Donald Trump’s stance towards the Turkish intervention in northern Syria has some (stress some) resemblance to his predecessor Barack Obama’s position on Ukraine. Obama like Trump, saw a reasoned basis for limiting US military involvement in Syria. In the background, is a degree of bipartisan (Republican and Democrat) opposition to this foreign policy approach.
It has recently become more obvious that the European Union cannot trust the United States, in which sentiment it has much in common with other groupings and individual nations around the world. The Trump policy debacle over Turkey and Syria is a significant sign in the expansion of general distrust.
While President Trump keeps trying to support a stock market via noises about negotiations with China progressing well, things are spiraling out of control in Hong Kong.
The protests continue to escalate and show no signs of slowing down. The goal has explicitly become attacking the legitimacy of the Hong Kong government and bringing down an economy vulnerable to a falling property market.
The attack vector here is not directly political, Hong Kong is being attacked by the West via student proxies through its currency peg.
The issue of the United States waging what seems to be a global war by way of sanctions rarely surfaces in the western media. The argument being made by the White House is that sanctions are capable of putting maximum pressure on a rogue regime without the necessity of having to go to war and actually kill people, but the reality is that while economic warfare may seem to be more benign than bombing and shooting the reality is that thousands of people die anyway, whether through starvation or inability to obtain medicines.
On September 24, while the Ukraine corruption scandal was gathering momentum in Washington, the US Air Force’s 31 Fighter Wing deployed F-16 strike aircraft to Graf Ignatievo Air Base in Bulgaria as part of Exercise Rapid Buzzard which has the aim of improving the “joint warfighting capability” of the US and Bulgarian air forces.
To the undiscerning, the United Nations (UN) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) perform different roles in the international arena. Yet both organisations have a common aim – the promotion of foreign intervention. While the UN promotes its humanitarian façade, NATO provides the militarisation of the UN’s purported human rights agenda.
The debate over what actually occurred on 9/11 and, more to the point, who might have been behind it, continues to preoccupy many observers worldwide. There is considerable legitimate concern that the commission that reviewed the incident engaged in a cover-up designed either to excuse a catastrophic failure on the part of the United States’ national security apparatus, or even connivance of federal agencies in the attack itself. And then there is the issue of possible foreign government involvement.
Ukraine has filed a problematic complaint through the European Court of Human Rights against Russia, alleging violations of the human rights of both individual citizens, and violations against the Crimean Tatar minority on the whole. But how they’ve gone about it, may require the commission to determine – whether overtly or de facto – whether Russia’s control over Crimea is illegal. This raises serious questions about the admissibility of the claims themselves, and create a procedural headache for the ECHR.
With a dangerous right-wing and quasi-fascist administration in power in Washington, one that rejects internationalism and consensus-building, it is past time for the United Nations to move its headquarters and member states’ permanent missions to a more neutral location. One can understand why the UN was originally located in New York. The Rockefeller family donated the land on Turtle Bay on the East River for the construction of UN Headquarters.
Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson showed his true colors this week when he led the collapse of European support for the nuclear deal with Iran. What’s more, it was pathetically evident that Johnson was pandering to US President Donald Trump.
