores of women and children, and displaced hundreds of thousands of people that leaders in the US and European countries seemed to realize the need to return to the two-state solution. US President Joe Biden and some European leaders have expressed their stance on this recently.

Although the current suffering in the Middle East is not directly caused by the US and Europe, as countries deeply involved in the geopolitical game there since World War II, they bear a heavy responsibility for the resumption of the war.

It is precisely because of the US' unlimited support for Israel and the cowardice of the US and Europe that led to the failure to take action to maintain peace. Israel marched into Gaza without any scruples, carrying US-made weapons and equipment. 

So far, the US has not called for shifting the focus to a ceasefire. Instead, it supported Israel's retaliatory strikes against Gaza and enhanced the deployment of force to restrain the involvement of other forces in the Middle East.

MUCH MORE Impressed With Mark Crispin Miller Than I Am With Myself!!!

off-guardian  |   There is one thing that’s new about this latest propaganda drive since January, 2020. Whereas the others all united what we (very loosely) call “the left” (along with certain sectors of the GOP) against the “far-right” bogey, this one has abruptly split that gross alliance, as both parties—Trump et al. included—and the “liberal media” have (predictably) swung virulently Zionist, while the “woke” masses (predictably, and, often, virulently) “stand with Palestine,” along with some few politicians, movie stars and rappers. This livid falling-out has only weakened the antagonists, since both sides are disabled by a common blindness to what’s really happening to them both (and all the rest of us).

“We are the people of light, they are the people of darkness—and light shall triumph over darkness.” Thus spake Netanyahu two days ago, spelling out the Manichaean vision that “our free press” has, by and large, been variously pitching since October 7, and that has Zionists beside themselves with open genocidal rage, not just at Hamas, and/or its armed confederates, but at the Gazans overall, and, no doubt, all Palestinians.

It was, of course, the “sudden” horror of Hamas’s attack, and the endless invocation of the Holocaust by the Israeli government (and, therefore, by “our free press”), that now has Zionists not only cheering as the IDF kills thousands more than Hamas killed (and forcibly “relocates” many thousands more), but attacking anyone who isn’t cheering, too, demanding that whoever doesn’t “stand with Israel” be censored, fired, expelled from school or otherwise eliminated in a crackdown that makes “cancel culture” seem (almost) benign.

This ferocious drive against the Palestinians, and anyone who advocates on their behalf, is wholly based on the Official Story that “our free press” (as usual) will not question, even though the Israeli people don’t believe it, since there is overwhelming evidence against it—evidence that “our free press” will not report, just as it has long blacked out the agony in Gaza (and those eight years of Nazi violence in East Ukraine).

And as the Zionists have been disastrously misled by the Official Story, so have those who applauded Hamas’s bloody raids, voicing “exhilaration” over what they took to be a righteous counter-blow against the occupying power, like the heroic uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. While Gaza does recall the Warsaw ghetto, Hamas’s “surprise attack” does not recall that uprising, which actually did come as a surprise (and, of course, killed no civilians), whereas “October 7” clearly was an “inside job,” as the Israeli people know—an inconvenient fact for all who now want to see still more people die, whether Israelis, Gazans, Jews, Palestinians, Muslims or whomever else they hate, for whatever reason (or no reason).

So let us finally pose the crucial question: Who benefits from the catastrophe that may now sweep us all away, if we don’t break the spell of the Official Story? It’s surely not the Zionists, since Netanyahu obviously isn’t one, or he wouldn’t have forced “vaccination” on his people, through what may well have been the toughest “vaccine” mandate in the world. Despite his reputation, and his demagogic rhetoric, Netanyahu would appear to be a globalist, not a Zionist.

Certainly this latest melodrama is now speedily intensifying the repressive trends that started with the rollout of “the virus,” from ever-tighter censorship, to still “smarter” surveillance, to the splintering of opposition, to the exacerbation of the refugee crisis, and so on, as this acute OffGuardian piece makes clear:

The Israel-Hamas War is ALREADY Pushing the Great Reset Agenda”
Kit Knightly, Off-Guardian.org, October 20 2023

Now, let’s return to the only bit of good news in this whole hyper-barbaric episode—that the Israeli people get it, not just about Hamas’s “surprise attack,” but about the “vaccination” drive that Netanyahu forced on them, and which now has them “dying suddenly” week after week, along with other peoples the world over.

Could it be that Netanyahu actually is not the ultimate or only author of “October 7,” and that its purpose wasn’t just to save his hide politically?

Is it not possible that, just as “his” drive to “vaccinate” all the Israeli people was probably dictated from on high, he organized “October 7,” or okayed it, on the orders of the same powers who’ve been ravaging the world since January, 2020?

Not only is this crisis serving perfectly to foster still more chaos, division and economic ruination overall, but, more precisely, it has (at least for now) completely drowned out the Israelis’ quiet, shared awareness that “vaccination” is a stroke of democide, imposed worldwide not with the noble goal of “saving lives,” but—on the contrary—to end as many lives as possible, for the purpose of extreme depopulation everywhere (as Bill Gates once incautiously revealed, when he referred to the eventual concluding phase of global “vaccination” as “the final solution”).

The last thing that our masters want is for the Israelis’ consciousness of what’s been done to them to spread to other countries, so that enough of us wake up, and unify enough to put an end to these catastrophes at last.

And so those whose eyes are now so full of blood that they just want to see more people die—whether Jews or Palestinians—had better understand, for their own sake, that those behind the “vaccination” drive agree with you, and with your enemy, since they want nearly all of us to die, and the sooner the better.

So if you can’t stop hating any others to the point of wanting them all dead, go ahead and keep it up. It’s your funeral (assuming anyone will be around to bury you).

The Biden Administration Budgeted For The Ethnic Cleansing Of Gaza

stephensemler  |   The White House deployed the Secretaries of Defense and State to Capitol Hill this morning to sell Biden’s $106 billion spending request, which includes billions in military aid for Israel. With rising concerns that Israel’s ongoing military offensive will amount to mass ethnic cleansing, a bunch of protestors thankfully attended the congressional hearing too.

The Protestors Are Right

As this newsletter’s resident budget boffin, I want to explain why the activists were right to protest this specific spending plan. Biden’s proposal lists up to $23.5 billion in funding related to Israel’s military offensive: $8.7 billion in direct military aid, $5.6 billion in potential long-term military support, up to $3.5 billion for State Department’s migration assistance programs, and up to $5.7 billion for USAID’s humanitarian aid programs.1

All of it supports the forced displacement of Palestinians. Based on my reading of the tea leaves — and the 69-page PDF from the White House Office of Management Budget detailing the $106 billion request — I believe Biden is prepared to subsidize ethnic cleansing2 on a historic scale. Here’s how.

The $8.7 billion in military aid would bankroll Israel’s ongoing violent displacement of Palestinian civilians by sustaining its bombing campaign and ground invasion. The other $5.6 billion in military spending is there to support a bloody, protracted invasion of Gaza (which Israeli military leaders openly admit is a real possibility) by boosting US weapons stockpiles in Israel that Israel can draw from upon request, and funding the president’s new authority to send Israel any weapon directly from Pentagon stocks (with minimal oversight). Biden’s plan would primarily manage the humanitarian fallout not by securing Gaza, but by financing mass migration. Judging by how they were written in the proposal, the intent behind the $3.5 billion request for migration assistance is to manage near-term displacement, and the $5.7 billion in humanitarian relief is to accommodate the long-term (and perhaps permanent) mass displacement of Palestinian civilians.

Israeli leaders have expressed interest in ultimately shrinking Palestinian territory and greatly reducing the number of people living in it, and formalized plans for the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza have recently emerged from the country’s political establishment. As president, Biden could prevent Israel from weaponizing mass migration, but he chose to budget for it instead.

Were You Aware Of The Secret U.S. Military Bases In Israel?

theintercept  |  Two months before Hamas attacked Israel, the Pentagon awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to build U.S. troop facilities for a secret base it maintains deep within Israel’s Negev desert, just 20 miles from Gaza. Code-named “Site 512,” the longstanding U.S. base is a radar facility that monitors the skies for missile attacks on Israel.

On October 7, however, when thousands of Hamas rockets were launched, Site 512 saw nothing — because it is focused on Iran, more than 700 miles away.The U.S. Army is quietly moving ahead with construction at Site 512, a classified base perched atop Mt. Har Qeren in the Negev, to include what government records describe as a “life support facility”: military speak for barracks-like structures for personnel.

Though President Joe Biden and the White House insist that there are no plans to send U.S. troops to Israel amid its war on Hamas, a secret U.S. military presence in Israel already exists. And the government contracts and budget documents show it is evidently growing.

The $35.8 million U.S. troop facility, not publicly announced or previously reported, was obliquely referenced in an August 2 contract announcement by the Pentagon. Though the Defense Department has taken pains to obscure the site’s true nature — describing it in other records merely as a “classified worldwide” project — budget documents reviewed by The Intercept reveal that it is part of Site 512. (The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

“Sometimes something is treated as an official secret not in the hope that an adversary would never find out about it but rather [because] the U.S. government, for diplomatic or political reasons, does not want to officially acknowledge it,” Paul Pillar, a former chief analyst at the CIA’s counterterrorism center who said he had no specific knowledge of the base, told The Intercept. “In this case, perhaps the base will be used to support operations elsewhere in the Middle East in which any acknowledgment that they were staged from Israel, or involved any cooperation with Israel, would be inconvenient and likely to elicit more negative reactions than the operations otherwise would elicit.”

Rare acknowledgment of the U.S. military presence in Israel came in 2017, when the two countries inaugurated a military site that the U.S. government-funded Voice of America deemed “the first American military base on Israeli soil.” Israeli Air Force’s Brig. Gen. Tzvika Haimovitch called it “historic.” He said, “We established an American base in the State of Israel, in the Israel Defense Forces, for the first time.”

Jewish Antisemitism Toward Arabs Was Hamas' Strategic Opportunity

[Thread] For the third weekend in a row, cities across Europe 🇪🇺 have seen massive demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine 🇵🇸

1) London: A wall of humanity marches through the city center. Some estimates say 500,000 people are there. pic.twitter.com/2KGubzJvhG

— Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) October 28, 2023

johnhelmer  |  If we abstract from the versions about the eschatological motives of the parties to the conflict and various hypotheses about the scenario of how events developed,  the Al-Aqsa Flood operation exposed three  vulnerabilities of the Israelis of a military intelligence nature:

— a failure in strategic intelligence regarding the plans and intentions of Hamas. Although, based on the received HUMINT [human intelligence] data, there were warnings from the Egyptian intelligence services. The Israelis position their technical intelligence capabilities as dominant [above their human intelligence].

— the discrepancy between the capabilities of the advanced, expensive Iron Dome missile defense system and the requirements for repelling the direct and asymmetric threats [employed by Hamas].

— strategic miscalculation in the use of a complex, high-tech, expensive security barrier around the perimeter of the Gaza Strip. The construction of the  barrier strategically set restrictions on offensive  manoeuvre for the IDF and the ability of the Israelis to anticipate. Hamas has gained thereby the operational initiative – the mobility of their forces against the static dispersion of the Israelis.  Considering the barrier impenetrable before the operation, the Israelis had relocated most of their regular forces to northern-sector control of the territories near the borders of Lebanon and Syria,and to the West Bank.

The “great Israeli wall” has appeared to be almost totally useless. Hamas overcame it in a short time, which allowed it to operate almost unhindered in the adjacent territories. The disabling of [the IDF’s] technological means demonstrated the lack of the human resources to respond. In terms of communications, the dependence of the Israeli forces on wireless data transmission has become a critical vulnerability.

As in the case of Iron Dome, the Israelis relied on technological solutions, methods,  and thinking, neglecting the principle of war being waged by people, not by  machines (yet). To this is added a doctrinal and strategic discrepancy with the actual conditions of combat. Technological superiority was placed at the forefront, but the complex systems showed vulnerability to a cascade of failures, leading the system to collapse. A regional conflict would make this catastrophic. 

[*]  The lead cartoons are, left, by Carlos Latuff in Brazil in 2006  and, right, by Mr Fish in the US (Harper’s Magazine) also in 2006. They have been reproduced by Evan Jones in a collection of western media cartoons on the meaning of anti-Semitism as an information warfare weapon in US-Israeli military operations against the Arabs until editorial censorship was imposed in both the UK and US. Click to read.  

[**] Read the 80-year old story of the German General Staff plans for the Arab states and Hitler’s failure to implement them, followed by the plans of Coon, the OSS, and the CIA homicidalists against the Arabs, which are still being followed in Washington and Tel Aviv. Click.  On Saturday night, October 28, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed his intelligence services and military staff for failing to warn him of the Hamas war plan. Under counter-attack from the services and the military, Netanyahu then apologised and retracted his claims. The Israeli press record of the episode reveals that the entire Israeli political and military leadership shares the same racial superiority doctrine.  

[***] In a special session of security officials called to discuss the Makhachkala airport incidents, President Vladimir Putin said: “We must clearly understand who in reality is behind the tragedy of the peoples of the Middle East and other regions of the world, who organizes deadly chaos, who benefits from it. Today, in my opinion, it has already become obvious and understandable for everyone – customers act openly and brazenly. It is the current ruling elites of the United States and their satellites that are the main beneficiaries of global instability. They extract their bloody rent from it. Their strategy is also obvious. The United States as a global superpower – everyone sees it, understands it, even according to trends in the global economy – is weakening, losing its position. The American-style world, with one hegemon, is being destroyed, is leaving, gradually but steadily going into the past…The events in Makhachkala last night were inspired, including through social networks, not least from the territory of Ukraine, by the hands of agents of Western special services. I want to ask myself in this regard: is it possible to help Palestine by trying to attack the Tats and their families? Tats, by the way, are the titular nation in Dagestan. Palestine can only be helped in the fight against those who are behind this tragedy. We, Russia, are fighting them as part of a special military operation, it is with them – both for ourselves and for those who strive for real, true freedom.” 


Antisemitism Is Special Bigotry Because Jews Are THE Special People

timesofisrael  |  Bias against homelands can hurt minorities in the Diaspora. Prejudices against Africans (‘primitives,’ ‘hotheads’) devalue Black migrants around the world. Prejudices against Asians (‘mystical people’) dehumanize Asian migrants the world over. But propaganda against Israel hurts Jews in their Diaspora like no other minority. Zionism is to Jews what feminism is to women. Men who ‘like women but not feminists’ show they don’t like women; rather, they like being served. Jews and Gentiles who ‘like Jews but not Zionists’ show they like Jews as long as they feel scared all the time so that they can be manipulated to serve and comfort the Gentile powers to be; but not when they are independent and proud of themselves. 

Judaism laid much of the foundation of all Monotheism (One G^d), Science (One Universe), and Democracy (Equality) in the world. That’s why hatred of Jews is the ultimate ungratefulness, throwing mud on Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Einstein, and Herzl. And therefore, the Holocaust doesn’t compare to any other genocide, Armenian included—though they are all horrific.

It seems that Intersectionality was designed to promote Antisemitic. It advocates comparing oppressions and seeing how they are all interwoven. Because Antisemitism is so unique, and because Jews are kept hostage by the top level of societies (and blamed for all ills), it often ends up uniting all oppressed groups against the Jews, the victims of the oldest hatred.

And so, you see there is reason not to just regard Antisemitism as one of the forms of Racism. Jews-oppression is too specific. It’s a special bigotry.

 

 

For Halloween Blinken Dressed His Child As The Cucaracha Of Kiev...,

NYPost  |  Secretary of State Antony Blinken dressed his 4-year-old son as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for a Halloween event with President Biden on the White House lawn Monday night.

Biden gave the young “Zelensky,” who wore a dark green sweatshirt, a box of M&Ms bearing the presidential seal — after asking Congress earlier this month to give another $61.4 billion for the real deal, on top of $113 billion already appropriated to help Kyiv resist Russia’s 20-month-old invasion.

Blinken was accompanied by his wife, Biden’s White House cabinet secretary Evan Ryan, and their 3-year-old daughter, who was dressed in the Ukrainian flag’s blue-and-yellow scheme.

The top US diplomat’s grandfather, Moritz Blinken, was born in Ukraine’s capital, then part of the Russian empire, in 1900 and immigrated to the US with his family as a 4-year-old.

Blinken’s ancestors were, like Zelensky, Ukrainian Jews.

The Empire Can't Spin The Murder Of Thousands Of Children

🇵🇸🇮🇱🚨‼️ “We wrote their names on the children’s bodies so that we would recognize them when they were torn into pieces.” pic.twitter.com/vQFG9njJwS

— Lord Bebo (@MyLordBebo) October 29, 2023

catyjohnstone |  Propagandists are used to having a lot more wiggle room to work with than this. They’re used to interfacing with a complex matrix of narrative and manipulating it to distort the public’s understanding of what’s going on. But raw video footage of a mother clutching the tattered remains of a child is not narrative. Satellite images of powdered city blocks are not narrative. It’s just reality. Right there in your face.

Western civilization is dominated by propaganda. The “freedom” and “democracy” we think we have is an illusion that has been carefully cultivated by those who manipulate the way we think, speak, act and vote by mass-scale psychological manipulation — as Chomsky says, propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state. A mind-controlled dystopia is not some dark future that awaits humanity if things go terribly wrong for us; it is already presently the case.

Propagandists are able to control civilization so effectively because they understand that humans are storytelling creatures whose lives are dominated by mental narrative, so if you can control the narratives the humans are telling each other, you can control the humans. A globe-spanning empire centralized around the United States depends heavily on its ability to indoctrinate us with subtle mass media messaging from a very early age.

The Gaza massacre throws a big fat monkey wrench in all that, because the raw data coming out of it is so transparently horrifying that no amount of narrative spin can make it look acceptable. The fact that the US and its allies are helping Israel murder children by the thousands is a giant glitch in the narrative matrix.

The longer this continues, the more people are going to wake up out of the propaganda-induced coma the empire has had them in all their lives. The more people are going to realize that their government is not what it has been pretending to be and the media have not been telling them the truth about the world. As the western empire backs the slaughter of thousands of children, the discrepancies between what the propaganda tells us about our society and what our society actually is are being brightly illuminated.

By murdering thousands of children in Gaza, the empire has exposed its true face in front of everyone. And the people aren’t liking what they see.

Eyes are opening everywhere. People are being radicalized in record numbers. The streets are being flooded with protesters. Very inconvenient questions are being asked. Rigorous scrutiny is being applied in places it was seldom applied before. Light is shining in through cracks that weren’t there before.

This is all so, so horrible and so, so painful to watch day in and day out. But something is moving underneath it all. Something big. The empire has done irreparable harm to its ability to keep everyone sleeping and complacent going forward. A healthy world may be in our future yet.

 

 

 

Why Two Carrier Groups Are A Useless Response To Gaza

Aurelian2022  |  In reality, the relationship between the use of force and the attainment of a defined political objective is a highly complex, inexact and uncertain art, and is much easier to explain theoretically than to do in practice. It implies a whole series of complicated, asserted relationships that don’t necessarily exist tidily in real life. To begin with, of course, you need to have a defined political objective, which is agreed, practicable and measurable. Bombing somebody, or firing off some shells like the French ship, is not an objective in itself, and is often indistinguishable from a display of pique to make yourself feel better. What the military call the “end-state” has to be clearly distinguishable from the current state, not to mention better than it, or there is no point in pursuing it.

You also have to be reasonably sure of how the political end-state will play out, or you could be in a worse situation than you were at the start. This implies a realistic knowledge of the political situation you are trying to affect, and what the political consequences of your military actions might be. So the NATO bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999 was intended to humiliate the government of Slobodan Milosevic by forcing the surrender of Kosovo, and so remove him from power in the elections the following year. It was assumed that the government that replaced his would be grateful to NATO for bombing them, and would adopt a pro-western, pro-NATO stance. What was not anticipated  (well, except by those of us who were paying attention) was that Milosevic would be brought down by nationalist agitation, and replaced by a hard-line nationalist President, Kostunica. And as for the idea that a teetering Gaddafi, perhaps on the point of being overthrown in 2011, could be pushed over the brink by western intervention, leading to a stable, pro-western democratic system … well if there is a stronger word than “catastrophic” to put before “misunderstanding” let’s by all means use it. Oh, and let’s not even get into the political fantasies of western capitals about what would follow the forced resignation of Vladimir Putin.

So this use-of-force-for political-objectives thing looks a bit more complicated than we thought at first sight, doesn’t it? It also means that you might just get your fingers trapped in the wringer. For example, the US has deployed two carrier battle groups to the eastern Mediterranean. Now, this is a traditional action of governments that have no other options really open to them, and not, of itself, necessarily criticable. In the circumstances there is a political obligation to do something, whatever that something might be. And to be fair, carriers are very useful for evacuating foreign nationals, under military protection or otherwise, as the French showed in Beirut in 2006.

The problem is that it’s virtually certain that the carrier groups have been deployed according to this “do something” logic, which is to say that there is almost certainly no accompanying political strategy: as often, the US is making it up as it goes along. (Talking about “deterrence” or “stabilisation” is not a strategy, it’s an attempt at a justification.) The difficulty with all such deployments, though, is that they are much easier to start than stop. To withdraw the force is to send a political message that you think the crisis is over, or at least manageable, which may not be the message you want to send. So you keep the force in position, and eventually you replace it, because you don’t have any choice. The difficulty is that, apart from evacuations, there’s almost nothing for which the career group can be usefully employed. Intelligence gathering maybe, but there are far easier and more discreet ways of doing that. In the meantime, they are large targets, probably limited to flying patrols and not much else. (I’m assuming that the US would not be so insane as to join in the bombardment of Gaza itself.)

In turn, this reflects the effective impotence of the US in the present conflict. Its historical attempt to combine the positions of independent facilitator with doglike devotion to one side was always dubious, but was tolerated insofar as the country was actually able to have some influence. That’s clearly no longer true. Nobody in the Arab world is going to be influenced by the US now, and it has also ruled itself out of any influence over Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas. Biden’s initial maximalist rhetoric has effectively given away most of the influence the US might have been able to assert over Israel as well. Which doesn’t leave a lot, and doesn’t leave a lot for US military power to actually do, either.

In any event, even if a decision were made to use military power, in a political vacuum, and just to look threatening, what could the US actually do? For the moment, nothing. Now if a major ground invasion were to start in Gaza, and if Hezbollah were to react militarily along the northern frontier, then theoretically the US could target them, but with massive attendant risks to the Lebanese population, and considerable risk of casualties to itself, in other places where there are US troops. Put simply, an attack agains Hezbollah which is large enough to make a difference could cause massive collateral damage to Lebanon, whereas anything smaller will not make a difference anyway. The US has invested massively in the stability of Lebanon in recent years, and is not to going to put that investment in jeopardy now.

There is certainly every chance that Iran would consider a large-scale attack on Hezbollah to be an unfriendly action, and then retaliate. The problem for the Americans is that the Iranians can inflict far more damage on them and their interests than they can inflict on the Iranians. This is nothing to do with the sophistication, or even numbers, of weapons: it’s a lot more mundane than that. Get out a map, and have a look at the region, and ask yourself, where could US carrier groups safely go? Which countries could be expected to provide airfields, ports and harbours and logistic depots? In the present political situation, the answer is probably “none.” No doubt an air- and sea-launched missile attack on Iran could do some damage, but what would be the point? What possible proportional political objective could be served thereby? No conceivable amount of damage caused to Iran could compel the government, for example, to cut off support for Hezbollah, or for the current government in Syria. By contrast, severe damage to a single carrier, even if it were not sunk, would  be enough to drive the US  out of the region.

I think we can draw some general lessons from these examples, which in turn may help us understand how the current Gaza crisis may eventually resolve itself. We can start by recalling that the theory of using military power to achieve political end-states is important, but primarily as a limitation. That’s to say that, whilst military action without a political objective is pointless, the mere fact of starting military action towards a declared political end-state doesn’t mean that you will automatically get there. You still have to do the hard work of turning the one into the other, and it’s that that I want to talk about now.

Consider a political end-state of some kind. It doesn’t have to be heaven on earth or for that matter the surrender of your enemy. It can be something simpler, such as an enforceable decision by your neighbour to stop supporting separatist groups in your country. So let’s assume you define that political end-state, which we’ll call P(E). Now the first thing to say is that this political end-state must actually be politically (not just militarily) possible. It must be within the capacity of the other government to agree to, or failing that the balance of political forces at the end of the conflict must at least make it possible. It is pointless and dangerous to attempt to force a country or a political actor do do something that is beyond their power to do; not that this hasn’t been attempted often enough.

What Is At The Heart Of The US-Israel Special Relationship?

Benjamin Netanyahu in the 1980's: 'We have the US Senate, the Congress and a record strong Jewish lobby on our side. We have a huge influence over them, America won't force us into anything' pic.twitter.com/zQXUEEyae0

— DD Geopolitics (@DD_Geopolitics) October 25, 2023

strategic-culture  |  The Biden administration is becoming increasingly edgy about the crisis in Gaza and what the objectives are for the Netanyahu war camp. Most of all, its worried that it is being carefully coaxed into a war between Israel and Iran which even the hapless U.S. president knows is not somewhere he wants to go, regardless of how far he is away from his re-election campaign. Netanyahu, for his part, is not even sure himself if he actually wants to launch a ground offensive and a number of top analysts are even predicting that he even won’t go ahead with it, given what’s at stake and the history of such initiatives in the past. Politically, he is not at all in a good place right now and the attack on October 7^th in many ways, while buying him time in office and allowing him freedom from corruption investigations, is a double-edged sword which will dismember him when Israelis’ patience runs out. Most blame him for the attacks and kidnappings in the first place so he has a limited amount of political bandwidth to work with.

His strategy seems to be more about playing it cool and letting time take its toll. Even though he doesn’t have too much time himself, Biden has much less. The stranglehold that Netanyahu has on Biden tightens each day, when it is clear that Biden doesn’t have the patent ability to invoke a ceasefire and do what most U.S. presidents should do: behave like a superpower. This, apparently will have to be left to the two real superpowers who tend to do more and talk less: China and Russia. For the moment both Biden and Netanyahu are both waiting for a miracle to happen which allows for a ceasefire to happen without Netanyahu losing face. Biden could simply insist that Netanyahu stops the campaign and then at least Bibi could say to the world “this is what the U.S. has asked us to do”. But even in this setup, there would be a price to pay for Biden and his administration elsewhere.

As more and more Iranian militias build up on the Syrian-Israel border and the narrative heats up between Hezbollah and Israel, everyone in fact is looking for a stroke of luck to throw the entire gruesome slaughter out of sync. Biden could do this. He could be bold and courageous and show real élan on the world stage. But that’s just not what he does. Despite being an old school neocon and being a huge advocate for NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, these days he has lost his mojo. He simply doesn’t know what he wants with Israel, a country which he always professed to being a great supporter of, but whose present administration is not where Biden wants U.S. foreign policy to be.

Many experts question what actually is at the heart of the U.S.-Israel relationship and the 3bn dollars it hands to Israel each year in military aid? For a long time, it was the special relationship that Israel cherished while it, Israel, acted on behalf of the U.S. in the region and was there just in case Arab countries lost their way in their token allegiance to U.S. hegemony. At the very least it was an outpost.

Have Iran And Russia Set A Trap In Palestine?

thecradle  |    Hamas has called on the millions of Palestinians in the diaspora, as well as the whole Arab world and all lands of Islam, to unite. Slowly but surely, a pattern may be discerned: could the Arab world – and great swathes of Islam – be on the verge of significantly uniting to avenge their own “century of humiliation” – much as the Chinese did after WWII with Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping? Beijing, via its sophisticated diplomacy, is certainly hinting at it to key players, even before the ground-breaking, Russia-China brokered Iran-Saudi rapprochement was struck earlier this year. That by itself won’t thwart the perpetual US neocon obsession to bomb critical infrastructure in Iran. Worth less than zero when it comes to military science, these neocons ignore how Iranian retaliation would – accurately – target each and every US base in Iraq and Syria, with the Persian Gulf an open case.

Peerless Russian military analyst Andrei Martyanov has shown what could happen to those expensive American iron bathtubs in the Eastern Mediterranean in case of an Israeli-threatened attack on Iran. Moreover, there are at least 1,000 US troops in northern Syria stealing the country’s oil – which would also become an instant target. Ali Fadavi, IRGC’s deputy commander-in-chief, cut to the chase: “We have technologies in the military field that no one knows about, and the Americans will know about them when we use them.” Cue to Iranian hypersonic Fattah missiles – cousins to the Khinzal and the DF-27 – traveling at Mach 15, and able to reach any target in Israel in 400 seconds. And add to it sophisticated Russian electronic warfare (EW). As confirmed in Moscow six months ago, when it comes to military interconnection, the Iranians told the Russians at the same table, “whatever you need, just ask.”

The same applies vice-versa, because the mutual enemy is one and the same. The heart of the matter in any Russian-Iran strategy is the Strait of Hormuz, through which transits at least 20 percent of the world’s oil (nearly 17 million barrels a day) plus 18 percent of liquified natural gas (LNG), which amounts to at least 3.5 billion cubic feet a day. Iran is able to block the Strait of Hormuz in a flash. For starters, that would be some sort of poetic justice retribution for Israel aiming to gobble up, illegally, all the multibillion-dollar natural gas discovered offshore Gaza: this is, incidentally, one of the absolutely key reasons for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Yet the real deal will be to bring down the Wall Street-engineered $618 trillion derivative structure, as confirmed for years by analysts at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, as well as independent Persian Gulf energy traders.

So when push comes to shove – and way beyond the defense of Palestine and in a scenario of Total War – not only Russia-Iran but key players of the Arab world about to become members of BRICS 11 – such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE – do have what it takes to bring down the US financial system anytime they choose. As an old school Deep State higher up, now in business in Central Europe, stresses: “The Islamic nations have the economic advantage. They can blow up the international financial system by cutting off the oil. They do not have to fire a single shot. Iran and Saudi Arabia are allying together. The 2008 crisis took 29 trillion dollars to solve but this one, should it happen, could not be solved even with 100 trillion dollars of fiat instruments.” As Persian Gulf traders told me, one possible scenario is OPEC starting to sanction Europe, first from Kuwait and then spreading from one OPEC country to another and to all countries that are treating the Muslim world as enemies and war fodder.

You’re Lying If You Say You Care About America – But You Send $100 Billion To Other Countries

There aren't that many influential voices who are steadfastly denouncing the massive amounts of resources that are constantly being sent by Washington to other countries to fuel their wars, when there are so many pathologies/struggles Americans face.

I'm glad there are some: https://t.co/VS17VzRe4i

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 27, 2023

 

America Is Indispensable To Who?

responsiblestatecraft  |  In his recent address concerning the wars in Gaza and Ukraine and U.S. involvement in both, President Biden quoted the famous line by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, that America is “the indispensable nation.” This is indeed the belief by which the U.S. foreign and security establishment lives and works.

As Biden’s speech reflected, it is one way in which the establishment justifies to American citizens the sacrifices that they are called on to make for the sake of U.S. primacy. It is also how members of the Blob pardon themselves for participation in U.S. crimes and errors. For however ghastly their activities and mistakes may be, they can be excused if they take place as part of America’s “indispensable” mission to lead the world towards “freedom” and “democracy.”

It is therefore necessary to ask: Indispensable for what? Empty claims about the “Rules-Based Order” cannot answer this question. In the Greater Middle East, the answer should be obvious. I suppose that a different hegemon might have made an even bigger mess of the region at even greater cost to itself than the United States has succeeded in doing over the past 30 years, but it would have had to put some really serious effort into the task. Nor is it clear that the absence of a superpower hegemon could have made things any worse.

In this time, not one beneficial U.S. effort at peace in the region has succeeded; few were even seriously attempted. And more than this, the U.S. has not even fulfilled the core positive role of any hegemon, that of providing stability.

Instead, it has all too often acted a force of disorder: by invading Iraq and thereby enabling an explosion of Sunni Islamist extremism that went on to play a dreadful role in Syria as well; by pursuing through 20 years a megalomaniac strategy of externally-driven state-building in Afghanistan, in defiance of every lesson of Afghan history; by destroying the Libyan state, and thereby plunging the country into unending civil war, destabilizing much of northern Africa, and enabling a flood of migrants to Europe; by repeatedly wrecking or abandoning possibilities of a reasonable deal with Iran; and most gravely of all, by refusing to take an even remotely equitable approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict, and failing through the greater part of the past thirty years to make any serious effort to promote a settlement.

Over the past generation, successive U.S. administrations turned a blind eye, not merely while the Likud governments slowly killed the “two-state solution” and stoked Palestinian and Arab rage through its settlement policy, but while Prime Minister Netanyahu deliberately helped build up Hamas as a force against the Palestine Liberation Organization, so as not to have to negotiate seriously with the latter.

This strategy has now proved catastrophic for Israel itself. It was also carried out with no regard whatsoever to the interests of the United States or its European allies in the face of Islamist terrorism.

And what have the American people themselves gained from this? Nothing at all, is the answer; while the losses can be precisely calculated: More than 15,000 soldiers and contractors killed in Afghanistan and Iraq; more than 50,000 wounded, and often disabled for life; more than 30,000 veteran suicides; 2,996 civilian dead on 9/11, an attack claimed by al-Qaida as a reprisal for U.S. Middle East policy; some $8 trillion subsequently expended in the “Global War on Terror.”

Netanyahu Showed Map of 'New Middle East'—Without Palestine—to UN General Assembly

NC  |   Israel is committed to a ground invasion of Gaza. It has also doubled down on its stated aim of destroying Hamas in rejecting UN calls for a ceasefire.

The invasion of Gaza and the intent to destroy Hamas appear to be political aims, since the former will be extremely costly, particularly in soldiers’ lives to a casualty-averse IDF, and the elimination of Hamas is not attainable. The point Alex Christoforu made in his show today, that the US with its much greater resources, has not been able to eliminate Al Qaeda, is confirmed in a Financial Times comment, Israel must know that destroying Hamas is beyond its reach.

Many military experts, including former Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis, Douglas Macgregor, and Scott Ritter, have warned that it will be very difficult for the IDF to engage in this kind of urban clearing operation, particularly given its scale versus the IDF’s limited experience and the largely reservist status of the majority of its forces. Foreign Affairs, the premier US foreign policy publication, just released a grim prognosis in How Will the IDF Handle Urban Combat?Fighting Hamas in Gaza Will Be Difficult and Costly. Key sections:

A potential ground assault into Gaza…would entail horrendously difficult tactical conditions, including room-to-room combat and tunnel warfare that would lead to massive casualties. It would require fighting on the ground, in the air, and at sea—fighting that must be done in a carefully synchronized fashion. Combat will be slow and grinding, and the resulting devastation will almost certainly test international support for Israel’s invasion…

Urban combat is slow, grinding, destructive, environmentally devastating, and horrendously costly in human life—especially for civilians. It involves house-by-house, block-by-block fighting that soaks up troops and firepower in enormous quantities, as every room, street corner, rooftop, sewer, and basement must be secured before the next can be taken. Such combat is particularly dangerous for junior combat leaders, who must constantly expose themselves in order to see, communicate with, and command their soldiers…

…for soldiers and civilians in the midst of urban fighting, the danger, the fatigue, the sense of perpetual threat from every direction, and the horror of close-range hand-to-hand combat all take an immense physical and psychological toll. Battles tend to be confused, fleeting (measured in seconds), and short range, with targets often closer than 50 yards. Troops may be focused on the house or room they are fighting in, but at the same time they may also be targeted from a distance by mortar crews, snipers, and drone operators.

There is a lot more along these lines.

Several points seem noteworthy. First, as is evident even from this short extract, Foreign Affairs acts as if a ground operation is not a given, when there are reports of large numbers of Israeli tanks and troops newly positioned nearby and more expected. Second is that it bangs on about the findings of “NATO researchers” and of creating a “combined-arms effect.” As we saw in Ukraine, forces trained to supposed NATO standards were found by the Ukraine military to perform less well than ones that used what NATO derided as more primitive approaches better suited to battle conditions.

Third, and perhaps most important, this article does not give much consideration about how the extensive Gaza tunnel system vastly complicates this operation. Readers are welcome to correct me, but my strong impression is that not only has there never been a clearing operation in this large a setting, there has also never been one that has had to contend with such an extensive tunnel system.

The IDF may be correct in its belief, or one might say hope, that bunker busters can destroy most if not all of it and also detonate stored munitions. There was alleged evidence of that happening, with Jacob Dreizen posting a video of a presumed bunker buster then producing successive explosions from below ground a meaningful distance from the strike site.

 

Gaza Fitna Eclipse Fallujah And Mariupol F'Sho (REDUX Originally Posted 9/15/20)

Gestapo Surveillance was invented during America's Conquest of the Philippines...,

Counterpunch |  Entitled Future Strategic Issues/Future Warfare [Circa 2025], the PowerPoint presentation anticipates: a) scenarios created by U.S. forces and agencies and b) scenarios to which they might have to respond. The projection is contingent on the use of hi-technology. According to the report there are/will be six Technological Ages of Humankind: “Hunter/killer groups (sic) [million BC-10K BC]; Agriculture [10K BC-1800 AD]; Industrial [1800-1950]; IT [1950-2020]; Bio/Nano [2020-?]; Virtual.”

In the past, “Hunter/gatherer” groups fought over “hunting grounds” against other “tribal bands” and used “handheld/thrown” weapons. In the agricultural era, “professional armies” also used “handheld/thrown” weapons to fight over “farm lands.” In the industrial era, conscripted armies fought over “natural resources,” using “mechanical and chemical” weapons. In our time, “IT/Bio/Bots” (robots) are used to prevent “societal disruption.” The new enemy is “everyone.” “Everyone.”

Similarly, a British Ministry of Defence projection to the year 2050 states: “Warfare could become ever more personalised with individuals and their families being targeted in novel ways.”

“KNOWLEDGE DOMINANCE”

The war on you is the militarization of everyday life with the express goal of controlling society, including your thoughts and actions.

A U.S. Army document on information operations from 2003 specifically cites activists as potential threats to elite interests. “Nonstate actors, ranging from drug cartels to social activists, are taking advantage of the possibilities the information environment offers,” particularly with the commercialization of the internet. “Info dominance” as the Space Command calls it can counter these threats: “these actors use the international news media to attempt to influence global public opinion and shape decision-maker perceptions.” Founded in 1977, the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command featured an Information Dominance Center, itself founded in 1999 by the private, veteran-owned company, IIT.

“Information Operations in support of civil-military interactions is becoming increasingly more important as non-kinetic courses-of-action are required,” wrote two researchers for the military in 1999. They also said that information operations, as defined by the Joint Chiefs of Staff JP 3-13 (1998) publication, “are aimed at influencing the information and information systems of an adversary.” They also confirm that “[s]uch operations require the continuous and close integration of offensive and defensive activities … and may involve public and civil affairs-related actions.” They conclude: “This capability begins the transition from Information Dominance to Knowledge Dominance.”

“ATTUNED TO DISPARITIES”

The lines between law enforcement and militarism are blurred, as are the lines between military technology and civilian technology. Some police forces carry military-grade weapons. The same satellites that enable us to use smartphones enable the armed forces to operate.

In a projection out to the year 2036, the British Ministry of Defence says that “[t]he clear distinction between combatants and non-combatants will be increasingly difficult to discern,” as “the urban poor will be employed in the informal sector and will be highly vulnerable to externally-derived economic shocks and illicit exploitation” (emphasize in original). This comes as Boris Johnson threatens to criminalize Extinction Rebellion and Donald Trump labels Black Lives Matter domestic terrorists.

In 2017, the U.S. Army published The Operational Environment and the Changing Character of Future Warfare. The report reads: “The convergence of more information and more people with fewer state resources will constrain governments’ efforts to address rampant poverty, violence, and pollution, and create a breeding ground for dissatisfaction among increasingly aware, yet still disempowered populations.”

Preznit Biden Says "American Leadership Is What Holds The World Together"

adamtooze  |  American leadership is what holds the world together. 

The President wasn’t just improvising. He has not done a lot of speeches from the Oval Office. A speech-writing team crafted that extraordinary line.

It reflects deeply held views on the part of Washington. Back in February 2021, the newly appointed Secretary of State Antony Blinken gave several speeches and interviews in which he repeated the line:

The world doesn’t organize itself. When we’re not engaged, when we don’t lead, then one of two things happens: either some other country tries to take our place, but probably not in a way that advances our interests and values, or no one does, and then you get chaos.

This idea, that there is a “place” in the world, which is that of “America as the organizer”, and that without America occupying that place and doing its job, the world will fall apart, or some other power will take America’s place as the organizer, is deep-seated in US policy circles. 

As a metaphysical proposition it is silly and self-deluding. It is bizarre to imagine that the world needs America to “hold it together”. America itself is hardly in one piece.

It isn’t true that the world doesn’t organize itself without top down leadership from a power sitting in America’s “place”. Indeed, what would it mean for America’s “place” to be vacant and free for another power to fill, the specter conjured by Blinken? Does America disappear from the map when it elects Donald Trump President? The United States is always present in one form or another, even as an absence in international discussions - as was the case, for instance in the 1920s.

America’s power - potential or realized - is a force that world politics has been built around for just over a century. In the book Deluge I argued that 1916 was the moment that this became indisputably true. The Presidential election of that year was the first followed by the world in the way that the world will follow the 2024 election.

Whoever governs America, dysfunctionally or not, speculating about a post-American world, is a waste of time. And there a few key areas of global affairs in which American institutions today play a crucial organizational role. I have written often in this newsletter about the dollar system and its resilience. The dollar continues to be the basis for global finance. Though it dare not speak its name, the Fed acts as a global central bank.

It is also true that American leadership and military spending does hold structures like NATO together. But that is not “the world”. It is an exclusive military alliance.

For the most part, to make sense of the sort of thing that Biden and Blinken say, you have to realize that they are talking not to the world or about the world, but to Americans about America. Above all, Biden and Blinken’s rhetoric is directed against Trump, who conjured up a scenario in which America was, as Biden and Blinken see it, a chaotic, disruptive and untrustworthy force. This shames their self-understanding as a liberal elite. With a tight election in 2024 those fears will overshadow all America’s interactions with the world, whoever actually sits in the Oval Office.

American democracy, the system that produces the leadership that Biden and Blinken so self-confidently evoke, is clearly broken. Pervasive and well-merited skepticism about America’s system of government, is now a massive reality in world affairs.

 

The "Rules Based World Order" Never Looked Particularly "Rules Based"....,

WaPo  |  On Friday, Jordan’s King Abdullah II described Israel’s actions in Gaza as “a war crime.” He said Israel was carrying out “collective punishment of a besieged and helpless people,” which ought to be seen as “a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law.”

That may not trouble an Israeli leadership bent on retribution, argued Marc Lynch, professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, but it’s a problem for the United States. “It is difficult to reconcile the United States’ promotion of international norms and the laws of war in defense of Ukraine from Russia’s brutal invasion with its cavalier disregard for the same norms in Gaza,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs.

While it seems the Biden administration is working behind the scenes to attempt to restrain Israel’s war cabinet, Gaza’s more than 2 million people are living in a nightmare of airstrikes and explosions and are running out of food, water and places for safe sanctuary. In his speech, Biden stressed the gap between Hamas and the ordinary Palestinians in their midst. “We can’t ignore the humanity of innocent Palestinians who only want to live in peace and have an opportunity,” he said, pointing to the U.S. efforts to bring in humanitarian assistance — deliveries which aid groups say are staggeringly short of what’s required.

But that rhetoric rings hollow when set against the record of U.S. actions. “If the U.S. and other Western governments want to convince the rest of the world they are serious about human rights and the laws of war, principles they rightly apply to Russian atrocities in Ukraine and to Hamas atrocities in Israel, they also have to apply to Israel’s brutal disregard for civilian life in Gaza,” Louis Charbonneau, U.N. director for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement after the U.S. veto.

A senior diplomat from a country in the Group of 20 major economies told me that “it’s this kind of behavior that had the Global South so cautious about what the West was doing” when they were cajoling foreign governments to follow their lead on Ukraine. The current U.S. role in blocking action on Gaza, the official added, speaking this weekend on condition of anonymity because they were not cleared to brief journalists, shows “how much of a double standard the U.S. or West’s strategy relies on.”

In Europe, there’s a growing recognition of this tension, too. “What we said about Ukraine has to apply to Gaza. Otherwise we lose all our credibility,” a senior Group of Seven diplomat told the Financial Times. “The Brazilians, the South Africans, the Indonesians: why should they ever believe what we say about human rights?”

It is also a reminder of the failure of the international community — but chiefly, the United States — to revive the dormant peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. “Today, Western governments are paying for their inability to find, or even to seek, a solution to the Palestinian question,” noted an editorial in French daily Le Monde. “In the current tense climate, their support for Israel — which is perceived as exclusive by the rest of the world — risks jeopardizing their efforts to convince Southern countries that international security is at stake in Ukraine.”

The diplomat speaking to the FT gloomily summed up the latest Gaza war’s impact: “All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost. … Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.”

Joe Biden Is The Perfect Symbol Of America's Culture Of Emboldened Stupidity

MoA  |  Today we live in multilateral world. We see Russia, China and many smaller countries united in their will to preserve their rights and security. The cold-war is gone. The somewhat unilateral decades which had followed it are now over. We are in need a new world order.

In the U.S. that penny has finally started to drop.

It has not yet reached the ground. We do not know on which side it will land.

Two days ago U.S. President Joe Biden spoke at a campaign even. Among lots of the usual blah-blah this paragraph stood out:

We were in a post-war period for 50 years where it worked pretty damn well, but that’s sort of run out of steam. Sort of run out of steam. It needs a new — a new world order in a sense, like that was a world order.

There it is -  one can see the penny, slipping out of his hand and falling down.

The time for the U.S. to preserve some of its influence in the rising new world order is short:

Look, we’re at an inflection point in history — literally an inflection point in history, and that is that decisions we make in the next four or five years are going to determine what the next four or five decades look like. And that’s — that’s a fact.

The Ukrainian news site Strana, which was first to point to Biden's acknowledgement of global change, describes the implications of that thought (machine translation):

It should be noted that the "damn good" post-war 50-year peace that Biden spoke about arose as a result of the most brutal war in the history of mankind. It also appeared due to the agreements of the USSR and the United States, which essentially divided the spheres of influence in Europe.

If we proceed from this historical context, then Biden, it turns out, offers either to win a military victory over the Russian Federation and China, with which the United States is currently at enmity, or to negotiate with them and arrange a "new Yalta" with the division of spheres of influence.

On which side will the penny land? The side of a new global war? Or on the side of new negotiations?

We do not know.

---

Putin had predicted that the pursuit of unilateral power would automatically lead to the end its pursuer. As Biden acknowledges, the U.S., in its delusion, is ripping itself apart.

Prior to the campaign event Biden had given a public speech from the White House.

Adam Tooze reflects on it:

Biden:

American leadership is what holds the world together.

The President wasn’t just improvising. He has not done a lot of speeches from the Oval Office. A speech-writing team crafted that extraordinary line.

It reflects deeply held views on the part of Washington. Back in February 2021, the newly appointed Secretary of State Antony Blinken gave several speeches and interviews in which he repeated the line:

The world doesn’t organize itself. When we’re not engaged, when we don’t lead, then one of two things happens: either some other country tries to take our place, but probably not in a way that advances our interests and values, or no one does, and then you get chaos.

This idea, that there is a “place” in the world, which is that of “America as the organizer”, and that without America occupying that place and doing its job, the world will fall apart, or some other power will take America’s place as the organizer, is deep-seated in US policy circle.

As a metaphysical proposition it is silly and self-deluding. It is bizarre to imagine that the world needs America to “hold it together”. America itself is hardly in one piece.

He describes the negative global consequences of delusional U.S. thinking to then muse about the outcome:

What is the impact of a dysfunctional US political system, where the more reasonable wing of the ruling elite cling to ideas about America’s role that are systematically self-deluding. You could say that hypocrisy is normal. It is the besetting sin of liberalism. But in light of the scale of looming global problems and the shift in the balance of power that has already taken place, let alone that which may still to come, how long can this tension be maintained and what will be the price?

He seems to ask if the now falling penny will ever hit the ground:

The only thing that seems for sure is that we should avoid falling into the trap of what I’ve called fin-fiction or fin-fi, which assumes that because these tension seem unbearable they must therefore resolve in some logical way, for instance in the speculation over the end of dollar hegemony, or what appears be the Biden fantasy of a return to the normality of American leadership.

I am skeptical even of invoking terms like “interregnum”, signifying a temporary hiatus between orders of power.

What gives us confidence that our current situation is temporary and that some new order, like the old, will emerge?

Is that not another version of the kind of thinking that says the world “needs organizing” by a power sitting at the head of the table - in “America’s place”?

That question, to me, seems to miss what multilateralism really means. It does not mean unilateralism with a different country in the lead. It means a somewhat democratic UN system, with an expanded Security Council that includes the large population countries of each continent.

It means to follow international law.

Will the U.S. come back into that system? Or does it need a global war to decide the outcome?