By Giorgio CAFIERO

Marking a major boost to Sino-Syrian relations, on 12 January, Syria joined the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s ambitious infrastructure development strategy stretching from East Asia to Europe.

For analysts with an eye on Syria, the development was expected. In November 2021, President Bashar al-Assad discussed his country gaining membership in the BRI with his counterpart in Beijing, Xi Jinping, following high-level meetings between officials of both states in previous months.

The move will likely help Syria deepen its cooperative and economic ties to other countries in the BRI, and enable it to circumvent the effects of harsh US sanctions on the country.

China clearly seeks to bolster the government in Damascus. Over the past decade, and for various reasons enumerated here on The Cradle, conflict-ridden Syria has been a country of increasing interest to Beijing.

Economy and the long game

China’s BRI agenda has been one main point of mutual interest: As Beijing sees it, Syria represents a corridor to the Mediterranean Sea which bypasses the Suez Canal and revives ancient trade routes connecting China to the African and European continents.

The incorporation of coastal Tartus and the capital city of Damascus into the BRI could boost Beijing’s economic footing in the Levant and Mediterranean.

Although nearly 11 years of warfare in Syria have prevented the Chinese from leveraging the Arab state’s geostrategic location to advance Beijing’s BRI, China’s leadership has carefully focused on playing the long game.

Now, in the post-conflict era, with Syria in need of massive reconstruction and infrastructure projects, China’s BRI has been brought into play.

Ancient links and modern opportunities

As a BRI member, Syria will look to further integrate itself economically into West Asia. In desperate need of foreign investment for the process of redevelopment, the Syrian leadership views China as a key investor and partner to rebuild the war-ravaged nation.

Importantly, during this period, China’s good will has grown among Syrians, in large part because of Beijing’s bold initiatives to thwart direct western military intervention at the UN Security Council and other institutions.

It is safe to assume that China will, at least eventually, be able to leverage its popularity among Syrians to take advantage of new economic opportunities in the country’s post-conflict future.

At the ceremony of Syria’s admission into the BRI, held this month in Damascus, Fadi Khalil, who heads Syria’s Planning and International Cooperation Commission, hailed the initiative. He invoked the historic roles of Aleppo and Palmyra in the ancient Silk Road and spoke about the potential for future Sino-Syrian relations within the framework of greater bilateral and multilateral cooperation.

Khalil and Feng Biao, Beijing’s ambassador to Syria, signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Syria’s admission into this Chinese initiative, which other Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, have previously joined at different levels of commitment.

Other recent developments underscore the extent to which Syria and China are deepening their ties. At the start of this year, Beijing aided Syria by sending over more than a million COVID-19 vaccine doses, according to Syrian state-owned media.

Despite the many ways in which Syria sees itself benefitting from membership in the BRI, the West Asian framework for this project will be no bed of roses.

A geographic wrench in the works

For Beijing, it is important that Iraq establish a long-term BRI corridor to both Syria and Jordan. While the BRI route between Iran and Syria – that traverses Iraq – has yet to be agreed upon with Baghdad, the Chinese must have many valid concerns about the security risks of doing business in Syria and Iraq.

China recognizes that “Iraq continues to top the list of high-risk investment destinations” in this grandiose project. Obviously, the same can be said about Syria where ISIS and other extremist militants continue to wage acts of terrorism, notably on the country’s borders with Iraq and Turkey.

With serious issues stemming from terrorism, social unrest, economic woes, and violent political instability, Iraq and Syria are two countries plagued by countless security uncertainties.

Although Chinese firms tend to accept higher levels of security risks than western companies, securing the BRI in Syria’s volatile neighborhood will prove no easy task for Beijing and its West Asian trade partners.

A far more stable and secure BRI economic corridor to Europe would be via northern Iran – a route already secured – then extending directly from Iran into Turkey. Yet the ice-cold state of Ankara-Damascus relations, China’s view of Turkey as an uneasy BRI partner, and NATO pressures on Ankara to avoid Beijing and Tehran, all contribute to practical challenges that will not be easy for the BRI’s financiers to quickly overcome.

But the Sino-Syrian deal this week shows that China is moving forward with its West Asian framework, despite these obstacles. One wonders whether Beijing has reason to believe Iraq’s acquiescence to the BRI is already in the bag. There is little point of developing the Syrian part of the project, without the Iraqi bridge necessary to secure Iran’s connectivity to Syria.

Washington’s reconstruction obstacle: The Caesar Act

On 17 July, 2020, the US began implementing the most sweeping sanctions which Washington has ever imposed on Syria.

Formally known as the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019 (or Caesar Act), the Biden administration continues to target Syria with Trump-era sanctions which pursue entities or individuals worldwide – including third-party actors – conducting business with government-dominated bodies of the Syrian economy, such as gas, oil, construction, engineering, and banking.

When China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited Damascus in July 2021, he met with Assad and other high-ranking Syrian government figures.

That visit by Beijing’s top diplomat was an early indication of China’s seriousness about strengthening ties with Syria, despite Washington’s continued imposition of wide-ranging sanctions on the state.

During his visit to Syria, Wang emphasized his government’s staunch opposition to the foreign-backed ‘regime change’ agenda targeting the Assad government. Beijing frames its pro-Assad stance within the context of supporting Syria’s sovereignty as an independent nation-state.

Throughout the past 11 years of warfare in Syria, China has maintained four core beliefs on the conflict: First, that the Syrian people need to reach a political solution; second, that a political transition in Syria is necessary; third, that top priorities include nation-wide reconciliation and unity; and fourth, that the international community has an obligation to help Syria.

The BRI, while initiated and heavily financed by the Chinese, is ultimately a multinational project involving dozens of countries, many of them US-allied, and interconnected with Syria via history, religion, culture, and economy – past and present.

A project this global is unlikely to come to a grinding halt because of a domestic US government ruling on trade formulated thousands of miles away from the activity.

Fighting terrorism in Syria and China

Another issue that has driven the Beijing-Damascus joint agenda in recent years is China’s ‘securitization campaign’ or ‘pacification drive’ in Xinjiang.

Assad’s government has publically condemned western efforts to use the plight of Uighurs for the purpose of creating a wedge between China and Muslim-majority countries.

Syria, like most Arab-Islamic countries, has defended Beijing in the face of the US and other western governments which allege that Chinese authorities are guilty of waging ‘genocide’ in Xinjiang, where about 12 million Uighurs, mostly Muslim, reside.

Mindful of the fact that Uighur jihadists came from Xinjiang to Syria to fight the Syrian government in the ranks of Islamic State and other violent extremist groups, Damascus and Beijing see themselves as having common cause in a struggle against terrorism and extremism.

In 2017, Syria’s ambassador to Beijing said that roughly 5,000 terrorists from Xinjiang were transported, mostly via Turkey, to Syria during the conflict. Chinese authorities have voiced serious concerns about the now battle-hardened and indoctrinated extremists potentially returning to China to carry out acts of terrorism.

Likewise, Beijing rejects the view of western governments that Assad is guilty of serious crimes. China’s leadership believes that the Syrian government deserves praise for its fight against forces which sought to overthrow Assad and his government.

When Wang was in Syria last summer, he said that “the Syrian government’s leading role in fighting terrorism on its soil should be respected, schemes of provoking ethnic divisions under the pretense of countering terrorism should be opposed, and Syria’s sacrifice and contribution to the anti-terror fight should be acknowledged.”

The future of the Sino-Syrian relationship

Currently in the US there is strong support from both sides of Washington’s political aisle for stringent Trump-era US sanctions on Damascus. In fact, this year, Biden’s administration has come under bipartisan pressure to intensify the US government’s enforcement of the Caesar Act.

Given the existing polarization and hostility in West Asian geopolitics, it is difficult to imagine Washington lifting the Caesar Act in the foreseeable future. Ultimately, this means that the US will probably continue to target Syria’s economy with crippling sanctions.

Within this context, Damascus has all the reason in the world to pursue strategies that can help it minimize the harm caused by Washington’s financial warfare.

“China can play an important role in weakening the impact of the Caesar sanctions,” said Dr. Joshua Landis, head of the Middle East department at the University of Oklahoma, in an interview last year with The Cradle.

“In Iran, China has done this,” Landis explained. “Iran’s oil exports, which were devastated by sanctions, have begun to grow again, largely because China is purchasing Iranian oil again. China is the workshop of the world so it can supply most of the goods that Syria needs. China is also strong enough to thumb its nose at US sanctions. As the US increasingly forbids US companies from dealing with Chinese firms, China has greater incentive to punish the US by breaking sanctions on countries like Iran and Syria.”

Now that Syria has joined the BRI, it is safe to conclude that the Chinese will play an increasingly important role in terms of Syria’s strategies for withstanding sanctions imposed by the US.

The odds are good that, as time passes, China and Syria’s geopolitical and geo-economic value to each other will only expand.

thecradle.co

It’s an especially dumb day for anti-China propaganda. The Biden administration has imposed trade restrictions on 34 Chinese institutions on the unsubstantiated allegation that they are developing “brain control weaponry”, a claim the mass media have been all too happy to uncritically pass on to the public. Between that and the ridiculous reporting on Russian Havana Syndrome ray guns it’s like they’re literally trying to get everyone to wear tinfoil hats.

Then there’s the Tucker Carlson guest who just told Carlson’s massive audience that the US military needs to be full of “Type A men who want to sit on a throne of Chinese skulls.” It’s highly disturbing how much the mass media have been talking about war with China like it’s a foregone conclusion lately, almost as though they’re working to normalize that horrifying idea.

There’s also this new article for The Hill, hilariously titled “‘Allies’ China and Russia are ganging up on America”, about how the poor widdle US empire is being bullied by mean old Xi and Putin’s increasingly tight-knit collaboration. It is authored by Gordon Chang, who has been wrongly predicting the imminent collapse of China for decades, and is plainly absurd because the Moscow-Beijing alignment is in reality nothing other than the natural consequence of two nations realizing the need to work together against the globe-spanning power structure that is trying to bully them into submission.

The US military budget has once again increased despite the US ending a war this year, and despite its facing no real threats from any nation to its easily-defended shores. The increase has been largely justified by the need to “counter China” and includes billions in funding for the ongoing construction of long-range missile systems on the first island chain near the Chinese mainland, explicitly for the purpose of threatening China. One need only imagine what would happen if China began constructing a chain of long-range missile systems off a US coastline to understand who the actual aggressor is between these two powers.

Fox guest: “We don’t need a military that’s woman-friendly, we don’t need a military that’s gay-friendly,” we need “Type A men who want to sit on a throne of Chinese skulls” pic.twitter.com/JztfZKpYyr

— Brendan Karet (@bad_takes) December 18, 2021

In reality, concern trolling from the western political/media class about things China is doing both internationally and domestically has pretty consistently been about actions that China has taken in response to aggressions from the US and its allies. Such concern trolling is generally framed as opposition to alleged human rights abuses and the need to protect China’s neighbors from “Chinese aggression”, but in reality it’s done to facilitate the agenda to make China weaker and smaller by any means necessary.

The actual source of tensions between the US and China never actually has anything to do with “human rights” or “protecting” anyone; that’s just the narrative overlay pinned on top of the actual agenda. The actual source of those tensions is always the fact that it is in the US empire’s interests to make China smaller and weaker and it is in China’s interests to be big and strong. The US resolved after the fall of the Soviet Union to prevent the rise of any other rival superpower, and all of the grievances we see aired about alleged Chinese abuses are really just justifications for aggressions geared toward undermining, subverting, threatening, out-maneuvering and balkanizing China to make it weaker and smaller.

Pretty much everything China gets slammed for by the imperial media is actually a response to western aggressions, whether you’re talking about Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, territorial disputes over borders or ocean waters, or domestic authoritarianism. The US is consistently the aggressor, and China is consistently responding defensively to those aggressions.

Only an absolute moron would believe the US and its allies actually care about Muslims in Xinjiang after they just spent the last two decades slaughtering Muslims by the millions in their post-9/11 wars of aggression. The propaganda narratives focus on human rights, but the real reason is that Xinjiang is a very geostrategically valuable region that US imperialism would benefit from carving away from China, and Beijing would benefit from keeping. Take this excerpt from a 2017 SBS article about China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to illustrate (emphasis mine):

An example of one significant BRI project that has multiple purposes is the creation of an overland route from Xinjiang in China’s far west through Pakistan to its deep water Gwadar port on the Arabian Sea. US$54 billion of infrastructure is planned for this stretch, despite some of the route passing through territory disputed by India and Pakistan.

This route gives China cargo overland access to the Arabian Sea, will spur investment in Xinjiang, and opens up a new route into China for energy imports from the Middle East — a route that is not vulnerable to US maritime power like its east coast sea lanes.

This map says more than any article you’ll ever see in corporate media about why Western imperialist countries (that have spent decades killing Muslims) suddenly pretend to care about Uyghurs in Xinjiang, China.

They want to break China up and stop its Belt and Road Initiative. pic.twitter.com/mhWSsrtSIu

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) July 25, 2020

When Uyghur separatist groups began inflicting acts of terror with the goal of driving the Chinese government out of Xinjiang and creating their own state, Beijing had essentially three choices:

1. To engage in a US-style campaign of mass military slaughter against these groups until they were defeated,
2. To allow a violent uprising of what would inevitably become western-backed jihadists as they had just seen in Libya and Syria carve away a geostrategically crucial part of China to be exploited by the US and its allies, or
3. To find some alternative to 1 and 2.

Beijing went with option number three, and the alternative it found was the aggressive deradicalization campaign it ended up implementing and the re-education facilities it has been so widely criticized for. This move would surely have entailed many of the abuses you’d expect from a mass-scale police action and dramatic escalation of authoritarian policies, but claims that it constituted “genocide” have been soundly discredited by independent research groups and by members of the public using publicly available information, while the most egregious allegations of abuse have been shown to be subject to manipulation and riddled with major plot holes.

You can criticize Beijing for how it went about its dilemma in Xinjiang all you want, but it was plainly universes less draconian than the US approach of killing millions and displacing tens of millions in its barbaric “war on terror”. And unlike the “war on terror”, Beijing’s approach actually worked, which even western media have been forced to grudgingly concede as tourism surges in Xinjiang.

I would like to think that maybe in the future people will be slightly more skeptical about sensationalist claims about human rights in official enemy countries but that’s probably being optimistic https://t.co/nkdVI3rOsw

— Rob (@robrousseau) October 12, 2021

The west has understood for a very, very long time that it needs to keep China weak and small to retain supremacy. That’s why so many narratives revolve around “liberating” (balkanizing) parts of China from Beijing. Here’s a Winston Churchill quote from over a century ago:

I think we shall have to take the Chinese in hand and regulate them. I believe that as civilized nations become more powerful they will get more ruthless, and the time will come when the world will impatiently bear the existence of great barbaric nations who may at any time arm themselves and menace civilized nations. I believe in the ultimate partition of China — I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.

This pattern of working to make China weaker and smaller is the same with Hong Kong, where the US was actively working to facilitate the balkanization of that area before Beijing shut down its interventionist operations. It’s the same with Taiwan, which has served as a US proxy for decades, has previously housed US nuclear weapons, is currently hosting US troops, is the subject of an astonishingly virulent western propaganda campaign, and plays a major role in US geostrategic interests.

It’s the same with the militarization of the South China Sea. Xi Jinping had been offering a mutual demilitarization of the sea, and instead Obama ramped up tensions with the still-ongoing “pivot to Asia” which has seen a continuous buildup of US and allied military activity in the area. As former UN Security Council President Kishore Mahbubani explained in an interview last year:

“I quote a former American ambassador to China, Stapleton Roy, who told me, ‘Kishore, when Xi Jinping made an offer to demilitarize the South China Sea, America should have grabbed that offer and agreed to stop all our military activities in the South China Sea. That would have pushed the Chinese out.’ Of course, the Americans would be out too. But the South China Sea is much more important to China than it is to America. If America steps out, the Chinese military steps out. And that’s a win for America, right? Instead, the U.S. Navy responded by sending naval vessels. So Xi said, ‘Okay. You reject my offer. So be it.’”

It’s the same even with the authoritarian domestic policies for which China is frequently criticized by the western world. We learned in a recent Bloomberg article that US spies are finding it hard to conduct operations against the Chinese government because its strict policies make it impossible for them to function.

“CIA officers in China face daunting challenges posed by China’s burgeoning surveillance state, which has blanketed Chinese cities with surveillance cameras and employs sophisticated facial recognition software to track threats,” claim the article’s authors.

Bloomberg explains that China’s anti-corruption measures have made it much harder to recruit CIA assets, writing, “Xi’s broad anti-corruption campaign, which has punished more than 1.5 million officials, has also led to greater scrutiny of Chinese officials’ income, making payments to potential sources far more problematic, two former officials said.”

“Those efforts were detailed extensively in 2017 by the New York Times, which said as many as a dozen U.S. sources were executed by China, with others jailed, in what represented one of the worst breaches ever of American spying networks,” the article also notes.

As John Pilger documented in his prescient “The Coming War On China”, the US has been surrounding the PRC with military bases and weaponry, building a “noose” around that nation which now includes the aforementioned long-range missile systems currently under construction through the first island chain. If any foreign power were doing this to the United States it would be considered an act of war, and war would be declared immediately, but it somehow never enters westerners’ heads that China could be the one who is responding defensively to an aggressor.

None of this means that China is run by innocent little girl scouts who never do anything wrong, it just means it’s clearly not the aggressor in these conflicts, and that the picture we are presented with in the western empire’s frenzied campaign to manipulate public thought about China is not based in reality. The propaganda campaign is so pervasive and forceful that even people who are aware it’s happening still commonly fall for its lies and distortions just because there’s so much of it coming from so many different directions.

The propaganda campaign against China is not going to go away; it’s going to get far louder, crazier, and more aggressive. With each new shrill narrative that comes up, research it with the question “How is this geared toward making China weaker and smaller?” in mind. You’ll find something there every time.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There’s no good reason nations can’t collaborate with each other toward the common good instead of squandering all their energy and resources in this insane struggle of US hegemonic conquest. The word “detente” never enters into mainstream discourse because it does not serve the interests of the western imperialists who rule us, but it does serve everyone else, infinitely more than pouring fortunes into cold war brinkmanship and flirting with the prospect of world war between nuclear-armed nations.

Detente is what’s needed. But in order for that to happen the US empire is going to have to stop aggressing, and it’s going to have to stop lying.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

The usual suspects tried everything against Yemen.

First, coercing it into ‘structural reform.’ When that didn’t work, they instrumentalized takfiri mercenaries. They infiltrated and manipulated the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), ISIS. They used US drones and occasional marines.

And then, in 2015, they went Total Warfare: a UN-backed rogue coalition started bombing and starving Yemenis into submission – with barely a peep from the denizens of the ‘rules-based international order.’

The coalition – House of Saud, Qatar, UAE, US, UK – for all practical purposes, embarked on a final solution for Yemen.

Sovereignty and unity were never part of the deal. Yet soon the project stalled. Saudis and Emiratis were fighting each other for primacy in southern and eastern Yemen using mercenaries. In April 2017, Qatar clashed with both Saudis and Emiratis. The coalition started to unravel.

Now we reach a crucial inflexion point. Yemeni Armed Forces and allied fighters from Popular Committees, backed by a coalition of tribes, including the very powerful Murad, are on the verge of liberating strategic, oil and natural gas-rich Marib – the last stronghold of the House of Saud-backed mercenary army.

Tribal leaders are in the capital Sanaa talking to the quite popular Ansarallah movement to organize a peaceful takeover of Marib. So this process is in effect the result of a wide-ranging national interest deal between the Houthis and the Murad tribe.

The House of Saud, for its part, is allied with the collapsing forces behind former president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, as well as political parties such as Al-Islah, Yemen’s Muslim Brotherhood. They have been incapable of resisting Ansarallah.

A repeat scenario is now playing in the western coastal port of Hodeidah, where takfiri mercenaries have vanished from the province’s southern and eastern districts.

Yemen’s Defense Minister Mohammad al-Atefi, talking to Lebanon’s al-Akhbar newspaper, stressed that, “according to strategic and military implications…we declare to the whole world that the international aggression against Yemen has already been defeated.”

It’s not a done deal yet – but we’re getting there.

Hezbollah, via its Executive Council Chairman Hashim Safieddine, adds to the context, stressing how the current diplomatic crisis between Lebanon and Saudi Arabia is directly linked to Mohammad bin Salman’s (MbS) fear and impotence when confronted with the liberation of strategic Marib and Hezbollah’s unwavering support for Yemen throughout the war.

A fabricated ‘civil war’

So how did we get here?

Venturing beyond the excellent analysis by Karim Shami here on The Cradle, some geoeconomic background is essential to understanding what’s really going on in Yemen.

For at least half a millennium before the Europeans started to show up, the ruling classes in southern Arabia built the area into a prime hub of intellectual and commercial exchange. Yemen became the prized destination of Prophet Muhammad’s descendants; by the 11th century they had woven solid spiritual and intellectual links with the wider world.

By the end of the 19th century, as noted in Isa Blumi’s outstanding Destroying Yemen (University of California Press, 2018), a “remarkable infrastructure that harnessed seasonal rains to produce a seemingly endless amount of wealth attracted no longer just disciples and descendants of prophets, but aggressive agents of capital seeking profits.”

Soon we had Dutch traders venturing on terraced hills covered in coffee beans clashing with Ottoman Janissaries from Crimea, claiming them for the Sultan in Istanbul.

By the post-modern era, those “aggressive agents of capital seeking profits” had reduced Yemen to one of the advanced battlegrounds of the toxic mix between neoliberalism and Wahhabism.

The Anglo-American axis, since the Afghan jihad in the 1980s, promoted, financed and instrumentalized an essentialist, ahistorical version of ‘Islam’ that was simplistically reduced to Wahhabism: a deeply reactionary social engineering movement led by an antisocial front based in Arabia.

That operation shaped a shallow version of Islam sold to western public opinion as antithetical to universal – as in ‘rules-based international order’ – values. Hence, essentially anti-progressive. Yemen was at the frontline of this cultural and historical perversion.

Yet the promoters of the war unleashed in 2015 – a gloomy celebration of humanitarian imperialism, complete with carpet bombing, embargoes, and widespread forced starvation – did not factor in the role of the Yemeni Resistance. Much as it happened with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The war was a perverse manipulation by US, UK, French, Israeli and minions Saudi, Emirati and Qatari intel agencies. It was never a ‘civil war’ – as the hegemonic narrative goes – but an engineered project to reverse the gains of Yemen’s own ‘Arab Spring.’

The target was to return Yemen back to a mere satellite in Saudi Arabia’s backyard. And to ensure that Yemenis never dare to even dream of regaining their historic role as the economic, spiritual, cultural and political reference for a great deal of the Indian Ocean universe.

Add to the narrative the simplistic trope of blaming Shia Iran for supporting the Houthis. When it was clear that coalition mercenaries would fail to stop the Yemeni Resistance, a new narrative was birthed: the war was important to provide ‘security’ for the Saudi hacienda facing an ‘Iran-backed’ enemy.

That’s how Ansarallah became cast as Shia Houthis fighting Saudis and local ‘Sunni’ proxies. Context was thrown to the dogs, as in the vast, complex differences between Muslims in Yemen – Sufis of various orders, Zaydis (Houthis, the backbone of the Ansarallah movement, are Zaydis), Ismailis, and Shafii Sunnis – and the wider Islamic world.

Yemen goes BRI

So the whole Yemen story, once again, is essentially a tragic chapter of Empire attempting to plunder Third World/Global South wealth.

The House of Saud played the role of vassals seeking rewards. They do need it, as the House of Saud is in desperate financial straits that include subsidizing the US economy via mega-contracts and purchasing US debt.

The bottom line: the House of Saud won’t survive unless it dominates Yemen. The future of MBS is totally leveraged on winning his war, not least to pay his bills for western weapons and technical assistance already used. There are no definitive figures, but according to a western intel source close to the House of Saud, that bill amounted to at least $500 billion by 2017.

The stark reality made plain by the alliance between Ansarallah and major tribes is that Yemen refuses to surrender its national wealth to subsidize the Empire’s desperate need of liquidity, collateral for new infusions of cash, and thirst for commodities. Stark reality has absolutely nothing to do with the imperial narrative of Yemen as ‘pre-modern tribal traditions’ averse to change, thus susceptible to violence and mired in endless ‘civil war.’

And that brings us to the enticing ‘another world is possible’ angle when the Yemeni Resistance finally extricates the nation from the grip of the hawkish, crumbling neoliberal/Wahhabi coalition.

As the Chinese very well know, Yemen is rich not only in the so far unexplored oil and gas reserves, but also in gold, silver, zinc, copper and nickel.

Beijing also knows all there is to know about the ultra-strategic Bab al Mandab between Yemen’s southwestern coast and the Horn of Africa. Moreover, Yemen boasts a series of strategically located Indian Ocean ports and Red Sea ports on the way to the Mediterranean, such as Hodeidah.

These waterways practically scream Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and especially the Maritime Silk Road – with Yemeni ports complementing China’s only overseas naval base in Djibouti, where roads and railways connect to Ethiopia.

The Ansarallah – tribal alliance may even, in the medium to long term, exercise full control for access to the Suez Canal.

One very possible scenario is Yemen joining the ‘string of pearls’ – ports linked by the BRI across the Indian Ocean. There will, of course, be major pushback by proponents of the ‘Indo-Pacific’ agenda. That’s where the Iranian connection enters the picture.

BRI in the near future will feature the progressive interconnection between the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) – with a special role for the port of Gwadar – and the emerging China–Iran corridor that will traverse Afghanistan. The port of Chabahar in Iran, only 80 km away from Gwadar, will also bloom, whether by definitive commitments by India or a possible future takeover by China.

Warm links between Iran and Yemen will translate into renewed Indian Ocean trade, without Sanaa depending on Tehran, as it is essentially self-sufficient in energy and already manufactures its own weapons. Unlike the Saudi vassals of Empire, Iran will certainly invest in the Yemeni economy.

The Empire will not take any of this lightly. There are plenty of similarities with the Afghan scenario. Afghanistan is now set to be integrated into the New Silk Roads – a commitment shared by the SCO. Now it’s not so far-fetched to picture Yemen as a SCO observer, integrated to BRI and profiting from Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) packages. Stranger things have happened in the ongoing Eurasia saga.

thecradle.co

With the recent pledge by China, Russia, Iran and Pakistan for renewed defense of Afghanistan’s sovereignty and right to develop, many have jumped the gun to celebrate a little prematurely.

While watching a hegemonic wanna-be global overlord choke on humble pie is certainly satisfying, and while Afghanistan unquestionably has a renewed hope to recapture its ancient role as a pearl on the Silk Road uniting all cultures of the globe, something darker is also afoot. A process reminiscent of the events of 1979 when Zbigniew Brzezinski, then leading a trilateral Commission takeover of the USA using a dim-witted puppet president, managed to launch a program known as “Operation Cyclone”.

This clandestine operation was premised on the lies of Zbigniew’s Team B analysis of Soviet ambitions to supposedly dominate the world and which thence justified a program that utilized billions of dollars in tax payer money to fund the growth of Mujahedeen terrorist cells and narcotics in a bid to light a fire under Russia’s soft underbelly and suck the unsuspecting soviets into a bloodletting that would be sold to an incredulous western population as “Russia’s Vietnam.”

Over forty years later, the results of Zbigniew’s duplicitous proxy war are well known.

The Soviet Union was certainly bled, leading to its ultimate dissolution under Gorbachev and the world was given the gift Islamic terrorism- funded, armed and trained generously by CIA, MI6 and ISI operatives.

Additionally, organized crime syndicates of the world also grew their influence in leaps and bounds as the world center of opium production was moved from its former zones of Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar to more fertile soil in Afghanistan, providing both the funding needed to light the region on fire for decades while also amplifying a new opium war against ALL of civilization. The conspicuous integration of the DEA and CIA during this period which coincided with the heroin boom and also the flooding of crack cocaine into the ghettos of the USA under CIA director George Bush Sr (also a defender of Zbigniew’s Team B takeover of U.S. intelligence estimates) cannot be ignored.

Signs of Darkness

Signs of the re-activation of this old script with a modern twist are already visible on numerous levels, not the least of those signs being witnessed in the strange decision to demolish the CIA torture annex in Kabul in response to the August 26 attack by the mysterious ISIS-K on the Kabul airport which killed 170 civilians and 13 U.S. soldiers. Why was it the case that U.S. and British intelligence agencies issued warnings of an attack at that location and time long before it occurred and yet did less than nothing, other than shooting civilians and bombing three households after it happened?

Why would the U.S. military deem it wise to destroy a CIA base which has been a strategic central point of command of all clandestine activities in the region for the past two decades in response to this completely foreseeable event?

Recently a Lebanese analyst, commenting on the observations of the leader of Hezbollah wrote that “the U.S. have been using helicopters to save ISIS terrorists from complete annihilation in Iraq and transporting them to Afghanistan to keep them as insurgents in Central Asia against Russia, China and Iran”.

This observation is not unique to Nasrallah, but has been echoed at various times over the past three years by the Russian government, Syrian state media and leading officials in Iran including former Foreign Minister Javad Zarif who noted as early as March 2018 that “this time, it wasn’t unmarked helicopters. They were American helicopters, taking Daesh out of Haska prison. Where did they take them? Now, we don’t know where they took them, but we see the outcome. We see more and more violence in Pakistan, more and more violence in Afghanistan, taking a sectarian flavor.”

Zarif’s words echoed those of Iranian Chief of Staff Major General Mohammad Baqeri who said: “After witnessing ISIS and other organized terrorist groups losing their ground in Iraq and Syria, they are now relocating them to Afghanistan.”

Additionally, U.S. mainstream media has been preparing the western zeitgeist with strange interviews with leaders of Al Qaeda and ISIS-K in recent weeks. First the state-funded PBS broadcasted a suspicious interview with Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (aka: Al Nusra aka: Al Qaeda) leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani who was repackaged in a business suite and sold as a “moderate resistance fighter” in Syria. Then just days before the August 26 Kabul attack, CNN’s Clarissa Ward interviewed an ISIS-K commander in a silhouetted frame to protect his identity. When asked if he would continue the campaign of international terror, the unnamed terrorist stated “instead of currently operating, we have turned to recruiting only, to utilize the opportunity to do our recruitment. But when the foreigners and people of the world leave Afghanistan, we can restart our operations.”

To top things off, the incredibly talented Bulgarian researcher Dilyana Gaytandzhieva noted on June 22 that the U.S. Army contracted four companies to purchase $350 million worth of weapons made by eight companies located in Serbia, Bulgaria and Croatia which are destined to flood into Syria as part of a program called Task Force Smoking Gun. This 2017 program was part of a U.S. Special Operations Command Unit Task force which carried out the Syrian ‘train and equip program’ designed to overthrow the Assad regime using Al Qaeda affiliates as freedom fighters. In her report, Gaytandzhieva wrote:

“According to the U.S. Federal Procurement Data System, the eight companies have already received orders with an estimated value of $25 million each or $200 million combined under the 5 year-long Pentagon program for non-U.S. standard weapons supplies. These are foreign weapons which are not compatible with the U.S. military standard, hence cannot be used by the U.S. army and will be delivered as military aid to third parties.”

China Will Fill the Vacuum

It is 100% certain that China has great hopes to invest in Afghanistan’s bountiful rare earth, copper and iron deposits, as well as rail, roads, fibre optics, energy plants and communications bringing Afghanistan into the evolving Belt and Road Initiative. However, the expanded presence of Chinese engineers in the region will put China at risk of asymmetric attacks.

Over the past 15 years, projects like the 2007 Mes Aynak copper mining operation and 2011 Faryab and Sar-i-pul oil development deals have stalled due to the frequent occurrence of U.S.-backed terrorist attacks on Chinese engineers and workers. Just this summer, 9 Chinese engineers were killed in Pakistan when an explosive device detonated sending a busload of workers off a cliff. These workers were en-route to work on the large Dasu hydroelectric dam that is part of the CPEC.

China is additionally concerned that the East Turkestan Islamic Movement which has cut its teeth fighting alongside its Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan may also spring to new life. It was only in November 2020 that Secretary of State Pompeo removed the group from the U.S. list of terrorist groups despite the fact that the United Nations Security Council had released a report in May 2020 stating that the ETIM “has a transnational agenda to target Xinjiang, China, and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, as well as Chitral, Pakistan, which poses a threat to China, Pakistan and other regional States.”

The refutation of China’s anti-Muslim genocide myth promoted by western MSM was laid out in a recent interview by this author here:

Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen has attempted to allay China’s fears saying: “Those who are intending to carry out sabotage activities in other countries or have their foreign agenda would not be able to remain in the country.”

However, it is still too early to validate such claims as the ETIM alongside ISIS cells certainly abound in the mountainous northeast regions enjoying support from western clandestine operations and parallel networks still active in Pakistan such as Lashkar-e-Islam and Tehrik-e-Taliban as outlined in the aforementioned UN report.

The need to cut off all Al Qaeda operations are vital at this time and thus the convergence of the “big four” nations of Russia, China, Iran and Pakistan are so vital. With Iran having been inducted into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as of September 17 joining both Pakistan and India as full members, it is understood by all relevant parties that a new security doctrine is needed in the region premised on win-win cooperation.

This is most apparent when one considers that the living force for the multipolar alliance’s long-term success is hinged upon the continued success of China’s 130 nation strong Belt and Road Initiative whose four of the six primary networks pass through Xinjiang and the region which Brzezinski lit on fire four decades ago to keep the “world island” divided and weak.

The Chinese and their growing array of partners have come to the fundamental insight that the only way to destroy terrorism is not by bombing nations to smithereens, but rather by providing the means of improving the lives of people. This is the true meaning of “civilization” that not merely builds infrastructure for the sake of shareholder value, but uplifts and ennobles the hearts and minds of a people who have been caught too long in the darkness of ignorance, despair, war and poverty. This is the only antidote for global terrorism, the plague of drugs that have ravaged countless lives, and even the poisonous misanthropy underlying the decaying “Rules-Based International Order”.

The author can be reached on his Substack

Seven years after being launched by Chinese President Xi Jinping, first in Astana and then in Jakarta, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) increasingly drives the American plutocratic oligarchy completely nuts.

The relentless paranoia about China’s New Silk Roads “threat” has much to do with the exit ramp offered by Beijing to a Global South permanently indebted to IMF-World Bank exploitation.

In the old order, politico-military elites were routinely bribed in exchange for unfettered corporate access to their nations’ resources, coupled with go-go privatization schemes and outright austerity (“structural adjustment”).

This went on for decades until Belt and Road became the new game in town in terms of infrastructure building, offering an alternative to the imperial footprint….

asiatimes.com

Is this statement too cynical?

It is a provable fact that if one chooses to organize their society around the concept that all players of a “great game” must exist in a finite world of tension as all zero-sum systems presume, then we find ourselves in a relatively deterministic trajectory to hell.

You see, this world of tension which game masters require in today’s world are generated by increasing rates of scarcity (food, fuel, resources, space, etc). As this scarcity increases due to population increases tied to heavy doses of arson, it naturally follows that war, famine, and other conflict will rise across all categories of divisions (ethnic, religious, linguistic, gender, racial etc). Showcasing this ugly misanthropic philosophy during a December 21, 1981 People Magazine Interview, Prince Philip described the necessity of reducing the world population stating:

“We’re in for a major disaster if it isn’t curbed-not just for the natural world, but for the human world. The more people there are, the more resources they’ll consume, the more pollution they’ll create, the more fighting they will do. We have no option. If it isn’t controlled voluntarily, it will be controlled involuntarily by an increase in disease, starvation, and war.”

When such a system is imposed upon a world possessing atomic weapons, as occurred in the wake of FDR’s death and the sabotage of the great president’s anti-colonial vision, the predictably increased rates of conflict, starvation and ignorance can only spill over into a global war if nuclear superpowers chose to disobey the limits and “norms” of this game at any time.

Perhaps some utopian theoreticians sitting in their ivory towers at Oxford, Cambridge or the many Randian think tanks peppering foreign policy landscape believed that this game could be won if only all nation states relinquished their sovereignty to a global government… but that hasn’t really happened, has it?

Instead of the relinquishing of sovereignty, the past decade has seen a vast rise of nationalism across all corners of the earth which have been given new life by the rise of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and broader multipolar alliance. While these impulses have taken on many shapes and forms, they are united in the common belief that nation states must not become a thing of the past but rather must become determining forces of the world’s economic and political destinies.

The Case of the Bi-Polar USA

Unfortunately, within the USA itself where nationalism has seen an explosive rise in popularity under President Trump, the old uni-polar geopolitical paradigm has continued to hold tight under such neocon carryovers as Mike Pompeo, Defense Secretary Esper, CIA director Gina Haspel and the large caste of Deep State characters still operating among the highest positions of influence on both sides of the aisle.

While I genuinely believe that Trump would much rather work with both Russia, China and other nations of the multipolar alliance in lieu of blowing up the world, these aforementioned neocons think otherwise evidenced by Pompeo’s October 6 speech in Japan. In this speech, Pompeo attempted to rally other Pacific nations to an anti-Chinese security complex known as the Quad (USA, Australia, Japan and India). With his typically self-righteous tone, Pompeo stated that “this is not a rivalry between the United States and China. This is for the soul of the world”. Earlier Pompeo stated “If the free world doesn’t change Communist China, Communist China will change us.”

Pompeo’s efforts to break China’s neighbours away from the Belt and Road Initiative have accelerated relentlessly in recent months, with territorial tensions between China and Japan, Vietnam, South Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, Indonesia, Philippines, Indonesia and Brunei being used by the USA to enflame conflict whenever possible. It is no secret that the USA has many financial and military tentacles stretching deep into all of those Pacific nations listed.

Where resistance to this anti-China tension is found, CIA-funded “democracy movements” have been used as in the current case of Thailand, or outright threats and sanctions as in the case of Cambodia where over 24 Chinese companies have been sanctioned for the crime of building infrastructure in a nation which the USA wishes to control.

Pompeo’s delusional efforts to consolidate a Pacific Military bloc among the QUAD states floundered fairly quickly as no joint military agreement was generated creating no foundation upon which a larger alliance could be built.

China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi accurately called out this regressive agenda on October 13 saying:

“In essence [the Indo-Pacific Strategy] aims to build a so-called Indo-Pacific NATO underpinned by the quadrilateral mechanism involving the United States, Japan, India and Australia. What it pursues is to trumpet the Cold War mentality and to stir up confrontation among different groups and blocs and to stoke geopolitical competition. What it maintains is the dominance and hegemonic system of the United States. In this sense, this strategy is itself an underlying security risk. If it is forced forward it will wind back the clock of history.”

China Responds with Class

China’s response to this pompous threat to peace was classy to say the least with Wang Yi teaming up with Yang Jiechi (Director of China’s Central Foreign Affairs Commission) who jointly embarked on simultaneous foreign tours that demonstrated the superior world view of “right-makes-might” diplomacy. Where Wang Yi focused his efforts on Southeast Asia with visits to the Philippines, Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaysia, Laos, Thailand and Singapore, Yang Jiechi embarked on a four-legged tour of Sri Lanka, the UAE, Algeria and Serbia.

While COVID assistance was a unifying theme throughout all meetings, concrete economic development driven by the Belt and Road Initiative was relentlessly advanced by both diplomats. In all bilateral agreements reached over this past week, opportunities for cooperation and development were created with a focus on diminishing the points of tension which geopolticians require in order for their perverse “game” to function.

In Malaysia, the $10 billion, 640 Km East Coast Rail link was advanced that will be completed with China’s financial and technical help by 2026 providing a key gateway in the BRI, as well as two major industrial parks that will service high tech products to China and beyond over the coming decades.

After meeting with Wang Yi on October 9, Indonesia’s Special Presidential Envoy announced that “Indonesia is willing to sign cooperation documents on the Belt and Road Initiative and Global Maritime Fulcrum at an early date, enlarge its cooperation with China on trade and investment, actively put in place currency swap arrangements and settlements in local currency, step up the joint efforts in human resources and disaster mitigation, and learn from China’s fight against poverty.”

In Cambodia, a major Free Trade Agreement was begun which will end tariffs on hundreds of products and create new markets for both nations. On the BRI, the New International Land-Sea Trade corridor and Lancang-Mekong Cooperation plans were advanced.

In the Philippines, Wang Yi and Foreign Minister Locsin discussed Duterte’s synergistic Build Build Build program which reflects the sort of long term infrastructure orientation characteristic of the BRI which are both complete breaks with the decades-long practices of usurious IMF loans which have created development bottlenecks across the entire developing sector.

In Thailand Wang Yi met with the Thai Prime Minister where the two accelerated the building of the 252 km Bangkok-Korat high speed rail line which will then connect to Laos and thence to China’s Kunmin Province providing a vital artery for the New Silk Road.

In the past few years, the USA has been able to do little to counter China’s lucrative offers while at best offering cash under the rubric of the Lower Mekong Initiative established under the Hillary-Obama administration in preparation for the Asia Pivot encirclement of China that was unleashed in 2012. This was done as part of a desperate effort to keep China’s neighbors loyal to the USA and was meant to re-enforce Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership which Trump thankfully destroyed during his first minutes in office.

Yang Jiechi’s Four-Legged Tour

In Sri Lanka, a $90 million grant was offered by China which will be devoted to medical resources, water supplies and education and which the Chinese embassy website stated “will contribute to the well being of Sri Lankans in a post-COVID era”. Another $989 million loan was delivered for the completion of a massive expressway stretching from Central Sri Lanka’s tea growing district to the Port of Hambanota. While this port is repeatedly used by detractors of the BRI like Pompeo as proof of the “Chinese debt trap”, recent studies have proven otherwise.

In the UAE, the Chinese delegation released a press release after meeting with Prince Zayed al-Nahyan stating: “Under the strategic guidance of President Xi and the Abu Dhabi crown prince, China will enrich the connotation of its comprehensive strategic partnership with UAE, cement the political trust and support, promote alignment of development strategies, and advance high-quality joint construction of the Belt and Road.”

In Algeria, Yang offered China’s full support for the New Economic Revival Plan which parallels the Philippines’ Build Build Build strategy by focusing on long term industrial growth rather than IMF-demands for privatization and austerity that have kept North Africa and other nations backward for years.

Finally in Serbia which is a vital component of the BRI, the Chinese delegation gave its full support to the Belgrade-Budapest railway, and other long term investments centered on transport, energy and soft infrastructure, including the expansion of the Chinese-owned Smederevo Steel Plant which employs over 12 000 Serbians and which was saved from bankruptcy by China in 2016. By the end of the trip, Prime Minister Brnabic announced: “Serbia strongly supports China both bilaterally and multilaterally, including President Xi Jinping’s Access and Roads Initiative and the 17+1 Cooperation Mechanism, in the context of which most of Serbia’s infrastructure and strategy projects will be realized”

The Spirit of Win-Win Must Not Be Sabotaged

Overall, the spirit of the growing New Silk Road is fast moving from a simple east-south trade route towards a global program stretching across all of Africa, to the Middle East, to the High Arctic and Latin America. While this program is driven by a longer view of the past and future than most westerners realize, it is quickly becoming evident that it is the only game in town with a future worth living in.

While China has committed to the enlightened idea that human society is more than a “sum of parts”, the Cold Warriors of the west have chosen to hold onto obsolete notions of human nature that suppose we live in a world of “each vs. all”. These obsolete notions are premised on the bestial idea that our species is destined to do little more than fight for diminishing returns of scraps in a closed -system struggle for survival where only a small technocratic elite of game masters calling themselves “alphas” control the levers of production and consumption from above.

Thus far, President Trump has distinguished himself from other dark age war hawks in his administration by promoting a foreign policy outlook centered on economic development. This has been seen in his recent victories in achieving economic normalization between Serbia and Kosovo, and endorsing the Alaska-Canada railway last month. With the elections just around the corner and the war hawks flying in full force, it is clear that these piecemeal projects, though sane and welcomed are still not nearly enough to break the USA away from its course of war with China and towards a new age of win-win cooperation required for the ultimate survival of our species.

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

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.

Today, these same words apply just as well to those modern states who, though not American, have everything to lose by clinging onto historic resentments, prejudices, and Cold War traditions. These same states have all to gain by joining hands and working together on projects which will benefit each others’ children and grandchildren.

A special case can be seen in today’s conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan whose clashes over the autonomous region of Nagorno-Karabakh which began on September 27^th as the Azerbaijani government began firing upon the small pro-Armenian enclave within its territory.

It was heartening to witness certain progress towards a peace agreement take shape with the Macron-Putin-Trump joint statement of October 1^st, and advanced upon by the recent peace treaty brokered by Russia signed on October 10^th by the Foreign Ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan. In spite of these positive steps, belligerent hotheads in Azerbaijan and beyond have chosen to “hang separately” and have wasted no time demonstrating their commitment to total war as missiles, and other heavy artillery reined down upon civilian and military targets alike only minutes after the treaty was to come into effect.

What makes this issue so dangerous during our current age of renewed thermonuclear sabre-rattling on Russia’s southern and Arctic borders, is that it is but one of a wide array of hotspots that are simultaneously being lit on fire under a strategy which is comparable to the same sort of asymmetric warfare that characterized much of the world during the dark days of the Cold War. These were the days when such luminaries as Zbigniew Brzezinski spoke openly of playing the “Islamic card” against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and as millions of dollars moved through CIA fronts and into radical madrasas throughout the Arab world.

From renewed conflict in Kyrgyzstan where recent election results are being disputed, to anarchy in East Ukraine, to Belarus where a full color revolution was recently put into motion, to Georgia where Saakishvilians have seen a rise in popularity leading into October elections to Moldova’s Transnistria autonomous zone which remains a point of contention waiting to be sparked… it appears that the seeds of discord are being sowed all across Russia’s soft underbelly among ethnic groups of the former Soviet Union.

Recognizing the danger of radical Islamic terror groups from Syria and Libya spreading into Russia via Azerbaijan amidst the current crisis, the head of Russian Intelligence Sergei Naryshkin stated that “We cannot but be concerned that the South Caucasus is capable of becoming a new launchpad for International terrorist organizations, from where militants can subsequently enter states neighboring Azerbaijan and Armenia, including Russia”. Naryshkin was referring to the vast throngs of Islamic militants from such sects as Jabhat al-Nusra, Firkat al-Hamza and Sultan Murad who have been deployed as mercenaries alongside over 150 Turkish officers working in Command positions in Azerbaijan.

So rather than idly sit back and watch terrorism burst into Russia, Europe and beyond, a more useful question to ask is: What sorts of pathways would a creative statesman focus upon which might defuse these conflict zones, and transform hopeless discord into harmonious collaboration?

For starters, President Trump and other western statesmen would do well to continue on the positive momentum begun on October 1^st by giving his full backing to the recent peace agreement brokered by Russia.

Trump displayed the right instincts in his earlier September 4^th peace initiative between Serbia and Kosovo in the White House and a continuation of that display in the current Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict would be a welcomed follow up. Just as the Serbia-Kosovo agreements were driven by an understanding that economic development had to lead (and not follow) any durable formal effort at peace, the same principle applies to the current crises in the Caucasus and other parts of Central Europe being lit on fire.

Just as the American Development Finance Corporation, in tandem with the Export Import Bank committed to fund strategic railways and roads connecting Serbian and Kosovo capitals, provide long term loans to SMEs and build a rail to the deep sea port on the Adriatic to the tune of $1 billion, similar projects involving both Armenia, Azerbaijan and other Central Asian nations await construction requiring only support from the west. The principled driver for these long term programs involves the vast multimodal International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC).

This corridor is a 7200 km network of rail, roads, and ports connecting India with Russia via the ports of Chabahar and Bandar Abbas in Iran through a vast network of rail towards Russia.

First established in 2002 by Russia, Iran and India, the INSTC has grown to include Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Ukraine, Syria, Belarus and Oman (with Bulgaria having recently joined as an observer). This program in many ways parallels the new model of long term investment pioneered by China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and involves integrating and unifying nations into spheres of common interests rather than competing over diminishing returns of resources or other points of divisions. By avoiding the Suez Canal, this project will cut 15 days off the transit of goods from India to Russia. Meanwhile Russia is finalizing a free trade zone with India and the Eurasian Economic Union (comprising Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan) and has just finalized another free trade agreement between the EEU and Serbia. Both the EEU and Belt and Road Initiative have signed integration agreements already bringing the INSTC and BRI into greater harmony and defusing ever more tension.

Since the extension of the BRI into Russia’s Far East and Arctic via the Polar Silk Road, the INSTC has taken on a new identity as a harmonious segment of this new development complex. What is stopping the USA from investing in these projects?

Under these dynamics the long overdue Southern Armenian Railway could be built with financial assistance from the USA providing the missing 316 km link of the North South Transport Corridor between the Black Sea and Persian Gulf. This project involves an incredible 84 bridges (19.6 km) and 60 tunnels (102.3 km) through the mountainous terrain ultimately connecting the Persian Gulf’s main artery to Europe with vast benefits for all nations and people involved. Of course, this would involve a total re-think of America’s anti-Iranian agenda… but we are talking about avoiding World War after all.

One of the greatest causes of strife and division which has continuously thwarted peacemaking initiatives over the years has been poverty and insecurity. The INSTC, BRI and other great infrastructure projects would not only create new relationships and open up new markets over the course of many years, but would also provide the basis for new industries, increased productive potential and incredible investment potentials for all interests regardless of religious, ethnic or other differences which imperialists have sought to exploit for eons.

If President Trump pushes forward with political and economic support for this positive orientation, then the foundation for durable peace can finally be created and the terrible threats of anarchy, terrorism and war may be averted.

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

Such is the image projected by Mike Pompeo’s ranting anti-China attacks or the relentless demonization of Russia sweeping across mainstream media ever day- both nations who have repeatedly called for cooperation and friendship with the USA. If it were simply belligerent words then we could brush off these childish attacks as mere foolish rhetoric, but sadly these words are backed by extraordinarily dangerous action. From escalating military maneuvers on Russia’s border, to belligerent military expansion in China’s backyard, everywhere one looks, we find the same lemming-like commitment to playing a nuclear game of chicken in the hopes of psychologically breaking the Multipolar Alliance.

However, as China’s Ambassador Cui Tiankai recently stated, “China and the USA need to recapture the spirit of cooperation from WWII and join hands to confront our common enemies in the new era.”

I couldn’t agree more.

As the Ambassador invoked the spirit of Lincoln citing the beautiful quote: “the best way to predict the future is to create it”, I think it’s wise to revisit the two opposing global policy options the USA had available to it at the turn of the last century while the Civil War hero William McKinley still presided in the office of the presidency in 1901.

At this crucial moment in world history, it was still undetermined whether America would hold on to its anti-imperial traditions or slip into the trap of a new imperial identity.

Monroe Doctrine or Empire?

As Martin Sieff eloquently laid out in his recent article, President McKinley himself was an peacemaker, anti-imperialist of a higher order than most people realize. McKinley was also a strong supporter of two complementary policies: 1) Internally, he was a defender of Lincoln’s “American system” of protectionism, internal improvements and black suffrage and 2) Externally, he was a defender of the Monroe Doctrine that defined America’s anti-imperial foreign policy since 1823.

The Monroe Doctrine’s architect John Quincy Adams laid out this principle eloquently on July 4, 1821:

“After fifty years the United States has, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations, while asserting and maintaining her own.

That the United States does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

That by involving itself in the internal affairs of other nations, the United States would destroy its own reason of existence; the fundamental maxims of her policy would become, then, no different than the empire America’s revolution defeated. It would be, then, no longer the ruler of itself, but the dictator of the world.”

America’s march is the march of mind, not of conquest.

Colonial establishments are engines of wrong, and that in the progress of social improvement it will be the duty of the human family to abolish them”.

It was an aging John Quincy Adams whom a young Abraham Lincoln collaborated with in ending the imperial Mexican-American war under Wall Street stooge James Polk in 1846. When Adams died in 1848, Lincoln picked up the torch he left behind as the London-directed “proto deep state” of the 19^th century worked to dissolve the republic from within. The foreign policy conception laid out by Adams ensured that America’s only concern was “staying out of foreign imperial entanglements” as Washington had earlier warned and keeping foreign imperial interests out of the Americas. The idea of projecting power onto the weak or subduing other cultures was anathema to this genuinely American principle.

A major battle which has been intentionally obscured from history books took place in the wake of Lincoln’s murder and the re-ascension of the City of London-backed slave power during the decades after the Union victory of 1865. On the one hand America’s role in the emerging global family of nations was being shaped by followers of Lincoln who wished to usher in an age of win-win cooperation. Such an anti-Darwinian system which Adams called “a community of principle” asserted that each nation had the right to sovereign banking controls over private finance, productive credit emissions tied to internal improvements with a focus on continental (rail/road) development, industrial progress and full spectrum economies. Adherants of this program included Russia’s Sergei Witte and Alexander II, Germany’s Otto von Bismarck, France’s Sadi Carnot, and leading figures within Japan’s Meiji Restoration.

On the other hand, “eastern establishment families” of the USA more loyal to the gods of money, hereditary institutions and the vast international empire of Britain saw America’s destiny tied to an imperial global partnership with the Mother country. These two opposing paradigms within America have defined two opposing views of “progress”, “value”, “self-interest” and “law” which have continued to shape the world over 150 years later.

William Gilpin vs Alfred Mahan: Two Paradigms Clash

A champion of the former traditionally American outlook who rose to the international scene was William Gilpin (1813-1894). Gilpin hailed from a patriotic family of nation builders whose patriarch Thomas Gilpin was a close ally of Benjamin Franklin and leading member of Franklin’s Philosophical Society. William Gilpin was famous for his advocacy of America’s trans continental railway whose construction he proselytized as early as 1845 (it was finally begun by Lincoln during the Civil War and completed in 1869 as I outlined in my previous paper How to Save a Dying Republic [LINK]).

In his thousands of speeches and writings, Gilpin made it known that he understood America’s destiny to be inextricably tied to the ancient civilization of China- not to impose opium as the British and their American lackies were want to do, but to learn from and even emulate!

In 1852, Gilpin stated:

“Salvation must come to America from China, and this consists in the introduction of the “Chinese constitution” viz. the “patriarchal democracy of the Celestial Empire”. The political life of the United States is through European influences, in a state of complete demoralization, and the Chinese Constitution alone contains elements of regeneration. For this reason, a railroad to the Pacific is of such vast importance, since by its means the Chinese trade will be conducted straight across the North American continent. This trade must bring in its train Chinese civilization. All that is usually alleged against China is mere calumny spread purposefully, just like those calumnies which are circulated in Europe about the United States”.

With Lincoln’s 1861 presidential victory, Gilpin became Lincoln’s bodyguard and ensured the president survived his first assassination attempt en route to Washington from Illinois. During the Civil War, Gilpin was made Colorado’s first Governor where he successfully stopped the southern power from opening up a western front during the war of secession (applying Lincoln’s greenback system to finance his army on a state level) and winning the “Battle of Glorieta Pass”, thus saving the union.

After the war Gilpin became a leading advocate of the internationalization of the “American system of political economy” which Lincoln applied vigorously during his short-lived presidency. Citing the success of Lincoln’s system, Gilpin said: “No amount of argument will make America adopt old world theories… To rely upon herself, to develop her own resources, to manufacture everything that can possibly be manufactured within her territory- this is and has been the policy of the USA from the time of Alexander Hamilton to that of Henry Clay and thence to our own days”.

Throughout his speeches Gilpin emphasizes the role of a U.S.-Russia alliance: “It is a simple and plain proposition that Russia and the United States, each having broad, uninhabited areas and limitless undeveloped resources, would by the expenditure of 2 or 3 hundred millions apiece for a highway of the nations threw their now waste places, add a hundredfold to their wealth and power and influence”

And seeing in China’s potential the means to re-enliven the world- including the decadent and corrupt culture of Europe: “In Asia a civilization resting on a basis of remote antiquity has had, indeed, a long pause, but a certain civilization- although hitherto hermetically sealed up has continued to exist. The ancient Asiatic colossus, in a certain sense, needed only to be awakened to new life and European culture finds a basis there on which it can build future reforms.”

In opposition to the outdated British controls of “chock points” on the seas which kept the world under the clutches of the might of London, Gilpin advocated loudly for a system of internal improvements, rail development, and growth of the innate goodness of all cultures and people through scientific and technological progress. Once a global system of mutual development of rail were established, Gilpin stated “in the shipment of many kinds of raw and manufactured goods, it will largely supersede the ocean traffic of Great Britain, in whose hands is now carrying the trade of the world.”

Gilpin’s vision was most clearly laid out in his 1890 magnum opus “The Cosmopolitan Railway” which featured designs for development corridors across all continents united by a “community of principle”.

Echoing the win-win philosophy of Xi Jinping’s New Silk Road today, Gilpin stated:

“The cosmopolitan railway will make the whole world one community. It will reduce the separate nations to families of our great nation… From extended intercommunication will arise a wider intercourse of human ideas and as the result, logical and philosophical reciprocities, which will become the germs for innumerable new developments; for in the track of intercommunication, enterprise and invention invariably follow and whatever facilitates one stimulates every other agency of progress.”

Mahan Derails America’s Anti-Imperial Identity

Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914) represented an opposing paradigm which true American statesmen like Lincoln, Secretary of State James Blaine, William Seward, President Grant, William Garfield, and McKinley detested. Sadly, with McKinley’s murder (run by an anarchist ring with ties to British Intelligence) and the rise of Teddy Roosevelt in 1901, it was not Gilpin’s but rather Mahan’s worldview which became the dominant foreign policy doctrine for the next 120 years (despite a few brief respites under FDR and JFK).

Mahan is commonly credited for being a co-founder of modern geopolitics and an inspiration for Halford Mackinder. Having graduated from West Point’s naval academy in 1859, Mahan soon became renowned as a total failure in actual combat having crashed warships repeatedly into moving and stationary objects during the Civil War. Since reality was not his forte, Mahan focused his post-war career on Ivory tower theorizing gushing over maps of the world and fawning over Britain’s power as a force of world history.

His “Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783 published in the same year that Gilpin published his Cosmopolitan Railway (1890) was a total break from the spirit of win-win cooperation that defined America’s foreign policy. According to the Diplomat, this book soon “became the bible for many navies around the world” with the Kaiser of Germany (now released from the influence of the great rail-loving statesman Otto von Bismarck whom he fired in 1890) demanding all of his offers read. Later Teddy Roosevelt ordered copies for every member of Congress. In Mahan’s book, the geopolitician continuously asserts his belief that it is America’s destiny to succeed the British Empire.

Taking the British imperial definition of “commerce” which uses free trade as a cover for the military dominance of weak nations (open borders and turning off protectionism simply makes a people easier to rob), Mahan attempts to argue that America need not continue to adhere to “outdated” habits like the Monroe doctrine since the new order of world empires demands America stay relevant in a world of sea power and empire. Mahan writes: “The advance of Russia in Asia, in the division of Africa, in the colonial ambitions of France and in the British idea of Imperial Federation, now fast assuming concrete shape in practical combined action in South Africa” demands that the USA act accordingly.

Attempting to refute the “outdated habits” of rail development which consume so many foolish statesmen around the globe, Mahan states: “a railway competes in vain with a river… because more facile and copious, water traffic is for equal distances much cheaper and because cheaper, more useful”. Like those attacking today’s Belt and Road Initiative, the power of railways is that their returns are not measurable by simple monetary terms, but are rather QUALITATIVE. The long-term construction of rail systems not only unite divided people, increase manufacturing and industrial corridors but also induce closer powers of association and interchange between agriculture and urban producers. These processes uplift national productive powers building full spectrum economies and also a culture’s capacity for creative thought.

The attempt made to justify sea traffic merely because “larger amounts of goods can be shipped” is purely quantitative and monetaristic sophistry devoid of any science of real value.

While Gilpin celebrates the successful awakening of China and other great nations of the world, in the Problem of Asia (1901) Mahan says: “It is scarcely desirable that so vast a proportion of mankind as the Chinese constitute should be animated by but one spirit”. Should China “burst her barriers eastward, it would be impossible to exaggerate the momentous issues dependant upon a firm hold of the Hawaiian islands by a great civilized maritime power.”

Mahan’s adherence to social Darwinism is present throughout his works as he defines the political differences of the 3 primary branches of humanity (Teutonic, Slavic and Asiatic) as purely rooted in the intrinsic inferiority or superiority of their race saying: “There are well recognized racial divergencies which find concrete expression in differences equally marked of political institution, of social progress and of individual development. These differences are… deep seated in the racial constitution and partly the result of the environment”. Mahan goes onto restate his belief that unlike the superior Teutonics “the Oriental, whether national or individual does not change” and “the East does not progress”.

Calling China a carcass to be devoured by an American eagle, Mahan writes: “If life departs, a carcass can be utilized only by dissection or for food; the gathering to it of the eagles is a natural law, of which it is bootless to complain… the onward movement of the world has to be accepted as a fact.”

Championing an Anglo American alliance needed to subdue and “civilize” China as part of the post-Boxer Rebellion, Mahan says “of all the nations we shall meet in the East, Great Britain is the one with which we have by far the most in common in the nature of our interests there and in our standards of law and justice”.

In case there was any doubt in the minds of Mahan’s readers as to the MEANS which America should assert its dominance onto China, Mahan makes clear his belief that progress is caused by 1) force and 2) war: “That such a process should be underlain by force… on the part of outside influences, force of opposition among the latter themselves [speaking of the colonial European monarchies racing to carve up China in 1901 -ed] may be regrettable, but it is only a repetition of all history… Every step forward in the march that has opened in China to trade has been gained by pressure; the most important have been the result of actual war.”

A Last Anti-Imperial Push

The chaos induced by the anti-foreigner Boxer Rebellion of 1899 which spread quickly across China resulted a heated battle between imperial and anti-imperial forces in both Russia and the USA. Where Transport Minister Sergei Witte who spearheaded the development of the Trans Siberian rail line (1890-1905) tried to avoid military entanglement, McKinley was busy doing the same.

The boxers soon attacked the Manchurian rail connecting Russia to China by land and Witte succumbed to pressure to finally send in troops. The reformers of China who attempted to modernize with American and Russian assistance under Emperor Kuang Hsu and Li Hung Chang fell from power as total anarchy reigned. The outcome of the Boxer chaos involved the imperial powers of France, Germany and England demanding immense financial reparations, ownership of Chinese territory and mass executions of the Boxers.

While McKinley is often blamed for America’s imperial turn, the reality is just the opposite.

The Spanish-American war begun in 1898 was actually launched unilaterally by Anglophilic racist Theodore Roosevelt who used the 4 hour window he had while Undersecretary of the Navy (while the actual Secretary was out of Washington) to send orders to Captain Dewey of the Pacific fleet to engage in a fight with the Spanish over their Philippine territories. McKinley had resisted the war hawks until that point but found himself finally bending to the momentum. In China, McKinley, like Witte worked desperately to reject taking territory resulting in great fears from the British oligarchy that a U.S.-Russia alliance led by McKinley and Witte was immanent.

The assassination of McKinley on September 18, 1901 catapulted Mahan-loving Vice President Teddy Roosevelt into high office, who enmeshed America into a new epoch of Anglo-American imperialism abroad, a growth of eugenics and segregation at home and the creation of an independent police state agency called the FBI.

As Sieff writes: “Roosevelt devoted his next eight years in the presidency and the rest of his life to integrating the United States and the British Empire into a seamless web of racial imperialist oppression that dominated Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and Asia and that destroyed the cultural history and heritage of the Native North American nations.”

In Russia, the 1902 Anglo-Japan Treaty led to the disastrous Japan-Russo war of 1905 which devastated the Russian navy, ended the political career of Sergei Witte and threw Russia into chaos leading to the fall of the Romanovs (Czar Nicholas II was the last statesman occupying high office that this author is aware of to have actively promoted the Bering Strait Tunnel rail connection in 1906. It wasn’t until FDR’s Vice President Henry Wallace met with Foreign Minister Molotov in 1942 that the idea resurfaced once more).

While the “open door” rape of the China was attempted by the Anglo-Americans, a fortunate rear guard maneuver orchestrated by another follower of Abraham Lincoln named Sun Yat-sen resulted in a surprise overthrow of the Manchu dynasty in 1911 and the institution of the Republic of China with Sun Yat-sen as the acting President. While Sun Yat-sen sided with Gilpin and Lincoln in opposition to the Mahanists on the issue of rail and industrial development (illustrated in his extraordinary 1920 International Development of China program), the intrigues that sank the world into World War I made any hopes of this early development of China impossible in Sun Yat-sen’s lifetime.

Today’s Belt and Road Initiative, and strategic friendship established between Russia and China has re-awoken the forgotten vision of William Gilpin for a world of cooperating sovereign nation states. Does President Trump have the moral and intellectual fortitude to keep his nation from disintegrating long enough to accept a Russia-U.S.-China alliance needed to revive McKinley’s American System or will we slip into a new World War?

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

While I have no great novel contribution to offer in that growing array of hypotheses (which are slowly turning into noise), I would like to share an insight which addresses a too-often-overlooked aspect of the role of Lebanon in the Great Game. Before proceeding, it is useful to hold in the mind several points of certainty:

1) The official narrative of a chance mishap of Turkish fireworks instigating the detonation of the 2700 tons of ammonium nitrate which had been sitting at the Port of Beirut for six years is entirely unbelievable.

2) This event should not considered in any way separated from the anomalously large pattern of explosions and arson which have spread across the Arab and African worlds in recent weeks.

3) This pattern of chaos must itself be seen in the context of the clash between two systems: The collapsing NATO unipolar alliance on the one side and the New Silk Road-led multipolar alliance on the other.

The Matter of Causality

The Middle East has been labelled the “geopolitical pivot” of the world island by devout adherents to the Hobbesian worldview of Halford Mackinder such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger and Bernard Lewis. Today it is understood that whomever can either stabilize or destabilize this region can control the levers for the “world island” (Africa, Europe, and Eurasia)… and as Mackinder once said “who controls the world island, controls the world.”

In the case of Lebanon, the role that this region plays as “Pearl on the New Silk Road”, and intersection of all major civilizations of the globe, has shaped global policy considerations in Washington, London and Israel for the past several years. The destructive events underway Lebanon cannot be separated from the breathtaking spread of Belt and Road projects across Iraq, Iran, Syria and other Arab nations.

More than Coincidence

In the weeks surrounding the Lebanon disaster, Iran found herself the target of a vicious sequence of attacks as arson and explosions were unleashed beginning with the June 26 explosion at the Khojir Missile production complex, the June 30 explosion at a medical clinic killing 19, a July 2 explosion at the Natanz nuclear facility which set Iran’s centrifuge production schedule back by months and the July 15 fires at the Bushehr Aluminum plant. Additionally, and the UAE experienced its own anomalous fires which ravaged one of the most important markets in Dubai (luckily empty due to Covid-19) on August 5.

If any of these anomalies were taken individually, “chance” could always be blamed as culprit. However when one takes them all together and recognizes the revolutionary BRI-connected agreements currently being finalized between both China and Russia with Iran does one get a solid idea of the deeper causality underlying these apparently separate situations of chaos.

Iran and the New Silk Road

The fact is that the long awaited $400 billion China-Iran economic and security pact which is in its final stages of negotiation includes not only important oil for infrastructure agreements which will extend advanced rail and new energy grids to Iran. This program also includes an important military/security partnership which will dramatically transform the “rules of the game” in the middle east for generations. Elements of this pact include not only defense and intelligence sharing infrastructure, but also also bolster China’s new digital currency the e-RMB which will circumvent western controls on trade.

Meanwhile Russia’s announced extension of the 20 year security/economic partnership agreement first signed in 2001 by Presidents Rouhani and Putin will certainly be finalized in the coming months. Iran has also made it’s interests in acquiring Russia’s S400 system well known and all geopoliticians understand well that this system which is spreading fast across all of Eurasia from Turkey to South Korea renders America’s F-35s and THAAD missile systems impotent and obsolete.

If the China-Russia-Iran triangle can be firmly established, then not only does America’s sanctions regime policy disintegrate, but a vital platform of Middle Eastern development will be established to better spearhead the growth of transport and advanced development corridors from China to the east (and Africa) along the New Silk Road. Since November 2018 an Iran-Iraq-Syria railway has taken great strides towards implementation as part of middle east reconstruction funded by Iran and ultimately connecting to Syria’s Lattakia Port as a hub to the Mediterranean and a 32km Shalamcheh-Bashra railway is in an advanced phase of development with Iran’s Minister of Roads and Urban Development Abbas Ahmad stating:

“Iran’s railway system is linked to railways of central Asia, China and Russia and if the 32 km Shalamcheh-Basra railway will be constructed, Iraq can transfer goods and passengers to Russia and China and vice versa.”

While the 32 km rail line would be phase one, the 2^nd phase is scheduled to be a 1545 km rail and highway to the Syrian Port.

The Iran-Iraq-Syria regional participation in the broader New Silk Road is incredibly important, especially since Iraq signed a September 2019 Memorandum of Understanding to join the BRI under a new infrastructure-for-oil program. This plan involves China’s reconstruction of the war-torn region under a multiphase program of hard infrastructure (rail, roads, energy and water projects), and soft infrastructure (hospitals, schools and cultural centers).

Similarly, China has made it intention to bring real reconstruction programs to Syria are also well known and President Bashar Al Assad’s long overdue Four Seas Strategy first announced in 2004 (and sabotaged with the Arab Spring) is finally coming back on line. President Assad had won 7 countries over to sign onto it’s construction by 2010 and entailed connecting all four major water systems (Mediterranean, Caspian, Black Sea, and Persian Gulf) together via rail and infrastructure corridors as a driver for win-win cooperation and regional modernization. Assad had said of the project in 2009 “once we link these four seas, we become the unavoidable intersection of the whole world in investment, transport and more.”

A fuller video of this important project can be viewed here:

Lebanon: Pearl of the New Silk Road

Lebanon’s participation in this long-awaited process should be obvious to all, sharing as it does a major border with Syria, hosts 1.5 million Syrian refugees and also a vital port to the Mediterranean making it a keystone of east-west development. Connecting this emerging zone of development to Africa where the Belt and Road has emerged as a leading force of change and hope in recent years, Lebanon finds itself among the most strategic keystones.

Designs for rail connecting Lebanon’s Port of Tripoli through Jordan and thence through Egypt would be create a new positive field of prosperity which could dramatically change the rules of the Middle East and Africa forever.

On June 17, 2020 the Chinese Embassy publicized an offer to extend BRI projects to Lebanon featuring a modern railway connecting coastal cities in the north with Tripoli through Beirut to Naquora in the south. China’s National Machinery IMP/EXP Corporation also offered the construction of three new power plants of 700 MW each, a new national energy grid and port modernization. The Embassy’s press release stated: “The Chinese side is ready to carry out practical cooperation actively with the Lebanese side on the basis of equality and mutual benefit in the framework of joint work to build the Belt and Road… China is committed to cooperation with other nations mainly through the role of its companies, the leading role of the market, and the catalytic role of government and commercial operation. Chinees companies continue to follow with interest the opportunities of cooperation in infrastructure and other fields in Lebanon.”

These offers were applauded by Hassan Nasrallah (leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah and partner in the coalition government) who had been an outspoken advocate of Lebanon’s participation in the BRI for years. Nasrallah has also advocated liberating Lebanon from the IMF whose structural adjustments and conditionality-laden investments have resulted in the small country’s debt exploding to over 170% of its GDP with nothing to show for it.

It is noteworthy that the same day China made its offers known publicly, Washington imposed the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act to punish all who wish to trade with Syria which itself has not only further crushed Syria’s cries for economic reconstruction, but had taken direct aim at Lebanon which sees 90% of Syrian goods flow through its borders to the Mediterranean.

When Chinese delegations first made their vision for the BRI’s extension to Lebanon known in March 2019 where the Arab Highway from Beirut to Damascus and rail to China was floated, western stooge Saad Al Hariri said no, preferring instead to sign onto a $10 billion IMF plan. Over a year later, not one iota of infrastructure was built. Secretary of State Pompeo played a major role at keeping Lebanon from “going east” as Nasrallah and even President Aoun had desired when he stated in a March 2019 press conference “Lebanon and the Lebanese people face a choice: bravely move forward as an independent and proud nation or allow the dark ambitions of Iran and Hezbollah to dictate your future.”

Pompeo’s obsessive drive to eliminate Hezbollah and especially the influence of Nasrallah in Lebanon has less to do with any perceived threat Israel claims to its existence and everything with Hezbollah and Iran’s embrace of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

When Chinese offers were renewed in June 2020, Pompeo’s stooge David Schenker (Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs) gave a June 23 interview stating that Hezbollah “is not an organization that seeks reform, but rather one that lives on corruption”. Schenker warned Lebanon from falling into the “China Trap” and said that Nasrallah’s demands that Lebanon “look east” was “shocking”.

Without going into a lengthy refutation of the “China debt trap” argument (which is really just the effect of western imperialists projecting their own dirty practices onto China’s BRI), it is sufficient to say that it is a 100% myth. A summary overview of Chinese investments in Africa which are numerically similar to American investments demonstrates that the difference is found entirely in QUALITY as China uniquely invests in real construction, manufacturing and even African banking which are verboten by all imperialists who only wish to use Africa as a looting ground for cheap resources and cheaper labor.

Speaking to this issue, and the hope for Lebanon more broadly the BRIX Sweden’s Hussein Askary stated:

“It is becoming obvious that a tiny country like Lebanon, but fully sovereign and independent can break the back of a global empire by opting to follow the path of progress, national sovereignty and international cooperation according to the win-win model offered by China. This does not mean cutting all bridges to the west. It is necessary to keep those that are in the true interest of Lebanon and its people. If the U.S. and Europe wish to change their policies and join China in offering Lebanon power, transport, water and agro-industrial investments, the Lebanese people and leadership would take them with open arms”.

The author gave a recent interview on this topic and can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

The greatest moment of decision (until now) occurred in June 2019 when elections resulted in a three-way split between a pro-Russian Socialist Party, the pro-EU ACUM and another pro-western Democratic Party run by the arch Moldavian kleptocrat Vladimir Plahotniuc.

Vlad Plahotniuc: Deep State Tool and Force of Regime Change

A renowned kleptocrat whom by all accounts is known as the richest man in Moldova, Plahotniuc was not only a media and advertising mogul controlling the vast majority of the news, and entertainment of the small nation, but was also a power in Moldova’s banking, hotel and services industry who, with the support of Victoria Nuland, took charge of the pro-EU Democratic Party from December 2016. Although his highest political office was Deputy Speaker of Parliament, it was known by all, that Plahotniuc was the hidden hand controlling the state and aspired to make that power official by becoming Prime Minister.

During the dark days of the Obama era, Plahotniuc interfaced closely with Asif Chaudhry (U.S. Ambassador to Moldova from 2008-2011) who acted as power broker and mediator during the tumultuous period of change that saw the elimination of the pro-Russian Communist Party and the rise of the pro-Euro Integration movement under the Democratic Party in the wake of the 2009 “Twitter Revolution” (sometimes called the “revolution of Twits”). This crisis saw a near color revolution as 30 000 Jacobin youth in Chisinau aspired to overthrow the government by declaring the recent elections to be fraudulent. The slogans shouted by the mob included “we want Europe”, “we are Romanians” and “down with Communism”. Romania had joined NATO in 2004 and the movement to absorb Moldova into Romania was supported by many in the west wishing to see NATO’s unabated growth.

Beginning in April 7, 2009, these mobs took over (and set fire to) government buildings and replaced Moldovan flags with Romanian and European Union flags. While this effort was quashed by crackdowns by police, a taste of the potential for regime change was felt by all and then-President Vladimir Voronin called it a “coup d’etat”.

In hindsight, we can observe the growth of the media empire under the control of Plahotniuc and the vast investments into “democracy building” by the National Endowment of Democracy to get a sense of the causal hand behind these events, though at the time the culprits never came to light.

One thing is clear: The American State Department’s hand pervaded this story as Ambassador Chaudhry (connected closely to Victoria Nuland according to Wikileaks emails), was a major power broker and brags that his work in carrying out Moldovan democracy reforms during this time was the most rewarding experience of his career.

In the wake of this attempted coup, three pro-western opposition parties created the Alliance for European Integration winning 53 seats and pushing out the Communist Party from power.

By 2014, the long-sought for EU association agreements were signed by Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine with NATO’s bureaucrats salivating at the prospect of assimilating all three. At this time, Ukraine’s pro-Russian government had just fallen to its own color revolution and the new regime of Yatseniuk was calling for speedy NATO entry. Even though its 1994 Constitution prevented it, Moldova was already a part of the NATO Partnership for Peace Program and had participated in NATO’s Kosovo Force since 2014. A change in Constitution to permit for NATO entry by way of Euro integration (or total regime change) was not a huge stretch of the imagination at this point.

During this time high level Obama-era regime change agents like Joe Biden and John McCain made stops in Moldova and encouraged speedy western integration, meeting with kleptocrats like Plahotniuc and celebrating the new age of western “liberalism” that would transform the eastern bloc.

With such a powerful machine supporting them, Plahotniuc and other local Moldovan kleptocrats had every reason to feel as though they had the power of gods. The lords of high finance of London and Wall Street had ensured their unchallenged success for years, and with Moldova’s full integration into the NATO/EU cage nothing would hold them back… but with this hubris came a fair dose of sloppiness.

“The Theft of the Century” and Its Aftermath

Working closely with Israeli-Moldovan businessman Ilan Shor and fellow oligarchs Vyacheslav Platon and Vlad Filat, Plahotniuc carried out a blatant “theft of the century” to the tune of $1 billion stolen from Moldova (representing 1/8^th of the nation’s GDP) between 2011-2014. The model was simple and based on the use of offshore shell companies which laundered money and received fraudulent loans issued by the Moldovan Central Bank. That bank had itself taken over three major financial institutions (the Banca de Economii, Unibank and Banca Sociala) which extended fraudulent loans and businesses controlled by Ilan Shor and others within Plahotniuc’s network to the tune of $1 billion. $100 million were used directly by Plahotniuc to purchase, banks, businesses, hotels and other luxury real estate around Europe and Moldova.

Even though the facts of this fraud could not long be kept secret, Plahotniuc’s control on the levers of justice (especially the Constitutional Court which is packed with his partisans) ensured that little could be done to bring the oligarch to justice.

Vlad Filat was sacrificed by his former partner in 2016 and given 3 years in prison for bribes and participation in the heist while Ilan Shor was charged with laundering and embezzlement in abstentia though never saw a jail cell. In April 2017, Vyacheslav Platon was found guilty and given 18 years in prison but Plahotniuc never faced a single charge in Moldova. Things were a bit different elsewhere however and in 2017, Moscow’s Basmanny Court found the oligarch guilty of attempted murder.

In 2019, a Moscow court found Plahotniuc guilty of drug trafficking and money laundering and he was also charged with 28 counts of smuggling and sales of drugs (mostly hashish from North Africa)- and to these charges Plahotniuc obviously cried “Russian fantasies and fake news”.

During the hot phase of blowback during 2016, Plahotniuc was a guest of the pro-NATO Atlantic Council in Washington where he met with Victoria Nuland and other members of the Obama regime change party. The ‘Atlantic Council Moldova Program’ was also advancing a steady stream of pro-NATO propaganda funded by Jashi’s Trans Oil Group (on whose board sat former U.S. Ambassador Chaudhry).

Upon his return from America, Plahotniuc speedily moved to take full control of the Democratic Party.

In spite of his control of mass media, news of this “theft of the century” spread widely, and in an impoverished nation ranked lowest on the European Union poverty index where nearly 50% of the male population lives and works abroad as cheap labor, public tolerance for Plahotniuc’s sank to new lows with a 96% disapproval rating. The Democratic Party machine fell from favor and the pro-Russian Socialist Party again took power under Igor Dodon.

President Dodon wasted no time accelerating Moldova’s observer status in the Eurasian Economic Union which was made official on March 14, 2018 when Dodon called for a pro-Europe and pro-Russia policy (a blasphemy for some technocrats). At this time, Putin laid out the philosophy of EU-EAEU cooperation saying: “The Eurasian Union will be built on universal integration principles as an integral part of a harmonious community of economies from Lisbon to Vladivostok.”

In a February 2020 interview, Dodon echoed this orientation stating: “I believe in a big Europe, from Lisbon to Vladivostok. It was Charles de Gaulle who came up with this idea and its repeated often by various world leaders. I think this is the only solution to make Europe stronger.”

This had to be stopped.

From 2017-2019, the Plahotniuk apparatus licked its wounds, regrouped, and waited for the right moment to strike… and on June 7, 2019 that moment came.

Plahotniuc Attacks and Trips

Three months had passed since the February 2019 elections and a government had not yet formed. The three opposing parties that each won over 20% of the votes included Plahotniuc Democratic Party, the pro-EU ACUM party of PM Maia Sandu and the Socialist Party of Igor Dodon. Sandu’s role as a former World Bank executive didn’t bode well, but luckily her recognition that an alliance with Plahotniuc was political suicide kept her from making a devils pact and at the last minute chose to form a coalition government with Dodon in defense of the nation’s true interests where both parties united in the common cause to flush the swamp of oligarchs.

This alliance was arranged at the same moment that Plahotniuc’s Constitutional Court deemed the February elections invalid (party leaders have 3 months to shape a new government after elections). The court demanded that Dodon be deposed as President (for failing to call new elections), and the new coalition government declared null and void. Former PM Pavel Filip refused to recognize the new government calling it illegal and demanding a new election while Plahotniuc waited with bated breath for his moment to take over.

From June 7-15^th a dual power struggle erupted and with the highest court in the land backing regime change, it wasn’t looking good. The Democrats staged demonstrations and blocked state buildings for days. Everything was in place for a coup.

The only missing ingredient was the expected American support that had always been there for Plahotniuk and the Trans Oil Machine which ran Moldova for decades.

Then something unexpected happened.

On June 15, 2019 Moldova’s Democratic Party officially announced that their leader had left the country to visit family “for a couple of days”. Over a year later, the oligarch still has not returned knowing that to do so could mean decades in a Moldovan (and possibly even Russian) prison.

Although there are many facets to this plot twist that are still hidden from public view, TASS’s coverage on June 15 made clear that the Democratic Party “leaders had never stopped to hope for Washington’s support in the confrontation with the President, parliament and Sandhu cabinet, but received none.”

U.S. Ambassador Horgan revealed in December 2019 that Plahotniuc’s departure was the result of his news that the USA would not help him.

Without this support, all hope was lost.

Within a month PM Sandu described the anti-corruption crackdown underway saying: “We are in the process of liberating this captured state. The servants of the Plahotniuc regime are leaving, one after the other.” Although Plahotniuc may have been a corrupt beast, he was no dummy and recognized the Transparency International report published in June 2019 outlining his sordid role in the $1 billion bank theft was not going to disappear.

By August 2019, a Russian arrest warrant was unveiled after Plahotniuc was tried in abstentia in Moscow for “creating and participating in criminal groups” and “carrying out illegal transactions in foreign currencies and rubles using fake documents”- referring to $569 million scheme that turned Moldova into a laundromat using the oligarch’s offshore shell companies. It was at this time that the oligarch applied officially for asylum in the USA.

As Sandu was replaced by PM Igor Chicu in November 2019, the cleaning of the swamp continued in full force with the new Prosecutor General Alexandru Stoianoglo tasked with bringing Plahotniuc to justice. In May 2020, Moldovan prosecutors charged Plahotniuc again and sought extradition from the USA where he has been holed up illegally in Florida.

Why do I say “illegally”?

Because on January 9, 2020, the USA State Department annulled his (and his family’s) VISA, with Pompeo declaring in a public statement four days later:

 “Today, I am designating former Moldovan official and oligarch Vladimir Plahotniuc due to his involvement in significant corruption. In his official capacity, Plahotniuc was involved in corrupt acts that undermined the rule of law and severely compromised the independence of democratic institutions in Moldova… Once the Secretary of State designates officials of foreign governments for their involvement, directly or indirectly, in significant corruption, those individuals and their immediate family members are ineligible for visas to the United States.”

The fearful oligarch has taken the unprecedented decision to launch a last Hail Mary effort to save his skin by suing the U.S. State Department on June 11 2020 saying “this action arises out of an unlawful and unjustified designation as ‘undesirable’ entered against Vladimir Plahotniuk and his immediate family members by the State Department” adding without a shred of evidence that Putin even attempted to kill him using Albanian hitmen on several occasions.

The question now remains:

Who is protecting Plahotniuc?

It is obvious that the Obama-era deep state that ran Moldova’s 2009-2016 EU/NATO integration insanity is no longer the sole force driving U.S. foreign policy and a fight between this apparatus and the Trump presidency has been waging for four years. Plahotniuc’s current status in Florida, in spite of an undesirable status and with no VISA indicates powerful forces are protecting him. Both in America and abroad alike.

The fact that within the same Florida luxury complex that Plahotniuc has been seen living in, also contains a $2.2 million condo owned by Trans Oil executive Dmitriy Kurilo should be taken seriously. The fact that Kurilo’s purchase was carried out by Trans Oil president Vaja Jhashi to whom Kurilo gave powers of attorney should also be considered. The connection of these figures to former U.S. Ambassador Asif Chaudhry who sits on Trans Oil’s board of directors and last served as the architect of Obama’s “Asia Pivot” while serving as advisor to the Chief of the NAVY in the Pentagon from 2011-2014 should also not be ignored. Lastly the fact that the Trans Oil group’s monopoly over Moldovan agriculture was made possible by multimillion-dollar U.S. government loans granted to the company while Chaudhry was the American Ambassador to Moldova is worth holding in mind.

We already know there are many two faced figures within the Trump presidency who project one patriotic face publicly yet who have actively worked against Trump’s oft-stated desires to have “good relations with Russia and China”, rebuild American manufacturing and end the “forever wars”. Bolton and Bannon were two of them, but Pompeo himself is another. Even former director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell had worked for Plahotniuc on various occasions.

Then there is the matter of international deep state support. For example, France’s Interpol has stalled repeatedly from issuing an international arrest warrant even though both Russian and Moldovan governments have made legitimate requests. Why this resistance? Even the European Parliament has passed a resolution in 2018 calling Moldova “a state captured by oligarchic interests”- making Interpol’s resistance ever more odd.

So where does Moldova go from here?

Regardless of whether or not Plahotniuc is extradited sooner or later, the game is most certainly up, and beginning in late 2019, Moldova began to reclaim its ancient heritage as a keystone in China’s East-West Silk Road as two major infrastructure deals worth $400 million were signed with China, including two major highways: One encircling Chisinau and the other connecting to Ukraine.

President Dodon beautifully expressed his understanding of this process in March 2020 saying:

“We should acknowledge that this pandemic has shown ‘who is who,’ who is a real friend and who will be always by our side in need, even if they also face hard times… I will cite as an example Russia and China here because these were the first countries that responded to our request.”

“We enjoy strategic partnership and strategic dialogue at the levels of presidents, prime ministers, and parliament speakers… I think one of the major achievements is that we have got rid of the oligarch regime,” he said. “An important result is that we started carrying out a balanced foreign policy. Even against the background of those deals signed with the European Union, we managed to obtain an observer status in the Eurasian Economic Union.”

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com