hegemony

It appears that President Trump is making good on his committment to get the US out of endless foreign wars. In a move sure to be overshadowed (and probably used) by the Compleat Fake Impeachment Inquiry, the White House announced late Sunday night that, following a conversation with Turkey’s President Recip Erdogan, Turkey will now move forward with a military operation in northeast Syria, in an area where US troops had been operating in conjunction with Kurdish-led forces.

There once was a world where state actors operated in an anarchic international environment, where maximizing their overall power was their goal, and war was their means of achieving it. That world is now dead.
In its place we have the current spectacle of what were known as the “great powers” who are now, at least, formally if by no means fully, democratic and economically interdependent on one another and informally, if firmly, coordinated by transnational elites.

Rim Banna, a famous Palestinian singer who translated Palestine’s most moving poetry to song passed away on March 24, 2018, at the age of 51. Rim captured the struggle for Palestinian freedom in the most dignified and melodious ways. If we could imagine angels singing, they would sound like Rim.

Russian television broadcast a dire sounding piece on February 5th that probably was rather disquieting to most Russians, and also a source of significant dismay to their hopes for a rapprochement in relations following the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency of the United States. The news agency “Vesti” explained that the US is preparing itself for nuclear war with Russia.

Opinion — One of the most ingenious propaganda weapons ever developed is that the powerful nations of the West—led by the United States—have a moral responsibility to use military force to protect the rights of people being repressed by their governments. This “responsibility to protect” (R2P) always had a dubious legal standing, but its moral justification also required a psychological and historical disengagement from the bloody reality of the 500-hundred-year history of U.S. and European colonialism, slavery, genocide and torture that created the “West.”

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The bigger picture behind Official Washington’s hysteria over Russia, Syria and North Korea is the image of a decaying but dangerous American hegemony resisting the start of new multipolar order, explains Daniel Lazare.

(CN) The showdown with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a seminal event that can only end in one of two ways: a nuclear exchange or a reconfiguration of the international order.

President-elect Donald Trump, center, listens to a member of the military in the stands as he watches an Army-Navy NCAA college football game at M&T Bank Stadium, Saturday, Dec. 10, 2016, in Baltimore. (AP/Andrew Harnik)

Artwork Jenny Starr
Gilad Atzmon
by Dr June Terpstra
“Those who have crossed
with direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
remember us—if at all—not as lost
violent souls, but only

From Balance of Payments to Balance of Power