On December 3rd, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced that NATO must address the “security implications” of China’s rise as a “military power”, and in true Orwellian doublespeak, insisted that he did not want to make an adversary out of Beijing but rather was interested in analysing how best to respond to the challenges China poses in a balanced way…by announcing it a ‘security threat’.
Ratcheting economic sanctions, military force encirclement, inciting seditious violence and relentless war rhetoric. This all by the US and its allies over the past year towards Iran, yet it is Iran which is portrayed as posing “potential threats” to American interests.
The hastily arranged meeting last week between Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had the hallmarks of a war-plan summit amid a peak in renewed media provocation against Iran.
The media loves to make any sort of peace process look like a personal matter between two sides with hurt feelings, when nothing could be further from the truth. These deals are not a matter of emotions or being nice but achieving political objectives. Very often conflicts remain stagnant because there is no possible point of compromise between both forces– there is simply two diametrically opposed objectives to be satisfied by some sort of deal..
In the United Kingdom on December 3-4 a gathering of the US-NATO military alliance took place to mark the 70th anniversary of its creation. It might be expected that such an occasion would have been one of jovial self-congratulation for managing to keep such a moribund institution on its expensive feet for so long, but the mood was decidedly downbeat, and divisions between some national leaders were most marked. Indeed the entire affair declined into farce rather than being dignified and productive.
“Old Age,” the great French President Charles De Gaulle famously said, “is a shipwreck.” We should certainly feel that way about the 70th birthday celebrations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – the most venerable security alliance and organization in the world.
The London Summit made it clear to the whole world: NATO at 70 has become a global joke.
If the NATO summit this week marking the 70th anniversary of its foundation in 1949 was meant to be a resounding celebration, it backfired spectacularly, more as a resounding farce. Amid all the pomp and ceremony afforded by an official reception at Buckingham Palace, hosted by the British Queen, the two-day gathering descended into squabbling, sneering and back-stabbing.
For an organization that declares its mission to be about “maintaining peace and security”, the infighting between NATO leaders showed an organization virtually at war with itself.
While Congress subjects the nation to its impeachment-flavored brand of bread-and-circus politics, our civil liberties continue to die a slow, painful death by a thousand cuts.
Future historians, if they exist, will look back in amazement at the leaders of three nations in particular. The leaders – Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, and US President Donald Trump – not only ignore, but criticized and question solid scientific data that the planet is in extreme environmental danger of a global catastrophe.
On May 13 2014, the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) Chief Prosecutor announced it would reopen the investigations into alleged war crimes committed by British soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, following additional submitted information pertaining to the investigation which had been concluded in 2006.
