4 December, 2024

Blog

War On China? – V: A “Carnival” Of Quads

By Sachithanandam Sathananthan

Dr. Sachithanandam Sathananthan

US Absolutism

The US administration sought an exemption for its armed forces personnel engaged in foreign military operations and compelled the UN Security Council to grant “immunity from prosecution by the ICC (International Criminal Court) to United Nations peacekeeping personnel from countries that were not party to the ICC”, through the June 2002 UNSC Resolution 1422, valid for 12 months. “The resolution was passed at the insistence of the United States, which threatened to veto the renewal of all United Nations peacekeeping missions…unless its citizens were shielded from prosecution by the ICC.” The UNSC extended it for one year in 2003 but refused a further extension in 2004 citing abuse of inmates in the Abu Ghraib prison (Iraq); the US dropped its demand.

Readers may recollect Washington flouted the 1986 ICJ (International Court of Justice) Ruling, that the US exercised “unlawful use of force” in its naval blockade of Nicaragua and support for Contras, alleging the ICJ had no jurisdiction though the “Court concluded that the United States, despite its objections, was subject to the Court’s jurisdiction”. Washington refused to participate in the proceedings and moved its Veto in the UNSC to block Nicaragua enforcing the Ruling. In the following year the US withdrew its consent to ICJ’s compulsory jurisdiction and also escalated the aggression. It’s well known the US administration violates almost every canon of international law in the Guantanamo Bay and by the so-called Extraordinary Rendition (kidnap and torture) in similar black sites in allied countries. This illegality and more was justified by the so-called “War on Terror”, undeclared against an amorphous enemy the US intelligence agencies had nurtured in Afghanistan between the 1970s and 1990s.

The Congress, ever faithful to its hallowed principle of “what’s wrong + what’s legal = what’s right”, routinely passed the 2002 American Servicemembers’ Protection Act (ASPA), which President Bush Jnr. signed into law. Human Rights Watch noted the ASPA’s major anti-ICC provisions:

  • “a prohibition on U.S. cooperation with the ICC;
  • an ‘invasion of the Hague’ provision: authorizing the President to ‘use all means necessary and appropriate’ to free U.S. personnel (and certain allied personnel) detained or imprisoned by the ICC;
  • punishment for States that join the ICC treaty: refusing military aid to States’ Parties to the treaty (except major U.S. allies).”

The US administration enticed numerous sovereign governments to approve bilateral “immunity agreements” that dictate US nationals shall not be handed over to the ICC. The result, noted HRW (Human Rights Watch), is “a two-tiered rule of law for the most serious international crimes: one that applies to U.S. nationals; another that applies to the rest of the world’s citizens” and it urged governments not to sign the “impunity agreements”.

Attempts have been made to extract a similar legal immunity from Sri Lanka Government under the 2019 SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement), under which “the US armed forces and its civilian components, while in Sri Lanka, will not be subject to Sri Lankan criminal or civil laws.” Public outcry compelled President Maithripala Sirisena to suspend the proposed agreement; its current status seems murky.

The US is manoeuvring to codify the peace-meal immunity agreements and extend them on a global scale under its version of a RBIO (Rules-Based International Order) in which, the Neoconservatives-controlled Washington apparently believes, the Congress and/or Executive would draft laws for NATO to impose across the world. The existing UN-centred International Law Regime is a clear obstacle to establishing this near US Absolutism. The eastward expansion of NATO towards the Russian border, co-called “colour revolutions” in several former Soviet republics, the 2014 regime change and on-going proxy war in Ukraine and many other egregious violations of International Law in the post-Soviet space have the potential to render the existing International Laws largely irrelevant. Washington is perhaps gambling most nations, compelled to desperately seek remedy under any legal regime, would not resist the US’ version of a RBIO.

The unprovoked aggression against China is a further nail, so the US-led NATO seems to believe, in the UN International Law Regime’s coffin. Time will tell.

Containing China

The British Royal Navy eliminated alleged “pirates” – who for the most part were competing Chinese maritime traders – in China’s Gulf of Leotung in 1855 to open the seas to “free passage“ and “lawful trade” for, yes, the English and later British East India Company. Quite accidentally, of course, the Britain’s navy found itself dominating the maritime trade routes and again accidentally ended up occupying littoral territories – Gibraltar, Cairo, Eden, Ceylon, Madras, Singapore, Malacca, etc. – a British “String of Pearls” that led many, as during the recent Falklands War, to condemn the British Navy as the most ruthless among pirates!

During his October 2019 address to the Heritage Foundation (his speech on the State Department website has since been taken down), then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo evidently took a leaf out of British Imperialism: he peremptorily issued an ultimatum to Beijing. The “security talks” between US, India, Australia and Japan within the East Asian Quad (EAQ), he reportedly explained, “will prove very important in…ensuring that China retains only its proper place in the world” – a “proper place” to be determined of course by Washington and its key NATO allies.

President Vladimir Putin deplored precisely “this insolent manner of talking down from the height of their exceptionalism, infallibility and all permissiveness” among US officials in his February 2022 address to the Russian Federation, in, on the eve of launching Special Military Operations in Ukraine. He continued: “we saw a state of euphoria created by the feeling of absolute superiority, a kind of modern absolutism, coupled with the low cultural standards and arrogance” that peddled an “empire of lies” – that, we may add, includes the Domino Theory, Clash of Civilisations, Thucydides “Trap” and the End of Peace Narratives.

Pompeo’s October Ultimatum cut through the academic waffle to state US’s realpolitik steeped in dangerous undertones of Thucydides’ primitive hubris: “…right, as the world goes,” Thucydides had cautioned Sparta more than two millennia ago, “is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Today’s International Law Regime has been crafted precisely to prevent such arbitrary and destabilising exercise of State power and the US administration seeks to undermine it for that very reason.

Regional alliances against China

Washington swiftly escalated the EAQ, in the newly minted Indo-Pacific Region, from a “Security Dialogue” to a security doctrine – the “Asian NATO” – to “contain” rising China. The US minted the “Indo-Pacific Region” as the EAQ’s theatre of operations, instead of the traditional Asia-Pacific, in order to isolate China. New Delhi acquiesced in return for Washington’s backing in the confrontation with Beijing on its northern border in the Himalayan region.

The Quad faltered, rather inauspiciously, when it began in 2007 and was re-booted in 2017. It is buttressed by the trilateral military alliance, AUKUS, cobbled together in 2021 to counter China and, again, steered by the US with UK and Australia in tow.

Both alliances supplement the third, earlier one: The Five Eyes (FVEY), which was put together at the height of WW2 in 1941 and consolidated during the US-USSR Cold War. FVEY is the combined espionage network of UK and its Anglo-Saxon settler-colonies US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The FVEY extracted intelligence to prosecute wars (Vietnam, Falklands, Gulf), overthrow governments (Mosaddegh’s in Iran, Allende’s in Chile), assassinate nationalist foreign leaders (Patrice Lumumba, Muammar al-Qaddafi) and more. Washington and London are swinging FVEY around to confront China.

New Zealand is the sole dissident within FVEY, less due to moral niceties and more because the country earns about 30% of its export revenue from trade with China. When the Foreign Minister “felt uncomfortable” and demurred, the CIA-front Voice of America stridently bullied Wellington for “selling out to Beijing”.

The Australian strategic planners are similarly walking a political tight rope between the US and China, as their Prime Minister awkwardly put it: “[w]e are a staunch and active ally of the United States…We share a comprehensive strategic partnership and free trade agreement with the People’s Republic of China”. Clearly Morrison, like Philippines President Duterte, worried about the economic fallout since China is an important trading partner.

The national character of Britain’s white rulers and of white-settlers who control the State in the other four FVEY member-countries has been forged in the crucible of colonial exploitation through slavery, land grab, resource theft and genocide of original peoples, whose remnants are now patronisingly labelled “First Nations”, etc. The resulting amoral ideology of Herbert Spencer‘s “Social Darwinism”, refined by Francis Galton into Eugenics, were invented in Britain to explain and justify why its white elite topped the Empire’s food chain and why it ought remain there. Social Darwinism found a much larger and an enthusiastically receptive audience in the US and its influence underpins US’ proxy war in Ukraine against “inferior” Russia’s Slavs and extends to Asiatics/Mongoloids in China in the confrontation in the South China Sea.

In contrast, China and India, despite their admitted shortcomings, have developed and emerged as major powers on their own steam, without looting the labour, land and resources of other nations. The FVEY member-States fear the more replicable development models of China and India may be attractive not only to neo-colonial client States but, more dangerously, entice their own peoples. They are further reasons for the relentless drumbeat about the negatives of Chinese and Indian experiences and for lunging to crush China’s economy and, inevitably, India’s too.

Apparently the three regional groupings above are insufficient to contain China; so two other Quads are on the anvil. In 2021 the US drew Afghanistan (before completing the US/NATO retreat), Pakistan and Uzbekistan into the Central Asian Quad (CAQ). The Biden administration claimed the CAQ, “[r]ecognizing the historic opportunity to open flourishing interregional trade routes, intend to cooperate to expand trade, build transit links, and strengthen business-to-business ties.”

In the same year, India joined the US-inspired embryonic “IndiaArMid Quad” (IAMQ) that includes the United Arab Emirates and Israel. It is expected to be an India-West Asia-Europe trade route “to drive China’s BRI [Belt and Road Initiative] into the ground”.

Given the context of the US military build up in the South China Sea, it’s evident the CAQ and IAMQ aim to keep Afghanistan (and some Central Asian countries) out of China’s sphere of influence by blocking the extension of its BRI into West Asia. The publicly stated rationales are the supposed “enhancing regional connectivity” and promoting “peace” in Afghanistan .

The CAQ surfaced, significantly, in July 2021 barely a month before the US completed the retreat of US/NATO forces from Afghanistan. In Washington’s calculus, the war-shattered and dirt-poor country would desperately need money to rebuild social infrastructure and construct particularly its flagship project, the TAPI (Tajikistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) gas pipeline. If the Afghans cannot be decimated by the Gun, they can surely be defeated by the Dollar.

Immediately after the Taliban took power in August the US administration sequestered Afghan Central Bank reserves, between $ 7 billion to $ 10 billion, held in the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. Perhaps Washington expected the cash-starved Afghans could be brought to their knees. Within 10 days of Taliban leaders occupying the Presidential Palace, CIA Director Williams Burns visited Kabul on the 25th of August to “consult” with Taliban’s leader Abdul Ghani Baradar.

However, the regional power balance had shifted while the US intelligence agencies were engrossed over the two-decade long Afghan invasion and its debacle. On the heels of US’ retreat, on 22 September Chinese and Russian diplomats re-established relations with Taliban leaders and agreed “to maintain constructive contacts in the interests of Afghanistan’s peace and prosperity, and regional stability and development” and, perhaps, fund the TAPI pipeline.

Brzezinski’s nightmare

Washington made apparently little progress on the CAQ and IAMQ, probably due to its involvement in the Ukraine proxy war. The US-led NATO has armed and trained Ukraine’s army after the 2014 right-wing coup in Kiev and US personnel largely orchestrate the army’s ground operations against Russian forces. The palpable strategy is to emasculate the militarily powerful Russia, consolidate US control over that country and then tackle the economically more challenging competitor, China.

President Trump’s Secretary of Defence General Jim Mattis in his 2018 National Defence Strategy, cautioned “the present time [is] one of global disorder” and repeated the Neoconservative rhetoric of “the decline of the rules-based international order established at the end of the World War II.” Gen. Mattis’ contribution to “global disorder” is not insignificant. During his stint in the US-led NATO’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Marine Forces General’s own troops nicknamed him Gen. Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis.

He carefully distanced himself from the UN’s International Law Regime and pushed the alternative “rules-based” US-led Imperial Order in which Washington writes the rules, enforced by NATO. Observing the US hitherto fought regional wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc., Gen. Mattis converged to Brzezinski’s Neoconservative Project: Mattis insisted on readying the US to fight Big Power wars, if necessary simultaneously, against Russia and China – the two Eurasian Big Powers Brzezinski had stressed must be subdued – to shore up US-centred unipolarity.

The rhetoric of Big Power war implied the US-led NATO forces are ready to take on Russia and China, if necessary simultaneously. The reality so far, however, is that Washington did not confront Moscow head on. Instead the US has used Ukrainians as cannon fodder, hoping to weaken the Russian military. Does NATO intend to then put boots on the ground to mop up the remnants? Or has the Vietnam Syndrome entrenched itself more deeply in the US psyche after Iraq and Afghan debacles and foreclosed anther foreign ground war? Or is Washington aiming to launch an air war to crush Russia, in which case what purpose does the proxy war serve?

The absurd assertion that China is a military threat to the US has hardly any merit. However ratcheting up war fever serves the political function of justifying military spending to pull the US and western industrial economies out of the Monopoly Capital-induced Stagflation, which registers in the neo-classical economists’ mind as its empirical symptom of unemployment and inflation rising in tandem. So, the financial outlays for the M-I Complex are well underway. The Quad, AUKUS and FVEY alliances are aggressively postured against the PRC. While Beijing so far has only one foreign military base in Djibouti far from the US border, China is ringed, reported John Pilger, by approximately 400 (four hundred) US and allied military bases in countries Noam Chomsky characterised as “sentinel States”.

Would the people in the Quad countries, like the Ukrainians, become cannon fodder in the US’ pursuit of its strategic interests in the near future?

China-Russia Pact

Unsurprisingly hostility from the US-led NATO has pushed Beijing and Moscow closer, a nightmarish situation (for Washington) that worried Brzezinski in his 1997 Chessboard: “the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an ‘antihegemonic’ coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances…China would likely be the leader…Averting this contingency…will require a display of U.S. geostrategic skill on the western, eastern, and southern perimeters of Eurasia simultaneously” (p.44), in order no doubt to extend the North American Manifest Destiny of US’ White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASP) over Eurasia.

Clearly that “skill” is in woeful short supply. The proxy war in Ukraine, cornering China using a surfeit of Quads and Washington transferring to AUKUS partner Canberra US technology to build, for the first time, nuclear-powered submarines – in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) – are two US administration’s manoeuvres that, rather than deflate, has in fact strengthened the China-Russia partnership.

The US Hawks’ fears have come to pass in the wide-ranging February 2022 bilateral Pact between China and Russia. It dealt with numerous issues; among them are:

On World Order

* protecting the UN-driven “world order based on international law, including the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations”, and “advance multipolarity” and pursue “true multilateralism”,

* seeking “genuine multipolarity” with UN/ UNSC playing a central role,

* to “resist attempts to substitute universally recognized formats and mechanisms that are consistent with international law for rules elaborated in private by certain nations or blocs of nations” [RBIO],

* democracy is “a universal human value”, that “there is no one-size-fits-all template” and the importance of opposing “[c]ertain States’ attempts to impose their own ‘democratic standards’ on other countries [and] monopolize the right to assess…compliance”,

* the “full and effective implementation of the Paris Agreement” on Climate Change.

On security

* collective security within the UN framework: “[n]o State can or should ensure its own security separately from the security of the rest of the world and at the expense of the security of other States.”

* oppose further “enlargement of NATO” and “its ideologized cold war approaches”,

* the threat to peace and stability of the US’ “Indo-Pacific strategy” and “U.S. withdrawal from the Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles”,

* the peaceful uses of outer space” under the “central role of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space”, and prevent “the weaponization of space”,

* prohibit “the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons”,

* the US is “the sole State Party to the Convention that has not yet completed the process of eliminating chemical weapons”,

* the “Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)” to further shape “a polycentric world order” based on “the universally recognized principles of international law”, and

* to “develop cooperation within the ”Russia-India-China“ format”.

To achieve the above and more goals in the Pact, “[f]riendship between the two States has no limits, there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation”. Most western media outlets have quoted this last sentence out of context and in isolation to insinuate the China-Russia Pact is an anti-West conspiracy.

Both Beijing and Moscow are of course pursuing their own geo-strategic interests; it would be ludicrous to assert otherwise. However, whilst Washington wishes to entrench unipolarity both Eurasian powers are at this writing struggling against the US-led NATO to defend the fledgling multipolarity that is conducive to their ambitions and advantageous for most UN member-countries. The rejection of US sanctions against Russia by the majority of nations, among them key ones – India, China, Brazil, South Africa – in the Global South underlines this perception.

Though cooperation with the stronger Russia may be a shot in the arm for China, China in fact expects to take about 25 (twenty five) years from now, up to 2049, to reach military parity with the US. Till then the balance of armed power is overwhelmingly advantageous to the US. Anglo-American military planners, consequently, are asserting a “limited war” could be fought in, and contained largely to, the Chinese mainland. The objectives are to assuage the US and West European publics that hostilities will not spill over to their home territories and to inveigle the US middle and working classes to condone Biden’s whopping $813 billion arms budget to pay for weapons and military contractors, envisaged by Mattis’ 2018 National Defence Strategy. To make the unprecedented allocation to the M-I Complex palatable, the arms expenditures are sugar-coated with proposals inter alia for a minimum income tax on the super rich and an increase in corporate tax; how the tax collection would play out in practice remains to be seen.

Peoples’ Forums in the US have firmly questioned the so-called “defence spending”. For instance, President of the US advocacy group Public Citizen Robert Weissman reasoned it “is ill-advised and enormously wasteful. The greatest threats to Americans in the 21st century are not external adversaries, but rather skyrocketing wealth inequality, impending climate chaos, public health crises, and corporate greed;” he emphasised, “that sky-high Pentagon spending will somehow keep Americans safe [instead] works to prop up the military-industrial complex while siphoning resources away from real solutions to these problems and true, urgent human needs”; and he appealed: “Congress must resist the growing pressures to increase militarized spending at all costs, and instead put that funding to work for everyday people.”

President Biden has requested Congress to approve an additional $ 33 billion, supposedly $ 20 billion of which is to finance the proxy war in Ukraine.

Whether or not war preparations against China could be reined in depends on the well-known commitment to peace by the vast majority of the common people in the US and EU, on their political capacity to rein in Military-Industrial Complexes and, hopefully, to bring the Permanent War Economy to a close.

Meanwhile, the Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng cautioned the US political class citing the Chinese proverb: “One who tries to blow out other’s oil lamp will get his beard on fire.”

Previous posts

War on China? – I

War on China? – II

War on China? – III

War on China? – IV

(Next: Akhand Bharat)

*Dr Sachithanandam Sathananthan is an independent researcher who received his Ph.D degree from the University of Cambridge. He was Visiting Research Scholar at the Jawaharlal Nehru University School of International Studies and taught World History at Karachi University’s Institute of Business Administration. He is an award-winning filmmaker and may be reached at: commentaries.ss@gmail.com

Latest comments

  • 5
    5

    SS, I really didn’t care to read your China Chronicles because right now there is so much to worry about Lanka than China. Recently Taiwan accused China of debt traps and leading Lanka into bankruptcy. Is that true ?? You being China expert, may know the answers.

    • 7
      5

      Does anyone care if you care?
      If you really do not care why do you bother to make rude ill-informed remarks?

      • 3
        3

        Why, is it too heavy for SS to carry alone??

        • 2
          0

          I was only responding to your claim and its uncalled for rudeness.
          As usual, U R olvays rite!

        • 2
          0

          On the contrary, anything intelligent is too heavy for some small minds, which have only cheap jibes for tools.

  • 6
    0

    Surely everyone commenting here is internet savvy. SL’s External Resources Department will give you these stats: Market borrowings [from all sources] 47%; Asian Development Bank 13%; Japan 10%; China 10%; World Bank 9%; India [with recent loans] around 10%. You can take your pick as to who is leading us into a debt trap. Please get facts straight before your fingers hit the keyboard. The stats above are as at end April 2021, the nearest.

    • 3
      5

      Sarath , Taiwan government alleging is not same as internet. I already explained few times about Chinese debt trap which is not about the amount loaned, but the hidden intentions / motives , strings attached and conditions favouring only the donor. How naive to go by the amount and allege who helped us most. In that case Japan historically is our largest donor, and will you accuse them for doing so.???

    • 5
      4

      Sarath
      Thanks.
      The market borrowings are predominantly from the US and Europe, and since early this century the IMF has encouraged such borrowings.
      Also the transfer of most of the H’tota harbour buisiness to a Chinese firm was not at China’s bidding.
      The Chinese loan for the harbour project had not matured at the time of transfer. It was the Yahapalana government’s decision based on dubious advice to draw on the H’tota Harbour to pay off its dues, mostly to non-Chinese lenders. The idea perhaps was that the H’tota Harbour was a ‘White Elephant’. Mahinda R, in fairness, advised against it. But since the transfer, the Harbour is spinning money, sadly far more for the Chinese company with 85% shares than for us.
      What is most unfair is that since claims of China’s debt traps in Africa (Kenya and Uganda especially) were proven false, Hambantota has become the model for the anti-China lobby. The Chinese Embassy made a statement of clarification only very recently, while several serious studies have exploded the Loan trap myth several years ago..
      Chinese development projects are not entirely trouble free, but they have no conspiratorial dimension.
      The US invests in military installations in Africa, while China assists with infrastructure development. there lies the difference

  • 2
    4

    Another well presented article by Dr. Sachithanandam Sathananthan.
    The geopolitical wars have killed more than 12 million people in Congo. It is the same story in the Middle East, Asia and other African countries.
    The US led NATO military block’s eastward expansion ended up with Ukraine losing 30% of its territory to Russia within just 4.5 months.
    President Zelenskyy vowed to fight until every Ukrainian is dead and the Collective West happily supplied weapons to Ukraine to achieve their goal. The military in general is not mentally prepared to fight till the end. In most cases, they surrender and end up as POW. I understand the Azov Nazis have killed foreign war instructors hiding in the Azovstal steel plant to avoid them being POW. Even the one million mighty Japanese Kwantung army who vowed to fight to the last man surrendered to Soviet forces in Manchuria in 1945.
    The cities under Ukraine are falling faster than before starting from Mariupol to Luhansk. On 3 July, the Russian Defence Ministry announced that they had liberated 182 square kilometres within 24 hours! 182 sq.km is equal to 44,973.179 acres, which is huge.
    Contd’

  • 2
    5

    Russia will take over the entire Eastern and Southern Ukraine to “liberate” its people who were economically deprived since 2014. In any case, even before its special military operation, Russia was engaged in a ‘humanitarian war’ against Ukraine over a fresh water crisis in Crimea.
    Whether Ukraine agrees to cede its territories or not, none of the territories “liberated” by Russia will never return to Ukraine. The best example is Kherson. After Russia took over Crimea in 2014, the Kiev administration erected a concrete dam in the North Crimean Canal in the Kherson region to cut off fresh water to its own citizens in Crimea. Within 2 days of its special military operation, Russian troops destroyed the dam built by Ukraine, restoring fresh water supply to Crimeans. Will Russia ever give up Kherson? I don’t think so. And, most importantly, will Crimeans and Khersians ever want to be under Ukraine?
    Amid all these, Mr. Putin says Russia hasn’t even started (it’s war) in Ukraine! He is the President of the country that invented “Tsar Bomba” and “Satan II”. He has at least 50 “mass earthquakes” in hand. This is no joke. How long will he tolerate sanctions?

  • 5
    4

    SS,

    It was France-not an Anglo-Saxon nation- that took the lead in dethroning Gaddafi, who was a tyrant in the garb of a nationalist.

    And if the Western nations are still committed to Anglo-Saxon superiority, why would they open their borders to so many third-world immigrants, even at the risk of drawing backlash from their own far right, which is white nationalist in character and idolizes Putin as a kindred spirit?

    In the UK, many leading politicians are from the Indian subcontinent. In the US. whites are already less than 50% in California and in many metro regions, and immigrants dominate STEM fields, with many becoming billionaires. Why would they allow it if they were committed to Anglo-Saxon superiority? The Bernie Sanders wing of the progressive movement is often led by Pramila Jayapal, a Tamil lady born in Madras and married to an African American musician, and Ro Khanna, who is widely considered as the successor to Bernie Sanders and future progressive Presidential candidate

    • 8
      2

      I said something more that appears to have exceeded the word limit.

      Brzezinski and other intellectuals from Eastern European countries and Russia had experienced the horrors of communism firsthand and immigrated to America with a visceral hatred of communism and of Russian imperialism. They fortified the natural antipathy to communism that open democratic societies have, and made defeating the spread of communist ideology central to how foreign policy was conducted. SS shows no recognition of this fact and instead comes up with sweeping, stupid claims.

      • 4
        3

        A,
        I admire your unfettered loyalty to US imperialism. It seems a religion with you.
        *
        I think that you will do well to listen to saner voices outside your basket of right wing propagandists and warmongers.

        • 3
          2

          Agnos, any facts are too heavy for some stupid warped minds, which have only stereotyped comments for tools. I admire their loyalty to Chinese Pseudo Communism. It sure seems a culture / way of distorted thinking with them. How will such insane person know, the saner voices outside of his delusional head ???

          • 2
            3

            Dr olvays rite rides again

            • 0
              0

              Thanks Professor Dim Wit.

    • 3
      3

      India had two Dalits, a Muslim and a woman as presidents and now an Aadhivaasi female.
      That does not alter the character of the Brahmin-Bania dominated state and society which are casteist, anti-Muslim and male chauvinist, and aggressively encroaches on Aadhivaasi rights.
      Bangladesh, and Pakistan had women for prime ministers, but the place of the woman in society has hardly changed.
      You can have a Black president again and a Latino vice president and pack the judiciary with minorities. That will not alter the dominant ideology.

      • 2
        0

        SJ,

        The issue is that SS brought up the Anglo-Saxon vs Slavic issue. I have shown that is nonsense (since Brzezinski himself was Slavic).

  • 3
    3

    A sad residue of colonialism are the crippled native minds who continue to praise their former masters. Such minds seemingly are everlasting. There was praise when the scheming and iniquitous masters engineered “revolutions” that took over resource-rich lands and “willingly” gave up their rights to western corporations. There was applause when brutal dictators worldwide were installed or backed if they helped the Western project. So yes, you will be welcomed in their lands if you become part of their exploitative apparatus, or provide a pair of servile hands.
    One wonders what Julian Assange thinks of “freedom of speech” that’s promised by US democracy.

    • 2
      3

      Well said Sarath, but crippled minds are hard to heal as you can see..

  • 0
    2

    After Ukraine received HIMARS from the US, the civilian death toll started rising rapidly. I am sure State Secretary Blinken has a good explanation.

Leave A Comment

Comments should not exceed 200 words. Embedding external links and writing in capital letters are discouraged. Commenting is automatically disabled after 5 days and approval may take up to 24 hours. Please read our Comments Policy for further details. Your email address will not be published.