Now that US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Assad’s fate will be decided by the Syrian people and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, told reporters…“You pick and choose your battles.
Wikileaks latest Vault 7 release showcases a CIA hacking tool named “Marble”, which is employed by the agency to hamper forensic investigators from attributing viruses, trojans and hacking attacks back to the CIA. Marble was in use as recently as 2016.
According to a statement released by Wikileaks, “Marble” is part of the CIA’s Core Library of malware, consisting of 676 source code files.
Whenever one doesn’t respect the right of sovereign states to exist, it does more than violate the letter and principles of international law. It opens up the floodgates to further crises. These crises often come back to bite the very countries who initially engaged in illegal interventions into sovereign states.
Former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson once said that a week is a long time in politics. After months of Donald Trump’s foreign policy being something of a mystery, Secretary of State Rex Tilleron’s glob-trotting journey has made things a lot clearer.
The language of American foreign policy has changed significantly under Trump and Tillerson via-a-vis Obama/Clinton and Kerry. Ideology is and a kind of heavy handed but at times, surprisingly cordial pragmatism is in.
Here are the five ways this has manifested itself.
1. No More Lectures
Russiagate is falling apart and US lawmakers are scrambling to find any strand of evidence, however flimsy, that Russia interfered in the US election.
We even have “Little” Marco Rubio going in front of Congress to say he was hacked by Russia just yesterday. I was hacked by Russia 5 minutes ago. I am sure, you the reader, was also hacked by Russia these last few days as well.
If there was a Nobel Prize for hypocrisy, Turkey Foreign Minister Mevut Cavusoglu just won it. Speaking along side American Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in Ankara, Cavusoglu said,
“It is not good or realistic to work with a terrorist group while fighting another terrorist group”.
Vladimir Putin has directly answered the big question. Appearing at a panel hosted by CNBC, Putin referenced the infamous George H.W. Bush line when he asked his audience to read his lips when promising no new taxes.
Putin’s assurance that Russia did not meddle in the US election will almost certainly not change the tune of those who think otherwise.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan frequently threatens to ‘unleash’ waves of migrants onto Europe. The latest threat came as Turkish representatives said to European leaders, that ‘we will blow your mind’, in respect of the vast quantities of migrants. In spite of the odd nature of Erdogan’s ministers using the slogans of the psychedelic rock era, the threat has worried many in Europe.
Even if the US Congress moves on from Russiagate, the mainstream media have invested so much time and human resources into a perennially anti-Russian spin on news stories, it remains unlikely that they’ll give up on their investment any time soon.
Senator Joseph McCarthy was in office between 1947 and his death ten years later. During much of that time, his primary function was to accuse various people in the media, military, government and entertainment industries of being subversive pro-Soviet Communists.
Speaking in Geneva, Gennady Gatilov, Sergei Lavrov’s deputy at the Russian Foreign Ministry, gave a brief statement to the press, clarifying Russia’s much misunderstood position regarding a Syrian peace settlement.
Gatilov is a gentle, soft spoken man. At times he is too gentle, as many in Russia tend to be when faced with the onslaught of both western imperial aggression as well as the terrorist aggression of foreign fighters, currently plaguing the territory of their Syrian ally.
