War and Conflict

So President Trump, the self-declared business genius, wants to cut off the whole relationship with China and “save America $500 billion a year”. That’s what he told Fox News this week in an interview referring to the US trade deficit with China. The fault of the chronic US trade deficit with China (and much of the world), like that of the Covid-19 crisis in America, is classic 3-D Trump: dissembling, distracting and dealing in guilt-projection.

Is the coronavirus, which has hit GCC countries quite hard, going to fuel proxy wars further with the economic objective of fortunes to be made, once the fighting stops? Or dig them in deeper? Don’t overlook Russia in the scramble for reconstruction contracts.

Italian master thinker Giorgio Agamben has been on the – controversial – forefront examining what new paradigm may be emerging out of our current pandemic distress.
He recently called attention to an extraordinary book published seven years ago that already laid it all out.

The Pentagon is excelling itself in its enthusiastic march to war. There are countless thousands suffering from the effects of the Covid-19 virus, including hundreds of members of the U.S. armed services, while the world’s despots are relishing their freedom to persecute minorities, and the poor and downtrodden are dying in hideous misery because of starvation and lack of medical care.

Some people blog, Henry Kissinger writes and his take on the consequences of the Covid-19 virus are certainly worth analysis. Kissinger as a major insider for generations of American power speaks with a voice that reflects a certain perspective on things from deep within the Beltway that those on the outside cannot entirely see or understand.

The memory of those who gave their lives in the historic defeat of Nazi fascism could not be more insulted than this: U.S. President Donald Trump this week hailed the 75th anniversary marking the fall of the Third Reich, while at the same time embarking on a reckless war path with China.

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is one of the most influential books written on military strategy and philosophy. This is not confined to just Asians but Europeans and Americans alike have attempted to study The Art of War hoping its wisdom would be revealed to them.
However, it is clear with how the western intergovernmental military alliance, known as NATO, has chosen to conduct itself since its inception in 1949, that western understanding of long-term military strategy has left much to be desired.

Two months after the coronavirus pandemic broke out in Iran, we are seeing signs of a significant improvement for the total situation. The number of daily deaths has dropped below one hundred for a week in a row, the number of new COVID-19 cases has been on a continuous decline for more than three weeks, the restrictions are gradually being lifted and the streets are again vibrant.

On April 25 the White House published a heartening and most welcome “Joint Statement by President Donald J. Trump and President Vladimir Putin of Russia” to mark “the 75th Anniversary of the historic meeting between American and Soviet troops, who shook hands on the damaged bridge over the Elbe River.

Far right-wingers in the United States and other countries are pushing the propaganda line that China was somehow involved in the creation or spread of the Covid-19 virus, formally known as SARS [Severe acute respiratory syndrome]-CoV-2, to the rest of the world either deliberately or from an accidental release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.