There are reasons to be skeptical. After decades of stonewalling on the issue, suddenly American military chiefs appear to be giving credence to claims of UFOs invading Earth. Several viral video clips purporting to show extraordinary flying technology have been “confirmed” by the Pentagon as authentic. The Pentagon move is unprecedented.

The videos of the Unidentified Flying Objects were taken by U.S. air force flight crews or by naval surveillance and subsequently “leaked” to the public. The question is: were the “leaks” authorized by Pentagon spooks to stoke the public imagination of visitors from space? The Pentagon doesn’t actually say what it believes the UFOs are, only that the videos are “authentic”.

A Senate intelligence committee is to receive a report from the Department of Defense’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Task Force next month. That has also raised public interest in the possibility of alien life breaching our skies equipped with physics-defying technology far superior to existing supersonic jets and surveillance systems.

Several other questions come to mind that beg skepticism. Why does the phenomenon of UFOs or UAP only seem to be associated with the American military? This goes back decades to the speculation during the 1950s about aliens crashing at Roswell in New Mexico. Why is it that only the American military seems privy to such strange encounters? Why not the Russian or Chinese military which would have comparable detection technology to the Americans but they don’t seem to have made any public disclosures on alien encounters? Such a discrepancy is implausible unless we believe that life-forms from lightyears away have a fixation solely on the United States. That’s intergalactic American “exceptionalism” for you!

Also, the alleged sightings of UFOs invariably are associated with U.S. military training grounds or high-security areas.

Moreover, the released videos that have spurred renewed public interest in UFOs are always suspiciously of poor quality, grainy and low resolution. Several researchers, such as Mick West, have cogently debunked the videos as optical illusions. That’s not to say that the U.S. air force or naval personnel were fabricating the images. They may genuinely believe that they were witnessing something extraordinary. But as rational optics experts have pointed out there are mundane explanations for seeming unusual aerial observations, such as drones or balloons drifting at high speed in differential wind conditions, or by the crew mistaking a far-off aircraft dipping over the horizon for an object they believe to be much closer.

The military people who take the videos in good – albeit misplaced – faith about what they are witnessing are not the same as the military or intelligence people who see an opportunity with the videos to exploit the public in a psychological operation.

Fomenting public anxieties, or even just curiosity, about aliens and super-technology is an expedient way to exert control over the population. At a time when governing authorities are being questioned by a distrustful public and when military-intelligence establishments are viewed as having lost a sense of purpose, what better way to realign public respect by getting them to fret over alien marauders from whom they need protection?

There is here a close analogy to the way foreign nations are portrayed as adversaries and enemies in order to marshal public support or least deference to the governing establishment and its military. We see this ploy played over and over again with regard to the U.S. and Western demonization of Russia and China as somehow conveying a malign intent towards Western societies. In other words, it’s a case of Cold War and UFOs from the same ideological launchpad, so to speak, in order to distract public attention from internal problems.

However, more worrying still is that there is a dangerous reinforcing crossover of the two propaganda realms. The fueling of UFO speculation is feeding directly into speculation that U.S. airspace is being invaded by high-tech weapons developed by Russia or China.

U.S. lawmakers are demanding answers from the Pentagon about whether the aerial “encounters” are advanced weaponry from foreign enemies who are surveilling the American homeland at will. Some U.S. air force aviators have recently expressed to the media a feeling of helplessness in the face of seeming superior technology.

At a time of heightened animosity towards Russia and China and febrile talk among Pentagon chiefs about the possibility of all-out war, it is not difficult to imagine, indeed it is disturbingly easy to imagine, how optical illusions about alien phenomena could trigger false alarms attributed to Russian or Chinese military incursions.

The stoking of UFO controversy appears to be a classic psyops perpetrated by U.S. military intelligence for the objective of population control. Its aim is to corral the citizenry under the authority of the state and for them to accept the protector function of “our” military. The big trouble is that the psyops with aliens are, in turn, risking the exacerbation of fears and tensions with Russia and China.

With all the Pentagon-assisted chatter, it is more likely that an F-18 squadron could mistake an errant weather balloon on the horizon for an alien spacecraft. And amid our new Cold War tensions, it is but a small conceptual step to further imagine that the UFO is not from outer space but rather is a Russian or Chinese hypersonic cruise missile heading towards the U.S. mainland.

“Military leaders are worried about the shrinking pool of young people who qualify for military service,” Gina Harkins reports at Military.com. “More than 70% of young Americans remain unable to join the military due to obesity, education problems, or crime and drug records.”

Mission: Readiness, a group of retired military officers, wants the US Department of Defense to create an “advisory committee on military recruitment,” with a view toward getting the next generation in shape so that they’re qualified, as the old saying goes, to “travel to exotic, distant lands; meet exciting, unusual people; and kill them.”

I’ve got a better idea: Instead of trying to trim fat off America’s adolescents, trim fat off the US Armed Forces.

The US military employs nearly 1.4 million active duty personnel and about 850,000 reservists.

The latest National Defense Authorization Act — vetoed by President Trump but looking likely as I write this to be passed over his objection — calls for $740 billion ($2,300 for every man, woman, and child in the country) in theoretically “defense”-related spending next year.

The US, which is separated by oceans from all credible potential enemies and hasn’t fought anything resembling a defensive war in 75 years, boasts the third largest (after India and China, far more populous countries with real adversaries on their borders), and far and away the most expensive, military apparatus on Earth.

While the US defense budget and the armed forces’ staffing levels could probably be cut by 90% without significantly degrading actual national defense capabilities, I understand the impulse to moderation.

So how about a 50% cut in military spending and active duty troop levels over five years, with an upward bump in reservist numbers to a full million?

That would leave the US with 700,000 active duty personnel (still the world’s fifth largest military), and still the world’s number one military big spender (about twice as much as China, three times as much as Saudi Arabia, and nearly five times as much as Russia or India).

With 2 million Americans reaching military age each year and some veterans re-enlisting, the Pentagon would have little problem finding the skinny, literate, non-criminal people it needs to fill its ranks.

Yes, some US arms manufacturers would take big hits to their lavish corporate welfare paychecks, but they could retool — every American taxpayer would be better off by about $1,250, meaning fatter markets for products that don’t kill people.

It’s time to put the Pentagon on a diet.

counterpunch.org

When President-elect Joe Biden takes office Jan 21 he will be faced with some very expensive problems, from bailing out the Covid-19 economy to getting a handle on climate change. Vaccinating over 300 million people will not be cheap, and wrestling the US  hydrocarbon-based economy in the direction of renewable energies will come with a hefty price tag. One place to find some of that would be to respond to Russian, Chinese and United Nations (UN) proposals to demilitarize space, heading off what will be an expensive–and destabilizing–arms race for the new high ground.

Last December the US Department of Defense (DOD) created the Space Force, although a major push to increase the military’s presence in space dates back to the Obama administration. In fact, space has always had a military aspect to it, and no country is more dependent on that dimension than the US. A virtual cloud of surveillance satellites spy on adversaries, tap into communications and monitor military maneuvers and weapons tests. It was a US Vela Hotel satellite that caught the Israelis and the South Africans secretly testing a nuclear warhead in the southern Indian Ocean in 1979.

While other countries have similar platforms in space, the US is the only country with a world-wide military presence, and it is increasingly dependent on satellites to enhance its armed forces. Such satellites allow drone operators to call in missile strikes from half a world away without risking the lives of pilots.

The US is not the only country with armed drones. Turkish and Israeli drones demonstrated their effectiveness in the recent war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, and scores of countries produce armed drones. But no other country wages war from tens of thousands of miles away. American drones stalk adversaries in Africa, South Asia and the Middle East piloted from air conditioned trailers in southern Nevada. “It’s only really the US that needs to conduct military operations anywhere in the world all the time against anyone,” says Brian Weeden of the Secure World Federation told Scientific American in the magazine’s November article, “Orbital Aggression: How do we prevent war in space?”

According to the DOD, it is the Russians and the Chinese who have taken the initiative to militarize space, although most of that is ancient news and a lot of it is based more on supposition than fact. Moscow, Beijing and Washington have long had the ability to take out an opponent’s satellites, and have demonstrated that on a number of occasions. It takes no great skill to do so. Satellites generally have very predictable orbits and speeds. Astrophysicist Laura Greco of the Union of Concerned Scientists calls them “sitting ducks.”

Satellites do, however, have the capacity to maneuver. Indeed, it was a recent encounter between a Russan Cosmos “inspection” satellite and a US spy satellite that kicked off the latest round of “the Russians are coming!” rhetoric from the Pentagon. The Americans accused the Cosmos of potentially threatening  the American satellite by moving close to it, although many independent observers shrug their shoulders. “That’s what an inspection satellite does,” says Weeden, “It is hard to see at this point why the US is making it a big deal.”

Because blaster rattling loosens Congressional purse strings.

China’s military and civilian space budget is estimated to be $8.4 billion, and Russia’s a modest $3 billion. In contrast, the US space budget is $48 billion and climbing and that figure doesn’t account for secret black budget items like the X-37B unmanned space plane.

The DOD also points to the fact that the Chinese have launched more satellites in the past year than the US, but that is a reflection of the fact that the US currently dominates space, both on the military and the civilian side. Other countries–like India and the European Union–are simply trying to catch up. Out of 3,200 live satellites currently in orbit, the US controls 1,327.

Space is, indeed, essential for the modern world. Satellites don’t just spy or direct drones, they are central to communication systems, banking, weather predictions and monitoring everything from climate change to tectonic plate movement. An actual war in space that destroyed the satellite networks would cause a worldwide blackout and likely lead to a ground war.

Which is why it is so important to sit down with Russia, China and the UN and work out a way to keep space a realm for peace not war. While there are treaties that cover weaponizing space, they are dated. The 1967 Treaty on Outer Space keeps nuclear weapons from being deployed, but doesn’t cover ground-launched or space-launched anti-satellite weapons, or how close a satellite has to get to another country’s satellite to be considered a threat?

In 2008, and again in 2014, Moscow and Beijing proposed a Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space Treaty. So far, the US has not formally responded, and rejected four resolutions proposed by the UN’s General Assembly on preventing the militarization of space. There have been informal talks between the Russsians and Americans, but the last three US administrations have essentially stonewalled serious discussions.

Of course, the US currently holds most of the cards, but that is shortsighted thinking. Adversaries always figure out how to overcome their disadvantages. The US was the first country to launch an anti-satellite weapon in 1959, but the Russians matched it four years later. China destroyed one of its old satellites in 2007, and India claims it has such a weapon.

But there is strong opposition to such an agreement in the Pentagon and the Congress, in part because of growing tensions between Russia, China and the US, and in part because of the power of corporations. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics stand to reap billions in profits by supplying the hardware to dominate space. Added to the formidable lobbying power of the major arms corporations is another layer of up and comers like Virgin Galactic, SpaceX and Blue Origin,

The Space Force also has bipartisan support. Some 188 Democrats joined 189 Republicans to pass the National Defense Authorization Act for 2020.

The creation of the Space Force has not exactly been met with open arms by the other military services. Each of the services have their own space-based systems and the budgets that go along with that, and they jealously guard their turf. For the time being Space Force is under the Air Force’s wing, but its budget is separate and few doubt that it will soon become a service in its own right.

At this point the outlay for the Force will be $200 billion over five years, but military budgets have a way of increasing geometrically. The initial outlay for the Reagan administration’s missile-intercepting Star War system was small, but it has eaten up over $200 billion to date and is still chugging along, in spite of the fact that it is characterized more for failure than success.

The Biden administration will have to make hard choices around the pandemic and climate change while continuing to spend close to $1 trillion a year on its military. Adding yet another military service when American states are reeling from the economic fallout of Covid-19, and the warming oceans are churning out superstorms, is something neither the US nor the world can afford.

dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com

The basic difference between the U.S. Government and its allies, on the one hand, and between Russia and China and their allies, on the other, is the same difference in either case: whereas the U.S. and its allies require other Governments to follow their instructions, and consider their own instructions to be moral demands (and thereby binding, actually commands instead of mere suggestions), Russia and China and their allies reject — on principle — any country’s dictating to another. They don’t consider it to be moral, at all, but instead profoundly immoral — they consider it to be imperialistic, dictatorial, bullying, hostile toward international democracy — and they simply won’t accept it; they reject it morally, outright. Iran, too, feels that way about the matter. So, too, do many other countries. That’s the basic difference: the imperialists versus the anti-imperialists.

In other words: the U.S. and its allies consider imperialism — the supposed right of a nation to command another nation — to be something that should be within the bounds of, and accepted by, international law. The U.S. Empire doesn’t call itself an “Empire,” but it is one, and its empire is therefore called instead “the Washington Consensus”, which is a “consensus” in hostility against whatever countries the U.S. Government wants to become regime-changed — to turn into an American colony. The “Washington Consensus” is actually an imposed ‘consensus’. It is a consensus against nations that disobey that ‘consensus’.

The very concept of the “Washington Consensus” was created in 1989 when Mikhail Gorbachev, President of the communist Soviet Union, was unwilling to apply the amount of force that might hold the Soviet Union together, and the anti-communist Revolutions of 1989 in the Soviet Union and in China made clear that communism was about to end in at least the Soviet sphere, and that consequently the American rationale for the Cold War — anti-communism — would soon end. So, America, having perpetrated many ‘anti-communist’ (but actually anti-independence, and in some cases even boldly anti-democracy) coups in Thailand 1948, Syria 1949, Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973, and many other lands, needed a changed ideological excuse, in order to continue building-out its Empire (not yet called “the Washington Consensus”); so, the “Washington Consensus” became, itself, the new excuse. This ‘consensus’ of the U.S. and its allies consists in the imposition of “libertarian” or “neo-liberal” economic policies, as being an international obligation for countries in the “developing world” to accept and apply (often called “austerity,” because it is austerity for the masses of that underdeveloped country’s citizens, so that foreign investors can reap the profits from it). This ‘consensus’ became the new ideological excuse to extend the American Empire. However, as the appeal of “neo-liberalism” began to wane (as a result of its increasingly bad international reputation), a new excuse was increasingly needed. “R2P,” or “Responsibility to Protect” the residents in other lands, became introduced, especially after around the year 2000, as the new, ‘humanitarian’, excuse for America and its vassal nations (‘allies’) to apply sanctions against, and even to invade and occupy, countries such as Iraq, Syria, and Venezuela — countries that, ‘just by coincidence’, happened to reject the Washington Consensus. This new excuse for America’s spending approximately half of the entire world’s annual military costs was more clearly putting forward the Washington Consensus as constituting the ‘real’ United Nations — the one that had a military force (and that didn’t have Russia, China, or any other recalcitrant nation, on any “Security Council”). The U.S. regime champions R2P as being a ‘humanitarian’ motivation behind such sanctions, coups, and invasions, for ‘regime-change’ against recalcitrant countries, such as Iraq, Syria, and Venezuela. The American anti-‘communist’ organization, Human Rights Watch, and the British anti-‘communist’ organization Amnesty International, now became especially prominent, as public endorsers of R2P. Often, however, subversion by the U.S. succeeded at conquest, without there even being any need to apply sanctions (or worse). R2P isn’t necessary for those types of operations — subversion. An example is Brazil, in regard to the ending of any functional democracy in Brazil and the imprisonment of the popular democratically elected President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (“Lula”) and replacement of him by a far-right regime. The U.S. regime, prominently including Joe Biden, did it, so as to extract from Brazil’s poor the money to pay to foreign investors to buy and strip that nation, in accord with the dictates of the IMF and the rest of the Washington ‘consensus’. By the time of 19 July 2017, the U.S. Justice Department publicly admitted “It is hard to imagine a better cooperative relationship in recent history than that of the United States Department of Justice and the Brazilian prosecutors” who had rigged the ‘evidence’ that got President Lula thrown into prison. A remarkable article at Brazil Wire — which has been copied many times to the web archives — “Hidden History: The U.S. ‘War On Corruption’ In Brazil”, documents (with 77 links) U.S. subversion, which had regained U.S. control of that country, by means of a coup that was a cooperative effort by the aristocracies of both the United States and Brazil. Subsequently, on 15 June 2019, The Intercept bannered “Glenn Greenwald Explains the Political Earthquake in Brazil Caused by Our Ongoing Exposés” and linked to, and described, how the anonymously supplied evidence that they had published had laid bare the rigging of the case against Lula that had transformed Brazil from being a budding democracy, into its present fascist regime — again into being a country that U.S.-and-allied billionaires can exploit virtually without limit.

The U.S. regime’s emphasis upon ‘corruption’ had been central to the ‘justification’ of ousting Lula. This is an example of another excuse that the U.S. and its allies employ in order to ‘justify’ their imperialism: it’s America’s global ‘anti-corruption’ campaign. Agents of U.S. billionaires had actually established Transparency International at the very same time as they did the Washington Consensus, as a means to rig the corruption-rankings of countries, so that the World Bank would be able to ‘justify’ charging higher interest rates to countries that America’s aristocracy aim to conquer (regardless of whether that conquest was by subversion — such as in Brazil — or else by sanctions, or by coup, or by military invasion).

Consequently, the American Empire started, on 26 July 1945, in order to ‘conquer communism’ (U.S. President Harry S. Truman, on that date, got sucker-punched into that support of imperialism, and he remained so); and, then, after 24 February 1990, that ideological excuse morphed into the “Washington Consensus” imposition of “libertarian” or “neo-liberal” economic policies; and, then, it morphed yet again, into ‘responsibility to protect’ (or, as one of its champions put it, ‘Sovereignty is an anachronistic concept’ and should therefore be ignored); and, then, the alleged motivation came increasingly to rely upon ‘anti-corruption’. Regardless of the excuse, however, the actual intention has remained unchanged, ever since the Cold War started on 26 July 1945. Basically, America would impose its own world-government, and only the excuses for it were changing, over time — new paint on an old building — and, “To hell with the UN!” Billionaires’ greed was never being presented as the motivation behind their empire (just as the aristocracy’s greed has been behind every empire). But, after the time of Ronald Reagan’s election to the U.S. Presidency in 1980, the idea that “Greed is good” has been advocated by some U.S. officials; and some Americans even use that idea (such as “capitalism”) in order to argue for the Washington Consensus.

The U.S. and its allies believe that the English Empire is okay; the U.S. Empire is okay; the Spanish Empire was okay; the Italian Empire was okay, the French Empire was okay, the Dutch Empire was okay, the Portuguese Empire was okay; the German Empire was okay; the Russian Empire was okay; the Japanese Empire was okay; the Chinese Empire was okay, and so forth. And, this imperialism-accepting view of morality is profoundly contrary to the morality of today’s Russia, China, and their allies, all of which believe, instead, that imperialism by any nation is evil, because each nation’s Government is sovereign over its own land, and because national sovereignty consists in the right of each nation’s Government to rule over all of the internal matters within its own land-area. No national government, or alliance of national governments, should be able to dictate anything of the internal affairs in any other country. This is democracy between nations; it is international democracy. Democracy (or not) within a nation is no valid concern of international law, but is inevitably and entirely a matter of national law: the nation’s Constitution, and the entire national legal system. Foreigners should not be dictating that. To do so is international dictatorship.

Though all nations share a view that international matters require international agreements and international laws which are based upon international agreements, and therefore they all share the view that an international government, of some sort, is required, in order to enforce international agreements, the imperialistic countries believe themselves actually to be such international governments, or else that they are being ruled by such an international government (“the Empire,” “the Washington Consensus,” or whatever they might call it). The anti-imperialist countries believe that that’s not true, and that imperialism is what leads to interference in the internal affairs within other countries, and thereby produces wars, which are especially evil wars — ones that are of the aggressive type, aiming to expand the attacking nation’s control, to extend over additional lands. That’s international theft. Russia, China, and their allies, refuse to accept it.

Whereas anti-imperialist countries believe that any violation of a nation’s sovereignty — other than in response to an invasion from that country — is evil, pro-imperialist countries believe that it’s good, if one country agrees to be ruled by another country. (In the view of pro-imperialists, the agreement of one country to be ruled by another is alleged to be sometimes voluntary, and not to be the result of invasion and conquest or other means of external control — it’s alleged to be a ‘voluntary’ empire. Normally, the imperial country demands each of its ‘allies’, or vassal-nations, to say that their ‘alliance’ is ‘voluntary’. This myth is part of the imperial system.)

What politically divides the world today is precisely this difference: imperialism versus anti-imperialism — NOT capitalism versus socialism. (In fact, some countries, such as the Scandinavian ones, blend capitalism with socialism, and maintain higher levels of democracy than do the more ideologically rigid and more purely capitalistic countries such as the United States do.) So, there isn’t (and there never really was) any necessary correlation between democracy on the one hand, and capitalism versus socialism on the other: it was a figment of U.S.-allied propagandists’ imaginations — a lie — to suggest that capitalism goes with democracy. Nazi Germany was capitalist; fascist Italy was capitalist; imperialist Japan was capitalist, but they all were dictatorships, not, at all, democracies. For example: the Italian dictator Mussolini — the founder of fascism — said that fascism is “corporationism,” and he rejected both socialism and democracy. You can read here Mussolini’s essay on “Capitalism and the Corporatist State”, in which he was defining “fascism,” or his synonym for it, “corporationism,” and what he said in that essay describes the U.S. and its allied Governments today, as they actually are: today’s U.S. and its allied Governments are “corporationist” or “fascist,” as Mussolini described that, in 1933. Earlier, in 1914, Mussolini had said that “I shout it loudly: anti-war propaganda is a propaganda of cowardice.” He said that every nation seeks to expand, and that there is nothing wrong with this: “Imperialism is the eternal and immutable law of life. At bottom it is but the need, the desire, and the will for expansion, which every living, healthy individual or people has in itself.” He wasn’t similar to America’s leader in the 1930s, but he was similar to most American leaders of today. (For example, Barack Obama — though silk-tongued, unlike the less-deceptive and more forthright Mussolini — said repeatedly that every nation except America is “dispensable”: only America is not.) On 2 October 1935, Mussolini announced his war on Ethiopia, as providing a way for Ethiopians to share in Italy’s glory: “For many months the wheel of destiny, under the impulse of our calm determination, has been moving toward its goal; now its rhythm is faster and can no longer be stopped. Here is not just an army marching toward a military objective, but a whole people, forty-four million souls, against whom the blackest of all injustices has been committed – that of denying them a place in the sun.”

Basically, what Truman started on 26 July 1945 was America’s becoming, itself, a fascist nation. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was deeply anti-fascist, and had hoped to start the UN as the international democratic federal republic of nations, but Truman shaped what the UN became instead, which is a mere talking-forum that can do only what there exists virtual unanimity to do. So, effectively, “international law” has become, and now is, whatever the U.S. regime wants to do. Tin-pot invading dictators can be prosecuted, but America’s invading dictators (who lead vastly more mass-murdering and destructions of nations than the tin-pot ones do) can’t. FDR and the allies (especially Russia, which wasn’t even a democracy) defeated the fascists, but Truman (largely by mistake, instead of by intention) led the fascist resurgence and post-WW-II victory.

——

First, this difference, between the U.S. and the countries that it attacks, will be exemplified here in the case of U.S. versus China, and then it will be exemplified in the case of U.S. versus Russia. In each instance, the example applies also with regard to each of those two countries’ allies:

On October 9th, America’s Public Radio International (PRI) bannered “Biden says he’ll make China quit coal. Can he deliver?”, and sub-headed “China is on a coal spree, financing and providing technical expertise to roughly 60 new coal-fired power plants outside its borders.” But China (unlike the United States) is actually committing itself to reduce, instead of to expand, its usage of coal, and that fact is simply omitted from the PRI article, because PRI (like all of America’s major news-media) is an agency of U.S. Government propaganda — indoctrination. How, then, can their article claim “China is on a coal spree?” Is it simply a lie? No. The article isn’t about that (China’s domestic coal-usage). It is strictly about China’s building coal plants in other countries, because this is the issue that provides U.S. propagandists an opportunity to present the Chinese Government as being in need of regime-change. That’s essential, in order to maintain public support for the U.S. Government’s anti-China sanctions and other hostile policies toward China. It’s propaganda, for sanctions, subversion, and maybe later a coup, or even an outright U.S.-and-allied invasion, against China.

As regards China’s domestic usage of coal, an article was published, on September 30th, in the significantly less propagandistic (because not so beholden to the U.S. or any Government) Asia Times, headlined “China’s carbon neutral pledge – pipe dream or reality?”, which sub-headlined “Xi’s goal to be carbon neutral by 2060 clashes with China’s geopolitical interests,” and that article noted how extraordinarily dependent, upon coal, China — a coal-rich nation — is, and has been while its economy has been growing at a breakneck pace. This article also noted: “The U.S., the world’s largest economy, and second largest carbon dioxide emitter, for its part, is the only major world power that has not announced plans to go carbon neutral.” That fact, of course — America’s refusal to go carbon-neutral, and its 4 November 2019 abandonment of the 2016 Paris climate agreement, which both China and Russia remain committed to — somewhat punctures the U.S. Government’s case against China as being a global-warming villain. The U.S. doesn’t even have plans to restrict its CO2-emissions.

Furthermore, this news-article opened:

China is trying to spearhead a new climate change agenda that has the potential to dramatically reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by next decade and beyond and help the world’s second largest economy and most populous nation become a global climate change leader.

Last week, Chinese President Xi Jinping surprised his listeners at the virtual UN General Assembly in New York when he announced that China would be carbon neutral before 2060, and ensured that its greenhouse gas emissions would peak in the next decade.

This is a severe contrast to the U.S. Government. Nothing was said about it in the PRI article.

The PRI article deals with this problem for U.S. propagandists by falsely insinuating (which is the way that propaganda usually works) that the Chinese Government’s publicly announced plans are not to be taken seriously but are only communist propaganda:

Inside China, those overseas coal plants are often portrayed as benevolent. Jingjing Zhang, one of China’s top environmental lawyers, said that “from the Chinese government perspective, it is a way of giving. ‘We are helping the developing world … helping those countries have a better economy.’”

And if its smoke-spewing projects drive up the world’s temperatures?

“The argument from China’s government,” Zhang said, “is that it’s not the Chinese government’s responsibility. It is the host government’s responsibility.”

Actually, that view, which is expressed by China’s Government, is a basic operating principle of that Government’s foreign policies. It isn’t just propaganda; it is, instead, ideology — it is China’s, Russia’s, Iran’s, and many other countries’, ideology: anti-imperialism (versus America’s imperialism, America’s moralistic ‘regime change’ con, like “Saddam’s WMD”). Just as imperialism has become America’s ideology, anti-imperialism is the ideology of the countries that the U.S. propaganda-media attack.

The anti-imperialist ideology (supporting international democracy among and between nations — rejection of international dictatorship — instead of supporting international conquest and occupation or control over nations) was stated privately by U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the closing years of World War II — he blamed both of the two World Wars on imperialism, and was passionately committed to ending imperialism, by means of the United Nations. That’s an institution he actually invented, and even named (but all of this was done privately, not publicly, because he wanted buy-in from both Stalin and Churchill, and the latter, Churchill, argued ferociously with him against it, because Churchill was — and had always been — a champion of continuing, and even expanding, the British Empire). But FDR died on 12 April 1945, just before the UN would be organized. And his immediate successor, Harry S. Truman, shaped the UN so as for imperialism to be able to continue, in order for America to become the world’s first global empire, by means of sanctions, coups, and outright invasions, in order for the U.S. Government to be able to spread its influence and control. After WW II, America developed the biggest empire the world has ever had.

FDR’s concept of international law was that only a democratic global federation of nations, which he planned to be the “United Nations,” would, or even could, be the source for international law, because, otherwise, the history that had produced the two world wars — contending and competing gangs of nations, imposing their ‘laws’ upon their conquests, and trying to expand their empire — would continue. And that ancient system, of empires, has been continuing, despite what had been FDR’s hopes and plans. The UN that was created, was designed by Truman’s people, not by FDR’s.

I have written elsewhere about how crucial this difference of moral viewpoints is between Putin and the U.S. Government, which also explains why the U.S. and its allies also want to regime-change him and grab Russia. In terms of domestic policies, Putin is determined that the State not be controlled by the nation’s billionaires; and this, too, is a principle that the U.S. Government and its allies cannot tolerate. (The Washington Consensus instead endorses it, in principle, as part of “the free market.”) The U.S. and its allies refuse to accept any nation’s leader who is unalterably opposed either to being controlled from abroad, or to being controlled by his/her own nation’s billionaires. FDR refused for America to be controlled by America’s, or by any country’s, billionaires.

FDR was correct; Churchill was wrong; but Truman sided with Churchill (who got backed up by General Eisenhower, who seems to have clinched Truman’s decision because Ike was an American). And, on 24 February 1990, G.H.W. Bush made the equally fateful decision to continue Truman’s Cold War. And all the rest is history. Truman and G.H.W. Bush shaped it. We are living in it. It did trillions of dollars worth of good for the investors in corporations such as Lockheed and Exxon. That decision, by the U.S. Government, has been the choice of the people, America’s international billionaires, who, behind the scenes, have controlled the U.S. Government after FDR died, on 12 April 1945. It’s the new America: the imperial America. And it’s done not only by America’s Presidents, but by almost all members of the U.S. Congress. For a typical example of this: the 2017 “Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act”, against Russia and against Iran, passed by 419 to 3 in the U.S. House, and then 98 to 2 in the U.S. Senate. Imperialism is just about the only issue on which there is virtual unanimity in today’s Washington. It is truly bipartisan, there. Both of the billionaires’ Parties are war Parties. This is especially remarkable for a country that no country even threatens to invade (much less has invaded, since 7 December 1941). Its military Department is called the “Defense Department,” instead of the “Aggression Department.” Is that name dishonest? Should it be changed, to something more honest? Maybe it should be changed back, again, to being called the “War Department.” But, unlike when was called that, it now is 100% the Aggression Department. So, shouldn’t it be called that, now? Shouldn’t a spade be called a “spade,” instead of just “a gardening tool”? If it’s the Aggression Department, why don’t they call it that?

The Pentagon “failed to adequately respond” to the COVID-19 pandemic, charged ten Democratic lawmakers in a letter sent to the Pentagon Monday. The lawmakers say “lack of clear guidance” from Defense Secretary Mark Esper has put service members at risk because there has not been a clear coronavirus policy across the Defense Department.

The Trump administration decided in April to send the largest U.S. fleet ever to the Southern hemisphere to interdict “corrupt actors” in the Carribean, which led to the destroyer USS Kidd turning back for San Diego after reporting 47 cases of COVID-19. Last week, Fort Rucker had 100 percent of its nearly 2,000 soldiers wait nearly 10 hours for a drug test. As soldiers waited until nearly 2 a.m. for the test,they began to bring out couches and order pizza, in clear violation of social distancing. Post officials justified their decision to conduct a 100 percent urinalysis because they also had a test  “back in January” i.e. before COVID-19 hit U.S. shores. As it stands, the Army may have held the largest gathering in America during the pandemic.

There are plenty of examples like these to fuel the accusation that Esper’s response to the pandemic placed political considerations ahead of service members health. The Senators’ letter specifically focuses on other cases.

The Senators write that Esper placed politics above the health of the military forces and their families when he urged overseas commanders to not “make any decisions… that might surprise the White House or run afoul of President Trump’s messaging on the growing health challenge.”

There was no force-wide protocol because Esper delegated decision-making on how to address the pandemic to individual commanders of units, installations and vessels, which led to confusing and contradictory responses. While U.S. Forces in Korea acted quickly to contain the spread of the virus,  Navy commanders allowed the carrier Theodore Roosevelt to visit Vietnam, which resulted in more than 840 cases of COVID-19 on the vessel.

“Although local commanders know their units and operating environments better than anyone in the Pentagon, they are not public health experts,” the senators wrote. “They are now left to make decisions they should never have to make.”

Lawmakers also charge that Esper seems profoundly misled about COVID-19; he said as late as April 16 on NBC’s Today show that the spread on the Roosevelt of the novel coronavirus revealed a “new dynamic” showing the virus could be spread by asymptomatic carriers.

But by mid-March how coronavirus was contracted was already “extremely obvious,” the Senators write.

Signatories of the letter, including Sens. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., Patty Murray, D-Wash., Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Ed Markey, D-Mass., also complain that Esper would not disclose military locations where COVID-19 cases are clustered. The Pentagon argues this information would compromise force security.

The senators’ letter “does not even remotely accurately reflect our record of action against the coronavirus and the great lengths we have gone to to protect our people,” Jonathan Hoffman, assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, wrote in a response to Military.com. The senators “cherry-picked false and repeatedly debunked assertions that do not reflect reality.”

“Secretary Esper has made a clear, unambiguous decision to provide constant guidance to senior civilian and military leaders on how to confront the crisis,” Hoffman wrote.

The Pentagon issued basic force protection guidelines on January 30 and continued to update the guidance nine times. He also pointed out that the Pentagon has deployed 60,000 personnel to respond to COVID-19, including 4,000 health care professionals, two hospital ships, 14 Army medical task forces and two Navy expeditionary medical facility detachments. The Pentagon also provided 20 million N95 masks to the states.

Esper has until May 11 to respond to the lawmakers’ series of questions.

theamericanconservative.com

One year later, on October 24-26, 2000, another “hypothetical” military exercise was played out featuring an airline crashing into the Pentagon killing 341 people followed by yet another May 2001 Department of Defense “hypothetical scenario” which saw hundreds of medical personnel training for a “guided missile in the form of a hijacked 757 airliner” crashing into the Pentagon.

What arose from the smoke and debris of September 11, 2001 was unlike anything the sleeping masses or international community expected.

The shock effect so traumatized the masses that quite suddenly, citizens found themselves willing to give up their liberties at home while acquiescing to any retaliatory action desired by their government abroad. The scale of horror was so great that the international community banded together and showed their love and solidarity towards America in the wake of the tragedy with candlelight vigils across Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Russia and South America. Humanity’s natural tendency to embrace and aid our fellow man in times of crisis expressed itself like a bright light in a world of confused darkness and a hope for a durable peace awoke in the hearts of many.

Alas, as the world came soon to discover, that hope was short lived.

The Neocon Takeover of America

Police State measures grew swiftly with the Patriot Act and mass internal surveillance under the “crisis management” run by the neocon cabal in the White House. While a new type of regime change war was created abroad, Dangerous protocols for Cheney’s “Continuity of Government” were set into motion and with these procedures, new mandates for Martial Law were created amplifying the powers, financing and deployment of U.S. Military capabilities both within the USA “under crisis conditions” and around the world.

Governments that had no connection to 9/11 were swiftly targeted for destruction using false evidence of “yellowcake” produced in the bowels of MI6, and a broader unipolar military encirclement of both Russia and China was set into motion which President Putin called out brilliantly in his famous 2007 Munich Security Conference Speech.

Of course this should not have been a surprise for anyone who took the time to read the Project for a New American Century manifesto published in October 2000 entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses’ (RAD).

Under the Chairmanship of William Kristol (a neocon agent today leading the charge to impeach President Trump) and co-authored by John Bolton, Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, and Donald Rumsfeld, RAD stated that to “further the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one-absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event- like a new Pearl Harbor”. Going further to describe its Hobbesian agenda, the cabal stated that “the Cold War was a bipolar world; the 21st century world is- for the moment at least- decidedly unipolar with America as the world’s sole superpower”.

While much has been said about the “inside job” of 9/11, a lesser appreciated terrorist act occurred over several weeks beginning on September 18, 2001 killing five and infective 17 in the form of envelopes laced with bio-weaponized anthrax.

The Age of Bioweapons and PNAC

This anthrax attack led quickly into the 2004 Bioshield Act with a $5 billion budget and mandate to “pre-empt and defend further bioweapon attacks”. This new chapter of the revolution in military affairs was to be coordinated from leading bioweapons facility at the Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick. Since 2002, over $50 billion has been spent on Bioweapons research and defense to date.

The earlier October 2000 RAD document emphasized the importance which the neocon cabal placed on bioweapons (and other next generation war tech) stating: “Combat will likely take place in new dimensions: In space, cyber-space and perhaps the world of microbes… advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool”.

Lawyer and bioweapons expert Francis Boyle stated in 2007 that Fort Detrick’s mandate includes “acquiring, growing, modifying, storing, packing, and dispersing classical, emerging and genetically engineered pathogens for offensive weapon programs.” These new post-9/11 practices fully trashed the 1975 UN Convention Against Biological Weapons ratified by the USA by establishing a vast international network of bioweapons labs coordinated from Fort Detrick which would be assigned the role of doing much of the dirty work that the U.S. was “officially” prevented from doing on its own soil.

Where Hitler used the burning of the Reichstag to justify his enabling Acts, the neocons had their 9/11. The difference in the case of America was that Cheney failed to achieve the same level of absolute control over his nation as Hitler captured by 1934 (evidenced by pushback from patriotic American military intelligence circles against Cheney’s Iran war agenda). With this neocon failure, the republic lurched on.

The Rot Continues Under Obama

Obama’s rise was seen as a hopeful light to many naïve Democrats who still had not realized how a “false left” vs “false right” clash had been slowly constructed over the post WWII years. Either camp increasingly found itself converging towards the same world government agenda through using somewhat dissimilar paths and flavors.

It didn’t take long for many of Obama’s more critically-minded supporters to realize that the mass surveillance/police state measures, regime change wars, and military confrontation of Russia and China begun under Cheney not only failed to stop, but even expanded at faster rates than ever.

In the months before Obama left office in July 2016, the classified Directive 40: National Continuity Policy was enacted creating a line of “Devolution authority” for all branches of the government to a “duplicate chain of individuals secreted outside Washington available in a catastrophic emergency”. Days prior to Trump’s inauguration, Federal Continuity Directive 1 was issued to transfer authority to military forces who could be used to suppress “insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination or conspiracy.”

The Importance of Knowing This History

There are very clearly two diametrically opposing methods of analyzing, and solving the existential crisis threatening our world currently: Multipolar or Unipolar.

While Russia and China represent a multipolar/pro-nation state vision driven by large scale development projects that benefit all- rich and poor alike exemplified by the New Silk Road, Polar Silk Road, Space Silk Road and now Health Silk Road, something much darker is being promoted by the same financial oligarchy that owns both right and left sides of the deep state coin. These later forces have provably positioned themselves to take control of western governments under crisis conditions and are not afraid to use every weapon in their arsenal to destroy their perceived enemies… including bioweaponry. This latter uncomfortable reality was asserted quite candidly by leading officials of Iran and even the Chinese Foreign Ministry just weeks ago.

Admittedly, whether or not the current coronavirus pandemic is a bioweapon is not yet fully proven (although growing body of evidence asserts that it is, as seen here and here and here and here). What we know for certain are the following facts:

Numbers are being systematically misrepresented to convey much greater rates of death vs infections as dozens of leading medical experts have proven. Contaminated test kits have started showing up in the UK on March 30 and countless false results are showing up since covid test kits are often not differentiating between covid-19 and the typical coronavirus strains of the flu that average between 7-14% of flu cases every year. This doesn’t mean that COVID-19 should not be taken seriously, but only that the reported numbers are being artificially falsified to generate heightened panic.

The COVID-19 Task Force at London’s Imperial College has been found to be the singular source of the false “left” vs “right” debate poisoning the west’s response to the pandemic. Teams working out of this British Intelligence nexus have generated BOTH the “do-nothing-and-wait-until-natural-resistance-evolves” herd immunity theory while simultaneously creating the “shut everything down one-size-fits-all” doomsday models being used by the WHO, UN, and leading Deep State assets like Michael Bloomberg, Steve Bannon, Bill Gates and George Soros. In case you doubt the influence of the Imperial College on world policy, a March 17 New York Times article described them in the following terms: “With ties to the World Health Organization and a team of 50 scientists, led by a prominent epidemiologist, Neil Ferguson, Imperial is treated as a sort of gold standard, its mathematical models feeding directly into government policies.”

Investigative Journalist Whitney Webb’s February 2020 research demonstrated conclusively that DARPA had received funding in tandem with Fort Detrick since 2017 on genetic modification of novel coronaviruses (with a focus on bats) as well as the development of never before used DNA and mRNA vaccines which change the structure of DNA both for an individual and potentially for a whole race.

Lastly, and most importantly, the pre-9/11 military exercises were not merely hypothetical scenarios but exercises which led directly into a new “Pearl Harbor” that modified the behaviour of Americans under terror, panic and misinformation like nothing ever seen before. The parallels to today’s coronavirus outbreak cannot be missed for anyone who has taken a serious look at the strange case of the Event 201 Global Pandemic Exercise on October 19, 2019 in New York. Event 201 was sponsored by the Michael Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, and World Economic Forum which ran simulations under the “hypothetical” scenario of a novel coronavirus pandemic killing 60 million people. Reviewing just one of Event 201’s many recordings openly available on their official site features some very disturbing parallels to the events unfolding today:

Unipolar Martial Law or Multipolar Marshall Plan?

As I outlined in my previous paper, the mass-panic generated by COVID-19 has created a 9/11-situation with the expected police state laws being passed under the radar of many people who would normally be paying attention to such things. One of the most dangerous measures enacted involved a classified bill in February which formally mandates the head of NORTHCOM (who is also the head of NORAD) to become acting President of the United States under conditions of Martial Law, un-governability of the executive branch or general chaos in America. This later scenario is not terribly unlikely considering the danger of a financial blowout of the banking system combined with economic lockdowns of the west.

China and Russia both understand the nature of the game and both nations have acted responsibly in dealing with the outbreak of Coronavirus with China’s successful containment having won seven consecutive days of no new cases. It is important that unlike the remedies promoted by London’s Imperial College, neither Russia or China have totally shut down their nations, but have rather kept their economies alive which selecting methods for selective quarantines and lockdowns (China only locked down 15 nations plus Wuhan while the remaining 95% of their economy continued to produces and support the recovering component).

We know that President Trump has resisted the pressure by Deep State Experts to shut down America and has stated so repeatedly, but up until his recent conversations with Xi Jinping and Putin, there were very few options available to him beyond those proposed by Dr. Cauci, the Green New Dealing Dems or “bailout everything” monetarists around Mnuchin and Kudlow.

Now that China and Russia have begun sending cargo ships of vital medical equipment to America as part of the Health Silk Road (over the screams of neocons and neoliberal technocrats like), a new possibility for a cure has presented itself. If Trump acts decisively with courage and intelligence, there is still a chance that sovereign nation states may yet stay in the drivers’ seat and use this crisis as an opportunity to force through a debt jubilee, banking reform and new Bretton Woods emergency conference to establish a foundation for a new just economic system. If Trump is unsuccessful in this task, it is more than a little scary to think about what hell will beset the world in the coming months and years.

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

David P. GOLDMAN

Humiliated by the United Kingdom’s refusal to exclude Huawei from its 5G broadband network, the Trump Administration has doubled down on its attempts to stop China, with poor prospects for success.

The American response includes prosecution of Huawei under the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) statute, drafted to combat organized crime. It also includes proposed regulations that would stop the sale of any US components to Huawei and China’s second-rank telecommunications firm ZTE if 10% of their production comes from American technology.

Also proposed is a ban on sales of jet engines for civilian passenger aircraft that General Electric and France’s Safran have been selling to China since 2014 – an economic warfare measure that has no national security justification.

Never in the course of American events have so many said too much to so little effect.

US National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, meanwhile, told the Wall Street Journal on February 12 that the US had uncovered a secret backdoor in Huawei equipment that enabled the Chinese firm to spy on Western communications. Huawei rejected the charge, demanding that the United States make the data public.

The US charge elicited ridicule overseas. Orange CEO Stephane Richard said on February 14: “I’d be interested to see the evidence. It reminds me of the weapons of mass destruction during the Iraq war.” Germany’s Der Spiegel headlined its report: “A backdoor that only the US can see.”

At the weekend’s annual security conference in Munich, American officials including Defense Secretary Mike Esper and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned European countries to shun Huawei. “Reliance on Chinese 5G vendors, for example, could render our partners’ critical systems vulnerable to disruption, manipulation and espionage,” Esper said. “It could also jeopardize our communication and intelligence sharing capabilities, and by extension, our alliances.”

But the US news outlet Politico titled its report, “Europe turns deaf ear to US warnings on Chinese 5G.”

Major potential blowback

The blowback against American prestige and the risk to key American companies is enormous. If the United States makes good on the rumored threat to suspend jet engine shipments to China, effectively suspending China’s program to develop a home-built civilian passenger jet designed around the GE/Safran engine, the US-China trade war will take on an entirely different character. France’s Safran is a national security asset and the sandbagging of the French firm will push Paris towards Beijing. The prospective damage to leading US firms, including Boeing – which sells a quarter of its planes to China – as well as the top US chip designers may be devastating.

None of these measures has a precedent since the end of the Cold War. Their adoption stems from a fit of frustration in Washington after nearly all of America’s allies – except Israel, Japan, and Australia – ignored strident American demands to exclude Huawei from the rollout of 5G mobile broadband.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo publicly remonstrated with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson over his decision to permit Huawei to build part of Britain’s 5G networks, and President Trump personally intervened with the British Prime Minister to no avail.The Financial Times reported on February 6 that President Trump was “apoplectic” in a call to Johnson. On February 14 Johnson postponed a planned White House visit in response.

Germany’s government, meanwhile, overruled objections to Huawei’s involvement in its 5G rollout by a group of ruling party Bundestag members.

It is not clear what the RICO statute can do to impede Huawei’s operations, apart from subjecting individual employees of the Chinese company to extreme legal penalties.Export controls on US components to Huawei imposed in May 2019 failed to slow Huawei’s deliveries of 5G equipment and smartphones, as the Chinese giant turned to Japanese, Taiwanese and other suppliers instead. Huawei now manufactures both 5G ground stations and smartphones with no US components.

In late January the US Department of Defense vetoed a proposal from the Commerce Department to impose a 10% US content rule on component sales to Huawei and ZTE, in order to prevent foreign companies using American technology from selling to the Chinese firms.

White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow told the Wall Street Journal on February 4 that he supported the Pentagon’s objections, because “we don’t want to put our great companies out of business.”

But on February 12, the American media reported that the Pentagon had changed its mind, and now supported the more stringent ban on component exports to Huawei — evidently in response to the shift in mood at the White House.

Companies ‘will take their toys elsewhere’

Some US companies won’t go out of business, but they will go out of the United States.On February 16 the New York Times reported that the “RISC-V Foundation, a nonprofit that has created an open-source software standard for the chips that power smartphones and other electronics, acknowledged in recent months that it had chosen to move its incorporation from Delaware to Switzerland because of concerns from its members about more stringent regulations in the United States.”

The Times added: “If this administration proceeds with the current trajectory, we’ll see more defections of companies, of scientists,” said Scott Jones, a nonresident fellow with the Stimson Center. “They’ll take their toys and they’ll go elsewhere, and other economies will be the beneficiary of that.”

Qualcomm, Nvidia and other US semiconductor companies earn most of their revenues in Asia. If they are not permitted to sell to China, they will lose a large part of their business. Even worse: Huawei now produces smartphone chipsets like the Kirin series that compete head-on with Qualcomm’s offerings, and the Ascend processor for servers that compete with Nvidia.

According to a Chinese analyst, Huawei might drop the price of its chipsets by 30% in a price war with the Americans, driving them out of the whole of the Asian market. In that case, the analyst said, Nvidia would run out of cash in 18 months and Qualcomm would run out in 24 months, forcing them to shut down research and development. That would mark the end of American importance in the semiconductor industry that the US created.

Reportedly, the mooted ban on jet engine sales to China will be discussed at a February 28 cabinet meeting in Washington. General Electric and other US companies are lobbying furiously against the proposal, which has no clear national security purpose.Some US officials have suggested that China might reverse engineer the French-American engines, but GE observes that China has been buying such engines since 2014, and doesn’t need any new ones to tinker with.

The proposal will be read as an attempt to prevent China from developing a conventional technology. The likely result will be a shift in Chinese aircraft orders to Europe’s Airbus away from Boeing, already facing financial difficulties after the collapse of its 737 Max program.

Catastrophic intel failure

The Trump Administration has given conflicting signals about its intent towards Huawei, as in the flip-flop at the Pentagon over the proposed restrictions on sales of components with US content. The White House believed that it could cajole the British government into excluding Huawei, and failed to grasp what had happened even after London made its decision. This implies an intelligence failure of catastrophic proportions on the part of the United States.

Huawei has done more than sell high-quality, inexpensive telecommunications equipment to Britain’s mobile phone providers. It has made itself part of the fabric of British telecommunications engineering starting in 2011, when it hired the Chief Information Security Officer of the British government, John Suffolk, as the head of its UK business. A senior Huawei executive told me that the company’s relationship with the UK is the best of any Western country. GCHQ, the British counterpart of the National Security Agency, spent years critiquing Huawei’s code, often demanding improvements that the Chinese firm promptly made.

In 2012, Huawei announced to the applause of then Prime Minister David Cameron that it would invest £1.3 billion in the United Kingdom. A Huawei report notes that in 2018 it “invested £112 million in research and development, employing more than 300 researchers in the UK. Huawei also collaborated with 35 universities and research institutes, according to the report.”

Huawei employs 50,000 foreigners, most of them researchers, in two dozen research centers around the world, and subsidizes thousands of others. It is the first Chinese company that has engaged the engineering and scientific elite of the West and with their help, seized a commanding technological lead.

There never was any doubt that the United Kingdom would continue its collaboration with Huawei, illustrating Gen. Sun Tzu’s adage, “Every battle is won or lost before it is fought.” Huawei built its relationship with Britain in the open and became part of the British engineering establishment with strategic investments and calculated deference to Britain’s security services.

The United States didn’t see it coming for the same reason that no American agency considered the possibility that Pearl Harbor might be a Japanese target in December 1941, or the British military didn’t consider the possibility of a Japanese land attack on Singapore in 1942. It simply didn’t occur to America’s intelligence services that the Chinese were capable of cornering the world market in a game-changing technology. It also didn’t occur to Washington that China had developed sufficient capacities in semiconductors to produce its own high-end chips and ignore an American export ban.

Donald Trump evidently is getting his briefings from the same intelligence services that ignored the challenge from China until it was too late to stop it – and wants nothing more than to shift the blame away from its own failures. The result is a cringeworthy embarrassment for the United States and the danger of serious economic disruption.

asiatimes.com

Both nations are standing up to immense pressure by an Anglo American empire which has been working desperately since 2007 to build a vast military infrastructure around Russia under the utopian doctrine of “Full Spectrum Dominance” (aka: the belief that a nuclear war can be won with a first strike monopoly). This missile shield began to target China and Russia’s South Pacific flank in 2011 when Obama unveiled the military branch of the anti-Chinese “Pivot to Asia” (1).

The S400 Solution to Full Spectrum Dominance

However if nations like India, and Turkey who were meant to be participants of the encirclement of Russia and China were to adopt next generation defensive radar/missile systems like Russia’s S400, then the entire formula for unipolar dominance breaks down. Already, China has adopted the S400 as of 2015 which features short to long range supersonic interception of missiles, aircraft and bombs at altitudes of 38 km and at distances of 400 km. Other nations which have expressed interest in the S400 include Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco and Vietnam.

The rise of the S400 and the new security architecture which comes with it has come to be known as “Full Spectrum Defense” and is one of the most important transformations of the world order. When considered in tandem with the globally extended Belt and Road Initiative (which is tightly integrated with the Eurasian Economic Union and Shanghai Cooperation Organization), represents the greatest hope for mankind currently available.

Some particularly nutty personalities within NATO and the Military Industrial Complex would sadly rather burn in hell than serve in heaven and still adhere to the outdated script written in the early days of 2007 when the drum beat for war with Iran pounded at a feverish pitch. These figures, represented by the likes of US Defense Secretary Patrick O’Shanahan, Mike Pompeo and John Bolton are convinced that a nuclear war with Russia and China is still somehow winnable… if only “renegade” nations like Turkey and India would get back into line and follow the script!

Up until Russia’s entry into a beleaguered Syria in September 2015, it appeared that these neocon utopians may have had a winning hand. The Anglo-American alliance appeared to many to be the only game in town. With no serious opposition to the military might of NATO combined with the economic might of the City of London-Wall Street banking system, what else could any middle power like Turkey or India do but “go along to get along”?

 Turkey’s 2^nd Chance at Life

Turkey was quick to get burned by its decision to reject the Russia/China-led new paradigm when it was first offered an entry position to the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) in 2011 where it then signed on as a “Dialogue Partner” (one step below observer status). Just as ink was drying on the 2011 Turkey-EEU Memorandum of Understanding, several other nations were preparing to join the Russia-led initiative including Ukraine, Armenia, Moldova, Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan (the latter being now a full member). The onslaught on Libya followed by the attempt to duplicate that disaster in Syria put an end to Turkey’s decision to join the EEU at that time. A Nazi-driven coup launched in November 2013 ended Ukraine’s membership prospects as well.

Turkey was given a simple ultimatum: Go along with the anti-Russia/anti-China war plan for Full Spectrum Dominance as a loyal member of NATO and certain rewards will be guaranteed.

Turkey was to be granted full entry into the “prestigious” alliance of the European Union which its membership in NATO was always premised upon. Some of the grandeur of the Ottoman Empire would be recovered as managerial status would be granted Turkey over vast swaths of the Middle East now liberated from pesky Arab nationalist leaders. Signing over to this policy was supposed to be easy. All Erdogan had to do was provide covert support for the spread of the ISIS in Syria and keep an aggressive posture towards Russia. Anglo-American and Saudi Intelligence would do all of the heavy lifting.

Not so.

With Russia’s intrepid entry into Syria in September 2015, everything changed. Within two months, Turkey was horrified to find itself in the cross hairs of a nuclear war between NATO and Russia after it shot down a Russian fighter jet killing its pilot and lied to the British (who then chaired the UN Security Council) that Russia invaded Turkey’s sovereign airspace. The tension caused by this military confrontation not only brought the world extremely close to a nuclear war, but resulted in a sobering slap of reality for Erdogen who began his long road towards repentance by writing a public letter of apology for Russia on June 27, 2016. This letter was too much for certain war-mongers in the west.

By July 15, 2016 the time had come for Erdogan’s punishment.

Anglo-American networks controlling the Turkish Deep State activated every asset at their disposal within the military and government bureaucracy to overthrow Erdogan and everyone loyal to him. The form of this operation was shaped by the vast networks of CIA-asset Fethullah Gulen, a strange billionaire cult leader of ‘Hizmet’ based out of the USA whose followers and money had penetrated deeply through every branch of Turkey’s public and private sectors. During this coup attempt, Turkish fighter jets fired on their own parliament building, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Hulusi Akar was kidnapped by his own security detail and thousands of military personnel took to the streets leaving 241 dead and 2194 injured. Due to last minute intelligence provided by sources which many believe to be tied to Russia, Erdogan escaped his fate and regained control in time to purge the leading Gulen zombies from government.

Since that time, Turkey has found its original deal with the devil much less attractive than it had been in 2013.

The Collapse of the West and the Rise of a New Paradigm

Abraham Lincoln once said “a house divided cannot long stand” and no political body is more divided these days than the European Union. Every day, EU member states are seen fighting amongst themselves and against the technocratic sociopaths in Brussel’s who can do little more than ragefully sanction “climate and fiscal offenders” for trying to defend their own populations from unemployment, austerity and speculative finance run amok. This breakdown has driven forward thinking EU nations to prepare their escape from the Titanic and by joining the only viable game in town: China and the New Silk Road. Most recently, Italy joined the New Silk Road with an MOU in April 2019 and Greece joined the 17+1 pro-BRI Central and Eastern European nations weeks later. The Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), which has unified closely with the New Silk Road is currently welcoming new members with open arms with Uzbekistan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Mongolia and even Syria expressing clear intentions to join in the near term future. Both the SCO and EEU which are integral parts of this new paradigm are open for all to join- including Turkey.

With the re-election of Narendra Modi in May 2019 and the positive meetings between Modi, Xi Jinping and Putin during the SCO summit of June 13-14, the tension being artificially created across Asia appears to finally be receding. Pakistan and India (now full members of the SCO) have infinite points of mutual interest to work with the Belt and Road Initiative and with the peaceful integration of North Korea into a cooperative economic plan with China and South Korea, the US-Asia Pivot (which justified itself entirely because North Korea was so dangerous) has collapsed.

The battle between nationalist forces in America vs Deep State/NATO-ideologues is a fight which is hardly won, but which will be shaped in large part by Trump’s bilateral meetings between Modi, Erdogan, Xi and Putin on June 27-28 G20 Summit in Japan (if they are not sabotaged).

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(1) The economic warfare branch of the Asia Pivot was driven by the Trans Pacific Partnership which was designed to cut off China from its Pacific allies while empowering private corporations to wield greater legal power than sovereign governments. The TPP was killed by President Trump as his first act in office in Jan. 2017.

The Galapagos, located 563 miles west of South America, is governed as a territory of Ecuador. The decision by Ecuadorian Defense Minister Oswaldo Jarrín to allow the US military to use the island of San Cristobal as an airbase was met with protests across Ecuador and around the world. Jarrín also had the temerity to describe the environmentally-sensitive islands as a “natural aircraft carrier.”

The Trump administration insists that the Galapagos base was to inly be used for combatting drug trafficking. This excuse was echoed by Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno and Foreign Minister José Valencia. Ever since coming to power, Moreno has steered Ecuador away from its one-time role as a member of the socialist Latin American bloc, along with Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, and Argentina, standing firm against US imperialism in the region. However, Moreno has shown that merely because his father named him in honor of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union, he can be as much a lackey for US military expansion as Latin America’s other far-right leaders, including Presidents Ivan Duque of Colombia and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil.

The Moreno government’s insistence that the American base on the Galapagos is merely for counter-narcotics trafficking operation is laughable on its face. Former President Rafael Correa, now in exile in Europe and facing an extradition request from the Moreno regime, knows a thing or two about US bases in Ecuador. In 2008, Correa, for whom Moreno served as vice president, ordered the US Air Force to vacate its base at Manta, on Ecuador’s Pacific coast. Far from being engaged solely in counter-narcotics activity, Correa discovered that Manta was being used by the American military to assist Colombia in cross-border raids into Ecuador that targeted the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Correa also amended Ecuador’s constitution and banned all foreign military bases from Ecuadorian soil. Currently, Article 5 of the constitution states the “establishment of foreign military bases or foreign facilities for military purposes shall not be allowed.”

Moreno wasted no time in changing Ecuador’s foreign policy to act in lockstep with Washington. A June 2018 visit to Ecuador by US Vice President Mike Pence resulted in the Trump administration agreeing to supply Ecuador with weapons, radar systems, combat helicopters military training, and intelligence. At the same time, Moreno apparently agreed that in return for handing over to British authorities WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from asylum protection in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and refusing to cooperate with US Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller in his investigation of a link between Moreno and Trump 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort, he would receive US military hardware. The granting of the US of the Galapagos as a base was icing on the cake for Washington.

From exile in Belgium, Correa tweeted his reaction to the Galapagos being used as an American base: “Galápagos is NOT an ‘aircraft carrier’ for gringo use. It is an Ecuadorian province, world heritage site, homeland.”

As much as the Ecuadorian government denied that the Galapagos base would harm the environmental condition of the islands, the Galapagos governor admitted that the new US base involved the extension of the runway of San Cristobal airport in order to handle at least two US military aircraft, a Boeing 777 and a Lockheed P-3 Orion. Jarrín was also forced to admit to the Ecuadorian Congress that, in addition to being used as a counter-narcotics base, the Galapagos would be used by the US for “emergency situations.” The new US base will come under the command of the United States Southern Command in Miami.

The US also has its eyes set on another military outpost in a world heritage site, the strategic island of Socotra in the Gulf of Aden. Some 40 percent of the plant species on Socotra are not found anywhere else in the world. Socotra is currently a territory of Yemen. However, Yemen’s Saudi-backed president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, has offered the United Arab Emirates government in Abu Dhabi a 99-year lease on Socotra in return for the UAE’s support in the civil war between Hadi and his Saudi allies to wrest control of north Yemen from Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who control the Yemeni capital of Sana’a.

The proposed lease of Socotra to the UAE, a US ally, sounds suspiciously similar to the 99-year lease the US arranged with Cuba for the use of Guantanamo Bay as a naval base. Although the Guantanamo lease expired in 1999, the US not only continued to occupy the base but turned it into a concentration camp for Muslim detainees in the wake of 9/11.

The US Navy, which presumably would play a major role in operating a Socotra base sub-leased by the UAE to the United States, has left a trail environmentally-destructive waste dumps in every remote location it has occupied, from Keflavik, Iceland and Adak, Alaska to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and Midway Island in the Pacific.

Another tropical group of atolls where the US Air Force is reportedly building a drone base is the Australian territory of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands in the Indian Ocean. The US currently uses Cocos as a halfway stopover for military flights between Diego Garcia and Guam. There are plans afoot to expand the small military installation and the runaway to accommodate US P-8A Poseidon maritime surveillance aircraft, in addition to drones. The Pentagon has also been looking at another Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, Christmas Island, as a naval installation.

The environmental damage record for islands where the United States has established bases is a long one. Just some of the US military’s contaminants left on islands like Vieques, off Puerto Rico; Terceira in the Azores; Ascension Island in the South Atlantic; and Greenland include lethal cocktails of polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs); toxic metals, and chlorinated chemicals.

The US military’s piggish record of poisoning groundwater, soil and sediments, plants, and terrestrial or aquatic animals around the world should serve as a stark warning to environmentalists responsible for protecting the rare tortoises, shore and sea birds, iguanas, bats, sea lions, and other species, as well as the flora of the Galapagos. The Pentagon does not place any priority on protection of wildlife. In fact, the only applicable directives of the US Department of Defense concerning animal protection deal with the humane treatment of animals used for military research, wildlife on military installations, and the use of certain species, like marine mammals, for combat missions. Protests about the US Navy’s use of sonar that harms whales, dolphins, and other marine mammals have been met with haughty dismissals by the Pentagon. That serves a enough proof that the Pentagon cannot be trusted anywhere near the eco-systems of the Galapagos, Socotra, the Cocos Islands, or any other environmentally-sensitive locations.

A scenario approach,” is not the product of alarmists, but of two authors with expertise in their professional areas. Only one of the authors is an environmental expert. He is David Spratt, a Research Director at the Australian National Center for Climate Restoration in Melbourne. The other, Ian Dunlop. Is an unlikely harbinger of environmental doom. Dunlop comes out of the executive ranks of the coal, oil, and gas industries – the usual opponents of climate science. Dunlop is a member of the Club of Rome and the former chairman of the Australian Coal Association, not places where one would normally discover climate change proponents.

Backing up the authors is retired Admiral Chris Barrie, the Chief of the Australian Defense Force from 1998 to 2002. It is no longer unusual to find military services warning about the impending catastrophic effects of climate change. In January 2019, the US Department of Defense’s

Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment issued a report to the US Congress, “Report on Effects of a Changing Climate to the Department of Defense,” without the usual fanfare accompanying such an alarming finding. The Pentagon report, which forecasts US military bases susceptible to recurrent flooding, drought, desertification, wildfires, and thawing permafrost, was introduced in a low-key fashion due to the anti-science dogma of Donald Trump and key members of his administration. The Pentagon’s study sees 79 military bases to suffer from the effects of climate change. They include bases in Virginia, California, New Mexico, Utah, Florida, Colorado, Washington DC, Alaska, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Ohio, Hawaii, Guam, and even the National Security Agency (NSA) complex in Maryland and the Pentagon building, itself, in Virginia.

Although the Pentagon report avoided the global aspects of climate change, the Australian report was stark in its predictions for the immediate future. British author Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel about a post-nuclear war planet, titled “On the Beach,” which was followed by a 1959 film by the same title and produced and directed by Stanley Kramer, saw Australia as the last holdout on the planet from deadly radiation. Eventually, the radiation from the northern hemisphere crept southward, eventually eradicating the last human life in Australia. Many Australians prepare for the inevitable end by committing mass suicide in a national euthanasia program. The picture painted by the recent Australian climate impact report presents an opposite scenario from “On the Beach,” one that points to Australia being among the first regions to succumb to civilization collapse from climate change.

Admiral Barrie presents an “On the Beach” scenario in his foreword to the climate change report: “In Australia recently we have seen and heard signals about the growing realization of the seriousness of our plight. For example, young women speak of their decisions to not have children, and climate scientists admitting to depression as they consider the ‘inevitable’ nature of a doomsday future and turn towards thinking more about family and relocation to ‘safer’ places, rather than working on more research.”

The Australian report’s conclusions are sobering. It states: “Climate change now represents a near-to mid-term existential threat to human civilization.” Predicting the advent of a “hothouse Earth” by 2050, the report’s authors foresee devastating weather extremes, including wildfires, heatwaves, drought, and massive flooding. The loss of the Asian monsoons, glacial and polar ice, slowing of the Atlantic Gulf Stream, and collapse of the Amazon and other eco-systems will result in massive population shifts. The report states that such conditions will result in “outright chaos” and the “end of human civilization and modern society as we have known it.”

Although the report calls for a “Marshall Plan” on a national security level to immediately deal with the threat of civilization collapse, we have seen critically important nations elect political buffoons, all climate change deniers, to their leadership. These include Mr. Trump in Washington; Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who disregards climate science and plans to massively develop the Amazon Basin, known as the “lungs of the planet;” Argentine President Mauricio Macri; and Australia’s recently- reelected Prime Minister Scott Morrison; with the possibility that either “Mr. Brexit,” Nigel Farage, or climate change erratic skeptic Boris Johnson ending up as British prime minister.

It is the collapse of food production that spells the onset of civilization collapse, according to the Australian report. The disruption of the human food supply will be brought about by heat waves, floods, storms, and the decline in beneficial insect populations. Food and water shortages will lead to social upheaval on a scale virtually unknown in modern times. Oceanic flooding of some of the world’s agriculturally-important river deltas – including, the Mekong, Ganges and Nile – will result in massive population movement to areas where there is food and clean water. Seawater inundation will also make major cities uninhabitable and Chennai, Mumbai, Jakarta, Guangzhou, Tianjin, Hong Kong, Ho Chi Minh City, Shanghai, Lagos, Bangkok, and Manila will be abandoned. Even entire countries, like Bangladesh and small island-states, will lie empty.

The starkest prediction in the Australian report predicts that “even for 2°C of warming, more than a billion people may need to be relocated and In high-end scenarios, the scale of destruction is beyond our capacity to model, with a high likelihood of human civilization coming to an end.” The report points to the beginnings of climatic collapse with the current loss of Arctic sea-ice, the disintegration of the West Antarctica Ice Shelf and Greenland and Himalayan Ice Sheets, and global destruction of and coral reefs.

With limited human life-sustainable resources available, the Australian report foresees wars on an unimaginable scale and the breakdown of political and social order the lead-in to civilization collapse. The report states: “The flooding of coastal communities around the world, especially in the Netherlands, the United States, South Asia, and China, has the potential to challenge regional and even national identities. Armed conflict between nations over resources, such as the Nile and its tributaries, is likely and nuclear war is possible.” These scenarios are already beginning to play out, as Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia are already bickering over Ethiopia’s dam on the Blue Nile. The Nile is the lifeblood of Sudan and Egypt. For example, staking a newly-emergent claim for regional identity are the people of the Volta region of Ghana, who see the central government draining their water resources with the Akosombo Dam on the Volta river. Restive inhabitants of Argentina’s Patagonia region complain about foreign billionaires buying up property in their pristine homeland for the purpose of re-locating Jewish climate refugees from Israel, the United States, and Europe. Other emerging eco-separatist “go-it-alone” movements are springing up in Australia’s island state of Tasmania, the US state of Vermont, the Canadian region of Labrador, and the Rwenzori Mountains of Uganda.

The breakdown of social order will see an increase in the kidnapping of foreign tourists in countries for the payment of ransom, piracy on the high seas, looting of stores and warehouses, bank robberies, and other law-breaking activities by people desperate to provide food and clean water for their families.

The authors of the Australian report believe that mid-21^st century is the “point of no return” for Earth’s climate. However, other scientists believe that we have already reached that point with extreme weather already resulting in massive crop losses and flooding now routine in Miami, Houston, Venice, Dhaka, and other major cities.

Report after report warning of the disastrous consequences of climate change are not coming from environmental activist groups, but from the intelligence, national security, and defense sectors. In November 2018, the Trump White House issued the Fourth National Climate Assessment, based on the research of 300 scientists and 13 federal agencies, including the Defense Department. The report concluded that climate change now poses a direct threat to human life, ecosystems and the US economy. Trump dismissed his administration’s own report. In January of this year, the US Intelligence Community’s annual Worldwide Threat Assessment concluded that environmental degradation will “fuel competition for resources, economic distress, and social discontent through 2019 and beyond.” And recently, the White House blocked the testimony before Congress of a State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research expert who planned to warn of the immediate effects of rising sea levels and ocean acidification. The blocking came as Trump dismissed the climate change warnings of Britain’s Prince Charles after their meeting in London.

The only humor that can be found amid all the dire and depressing warnings about impending societal collapse is the fact that among the first victims of rising sea levels will be Trump’s billionaires’ club estate at Mar-a-Lago, located on the barrier island of Palm Beach on Florida’s Atlantic coast. Currently, king tide effects are causing some sewage and septic tank systems on the island to fail. The steady rise in sea levels means that within the next ten to fifteen years, Mr. Trump’s vacation Shangri-La will be inundated with sea water and raw sewage. For Trump, who withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Accord, it will be a fitting end for his seaside playground.