In whose best interest is it that no peace be permitted to occur in the Middle East and that U.S.-Russian relations remain verboten? And is such an interest a friend or foe to the American people?
One thing that was not endemic among the rulers of the princely states was religious extremism. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the current prime minister of India and the radical Islamist political leaders of Pakistan.
Washington’s aggression directed against much of the world continues with a national election less than two weeks away but no one is talking about it.
Whereas the U.S. requires other Governments to follow its instructions, and considers their own instructions to be moral demands, Russia and China and their allies reject — on principle — any country’s dictating to another.
Moscow may need to seriously revise its relations with Ankara, and let Erdogan know he is treading on red lines.
Today many people remember Iraq, some have a clue about Ukraine. But Serbia, which preceded them, is off the radar screen of most Americans.
A wise American once said “We either hang together or we will certainly hang separately.”
When Ben Franklin spoke those words in 1776, the elder statesman was stating a simple truth that unless the early colonies overcame their differences, fears and prejudices to unite under a higher unifying self interest that transcended their “local” concerns, they would all be mutually destroyed.
Rarely are geopolitical events innocently coincidental, as an old saying goes. Let’s look at a few recent upheavals. First we have the renewed pressure on Germany and Europe to abandon the Nord Stream-2 gas pipeline from Russia, which the strange Navalny affair and his alleged poison-assassination conveniently gives cover to what would otherwise be an unprecedented backsliding on strategic energy trade.
Then we have the resurgence in armed conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed enclave territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Now, as we enter the final month of the U.S. election, the expected climax to long-buried animosities is at hand. It is unlikely to be brief or decisive. The internal convulsions of the U.S. however, are one thing. But the implosion of social trust in the U.S. is radiating out, and its effects are radiating out across the globe. If the imprecarity of our times – compounded by the virus – is making us nervous and tense, it may be because we intuit that a way-of-life, a way-of-economics, too, is coming to its end.
According to the Department of Defense’s dismally short sighted vision for the Arctic, U.S. strategic interests were best maintained not by cooperation with Arctic partners, by rather by belligerent sabre rattling under the guise of “competition” with nations who have continuously professed a desire to work with the west as allies.
